Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Not everyone in Alexandria was happy. When retrocession passed with no African Americans voting, the Black community’s reaction was despair. One abolitionist later wrote that “as the votes were announced every quarter of an hour, the suppressed wailings and lamentations of the people of color were constantly ascending to God for help and succor, in this the hour of their need.” They were right to despair. In the District, they had protections for freedom of worship, and several schools existed to teach African Americans. As a part of Virginia, Alexandria shuttered Black churches and schools. Another law required manumitted or free Blacks to leave the state of Virginia within a year. The number of free Blacks dropped precipitously in Alexandria in the ten years after retrocession.13

  What changed to make white Alexandrians go against their favored son George Washington’s clear preference for the city to be in the capital? The reasons Alexandrians and Congress gave were suspect. Congress argued that it didn’t need the territory. Curious. A hundred-square-mile capital is not large, and giving away more than a third of its land did not leave much room for future growth. By 1846, the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory from France and annexed Texas. The Mexican-American War was well under way. The United States controlled more than twice the land it had in 1790 and had ambitions to dominate the continent. Surely it would need a capital to control this vast swath of land.

  Congress’s other reason for retrocession was equally suspicious. The people of Alexandria were deprived of the rights of citizenship because the District’s white men had no representation. True, but those north of the Potomac, on the Maryland side, also lacked the right to vote.

  In Alexandria, the white elite had seen their fortunes ebb. In 1790, they hoped their port town would rival Baltimore or Richmond. That dream died, and so too did their visions of an agricultural paradise. Over-farming of tobacco and wheat depleted the soil and led many to abandon Northern Virginia for more fertile territory south and west. With less farming, Maryland, the District, and Northern Virginia had a surplus of enslaved labor. Farther south, the thirst for slaves was all but unquenchable. Cotton became the cash crop, especially after the invention and continued improvement of the mechanical cotton gin, which more easily separated seeds from the fiber. Cotton production went from 200,000 bales in 1815 to 3.8 million bales in 1860.14

  The gin meant more enslaved labor picked cotton rather than separated it, making the crop far more lucrative for landowners. With mechanical gins and acres of cotton, plantation owners became some of the wealthiest men in North America, but they needed more enslaved labor. Alexandria became a lucrative slave-trading town, one of the biggest in the country. Slave dealers bought the enslaved from local farmers and then resold people to the newly settled cotton growers in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In 1834, one of the largest slave-trading companies in the country, Franklin and Armfield, owned a huge slave prison in Alexandria from where they shipped between fifteen hundred and two thousand enslaved people to the Deep South a year.15

  Starting in the 1830s, the slavers began to worry about abolitionists. The American Anti-Slavery Society campaigned to force Congress to end slavery and especially the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Congress had complete control over the District, making it vulnerable to antislavery attacks. Broadsides showcased the evil of the “man trade” in the “Metropolis of Liberty,” calling the buying and selling of humans “an outrage” upon public sentiment made worse by the use of federal tax dollars. One pamphlet decried “slavery and the slave trade in the nation’s capital … in defiance of God’s commands and in violation of our own fundamental national law.”16

  The most logical explanation for retrocession was to protect slavery, but the people of Alexandria and the pro-slavery forces in Congress hid their tracks. The two leaders of the legislation in Congress, John Calhoun of South Carolina in the Senate and R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia in the House, were both staunch advocates of slavery. Only four years after Alexandria rejoined Virginia, Congress outlawed the slave trade but not slavery itself in the District of Columbia.

  In the Compromise of 1850, the last successful attempt to keep the country together before the Civil War, Henry Clay, the senator from Kentucky, offered the northern states a prize—cessation of the slave trade in the District. Clay hoped that banning the slave trade would appease abolitionists. One pro-slavery paper, The Republic, supported the bill to mitigate abolitionists’ anger, arguing that northerners knew nothing of “the comfort or content of the slave.” All knew that Alexandria was just across the river and could easily absorb any slave trading from the city of Washington. In fact, Alexandria profited handsomely from the outlawing of slavery in the District, becoming a major enslaved warehouse during the 1850s.17

  After the 1850 law, Alexandria became even more enmeshed with the slave trade. Everyone benefited from the new trade, except, of course, the enslaved. The odious nature of the slave trade revealed itself in the local papers. During the summer of 1860, a Georgetown slave owner sold Sarah Miranda Plummer to a slave trader in Alexandria. He kept her in the notorious “slave pens” two months, waiting for the best price, before moving her to New Orleans for resale. Sarah couldn’t tell her family goodbye in person, because her mother was on a farm near Baltimore and the plantation where her father was enslaved was in Hyattsville.18

  Sarah likely moved to the Alexandria pen in a coffle, a line of humans chained to one another by their hands and feet. 19 Growing up in the South, I never heard the word “coffle.” The Alexandria Gazette described how “the children and some of the women are generally crowded into a cart or wagon, while others follow on foot, frequently handcuffed and chained together.” The slavers drove their human cargo many miles in coffles to the overcrowded and fetid slave pens. The Gazette noted that “scarcely a week passes without some of these wretched creatures being driven through our streets.”20

  Alexandria became infamous for its numerous enslaved prisons, some of them within blocks of Robert E. Lee’s boyhood home. Many hotels converted their rooms into slave cells to keep up with demand.21 For the enslaved, the new economic landscape meant a dread fear of families being broken apart and each person being sold separately often hundreds, even thousands of miles apart. And they knew where they were going—the plantations of the Deep South. No. I will not call them plantations and evoke an image of hooped-skirt ladies sipping iced tea on the veranda while the wind whispers through the Spanish moss. I will use a more appropriate term: “enslaved labor farms.”22

  * * *

  WHEN I LIVED in Alexandria, I never knew the retrocession story. During my childhood, no monument, no plaque, reminded Alexandrians of its central role in the slave trade. Instead, the Confederate soldier proudly stood sentinel on Prince Street.

  As a child, I never heard stories about Alexandria’s role in the Civil War either and for good reason. The “Battle of Alexandria” featured no Confederate heroics. In fact, Alexandria had less than twenty-four hours under the Confederate flag. On May 23, 1861, Virginians held a referendum to approve the state’s secession from the Union. In Alexandria, a secessionist stronghold, the vote reflected the white citizens’ overwhelming desire to leave the United States (958 to 48). With the secession vote counted, Virginia joined its slaveholding sister states in rebellion.23

  That evening, Lincoln ordered General Irvin McDowell, West Point class of 1838, to seize Alexandria. Under the cover of darkness, McDowell ordered a three-pronged assault. Infantry silently trooped across the Long Bridge, four miles north of Alexandria, into the secessionists’ territory. Farther upstream U.S. Cavalry crossed Chain Bridge. A smaller amphibious force landed directly on the Alexandria waterfront. Confederate skirmishers fired a few shots into the air and then skedaddled south. One Union soldier described the Confederates’ retreat, saying it was “as if the Devil himself had been after them with a particularly sharp stick.”24 The Battle of Alexandria was over, and the city would stay under U.S. control for t
he rest of the war. The Confederates in my hometown gave up without a fight—almost.

  The first U.S. Army officer killed in the Civil War died in Alexandria on May 24, 1861, and it was closer to murder than war. As the U.S. soldiers began to occupy my hometown, the most conspicuous sign of secession fluttered from the rooftop of the Marshall House inn. The massive Confederate flag (eight by sixteen feet) on a forty-foot staff was visible by spyglass from the White House. The inn’s owner, James Jackson, was an ardent secessionist and fierce defender of slavery who had a reputation for violence. Once, when a Catholic priest had upset him, Jackson beat the man senseless. Jackson itched to show his secessionist credentials after just missing the fight against John Brown’s ragtag militia at Harpers Ferry two years earlier. Instead of glory, Jackson brought home a withered chunk of human ear, which he claimed had once been attached to John Brown’s son.25

  Leading the assault into Alexandria was the 11th New York Volunteer Infantry Zouaves commanded by Captain Elmer Ellsworth, a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. Ellsworth dressed the 11th New York in their foppish French-Algerian-inspired uniform with baggy pants, open red jacket, spats, and a fez. The sharp-dressed Zouaves expected a fight but found none.26

  As Ellsworth led a small group of soldiers through Alexandria’s streets, he spied the Marshall House’s enormous rebel flag flying. Crying out, “That flag must come down!” Ellsworth double-timed into the inn and clambered up the stairs, cutting the flag from its staff. As he descended the stairs with the flag draped around his neck, he met the hotel’s owner. Jackson leveled a double-barreled shotgun at point-blank range into Ellsworth’s chest and pulled the trigger. Ellsworth fell the last two steps, mortally wounded.

  Jackson’s next shot missed Private Frank Brownell, and Brownell responded with a .58-caliber-rifled musket shot into Jackson’s face, followed by repeated bayonet thrusts to Jackson’s lifeless body. Brownell’s rifle featured a twenty-six-inch curved saber bayonet, creating a lance six and a half feet long. Brownell would later telegraph his parents in upstate New York, “Father,—Colonel Ellsworth was shot dead this morning. I killed his murderer. Frank.”27

  As word reached Washington, the city keened. Ellsworth’s friend President Lincoln was so distraught he burst into tears during a meeting with a senator. Lincoln said, “I will make no apology, gentlemen, for my weakness; but I knew poor Ellsworth well, and held him in great regard.” As Ellsworth’s body lay in state in the White House, the president stopped at the coffin, and those around him could hear his wail, “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice be made?”28

  The United States had its first martyred hero “shot down like a dog” in Alexandria. At his funeral, Edward L. Cole contrasted Ellsworth and Jackson: “The one dying in defense of the principles of human freedom … The other, dying the death of a traitor, his name given an infamous notoriety by the cowardly assassin act.”29

  Before Ellsworth’s murder, northern public opinion looked at the secessionists more like wayward brothers enticed by radicals. No more. “Remember Ellsworth!” became a rallying cry for the rest of the war. Another regiment, the 44th New York, became known as Ellsworth’s Avengers. It would take four years of war and hundreds of thousands of battlefield deaths before another, more important martyr, Lincoln, superseded Ellsworth as the most important single U.S. death during the Civil War. In his honor, the U.S. Army built Fort Ellsworth in Alexandria. Today, the George Washington Masonic Temple sits on that site. At the top of the monument, the old star-shaped fort was still visible, but in 1974 the Fort Ellsworth Condominiums obliterated the last remnants of its namesake.30

  If the United States had a martyr, so too did the white citizens of the South, especially Virginians, who greeted James Jackson’s death with their own bloodlust. The next day, the Richmond Examiner gloated about Ellsworth’s death, “Virginians, arise in strength and welcome the invader with bloody hands to hospitable graves.” The Richmond Whig whipped up its readers: “Let their accursed blood manure our fields,” and “the name of Jackson shall be enshrined in the heart of Virginia.”31 The paper later advertised a memorial volume called Life of James W. Jackson, the Alexandria Hero, the Slayer of Ellsworth, the First Martyr in the Cause of Southern Independence.32

  When I was growing up in Alexandria, I didn’t know the story of Ellsworth and Jackson, but if I had looked, I would have found that Alexandria made the murderer Jackson the hero. In 1900, the city added Jackson’s name to the Prince Street monument, eleven years after the other names, even though he was no soldier. About two miles from my house, the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans created a plaque in 1929 to “the first martyr to the Cause of Southern Independence … He laid down his life … in defense of his home and the sacred soil of Virginia.”33

  That’s the Virginia I knew. I shouldn’t feel surprised, but I always do. I’ve found so many plaques, monuments, and memorials that support white supremacy. Each one contributes to the stories and myths of my life. Down is up. Bad is good. White Virginians worked hard to feel good about slavery and segregation. In my Alexandria, history’s hero was James Jackson. Today, thank goodness, times are changing. In response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, the Marriott hotel chain, the new owners of the building, removed the plaque in 2017, giving it to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Fearful of any publicity, Marriott refused to take credit for displacing the plaque.34

  * * *

  ELLSWORTH AND JACKSON were probably the last two people killed in anger in my hometown during the entire Civil War. If Alexandria missed the destructive fighting that much of Virginia suffered, it did have a new issue. Safely behind U.S. Army lines, Alexandria became a destination for escaped slaves. Here was yet another story hidden from me while growing up in Alexandria. African Americans flocked to safety in Alexandria, where they found employment in the war economy. Almost twenty thousand African Americans were living in the city by 1865, a nearly tenfold increase. The huge influx created a refugee crisis.

  Segregated into hastily assembled shantytowns, the freedmen, and especially their children, were susceptible to camp diseases like dysentery, typhus, and smallpox that killed so many soldiers on both sides.35 The number of deaths overwhelmed the city’s ability to bury the dead. In 1864 with the cemeteries full, the federal government seized property on the corner of Washington and Church Streets for a freedmen’s burial ground. By 1869 more than eighteen hundred freedmen had found their final resting place at the cemetery; more than half of those buried were children. But the African American cemetery did not receive the same care as the white national cemetery. After the war, the government maintained the cemetery for a decade or so, but soon the wooden markers rotted away, and everyone forgot that the site was a cemetery. By the time I was born, a service station desecrated the land with a three-thousand-gallon underground gas tank.36

  Finally, in 1987 a local historian found an 1894 article from The Washington Post describing a “graveyard containing defunct colored people [that] was being washed away by the rains and those not washed into the Potomac were ground into fertilizer.” Over the last thirty years, extensive archaeological digs and archival research have identified the cemetery, demolished the gas station, and created a stunning memorial on that location.37 I visited the park recently and it filled me with hope. When we identify our history, we can change the narrative.

  When I talk about the Civil War or Confederate monuments, I hear complaints that I’m trying to change history. Is the new memorial in Alexandria changing history or correcting history? Yes to both. It’s recovering a story lost and creating a more accurate portrayal of the past. History is always changing. We link the past to our conception of the present and we always have. I want to change history because as a child in Alexandria I never understood the repugnant nature of slavery or the powerful history of African Americans in my city. Little wonder I grew up revering the Confederacy; my hometown revered it as well, and it either forgot or re
fused to honor the legacy of the African Americans who lived in Alexandria.

  As I looked at the history of Alexandria, I found amazing stories detailing African American contributions to the city. Every society needs heroes, but my Alexandria made Lee the slave owner, Lee the rebel, Lee the general, the greatest man. Now, as a historian and an army officer, I found new heroes. In Alexandria, my hero is Samuel Tucker, an African American lawyer born in 1913 who helped destroy the apartheid racial system in Virginia and the nation. As a child, he remembered his grandfather talking about the time before “they Jim Crowed us.” As Tucker said, “At an early age I knew it [segregation] had not always been this way. Segregation was not God ordained.” He was right; Jim Crow laws solidified segregation in the 1890s.

  As a teenager growing up in Alexandria in the 1920s, Tucker had to walk twenty-two blocks to catch a streetcar for a long trip across the Potomac into Washington because Alexandria had no high school for Black children. He said that in high school he “bootlegged an education.” Later he would recall his childhood experience with the Jim Crow system: “That was the first kind of scar. We knew something was wrong with it. There was a [white] public high school within sight of my home.”38

  After high school, Tucker went to Howard University. After his college graduation, he knew he wanted to practice law, but no white law school would accept him. Undeterred, he passed the bar exam before his twenty-first birthday. By his twenty-fifth birthday, Tucker had started a long campaign to kill Jim Crow segregation. He first targeted the new Alexandria Public Library, which opened in 1937, only two blocks from his home. The library refused to issue him or a Black veteran a borrower’s card, despite the city taxes they paid. Moreover, the city allowed white nonresidents to use the library for a small yearly fee.39