O’er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?
—JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL,
“The Washers of the Shroud” (1861)
Washington, January 1861
IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED an unusual transaction, hardly in the common line of business for a big auction house like Green & Williams, with its commodious premises just off Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. The partnership’s stock-in-trade ran more to real estate, furniture, kitchenware. These were the sorts of valuables that the capital city’s transient denizens often left behind, as the ever-revolving wheel of congressional elections and presidential administrations, the waxing and waning of political parties, regularly returned large numbers of inhabitants to the far-flung provinces from which they had so recently arrived.
Still, the potential commission on this sale was tempting, since it might well prove substantial. A Negro male just past the prime of life could fetch a thousand dollars—the price of a modest house and lot in the city—and the one now on offer was no common field hand, but a first-rate house servant. If a sharp-eyed speculator or two attended the sale, the price might go even higher. Shipped down to the New Orleans market, this fellow could bring as much as fifteen hundred, or at least close to it, even if his eventual master only intended to put him to work cutting sugarcane.
A newcomer to Washington that winter might have been surprised, even shocked, to see a slave put on the block here in broad daylight. This was, after all, 1861—hadn’t the slave trade in the District of Columbia been abolished more than a decade earlier, as part of the Compromise of 1850? Indeed, it had been heralded at the time as the South’s most important concession to the North. For decades, abolitionists had been wailing about the moral stain of human traffic here in the capital of the republic. Their propaganda broadsides had shown coffles of black men and women, shackled together, being marched past the dome of the Capitol itself. Visiting foreigners had written letters and books telling their own countrymen—in tones of outrage permeated with more than a hint of smug satisfaction—about the squalid slave pens at the heart of the Americans’ supposed empire of liberty. Now all that was supposed to be a thing of the past.
Few people—at least outside of Washington—noticed that the 1850 law did not actually prohibit slave trading itself. It simply banned anyone from bringing Negroes into the District of Columbia for the purpose of selling them out of state. That took care of those embarrassing coffles: Washington would no longer be a major entrepôt for Negroes being shipped off to the slave-hungry Cotton Belt from the overstocked Chesapeake region. But it was still perfectly legal for a Washingtonian to put his house servant up for public auction, and even to advertise the offering, as Green & Williams did, in the pages of the Daily National Intelligencer, the city’s leading newspaper and a semi official chronicle of congressional proceedings. If the unlucky slave happened to turn up the following week in one of the Alexandria slave pens right across the Potomac, ready to be packed onto a New Orleans–bound schooner—well, that too was perfectly within the law.1
The Negro coming up for sale on this particular occasion was a thirty-three-year-old man named Willis. Selling him might even be called a prestige transaction for Green & Williams, which, though large, was by no means known as one of the more genteel auction houses in the capital. For this slave had been, as the firm boasted in its advertisement, the valued property of “the late Hon. Judge George M. Bibb deceased,” one of the District’s most distinguished longtime residents.2
The courtly, white-haired Judge Bibb—known also, depending on whom you spoke to, as Chancellor Bibb, Senator Bibb, Secretary Bibb—had been a fixture of Washington politics and society ever since his arrival as a young senator from Kentucky during President Madison’s first term.3 As his respectful obituaries noted, he had been at various times United States attorney, secretary of the treasury under President Tyler, and—after retiring from government service and taking up practice as a leading Washington attorney—a habitué of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber. In his politics, the late judge had been admirably moderate: both a proslavery man and a Union man, in the hallowed tradition of his native Virginia. His most notable speech in the Senate had been back in 1833, when South Carolina had threatened to secede over nullification, one of those almost ceaseless sectional crises and compromises that had preoccupied the federal government throughout recent decades. “My voice is still for peace,” Bibb sonorously began, and then spent three and a half hours professing his belief in peace and the Union, the Union and peace. Making frequent allusions to the Founding Fathers, he spoke of states’ rights and “the horrors of civil war,” and of freedom-loving South Carolina “smarting under the rod of injustice and oppression”—a speech so worthy and so boring, one newspaper noted, that by the time it concluded, every living creature in the Senate chamber, with the exception of the satisfied orator himself, had either fallen asleep or fled.4
This is not to say that the late Judge Bibb had been a drab figure. Indeed, he was well known around town for his distinctive ways. Until the end of his life, he clung steadfastly to the fashions of Jefferson’s day: silk stockings, buckled knee breeches, and a ruffled white cravat. People saw him, sighed sentimentally, and knew beyond all doubt that they were gazing upon a true gentleman of the old school. The judge was an accomplished musician; his Georgetown neighbors were used to strolling past his fine brick house on a warm evening and hearing the strains of his violin through the open study windows. Then one spring the violin was heard no more.
As for Willis, the Negro, he had been for some years the old gentleman’s trusted body servant. It had been he who neatly laid out the silk stockings and knee breeches each morning; who put the violin away in its case; who shaved the grizzled jowls and attended faithfully by the bed during his master’s final illness. On the afternoon of the funeral, it was he who prepared refreshments for the distinguished mourners gathered in the judge’s parlor, including President Buchanan and most of his cabinet.5
Perhaps it was a bit unseemly for a fine family like the Bibbs to advertise their loyal household retainer for sale in the public prints—and then to make poor Willis stand on the block at that shabby auction house as Messrs. Green and Williams hovered assiduously, pointing out his finer qualities to whoever cared to look. As a man approaching middle age, Willis may well have had a wife and children, perhaps members of the District’s large free-Negro community, who would be heartbroken if he were sold south. But then, what use had the widow Bibb for a gentleman’s valet? Manumission was out of the question: had not the judge himself often declared his staunch opposition to the practice, calling free blacks “a nuisance to society”?6 There were estate taxes to think of, too; the deceased had left no fewer than seventeen children, and how, pray tell, was a Negro to be divided seventeen ways? Wasn’t the sale perfectly legal? Wouldn’t the good people of Washington, in any event, forget the matter quickly, remembering the late Hon. George M. Bibb only as a selfless public servant, a kindly neighbor, an honest gentleman?
Money, in the end, was money. So the advertisement appeared in the Intelligencer for “One Negro man, named Willis, about thirty-three years of age, and a slave for life.” Below that, a shorter line of type: “Also, one Gold Watch.”
WASHINGTON IN THE YEARS before the Civil War often seemed like a city of slaves and old gentlemen.7
Black men and women were everywhere: their labor, to a large degree, made the engine of the city run. Northern newcomers in the capital, imagining that slavery meant Negroes toiling by hundreds in the cotton fields, were often surprised at what they saw. Washington’s slaves shoveled coal and carried water; carved stone and split wood. Perched on the drivers’ seats of hackney cabs, enslaved men solicited fares outside the main railway station; trudging alongside creaking wagons, enslaved women converged on the Central Market each day before dawn, bringing their masters’ cabbages and country hams from Maryland farms. It was slaves who, to a consider
able degree, were building the grand and gleaming new extensions of the Capitol, just as they had built the old Capitol and the White House more than half a century before. And it was slaves who hauled up Sixteenth Street the daily cartloads of human dung—patrician and plebeian waste all democratically commingled—to be dumped onto a stinking field ten blocks north of the presidential mansion.
Like today’s Washington, the nineteenth-century capital attracted both foreign and American tourists. Visitors sometimes remarked that the big hotels—Willard’s, Gadsby’s, Brown’s—seemed like intricate machines run wholly by the Negro servants, who tended fireplaces, waited at table, emptied chamber pots and spittoons, and slept on the bare hallway floors outside guests’ rooms. In the city’s barbershops, it was almost exclusively black men who shaved the whiskers of lowly and mighty Washingtonians alike: “The senator flops down in the seat,” one traveler noted with amusement, “and has his noble nose seized by the same fingers which the moment before were occupied by the person and chin of an unmistakable rowdy.” When customers dined at Absolom Shadd’s National Eating House on Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the District’s finest restaurants, slaves tucked napkins into their collars before serving up specialties of the house: steamed Chesapeake crabs, spit-roasted game birds, and a buttery green soup made with sea turtle meat freshly imported from the Bahamas. Three of those slaves belonged to the hospitable Mr. Shadd himself—who happened to be a free colored man.8
Indeed, the usual categories of slave and free, black and white—terms that seemed so simple and stark in the speeches of abolitionist preachers or proslavery politicians—were all mixed up here in the shadow of the Capitol. Census takers recorded only a few thousand slaves in Washington just before the Civil War, a figure that nearly all modern historians have accepted unquestioningly. But most of the District’s slaves didn’t belong to Washingtonians, and so they weren’t counted in the census.9 Some were the property of Southern senators, congressmen, and even presidents, who brought them along as butlers, chefs, and body servants.10 Many more were owned by Maryland and Virginia planters who rented their Negroes out, often for years at a time, to work in the city. Other masters simply sent slaves off to seek employment on their own, demanding only a share of the earnings. The lives of such men and women, though often squalid and impoverished, could occasionally seem like freedom. The District’s large population of free Negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, lived in what sometimes seemed like slavery. In countless small ways each day, they were reminded that Washington was the capital of a country not their own. Any person of African descent was barred from entering the grounds of the Capitol—except, of course, for the servants and laborers whose work was in many respects more indispensible than that of the congressmen. Socializing publicly with whites was almost unthinkable: if Absolom Shadd had tried to sit down for a meal in his own restaurant, it might have sparked a riot. And each night at ten o’clock, when the bell of the Perseverance Fire Company at Eighth and Pennsylvania rang, all blacks—whether slave or free, ash haulers or restaurant owners—had to get off the streets or face arrest, followed sometimes by flogging.11
Curious foreign travelers often found themselves at a loss to understand the intricacies of local racial codes, or even to guess who was a slave and who wasn’t. Early in 1861, an English journalist was standing by the front window of Willard’s Hotel when he saw a tall, handsome young black man, elegantly attired from head to toe, strolling proudly up the Avenue. The Englishman turned to a white American who stood nearby: “I wonder what he is?” he inquired. “Well,” the stranger drawled, “that fellow is not a free nigger; he looks too respectable. I dare say you could get him for fifteen hundred dollars with his clothes off.”12
What, then, were these Negro men and women? The Supreme Court had ruled that they could never be citizens, and that they had no rights whatsoever that whites were bound to respect. Were they therefore simply property, as anyone might conclude from reading the classified ads in the Intelligencer or the ponderous folios kept by the recorder of deeds, where sales of human beings were duly inscribed among the real estate transactions? Or was it possible that they were simply people? Was it even possible that they could, one day, be Americans?
Such were the questions that had for decades bedeviled the capital city’s Old Gentlemen: the senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, justices, and presidents whose steady hands kept the ship of state on course. These matters had, indeed, bedeviled America’s elder statesmen ever since the nation’s founding, when a previous generation of wise men, sitting in a shuttered room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, had ruminated and decided that the new Constitution would reckon each slave as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, and more or less ignore them otherwise. That had seemed to settle the issue—at least to the extent of freeing the new federal union to turn its attention to other things.
Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the Old Gentlemen of the antebellum period were preoccupied not with the question of what black men and women were or might ever be, but with how to avoid the question entirely. Toward that end, they, and much of the nation, had mastered the art of circumlocution. In the best of times, in the politest Washington circles, slaves were mentioned rarely; the relative abstraction of slavery, only slightly more often; while “our peculiar institution,” “the domestic arrangements of the South,” and “a certain species of property” were among the euphemisms of choice. And when they talked about “Union,” it meant something very different from what it would come to mean a few years later. The word meant a nation united by compromise, preserved through the careful balancing of Southern interests and Northern ones, of slavery and freedom.
They were men of distinction, these Old Gentlemen—of nobility, even. One could see it immediately in their faces. Just down the avenue from Shadd’s restaurant, a glass-topped case outside Mathew Brady’s National Photographic Art Gallery displayed them in splendid array: “grave and reverent seignors,” an admiring reporter for the Daily National Intelligencer called them.13 Everyone came to sit for Mr. Brady in the prewar years. It was a political rite of passage no more optional than a new congressman’s taking the oath to support and defend the Constitution. No more partisan, either: men of every party and principle climbed the three flights of wooden stairs—some more nimbly than others—to arrive in a skylighted room where a flock of assistants, and sometimes even the famous proprietor himself, welcomed them. Brady, foppish and ingratiating, made the whole experience so pleasant. There was a little dressing room with a marble washstand where the client could mop his brow and arrange his hair—generally brushing the locks, scanty though they might be, forward in picturesque Caesarean fashion. When he emerged, a carved oak chair awaited, with a pedestal next to it ready to hold an appropriate prop: a thick gold-stamped volume of the Annals of Congress, for example. Occasionally the gentleman wrapped himself in a toga-like cloak, the better to hide a metal clamp that would keep his head from moving during the long exposure. (If he wished instead to rise and strike an oratorical pose—perhaps his recent speech on the tariff question had drawn favorable notice in the newspapers—a convenient metal armrest was also provided.) Then he drew his head back, knit his brows together, formed his mouth into a tight-lipped frown—and within thirty seconds, the Alabama cotton planter or Connecticut attorney was transformed into a veritable Cato the Elder, his visage suitable to be lithographed in a monthly magazine. Perhaps one day it might even be rendered in marble to adorn the state capitol back home.14
But anyone stopping by Brady’s gallery on the eve of the Civil War would have noticed that the noblest visages, though still ensconced honorably in their glass case, were no longer to be seen in the halls of the Capitol. The statesmen of restraint and moderation, the tongues that spoke in careful euphemisms or cried out eloquently for Union, Union, above all else, were becoming scarce. Webster and Clay, twin titans among the compromisers, were dead; so was Thomas Hart Bento
n, the lion of Missouri. John Bell had gone back to Tennessee, Sam Houston to Texas. Even the ranks of lesser men whose cautious ways had kept the Union safe—men like old Judge Bibb—were dwindling fast.
Brady’s studio now received a different sort of senator, in outlook and aspect: Ben Wade of Ohio, flinty-eyed and obdurate, a Republican whose radicalism went beyond antislavery to embrace women’s suffrage and trade unionism, and who was said to have carried a pair of horse pistols onto the Senate floor. Clement Clay of Alabama, lean and ascetic as an early Christian saint, who railed against Northern abolitionists for “seducing” gullible slaves away from their happy existence in the South, the better to satisfy a perverted appetite for interracial sex.15 Zachariah Chandler, Republican of Michigan, on whose saturnine head a Democratic colleague broke a milk pitcher one afternoon in the dining room of the National Hotel, this by way of correcting the legislator on a point of political doctrine.16 And Senator Davis of Mississippi, whom Brady shot standing in three-quarter profile: a figure unbending as ice, eyes distant and pale, like an astronomer gazing toward some far-off star.
A few men of the old cast remained in public life, however, keeping faith that the Union could be preserved through appeals to reason, history, and the rule of law. The scholarly chief justice of the United States, with encouragement from the president himself, had recently tried to resolve the slavery matter once and for all when the case of a Missouri slave named Dred Scott came before the high court. Judge Roger Taney, in fifty-four erudite and densely reasoned pages, had delved deep into English common law, colonial history, and constitutional precedent before reaching his elegantly simple conclusion: Africans could never, under any current or future circumstances, become Americans. Thanks to some quiet political pressure, two Northern justices had even concurred with Taney and his fellow Southerners on the court, lest the ruling seem simply a matter of sectional prejudices. And the result? Like every previous attempt to address slavery directly, this one had ended in disaster. “The Triumph of Slavery Complete,” proclaimed newspaper headlines in the North. “Wherever our flag floats,” cried William Cullen Bryant in his Evening Post, “it is the flag of slavery.”17 The delicate balance maintained for decades collapsed. The abolitionists grew shriller and more militant than ever. John Brown launched his bloody conspiracy. The Union pitched headlong toward dissolution, pushed over the brink by a ruthless paradox: the republic of liberty was also the single largest slaveholding nation in the world.18
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