“We rejoice that we are thrown into a revolution where the contest is not for landed territory but for freedom.…Let no man remove from his native country, for our principles are drawn from the book of Divine Revelation, and are incorporated in the Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are born equal.’ ”
Cook told them white Americans and their laws sorely abused them as people of color. But oppression would not defeat them.
“We pray God … that our visages may be so many Bibles that shall warn this guilty nation of her injustice and cruelty to the descendants of Africa, until righteousness, justice, and truth shall rise in their might and majesty, and proclaim from the halls of legislation that the chains of the bondsman have fallen—that the soil is sacred to liberty, and that, without distinction of nation or complexion, she disseminates alike her blessings of freedom to all mankind.”
Arthur yearned to join Cook’s contest for freedom in all its glory. But he couldn’t even hold a job. His failings were evident to all. Well born and well read, he had a love for horses that did him no good. He had a thirst for liberty yet a weak will. He was wise about the human heart but oblivious to the workings of power. Dependent on women, he was immune to their influence. A failure at fisticuffs, he had a wit that could charm. He was sensitive to slights, prone to argument, imaginative about big things, oblivious about small. He was carefree, valiant, and foolish. He resembled no one so much as the late Dr. William Thornton.
There is no proof—or even published allegation—that William Thornton was Arthur Bowen’s father. But the evidence does not exclude the possibility. Arthur was often identified as mulatto, so his father was almost certainly white. His mother, Maria Bowen, had belonged to the Thorntons since she was a little girl, which meant she had never been the property of any other white man besides William Thornton. She was born around 1800 and lived in his house at the time of Arthur’s conception in 1815 and his birth nine months later, and for many years thereafter.
Liaisons between white slave owners and their black chattels were common. Dr. Thornton’s friend Thomas Jefferson had his colored companion of many years, the beautiful Sally Hemings. Senator Richard Mentor Johnson, nominated in May 1835 as Martin Van Buren’s vice presidential running mate in the 1836 election, had at least two African consorts, Julia Chinn and Parthene, whom he treated as wives. If William Thornton had taken young Maria Bowen by rape or seduction, it would not have been unusual.
Nor would it have been out of character. Dr. Thornton displayed a friendly and knowing interest in Negro women in his unpublished novel “Lucy.” The story, which sympathetically portrayed an unmarried white mother, depicted her free black servant Becky as especially perceptive about the ways of white people. “Miss,” Becky tells Lucy at one point, “a colored person may have quite the genius, and his master and mistress never be the wiser.”
What Anna Thornton thought is unknown. She probably recorded some reaction to Maria Bowen’s pregnancy and Arthur’s birth in late 1815 or early 1816. She kept her diary from 1800 to the 1850s, filling some fifteen notebooks with neatly composed recollections, but her journals for the years from 1815 to 1827 are missing. Anna (or her heirs) decided not to save her journals from the period in which Arthur Bowen was conceived, born, and grew up. Why her account of those years was lost is unknown, but the timing is suggestive. Anna Thornton, who had a keen sense of history, may not have wanted some things to be remembered. So while there is no certainty that William Thornton fathered Arthur Bowen, he is the most likely candidate.
Yet what could Dr. Thornton’s paternity mean to Arthur but betrayal and mockery? William Thornton had designed the seat of government for what people said was the freest country in the world, yet Arthur remained in bondage. In his third-floor garret in the house on F Street, he felt he deserved his freedom. But what could he do if Mrs. Thornton did not care to give it to him? His predicament was intolerable yet inescapable. He had to do something. But what?
In search of answers, he returned again to the Philomathean Talking Society.
19
THE ABOLITIONIST MENACE arrived unbidden and unnoticed on the docks of Georgetown in June 1835 when a twenty-nine-year-old white man walked off a steamboat, just arrived from New York City. By the 1830s Georgetown was turning into what it would become, a residential enclave with more society and charm than Washington City. But charm is not what the arriving passenger, Dr. Reuben Crandall, sought. He was more a man of science and religion. Recipient of a medical degree from Yale College in 1828, Crandall was a doctor, a botanist, a Christian, and a temperance man. He was also deeply opposed to slavery. Not since Benjamin Lundy prowled E Street had such a courageous antislavery man decided to make the capital his home.
Reuben Crandall was looking to settle down with a teaching position. To that end, he called on Benjamin Hallowell, the headmaster of a school in Alexandria who needed a lecturer in science. Hallowell, a Quaker and leader in American scientific education, told him that he would hire him on the condition he provide two letters of reference. Reuben took a steamer back to New York, where he collected his clothes, his possessions, his papers, and his recommendations. He booked a return trip to Georgetown within a few weeks. He returned accompanied only by a large trunk.
Crandall’s trunk was Frank Key’s nightmare. It contained hundreds of bundled copies of abolitionist tracts such as The Emancipator, The Liberator, The Anti-Slavery Record, and Human Rights. It even had copies of The Slave’s Friend, an antislavery book for children. Reuben’s new neighbors did not know about the contents of the trunk, but they regarded him coolly. He was from New York, which was unusual enough. He also had a notorious last name. He was the brother of Prudence Crandall, the Connecticut teacher whose school for free girls of color had made national headlines in 1833 before being shut down, first by the state legislature, and then by a mob.
Reuben was more cautious than his famous sister but he did not lack conviction. Key would later claim that Reuben formally served as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which was not exactly true. He was not an agent but two of his friends worked for the society at a high level. Charles Denison, a fellow Yale man, edited The Emancipator, the society’s flagship publication. Denison had visited Reuben in New York the year before and delivered the trunk that Reuben had now imported to the South. Reuben was also a friend of Robert C. Williams, who served as publications manager for the society.
Both Denison and Williams promoted the organization’s audacious new strategy for shaking slavery’s grip on the United States. Adopted at its second annual meeting in May 1835, the plan was concocted by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, brotherly prototypes of that enduring self-summoned figure in American politics, the Wall Street progressive. Raised in a Calvinist household in Massachusetts, the Tappans proved adept at making money at an early age when they moved to New York and started importing silk from China. Arthur Tappan would go on to establish the country’s first financial newspaper, the Journal of Commerce, and the Mercantile Agency, the first credit-rating firm on Wall Street, both of which made him rich. The Tappans wanted to generate an antislavery message independent of William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, whose fierce language had won him national notoriety and alienated more than a few people. Unlike Garrison, the Tappans did not want to denounce or shame those moderates who wanted to do something about slavery. They wanted to persuade them that the procrastination of colonization was pointless, and that America should simply abolish slavery and give citizenship to the blacks.
Arthur Tappan envisioned using the newest technology, powerful steam-driven cylinder printing presses imported from England that could publish ten times the output of the hand-driven presses then in use. The antislavery society could then inundate the South with their own publications and provoke the public discussion that the slave owners always sought to suppress in the newspapers, the churches, and everywhere else. The pamphlet campaign, as they called it, would take special aim at the District
of Columbia. In closing their meeting, the group prepared a memorial, or petition, insisting that the U.S. Congress certainly had the power to outlaw slavery in the capital, “and it is hardly less certain that a majority of this nation desire its abolition.”
Reuben Crandall did not attend that meeting, but his friends Denison and Williams did. The society had already published more than 120,000 copies of its various pamphlets. This effort, the society decided, should be vastly increased. “It is obvious to remark,” said the final report of the meeting, “that a proper organization of its friends throughout the country might enable the Society to accomplish a hundred-fold more by the press.”
Within weeks bags of antislavery pamphlets, each individually addressed, began reaching the post offices of Washington and other cities in the South. Before the end of 1835, the society would distribute a million copies of four different publications.
The government’s spies were among the first to notice the deluge of antislavery material. In July 1835, James Kennedy, a Post Office clerk in Washington who had the job of surveilling the mails, was appalled to see a bushel basket full of copies of The Anti-Slavery Reporter and The Emancipator arrive for local delivery. Another clerk, Charles Gordon, followed the abolitionist sheets so closely he could cite their various publication schedules from memory.
“A shower of Anti-Slavery periodicals and pamphlets have … descended … chiefly through our city post office,” the weekly Mirror reported. “The Emancipator and the Anti-Slavery Record, in particular, have been addressed to most of the gentlemen belonging to our public offices, to the President and Professors of our Colleges &c. We understand that in most instances, these firebrands have been flung back to the source from which they sprung.”
By then Reuben Crandall had rented an office with lodgings in Georgetown, near the corner of First Street and High Street, the town’s north-south thoroughfare (now known as Wisconsin Avenue). In the privacy of his new quarters, he opened his trunk and took out one of the bundles. Scrawled neatly on the top copy, in his own handwriting, was the injunction “Please to read and circulate.”
Reuben Crandall would do just that.
20
BEVERLY SNOW SENSED the city’s growing agitation. As the newspapers filled with reports on the influx of incendiary tracts evangelizing about “abolitionism,” he offered a less controversial alternative: GREEN TURTLEISM.
His next advertisement in the Mirror declared that “Green Turtleism” came in four different variations: “Soup-ism,” “Calipee-ism,” “Calipash-ism,” and “Patte-ism.” Snow offered this menu of culinary ideologies to “politicians of every denomination,” saying they would go down easier than any other “ism.” As an Epicurean, he naturally held himself aloof from public affairs. (The wise man, said the Grecian sage, “shall not take upon him the Administration of the Commonwealth.”) Snow’s ad seemed to mock the passions of both the abolitionists and their enemies with the playful suggestion that a good meal might be as important as their arguments. Or was he suggesting that immediate emancipation was as natural and urgent as eating? With Beverly Snow one could only be sure of one thing: While others boiled, he would stay cool.
Jocose irreverence hung in the air of Washington City. With the arrival of summer the congressmen and senators had mostly gone home, and the usual claques of lawyers and lobbyists had vanished. All the cabinet secretaries save Postmaster Amos Kendall and Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury had absconded to cooler climes, and the clerks in the government office buildings on President’s Square took to knocking off work around three in the afternoon in time to catch the daily band concert at the Capitol. The slow recovery from the bank panic of 1833 had brought pedestrians and tourists back to the Avenue and customers into the shops. The rough-hewn slavers still moved coffles of slaves at night toward uncertain fates in the South while their free brothers and sisters could only watch helplessly. Yet the peculiar respectability of the successful free people of color in Washington City undermined the pretensions of the slave republic by refuting its presumption of white superiority. As a result, everyone was feeling more free and less safe.
New technology was changing the city’s daily routines. In the print shops, the introduction of the steam-driven cylinder press had transformed the traditionally prestigious printer’s job. In 1831 Francis Blair had launched the pro-Jackson Globe with a cylinder press that offered competitive advantage over his rivals. Whereas the traditional iron hand press could produce two hundred copies an hour, a cylinder press could run off a thousand or two thousand. The new presses required new jobs such as feeding paper and stitching pamphlets that did not require the labor of highly paid men. These new machines could be run just as well—and more cheaply—by teenage boys and girls. When Duff Green announced in May 1835 that the Telegraph was bypassing the city’s traditional apprentice system to hire workers—male and female—to run his new steam presses, the male members of the printers’ guild, the Columbia Typographical Society, denounced the new employees in print as “rats.” Rival bands of printers brawled in the streets.
Obnoxious assertion prevailed among the mechanics living in hovels near the Navy Yard or in work camps along the canal. Amidst the economic slowdown, they had few women and fewer jobs, only ample opportunity to drink. Disdained by the city’s ladies and gentlemen, they started to feel free to do whatever the hell they wanted, starting with mockery of the monthly civic ritual known as Muster Day. By law, all men in Washington City between the ages of eighteen and forty had to muster as a militia once a month. Forced to leave their offices and workshops, the unarmed men paraded indifferently through the streets for no useful purpose. As they lined up, various gentlemen assumed the airs and titles of commanding officers. The militia was headed by Walter Jones, a fifty-eight-year-old lawyer and friend of Anna Thornton’s. General Jones, who had last served in the War of 1812, was a leader of men, but he had not heard a shot fired in anger in a long time.
In the tropical torpor of summer, Muster Day was a dismal routine, often lubricated into jollity by massive consumption of spirits in the taverns and grog shops along the Avenue. Those unsalaried men who lost a day’s wages especially resented the occasion, even more so because of the free Negroes whose dark skin, for once, conferred an advantage. Since they could not be part of the militia, they were free to work. Jobless white men had to march while free black men got paid.
When Muster Day came in May 1835, one of the mechanics dared to disrupt this stale routine. As the men paraded on the Avenue, a fellow wielding an enormous sword made out of papier-mâché darted into their ranks. He had red whiskers pasted on his cheeks and, like a French toy soldier, a ridiculous pasteboard chapeau de bras on his head. This rollicking clown attracted younger boys, whooping and hallooing among the glum mechanics, who started to laugh at the farce of it all.
William Thompson, the sympathetic young editor of the weekly Mirror, reported on the incident. The dressed-up mechanic and his friends, he wrote, hoped to end the mandatory muster “by force of public ridicule.” There seemed to be a new spirit of insubordination floating above submerged resentments, both social and racial.
Mr. Key was rather too busy to pay much attention. He was too old for mandatory militia duty, and much engaged besides. With the circuit court in session, he traversed the stairs between his office on the second floor of City Hall and the courtroom on the first a dozen times a day. At his desk, he wrote up indictments and arrest warrants, then did his correspondence. In court, he prosecuted the usual array of wrongdoers. The human propensity for assault and battery, larceny and rioting remained impressive among both whites and blacks. His campaign against the bawdy houses continued. Key brought charges against Poll Robinson, the prosperous colored courtesan. He obtained conviction of the Sifford sisters—Ann, Rachel, and Sarah—who were said to entertain men in sumptuous style. But his case against Mary Wertz and her oddly named daughter, Mary Wertz Jr., could not be sustained. As usual, Key’s family relations suffere
d from his dedication to work, though he did not seem to worry about it.
“I did not think it would be so long before I wrote to acknowledge your last letter,” he informed his daughter Ann, who was living in Maryland, “but have been so completely engaged in Court and with other affairs that I am sure you will excuse me.”
In the spring of 1835 Key had decided to move to Washington City to live closer to his office. The once-idyllic house in Georgetown had lost something when the new Chesapeake & Ohio Canal was routed through his property along the banks of the Potomac. Key had protested at a community meeting on the path of the canal, but to no avail. The canal cut off the Keys’ house from the river. Now the noise of progress, not the river breeze, rattled his windows.
“At present we are full of trouble about the house,” Key wrote to his daughter. “The one we are in is to be sold and we have been looking out in vain … for another.” Key soon found a new home in Washington City, a new wide brick house on C Street near the corner of Third. For a man who liked to work, the location exuded attractions. City Hall beckoned just a couple of blocks away. The hotels could be reached in minutes. He paid the builders to construct a separate entrance for a home office. Then he and Polly and the youngest children moved in, but now they were fewer. Eighteen-year-old Daniel had left home, enlisting in the navy and then shipping out to the Pacific on a frigate called the Brandywine.
Eight hundred miles away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Mrs. Sarah Gayle was thinking of Mr. Key. Governor Gayle was traveling on political business as usual, and Sarah’s thoughts were drifting to her famous lover’s words.
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