You have probably read a plethora of news stories generated by first lady Michelle Obama’s remarks about enslavement and the White House in her opening night endorsement speech for Hillary Clinton, delivered at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia:
That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn
The controversy was escalated by right-wing Faux newsman Bill O’Reilly, who made a series of trollish (and wrong) comments guaranteed to inflame his audience of haters and generate ad revenue.
The upshot: Whatever gets more Americans to confront the history of how this nation was built and financed is a good thing, no matter the denialists.
Our first lady, like a majority of African Americans (including some folks currently listed as “white”), has enslaved ancestors in her family tree.
What tends to get overlooked in the rush to fact-check Mrs. Obama’s remarks about the White House is that our nation’s capital was built on Native American land, and “donated” by two slave states, Maryland and Virginia, to become a district and capital in which slavery was the law.
I take an interest in this not just as a student of history. For me, part of it is personal, since I have ancestors who were enslaved in the District of Columbia.
This graphic is a detail from “Slave Market of America,” which is:
A broadside condemning the sale and keeping of slaves in the
District of Columbia. The work was issued during the 1835-36 petition campaign, waged by moderate abolitionists led by Theodore Dwight Weld and buttressed by Quaker organizations, to have Congress abolish slavery in the capital. The text contains arguments for abolition and an accounting of atrocities of the system. At the top are two contrasting scenes: a view of the reading of the Declaration of Independence, captioned "The Land of the Free," with a scene of slaves being led past the capitol by an overseer, entitled "The Home of the Oppressed." Between them is a plan of Washington with insets of a suppliant slave (see "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" no. 1837- ) and a fleeing slave with the legend "$200 Reward" and implements of slavery. On the next line are views of the jail in Alexandria, the jail in Washington with the "sale of a free citizen to pay his jail fees," and an interior of the Washington jail with imprisoned slave mother Fanny Jackson and her children. On the bottom level are an illustration of slaves in chains emerging from the slave house of J.W. Neal & Co. (left), a view of the Alexandria waterfront with a ship loading slaves (center), and a view of the slave establishment of Franklin & Armfield in Alexandria.
Back in 2009, I wrote “Ode to a colored soldier whose name I bear,” detailing a bit of the history of Dennis Weaver—for whom I was named Denise—who was one of the members of my family held in bondage in Washington. Thanks to now-digitized and transcribed records, I was able to locate documents filed under the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act by one of the owners of my family members, who were surnamed Weaver, Sipio (Scipio), and Jackson.
For those people who fiercely resist the idea of reparations, I point to this history of slavers who owned humans. They were paid compensation by the Feds for losing their human chattel.
Petition of Hugh W. Throckmorton, 5 May 1862
PETITION.
To the Commissioners under the act of Congress approved the 16th of April, 1862, entitled "An act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia."
Your Petitioner, Hugh W. Throckmorton of Washington City D.C. by this his petition in writing, represents and states, that he is a person loyal to the United States, who, at the time of the passage of the said act of Congress, held a claim to service or labor against the following persons of African descent of the names of Lewis Sipio, Solomon Ford, Henry Weaver, Patsy Jackson, John Jackson, Dennis Weaver, Winney Ford and Joseph Ford for and during the life of said Persons and that by said act of Congress said Persons was discharged and freed of and from all claim of your petitioner to such service or labor; that at the time of said discharge said Lewis Sipio was of the age of Thirty Years and of the personal description following:(1) Light Coloured, Solomon Ford Twenty Nine Years of a Dark Coloured, Henry Weaver aged Twenty Six Years, Dark Coloured Patsy Jackson, aged Twenty two years, Dark Coloured John Jackson aged Eight Months. Light Coloured Dennis Weaver aged Eighteen years. Dark Coloured Winney Ford aged Sixteen years, Dark Coloured and Joseph Ford aged fifteen years. Dark Coloured all very healthy and No defect excepting Henry Weaver who has a Broken Leg; and at Present Writing on Crutches but improving
For those who refuse to accept the history of enslaved people who not only built the White House but who worked there, too, in A Capital Under Slavery’s Shadow, Adam Goodheart wrote:
Across the Potomac, in the nation’s capital itself, slavery and racial injustice were daily realities too. The labor of black men and women made the engine of the city run. Enslaved cab drivers greeted newly arrived travelers at the city’s railway station and drove them to hotels, such as Gadsby’s and Willard’s, that were staffed largely by slaves. In local barbershops, it was almost exclusively black men – many of them slaves – 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.”)
…
Even the slave trade – although supposedly outlawed in Washington more than a decade earlier – still operated there quite openly, with black men and women frequently advertised for sale in the newspapers, and occasionally even sent to the auction block just a few hundred yards from the White House. The ban, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, technically only forbade the importation of blacks into the District of Columbia to be sold out of state. The law permitted a local master to sell his or her own slaves – and there was little to keep them from being sent across the river to Alexandria, where slave trading flourished on an industrial scale, and the unfortunate captives might easily be forced aboard a cramped schooner bound for New Orleans or Mobile. Nor was it an uncommon sight to see a black woman going door-to-door in the most fashionable neighborhoods of Washington, begging for small donations toward buying her children out of slavery.
Thanks to Jesse J. Holland, the slaves of the White House finally get to have their stories told.
President Barack Obama might be the first black president to
serve in the White House, but he certainly was not the first black person to live there. Yet the history of the original black residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has been sparsely reported on, as
Associated Press reporter
Jesse J. Holland discovered when he began researching his latest book
, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House.
The Invisibles—a smart sketch on the lives of these men and women in bondage—is intended to serve as a historical first take. Holland’s goal writing about the slaves who resided alongside 10 of the first 12 presidents who lived in the White House is to start a conversation on who these enslaved people were, what they were like, and what happened to them if they were able to escape from bondage.
Holland may have started a conversation for those people interested in history and black history. But the faux controversy over FLOTUS’ remarks has brought that dialogue into the homes of many people who rarely think about it. Just as few Americans know the history of enslaved Africans building Wall Street. Most don’t see the nation’s capital as a symbol of enslavement, nor does the White House evoke an image of a plantation “big house.”
The Invisibles sheds some much-needed light. From Kirkus Reviews:
Ten of the first 12 United States presidents were slave masters. In this brisk history, Holland (Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C., 2007), Washington correspondent for the Associated Press, examines the tangled relationships between slaves and the presidents they served, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant, and exposes the convoluted laws enacted to impede slaves’ quests for freedom. Of the first 12 presidents, only John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, fierce opponents of slavery, did not own slaves, thereby incurring heavy costs for domestic help to maintain the White House. Although some slaves’ lives have been lost to history, Holland creates a vivid portrait of many, including William Lee, who worked as Washington’s 'body servant,' and Oney Judge, born at Mount Vernon, who was Martha Washington’s favorite. They were among some 150 slaves that Washington amassed by the time of the Revolution, many bought by his wife. Martha cherished Oney, and she was devastated when the woman fled from servitude. Tracked down, Oney was told that the Washingtons would free her when she returned to them—but she didn’t believe the offer. 'I am free now and choose to remain so,' she replied.' Holland reprises Jefferson’s connection to the Hemings family, whose descendants claimed that he fathered Sally Hemings’ children, and he reveals that even presidents who spoke against slavery kept slaves to run their farms and work on their land. James Madison, convinced that slaves should not be freed into white America, founded the American Colonization Society, 'dedicated to freeing slaves and transporting them to the west coast of Africa.' James Monroe, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson also endorsed that idea. Several thousand freed slaves were sent to Liberia from 1820 to 1840; in honor of Monroe, the capital was renamed Monrovia.
I won’t digress from the discussion of enslavement in D.C. to delve into the travesty of Liberia’s founding, except to note that in most cases emancipation had become so difficult in the South by the end of the enslavement period, that the only way to get free was to risk “death by re-settlement,” a deadly farce since those black Americans sent “back to Africa” were not Africans—they were Americans. I promise a future piece on that episode.
Holland’s first book, Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C., offers a very different type of tourist guide to our nation’s central city.
Millions of people visit the National Mall, the White House, and the U.S. Capitol each year. If they only hear the standard story, a big question remains: “Where’s the black history?”
Packed with new information and archival photos, Black Men Built the Capitol answers this question. In this thoroughly researched yet completely accessible volume, Washington insider and political journalist Jesse J. Holland shines a light on the region’s African-American achievements, recounting little-known stories and verifying rumors, such as:
• Enslaved black men built the Capitol, White House, and other important Washington structures. • Philip Reid, a thirty-nine-year-old slave from South Carolina, cast and helped save the model of the Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol Dome. • The National Mall sits on the former site of the city’s most bustling slave market. • The grounds that are now Arlington National Cemetery were, from 1863 to 1888, a self-sustaining village for former slaves called the Freedman’s Village.
Included are hundreds of places in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia that illuminate “the rest of the story” for Washington residents and visitors alike
One of the ironies of American History that isn’t often taught also involves Washington and enslaved black folks. That is the tale of the War of 1812 and the role played by enslaved blacks aiding the British in order to achieve freedom, and the part they played in the burning of the city’s federal buildings.
I have vague memories of it being covered in grade school, tales of the horrid British trying to take away our freedom won in the American Revolution. Not one mention was made of slaves joining the British. No mention of them fleeing and being resettled in places like Nova Scotia.
Historian Alan Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, should be on your bookshelf if you are interested in that history.
This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake by a
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
Reading Taylor’s work gave me a deeper understanding of the drive to escape enslavement by any means necessary. Taylor points out that there were free blacks who fought on the side of the U.S. against the British. They reaped few rewards despite their heroism, nor did their treatment get better. I was raised on the story of how my great-great-Aunt Annie, at around age 15, escaped to Canada from Loudoun County, Virginia, (near Washington) with the help of a free black bargeman. My mom remembered meeting her. Slavery isn’t ancient history in my family. It is one part of the warp and weft of my being.
For those of you who have some time to spare, Taylor’s April 17, 2014 lecture to the Virginia Historical Society is posted below:
As the time approaches when our black First Family will no longer occupy the White House, may President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama continue to be in our national and global spotlight. Michelle Obama, along with daughters Malia and Sasha, are a living link to a history we have not yet accepted nor transcended as a nation. The howls of denial and racism may be loud from certain quarters, but the self-evident truth will prevail—in time.