Beverly would have used a big knife to cut all the flesh from the bottom of the massive shell. He put the meat in a pan of water, then broke the shell in two, washed it, and put it in a big pot to boil. If he followed Mary Randolph’s recipe he cleansed the guts, peeled off the inside skin, and added bacon and chopped onions, leaving the mixture to cook for three hours.
With the soup under way, Beverly then turned to the meat of the turtle. He cut out the flesh of the belly, known as the calipee and renowned as the tastiest part of the animal. Then he removed the calipash, the flesh underneath the top shell, also a delicacy. He chopped both into small pieces, sprinkled on salt, and covered them. He parboiled the fins, removing all the black skin, and put them in the oven to bake at a medium temperature. When the shell and the guts were done boiling, he would take out the bacon, scrape the shell clean, and strain out the big pieces of the guts. What was left was the pride of Beverly’s kitchen: a fine green turtle soup.
To prepare the calipee in “the West Indian way,” which many colored cooks did, Beverly would use a moderate seasoning of butter, mixed with chopped thyme, parsley, and young onions, as well as salt, white pepper, cayenne pepper, and a pint or more of Madeira. While the turtle meat marinated, Beverly would fry up the chopped turtle guts into a fricassee and finish baking the fins.
The results were served up as a five-course terrapin feast. Diners began with the pièce de résistance, the calipee, followed by the fricasseed guts, the soup, and the fins, served warm or cold. The calipash was eaten last.
Beverly Snow was not falsely modest about the quality of his dishes or his customers.
“Some of the most refined Epicureans, of this Epicurean city, have said the Callapash and the Pattes, were the greatest luxury of the table,” he claimed in the Intelligencer.
For the crowds coming to the fall races, he declared his culinary credo:
HEALTH BOUGHT CHEAP
Just received from the steamboat Potomac, a Fine Green Turtle, which will be served up this day, at 11 o’clock.
Beverly stressed the salubrious rarity of this delicacy, boasting, “This luxury has been recommended by some of our most eminent physicians as a restorative.” Said physicians were not identified by name, but no matter. The practical message of “Health Bought Cheap” was inspired, even ahead of its time. The food at the Epicurean Eating House was not only good, it was good for you.
In 1833, Beverly made the city tax rolls for the first time, reporting three hundred dollars in personal property. Since his arrival three years before, he had saved an average of one hundred dollars a year, no small feat for a colored man who was new in town.
Beverly was by no means rich. He was not even the wealthiest Negro in Washington City. That distinction probably belonged to Poll Robinson, a madam who ran a bawdy house in the First Ward. But Beverly did well by any standard. He pocketed more money than virtually all of the Irish mechanics who helped pave the Avenue outside his restaurant. He had more money than some of the constables on the city police force. He had made a name for himself among the most distinguished white people in the capital of the country and was not shy about advertising the fact. In one ad in the Intelligencer, he proclaimed himself “The National Restaurateur.”
If Snow’s corner at Sixth and Pennsylvania was glamorous, with its daily bustle and late-night tempo, it could also be treacherous. While the ablest free men of color, like Beverly Snow and Isaac Cary, lived and worked among white people, they knew that, at night, the slave traders herded groups of chained families of black people through the city to transport them to the new cotton plantations of the South and West. Beverly did not have to pay attention to this daily crime any more than anyone else. The armed white men usually moved the coffles after curfew so that their fellow Americans would not suffer the experience of seeing enslaved people trudging past the Capitol. But Beverly had to be careful.
He was not exempt from the pressure that District Attorney Key and his constables applied to the free people of color. In June 1834, Key’s constables arrested Thomas Cary, the brother of Isaac, who worked next door in the Emporium of Fashion barbershop. The charge against Thomas Cary was not entered into the record, but it must have been serious because Beverly and Isaac put their money together and posted a five-hundred-dollar bond for his release. Whatever the charge, Thomas Cary, a dedicated antislavery man, had likely defied the legal restrictions on free Negroes in Washington that Key sought to enforce. A trial was scheduled for November 1834, but before it could take place, Key seems to have dropped the charges, possibly because Thomas Cary left town.
Around this time Beverly seems to have left town as well. Perhaps his financial success combined with his association with the outspoken Cary brothers had brought him unwanted attention from the authorities. Perhaps some white men found his audacious style obnoxious to their feelings of racial superiority. Perhaps he had gone, like Benjamin Lundy, to check out the growing colony of free blacks in Canada, where slavery had just been abolished. In any case, he stopped picking up his mail for the next few months, and William Walker ran the Epicurean Eating House in his absence.
By the end of the year, Beverly had returned. Congress had reconvened with the usual talk of tariffs and Texas, contracts and audits. The bars and hotels swelled again with people engaged in the business of American government. President Jackson delivered his annual message to Congress. Mr. Key commuted daily to City Hall. Anna Thornton shopped in Centre Market and rode out on the Avenue. Beverly cooked his dishes and welcomed customers. In the capital of the slaveholding republic he had obtained a rare thing for a free man of color: respect.
“This man Snow,” said Julia Seaton, “was a mulatto at the very head of the respectable colored population, keeping a restaurant much frequented by the good society of Washington.”
17
THE MOOD WAS somber but brisk as the mourners hastened out of the funeral service in the hall of the House of Representatives on January 30, 1835. Congressmen and senators in their long black coats moved along with a swarm of ladies in bonnets, sailors in uniform, clerks, gentlemen, ministers, and dowdy newspaper correspondents. The deceased member from South Carolina had been duly eulogized and now Friday’s business was calling.
Former president John Quincy Adams, portly and grim, exited the Capitol Rotunda as fast as his legs could move him. He wanted no contact with his successor, who lagged behind. President Jackson was walking arm in arm with Levi Woodbury, the secretary of the treasury. As the two men approached the marble pillars that framed the brass doors to the eastern exit, a thin-faced man with dark hair and whiskers stepped forward, standing still as the crowd passed him by. In his right hand, he held a pistol. He raised it.
Jackson, though frail, still had a soldier’s instinct for action. He pushed off from Woodbury and started toward the gunman. The young man—
“of genteel appearance and rather pleasant countenance,” a bystander said—pulled the trigger. Jackson was less than nine feet away when the explosion blasted the air. The man lowered the pistol in his right hand and calmly raised his left hand, also holding a pistol. Unhurt, Jackson was advancing with his cane raised when a second shot exploded. A passing navy lieutenant named Gedney tackled the gunman, sending him sprawling to the marble floor. Pandemonium rippled through the Rotunda. Bystanders rushed to surround President Jackson, who was shouting, “Let me alone! Let me get him,” and waving his cane. Kindly people tried to calm the old man.
A few feet away, the young man on the floor thrashed about as a few men held him down. When the constables arrived, he was put in handcuffs, lifted up, rushed outside, and stuffed into a carriage. It was the first attempted assassination of a U.S. president.
It was another job for Francis Scott Key.
A strange winter thunderstorm engulfed the city as the district attorney arrived at the courtroom in City Hall for the arraignment of the would-be assassin. The space was filling fast. Chief Judge William Cranch was seated on the bench
. Duff Green of the Telegraph was prowling about. So was his bitter rival, Francis Blair of the Globe, who eyed the shiny pistols already laid on the evidence table. Several spectators recognized the accused man, who was seated in the defendant’s dock in the middle of the courtroom. His name was Richard Lawrence. He was a house painter and said to be a good one. After Judge Cranch gaveled the hearing to order, Key rose from his seat at the government’s table and called Tom Randolph, the congressional sergeant at arms, to the stand.
Under questioning from Key, Randolph testified that he had spoken to Lawrence in the carriage ride after the attack and asked him why he had fired the shots. “Because the president killed my father,” Lawrence had replied.
Key called Lieutenant Gedney. The sailor testified that he had taken the pistols from Lawrence and examined them. Suddenly Frank Blair stepped to the front of the courtroom and approached the evidence table. The district attorney, who knew Blair well, did not object, nor did the three judges. The homely editor was known as the president’s confidant, and his newspaper showed no mercy to anyone who stood in Jackson’s way. Blair picked up one of the pistols and pulled back the trigger to expose the gun’s bullet chamber. He held up the gun for inspection to the now-silent and fascinated courtroom crowd. The chamber was fully loaded. The gun, which looked new, had misfired. Jackson’s life had been in real danger.
Blair’s grandstanding had a point: The president had been saved by a miracle. Duff Green watched Blair’s stunt with disgust. When he turned away, he noticed that Richard Lawrence was smiling for the first time, like the whole thing was a joke.
Judge Cranch set bail at fifteen hundred dollars, and Lawrence was taken, in the rain, to City Jail, a long two-story brick building on Fourth Street behind City Hall.
In the days that followed, Francis Blair and Duff Green fixed on the assassination attempt as the quintessence of the political moment. In the pages of the Globe, Blair insinuated that Jackson’s enemies, in their desperation to bring down the man of the people, had incited Lawrence. In the Telegraph, Green denounced the incident as a sham designed to elicit sympathy for a failing tyrant. As people discussed the shocking event, two discernible schools of thought emerged, a division of opinion that would become familiar in American culture. Some perceived a nefarious political conspiracy, while others saw the actions of a lone maniac.
As district attorney, Key had to sort out the matter legally. The next day, he went to the dingy jail, where a guard led him to Lawrence’s cell. The prisoner wore a short-sleeved shirt, impervious to the cold. When Key began his interrogation, Lawrence informed him that no one in the country could punish him, because Europe would object.
“What led you to do it?” Key asked.
“I have long been in correspondence with the powers of Europe,” Lawrence replied. “My family has been wrongfully deprived of the crown of England. I’ll yet live to regain it.”
Frank Key rarely lacked for words, but this was one of those times. He excused himself. The man was completely unhinged.
Key’s problem was that President Jackson had a very different understanding of what had happened. In the mansion on President’s Square, Jackson startled guests by declaring that he was certain, absolutely certain, that Lawrence had acted at the behest of George Poindexter, a senator from Mississippi. Once an ally of Jackson, Poindexter had broken with the president over the Bank War and the distribution of patronage jobs. Poindexter was no statesman. He was rather better known as a whoremonger and wife beater.
Jackson often told the story of how Senator Poindexter had persuaded his third wife to marry him by offering her twenty thousand dollars—and repaid her affection by whipping her regularly. When Poindexter was chosen to serve temporarily as president of the Senate the year before, the New York Evening Post saw a new low in American governance. “This man … yet rank with the fumes of a low debauch, his step yet tottering and his eyes rolling with a drunken leer, this man, all filth and vermin, called probably from a brothel or gin cellar, to the Senate Chamber, this man they chose … to preside over the U.S. Senate.”
Jackson was certain this man had sought to have him murdered.
Key had no evidence of that, putting him at odds with his political patron, an uncomfortable situation. But Jackson persisted. When Harriet Martineau, the best-selling English writer, visited with the president and mentioned the insane attempt on his life, Jackson rebuked her.
“He protested, in the presence of many strangers, that there was no insanity in the case,” Martineau recalled. “I was silent, of course. He protested that there was a plot, and that the man was a tool.…It was painful to hear a chief ruler publicly trying to persuade foreigners that any of his constituents hated him to the death.”
Jackson took satisfaction a few days later when a bricklayer who worked on the presidential mansion sent word that he had information of interest. His name was Charles Coltman. In addition to his day job, he represented the Second Ward on the city’s common council. Coltman said he had two friends who wished to share what they knew about Richard Lawrence. A mechanic named David Stewart who worked on Poindexter’s carriage said he had seen Lawrence talking to the senator in the Capitol lobby on the Tuesday before the assassination attempt. Mordecai Foy, who ran an ordinary near Poindexter’s house on Four and a Half Street, recalled seeing Lawrence come and go at different times, including the previous Tuesday. Coltman said he had encouraged both men to give statements to a justice of the peace.
The president invited Stewart and Foy for a visit. They called on the presidential mansion on February 12, and Jackson interrupted his meeting with Congressman Dutee Pearce of Rhode Island to usher them in. As the men told their story and shared their affidavits, Congressman Pearce scanned the statements, amazed at their allegations. After the meeting, Pearce told the story of Stewart and Foy’s affidavits to Sam Southworth, a Washington correspondent for a New York business newspaper, which may have been Jackson’s intention all along. Pearce was an ally, and Jackson knew the story would have more credibility if it did not come out in the Globe. Within a day Southworth’s article became the talk of the capital. The president had proof of an assassination conspiracy!
Senator Poindexter was outraged. He demanded the Senate address allegations “highly injurious to my moral character,” and the Senate responded by creating a six-member investigative committee. On February 22, Stewart and Foy testified. Under oath, they hedged on their statements. Stewart said he had only seen Lawrence near Poindexter’s house—he had never actually seen them together—and he admitted that Poindexter owed him four hundred dollars for work on a carriage. Foy could not even identify the location of the senator’s house. No other witnesses came forward.
The committee issued a unanimous report that exonerated Poindexter, asserting that “not a shade of suspicion rests upon his character.” The report was received with applause from the Senate gallery and unanimously approved. Down at City Hall, the board of aldermen and the common council passed two resolutions, one denouncing Coltman, the man who had encouraged the statement, and the other blasting “every individual involved,” a slap at the president himself. Jackson’s conspiracy theory was dead.
Some thought the Washington grand jury should indict Jackson and Coltman for subornation of perjury, but the district attorney was not interested. Key was more convinced than ever that the failed assassination proved Andrew Jackson was living under divine protection. The rest was politics.
“The whole transaction is inexpressibly base,” muttered John Quincy Adams to his diary, “and approaches much too near to the President for the good of his reputation.”
Frank Key had managed the situation adroitly, neither succumbing to Jackson’s manipulation of witnesses nor alienating his patron. In April 1835, Key brought the failed assassin, Richard Lawrence, to trial. He told the judges and jury that Lawrence was not guilty for reasons of insanity and ought to be committed to an asylum. The court agreed. Lawrence was convicted and se
nt back to the fetid City Jail. He would live in confinement until his death forty years later.
18
WASHINGTON CITY DID not lack dangers and attractions for Arthur Bowen, a wayward young man in search of freedom in the spring of 1835. There were occasional entertainments like balloon ascents from Mason’s Island, or the traveling exhibition of a rarely seen creature, the Orang Utang. There were also perennial diversions like the billiard halls, grog shops, the circus, and the Jockey Club. When the spring races opened on Meridian Hill in May 1835, Arthur attended and paid a price. The crowd was vast as usual. There were drinking and betting, cheering and arguing, girls to impress and rivals to challenge. Arthur got into a fight and did not come out the winner.
“Arthur came home this Evening (from the races) with his head cut + much hurt and bruised,” Anna wrote in her diary. “Sent for Dr. Causin who came late … trouble-trouble-trouble.”
She did not identify Arthur’s assailants in her diary. Were they other Negro boys like himself, slave or free, who were not so well dressed or so well spoken? Or was it white men annoyed by his assertive ways? Maybe Arthur never told her. A week later, he was still unwell.
Eventually Arthur recovered and made his way to the next meeting of the Philomathean Talking Society, where he might well have absorbed some of John Cook’s urgency. The schoolteacher had just returned from Philadelphia, where he served as secretary at the Fifth Annual National Negro Convention, the yearly gathering of free Negroes. The convention, well attended by Washington men, had spawned a national network dedicated to economic self-sufficiency and independence. Returning from this conclave, Cook breathed the gospel of freedom and reform as never before.
In the bare classroom on H Street, Cook tried to bake an audacious idea into the heads of the young black men who gathered to talk: Their cause in America was sacred. He wanted them to understand that education, temperance, and freedom were all part of the fabric of emancipation. He told them to reject the colonization scheme in favor of an American dream as voiced in the Philadelphia convention’s declaration, which he had signed, and may well have drafted.
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