Another factor in Beverly’s calculations: proximity to the hotels. The biggest was the Indian Queen, Jesse Brown’s four-story palace graced by a large swinging sign featuring the brown-eyed, ruby-lipped visage of Pocahontas, the legendary Indian maiden. Brown’s hotel was a destination for every kind of traveler from around the country, and for good reason. Brown was an exuberant hotelier of corpulent girth. Beverly was an experienced cook who knew how to prepare a fine table, but he could learn something from this showman of the carving board.
Jesse Brown would march out onto the hard-packed dirt of Pennsylvania Avenue with extended hand to greet his arriving guests as they descended from their coaches. In his huge dining room on the second floor, Brown boasted of fresh vegetables every day and carved the meat himself. He announced the excellencies of his offerings—fish, beef, or fowl—while inviting those seated at the tables around him to send up their plates.
“I have a delicious quarter of mutton from the Valley of Virginia,” Brown would proclaim in stentorian tones above the clatter of the crockery and the din of steel forks and knives.
“Let me send you a rare slice, Mr. A.”
“Colonel B, will you not have a bone?”
“Mrs. C, send up your plate for a piece of kidney.”
“Mrs. D, there is a fat and tender mongrel goose at the other end of the table.”
Beverly, fresh from the frontier, faced some serious city competition in his dream of setting up an eating house. Fortunately for him, most hotelkeepers were not so capable as Jesse Brown. Boardinghouse guests scared away by the bloody carcasses and soggy legumes spread before them on some dismal sideboard would surely take to the streets of the city to find something edible. Beverly planned to be ready for them.
When the races finally opened over the course of several lustrous weekends in the fall of 1830, Beverly imbibed Washington City at its most opulent. Delegations of sporting men crowded into the Indian Queen, the National, and other hotels along Pennsylvania Avenue. Planters from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas prosecuted the business of the turf as a pastime. To them cost was nothing. They bought stallions at staggeringly large prices, arranged for studs, wagered with gusto, and enjoyed society like English noblemen. The big event took place at the Jockey Club’s racetrack on Meridian Hill. The track consisted of a long dirt oval, one mile in circumference, fifty feet wide, and a low-slung viewing stand. In the company of his fellow barkeeps, Beverly set up an ordinary in a wooden booth in the middle of the racing oval. While customers perched on the roofs to watch the horses, he worked the crowd, dispensing ale, selling food, pocketing coins, and taking stock of his new customers.
“You must not be astonished at hearing that a number of beautiful females were present, sitting exposed on the tops and boxes of carriages, and in other conspicuous seats,” wrote one European visitor, delighted to see America’s reputation for puritanical propriety was overblown. To his astonished eyes it seemed that “every line of separation is so entirely obliterated that where there are men you are sure to meet women.” Indeed the Jockey Club races attracted people of all description—white, African, mulatto, dandy, mechanic, lady, and lad. They cheered, clapped, shouted, hugged, and cursed. There was laughter, quarreling, drinking, and fighting.
Not all of Washington society approved of this gay scene. In recent years, a new religious fervor had infused much of the nation and the capital too. Around the city, men organized temperance societies, dedicated to curbing their consumption of spirits. In the surrounding countryside, camp meetings, sponsored by flamboyant traveling preachers, offered salvation to growing crowds of men and women, both black and white, who wanted a holy presence in their lives. The idea of reform had taken root, but it hardly dampened the popular passion for the horses.
President Jackson’s arrival at the fall races in October and November 1830 was memorable. He came sauntering up Fourteenth Street astride his favorite gray steed, wearing a high white fur hat with a broad band of black crepe. As he and his entourage swept into the grounds of the racetrack they found their spot amidst murmurs and congratulatory shouts. The old general loved a crowd and he loved wagering large sums of money with full confidence in his mastery of the equestrian arts, a delusion that was both costly and incurable. In the main event, Mr. Burwell’s horse bested all comers in the two-mile race, and Jackson’s pony wasn’t even close. Crestfallen, the president went home with a thinner purse.
The fall races closed for good a few days later, but Beverly would not go out of business for long. He let his newfound friends and customers around town know that he would soon open an oyster house on Seventh Street.
In this first venture, Beverly knew what he wanted to serve: a variety of cooked birds dressed with sauces and served with champagne or wine. What he didn’t know was where he should advertise. He had two choices. The longest-lived newspaper in town was the National Intelligencer, which had an office around the corner on D Street. Edited by two gentlemen of good standing, William Seaton and Joseph Gales, the Intelligencer’s editorials treated Negroes with some respect. But the newspaper that everybody seemed to be talking about was the United States’ Telegraph, edited by a pugnacious and profane former army general named Duff Green, who worked out of a print shop on E Street. The Telegraph was as scrappy and aggressive as its irascible owner. Every issue came emblazoned with Green’s creed, “Power is always stealing from the many to the few.” When debating the issues of the day, Green proved a cantankerous philosopher. His arguments in defense of slavery and states’ rights included learned references to pistols, canes, and cowhide. One particularly frank exchange with a political opponent left Green with several broken bones and a dislocated leg. The Telegraph, needless to say, had a lot of readers.
Beverly did not have to care that Duff Green defended the slave masters. Most white men did. What mattered to the newcomer from Lynchburg was that people read his sheet. The way Beverly looked at it, no matter what words came out of the white man’s mouth, some food had to go in. Slavers or not, they were all potential customers. So Beverly gave his dollar to Duff Green’s printer, who typeset the handwritten text in hot lead, and the ad appeared in the Telegraph the next day:
BEVERLY SNOW
7th Street, a few doors south of the Patriotic Bank,
Respectfully informs his friends and the public generally, that he has opened an establishment at the above place where he will be ready to accommodate them on the shortest notice. He has made arrangements with the Steamboats to supply with Canvas-Back Ducks, Venison, Norfolk Fish, Oysters, and every other luxury which the market affords. His table will be furnished with Chafing Dishes and West India Jellies.
With this elegant missive Beverly injected himself into Washington City life, like no colored man ever had. Regardless of race, his enterprise was original. The ordinaries and inns of Washington served one or two meals a day at a fixed time and price, at a common table. The underpaid cooks were indifferent to the quality of their fare, and the customers were expected to help themselves to whatever landed in front of them. This arrangement, common in hotels as well, worked well for assertive men seated near the middle of the table. It could be frustrating for those with more particular tastes, as well as for women and children, not to mention for the wayfaring stranger, or anyone seated at the far corners.
Beverly’s new place resembled more what the French called a table d’hôte, or restaurant. These were a new sort of eating places, already common in Paris, that served a standard daily meal, usually roasted meat, at a communal table. The term “restaurant” had first come into popular use in France as the name of a table d’hôte serving light restorative (“restauratif”) dishes such as beef broth. By the late eighteenth century the Parisian restaurant had become a refectory that offered seating at private tables and single servings of food from a somewhat varied menu.
Beverly Snow was the first culinary entrepreneur in the capital city to offer this new restorative experience. How many peopl
e in Washington City had a skilled cook who could serve them canvasback duck, a bird renowned for the subtlety of its taste, at a cozy table with a chafing dish to warm their victuals? Not many. Beverly offered a dining room like those in the finest Virginia homes, like the one he grew up in, and he offered it to anyone who could pay. For aspiring people in a sometimes coarse city such an offer of comfort constituted an unusual treat, especially when the price was right. Beverly’s customers had a tendency to return.
4
BEVERLY PAID ATTENTION to the peculiar eating habits of Americans. “They consume an extraordinary quantity of bacon,” observed Mrs. Trollope, duly appalled. “Ham and beef-steaks appear morning, noon, and night. In eating they mix things together with the strangest incongruity imaginable. I have seen eggs and oysters eaten together; the sempiternal ham with apple-sauce, beef-steak with stewed peaches and salt fish with onions.” She complained of a “great want of skill in the preparation of sauces,” a paucity of second courses, and a general want of intelligent conversation because men and women rarely dined together.
Beverly intuited that a more coordinated and convivial repast might appeal. He and Julia probably lived in an apartment above his eatery on the west side of Seventh Street, just south of D Street. Their customers came from the neighborhood: lamblike tourists looking for the Patent Office, strutting senators, dour clerks, and ladies in their carriages. Before long the better sorts of people stopped in. Mrs. Julia Seaton, the wife of William Seaton, coeditor of the National Intelligencer, became a patron. So did William Bradley, president of the Patriotic Bank at the corner of Seventh and D, which disturbed Anne Royall, the capital’s only female editor. As sole proprietor of a crusading independent publication called Paul Pry, Royall was a scourge of Christianity, temperance, abolition, and other right-thinking causes. She was appalled that a free man of color like Snow could become Bradley’s “particular friend.”
As his next newspaper advertisement made clear, however, Beverly welcomed attention:
LOOK AT THIS!
The subscriber takes this method of informing his friends that he has just received a fresh supply of very fine venison which will be served up in the best style for the accommodation of his customers.
BEVERLY SNOW
It did not hurt Beverly’s prospects that his doors opened just one block north of Centre Market, the commercial hub of the city. The surrounding streets housed dry-goods dealers, glassblowers, tanners, dealers in coal and firewood, and two wool mills, not to mention assorted butchers and greengrocers.
This parade of humanity gave lie to the outdated joke that Washington was but a swampy village. The National Metropolis was beginning to live up to its billing, with a diverse population from all corners of the young republic. The southerners of Washington City carried themselves with ease and frank courtesy, observed Harriet Martineau, while the New Englanders were deferential to, if not cowed by, rivals who carried guns. “One can tell the New England member [of Congress] in the open air by his deprecatory walk,” Martineau observed. “He seems to bear in mind perpetually that he cannot fight a duel, while other people can.” As for visitors from the West, they beggared description. “One had a neck like a crane making an interval of inches between stock and chin,” Martineau reported. “Another wears no cravat, apparently because there is no room for one.”
The growing city also attracted another group of newcomers, the young white men known as “mechanics.” In America at the time any manual laborer, skilled or unskilled, might be called a mechanic, but in Washington City, the term seemed reserved for unskilled foreign workers, often Irish or German, who were brought in by the boatload from northern European ports, lured by contractors hired to pave Pennsylvania Avenue and dig the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. When a cholera epidemic struck in late summer 1832, more than four hundred and fifty people succumbed to the disease within three months, with white mechanics and free blacks, who often lived in unsanitary conditions, suffering the most.
Along with the influx of new immigrants came Americans with new ideas that some considered shocking, if not dangerous. Some residents, black and white, had begun to denounce slavery, not merely as unfortunate or cruel but as illegal, a violation of human rights. The liberal-minded whites who favored African colonization found themselves facing a new argument: that America should simply abolish the practice of enslaving people of African descent. Beverly did not identify himself as one of the so-called abolitionists, but he soon enough fell in with those who did.
He and Julia befriended a barber, Isaac Newton Cary, who owned the Emporium of Fashion barbershop on Sixth Street across from John Gadsby’s newly renovated National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Cary, who hailed from Fredericksburg, was the son of a prosperous free black man, Thomas Cary Sr., who admired Sir Isaac Newton and named his son in his honor. Known for his excellent sense and scrupulous conduct, Isaac Cary seemed to enjoy the respect of all who knew him, white and black. In his business, Cary touted himself to gentlemen staying at the nearby hotels as a “Professor of Shaving and adept at Hair-Cutting.” With a fellow barber, John Fleet, he was planning to open a second tonsorial emporium at Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
Isaac Cary did not advertise the fact, but he and his brother Thomas Jr. were also active opponents of slavery who sought to undermine the institution of racial bondage at every opportunity. Isaac Cary sold subscriptions to Freedom’s Journal, the first antislavery newspaper published by black men. When it ceased publication, he became an agent for another antislavery sheet, called the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In the summer of 1830, Cary had supported the National Negro Convention in Philadelphia, the first gathering of free black men from all of America. Cary did not attend the meeting but welcomed the convention’s declaration denouncing slavery and African colonization, and he agreed to serve on the local committee to advance its work, an audacious and potentially dangerous undertaking. In the slaveholding capital, Snow’s new friends, Isaac and Thomas Cary, qualified as subversives.
So did Cary’s friend John Francis Cook, also from Fredericksburg. Trained to be a shoemaker, Cook had come to the capital in 1826 when his aunt, Lethe Tanner, a light-skinned free black woman who ran a vegetable stand in President’s Square, bought his freedom. At eighteen years of age, Cook enrolled in a school for blacks near the corner of Fourteenth and H streets, run by teacher and antislavery activist John Prout. As Cook learned to read and write, his capacious intelligence became evident, and not just to colored people. He soon obtained a job in the Land Office, housed in a grand building on Seventh Street, where he worked for a white man named John Wilson, who became his friend for life. Cook’s “indefatigable application” was “a matter of astonishment” to Wilson, who said he had “seen nothing in all his observation to surpass and scarcely to equal it.”
Before long Cook was acting on his irrepressible lifelong imperative to educate, organize, and improve the lives of his fellows. When banker William Bradley manumitted one of his slaves in 1831, Cook organized a celebration with other young black men featuring the reading of antislavery poetry and tracts. Cook would go on to organize what he called the Philomathean Talking Society, also known as the Young Man’s Moral and Literary Society, where he condemned slavery and encouraged young black men to prepare themselves for freedom. Some white men viewed Cook with mistrust, but among black folks he was widely admired as a prodigy.
Beverly probably shook hands at some point with a friend of Isaac Cary’s named Benjamin Lundy, a white man who often came visiting from Baltimore. At forty-one years of age, Lundy was the itinerant editor and publisher of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. The Genius, as it was known, attracted loyal readers among free blacks and some whites because its pages exposed and denounced every aspect of the American slave system. Lundy reported the stories of injustice that the capital’s respectable newspapers—the Intelligencer, Telegraph, and Globe—rarely mentioned.
Lundy had grown up without much formal educ
ation in a Quaker family in New Jersey. As a young man he moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he roomed with a gambler and consorted with “wild and fashionable” friends. But when he glimpsed a coffle of enslaved people being forcibly transported south, he was stunned and disturbed. He decided to dedicate his life to fighting the slave system. He organized an antislavery society in Ohio and in 1821 started publishing the Genius wherever he happened to live. He moved to Tennessee, and then, in 1828, to Baltimore, where he supported himself and his family back in Ohio with the sale of subscriptions. “One dollar per annum,” he told his customers, “always to be paid in advance.”
The Genius was an early gem of American journalism. Barely four inches wide and eight inches tall, each issue came emblazoned with the words of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In its tiny pages Lundy reported on the terrible realities of continental slavery. He catalogued the depredations of slave traders, the ingenious methods of escape used by bondsmen, the regrettable quiescence of leading churchmen, the struggle against slavery in England, and so on. Despite the living nightmare of its subject, the Genius managed to exude a hearty outrage that reflected the editor’s tenacity and good humor.
Snow-Storm in August Page 3
