Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  After all, it was not Beverly’s literal words that disturbed white people. It was his example, his Epicurean style, and his evident success. John O’Sullivan of the Metropolitan said Beverly’s “insolent and overbearing effrontery had long rendered him obnoxious in this city.” But what made Snow obnoxious to some white people endeared him to others, including white women, who perhaps noticed that the proprietor of the Epicurean Eating House treated them rather better than other hotel keepers. As a free man of color, Snow had proven he could mix and compete with any white man in Washington City. The popularity of his dining rooms gave lie to Francis Scott Key’s conventional wisdom that the Negro was inherently inferior. Snow disproved that daily, showing that white and black people could break bread together in peace and pleasure. Not to mention that Snow dressed better, spoke better, and carried more money than Andrew Laub and the mechanics now squalling in the streets. As a married man and good Epicurean, Snow no doubt guarded himself against “the charms of love,” but if there was any black man in town capable of having a white woman, via seduction or payment, it was Snow.

  Whatever Beverly’s innuendo, it was not appreciated.

  “A number of persons assembled at his door, with a determination to inflict punishment on him,” the Telegraph reported.

  The crowd soon numbered in the hundreds and swelled to block the carriage traffic on the Avenue. Beverly was not caught by surprise; he had arranged for some white friends to come to his defense. “All the gentlemen of the city protected Snow so far as they could, not believing him guilty,” said Julia Seaton. Even Mayor Bradley favored his escape, complained Anne Royall.

  The mechanics overwhelmed Beverly’s friends with sheer numbers, pouring down the stairs and into the dining rooms of the restaurant and through the kitchen. There was no sign of the voluble cook, and Beverly’s friends denied any knowledge of his whereabouts, reminding the milling crowd not to damage the furniture as it belonged to a white man, John Withers.

  The mechanics asked more questions of the gentlemen defending Snow and did not believe the answers. Much to the disgust of the Telegraph, the restaurateur’s friends had “kept the people amused while Snow made his escape.” He took refuge, the paper reported, in the block of buildings behind his restaurant.

  Snow was already in motion. The rear of the Epicurean Eating House opened on the yard of Brown’s Hotel, where supplies and servants moved constantly. There were likely Negroes, enslaved or free, working there who would have helped Snow escape. He made his way down the alley and out to Seventh Street. When the mechanics realized that Snow was gone, one gang of men set out to find him. They “started a hunt for him, carrying ropes, pistols and other weapons,” one constable later recalled, “and it is safe to say that had he been overtaken, ‘Judge Lynch’ would have made short work of him.”

  The men left behind trashed the Epicurean Eating House. Over the objections of the outnumbered William Walker, the white men pulled down the “Refectory: Snow & Walker’s” sign on the wall over the outside door. They started bringing out and smashing the furniture. They helped themselves to the bottles of whiskey and champagne they could not afford to buy. They handed out drinks for themselves and poured the rest out on the street. Then they destroyed the apparatus of Beverly’s extensive kitchen. The ubiquitous Michael Shiner said mechanics of all classes “gathered in Snow’s restaurant and broke him up root and branch.”

  The story of Beverly’s boast spread across the city.

  “Today the mob are parading the streets in search of a negro by the name of Snow who keeps an oyster house,” one resident wrote to a friend. “He is reported to have said he could get any mechanic’s wife or daughter he pleased, and the mob are determined to be revenged upon him, if he is caught.”

  Even those who had no use for Beverly Snow were appalled.

  “The Mob-mania,” said the Metropolitan, “has become beyond control.”

  Beverly had a head start. He made his way to Tenth Street, running north. At that time, there was a runoff creek called the Sluice that meandered from a spring at Thirteenth and K streets down through the city to the Tiber Canal. As the armed gang of mechanics came up the street in pursuit, he sped north toward the bridge that crossed over the Sluice with the white men closing in on him. The chase continued north of F Street and beyond, but the gang could not catch up. They eventually lost his trail and headed back to the Avenue in search of new sport.

  In fact, Snow had ducked into a sewer under the bridge. The mob thundered overhead and continued up Tenth Street chasing a phantom. When they were gone, Snow moved on, unnoticed in the warm night.

  By early evening City Hall swarmed with people. As the excitement and fear grew—Would Crandall be hanged? Would the slaves rebel?—the city council met in emergency session. Its members had no love for a rebellious slave or a New York abolitionist, but they were appalled at the chaos in the streets. Working quickly, they approved a proclamation authorizing Mayor Bradley to “adopt such measures as may appear to him best calculated to allay the excitement now existing among a portion of the population of this City, and for the preservation of peace and public order.”

  Bradley then took the podium. He deputized General Jones’s volunteers, who were still gathering. He ordered Jones and his men to take “utmost vigilance” in “preventing any assemblage of meeting of colored persons, bond or free,” as if the black people of the city were interested in starting any kind of trouble.

  Jones, in turn, called on “the friends of Order and of the Laws” to join him outside on the steps of City Hall. Before long, sixty men had gathered, many carrying rifles or muskets with fixed bayonets. Others took the carbines requisitioned from the War Department. They were ready to take back their city from the mechanics.

  Frank Key made his own arrangements. He took a carriage to Georgetown, where he asked for a reinforcement of constables to come guard his house on C Street. Then he went home for the night.

  Two blocks south of City Hall, at the corner of Sixth and Pennsylvania, a herd of three or four hundred men, led by Andrew Laub, still occupied the ruins of the Epicurean Eating House. As they drank Beverly’s liquor and cursed his name, the appearance of General Jones’s militia up the street “excited great indignation on the part of the mechanics.” They felt the mayor’s militia was coming to protect Beverly Snow and his property. Laub and others emerged from the basement restaurant to shout at General Jones and the militia that they must go away, or they would be driven away. Laub and friends claimed, according to the Telegraph, that they “had no intention to injure any property, or do any mischief, except chastise Snow.” They refused to disperse as long as the militia remained in arms. After some negotiation between the two parties, the militia retreated to the defense of City Hall while a group of constables kept an eye on the most unruly mechanics and later arrested Laub and five others, who were charged with rioting.

  When General Jones and his volunteers retired to City Hall to sleep for the night, they effectively surrendered the streets of Washington City to the whims of the mob. The mechanics, now lubricated by Beverly’s bar, realized they were free to indulge their instincts to administer justice wherever they pleased. They started to disperse across the city in squads of tens and twenties in search of new targets and new victims.

  The constables could not have stopped them if they had wanted to, which they did not.

  Like many residents of Washington City that night, Anna Thornton could not sleep. With Arthur in jail and mobs rampaging, she felt close to collapse.

  “I feel unwell & nervous,” she wrote in her diary. “I never expected to have any cause for grief after my beloved husband’s death … but I find there are other griefs besides death. Oh Lord strengthen me for this trial is overcoming my spirits.”

  30

  THE EVENTS OF August 1835 would soon be dubbed the “Snow Riot” or the “Snow-Storm” in recognition of the central role that Beverly Snow’s singular personality played in igniting
popular passion. But the breakdown in order was not simply a loss of control, as implied by the word “riot,” nor a natural phenomenon, as implied by “storm.” The mobs of Washington City chose their targets, discerning observers noticed. Margaret Bayard Smith, Anna Thornton’s good friend and chronicler of Washington society, noted that the anger of whites could be traced to events several days before Snow allegedly made his salacious jape. The disturbances, she wrote, originated during the hunt for Arthur Bowen.

  “The constable in seeking him made some discoveries among the colored people that alarmed the public and gave rise to the disturbances that ensued,” she wrote. “Four [men], who were objects of greatest indignation, have fled the city.” Smith did not identify the four offenders but noted they posed no threat to public safety, only to white people’s feelings of superiority.

  “No insurrection against the whites was seriously apprehended,” she wrote, “but insolence, insubordination and contempt had been exhibited that were certainly sufficient to excite the indignation that existed and called for punishment, though every one regrets that a mob should assume the right of inflicting it.”

  The constable who did the discovering of “insolence, insubordination and contempt” was Madison Jeffers, the man who had arrested Arthur Bowen on Saturday, and then Reuben Crandall on Monday. It was Jeffers who incited the crowd against Crandall by telling them about the pamphlets. Many a white man shared his indignation.

  Beverly Snow, who had offered to help quell any talk of insurrection among the blacks, was now a target of the whites. So was John Cook, perhaps the most educated black man in the city. One mob marched up the Avenue to Fourteenth Street and then north to H Street, where his school was located. Cook too had expected trouble and made himself scarce. He mounted his horse, stabled at the house of a white friend, and sped north in the night, heading for Pennsylvania. The mechanics engulfed his schoolhouse, destroying all the books and furniture. They had started to tear down the building itself when they were challenged by Edward Dyer, a white man and auctioneer who also served as alderman for the Second Ward. Dyer planted himself between the mob and the house and the attackers moved on.

  Another gang of white men invaded the boardinghouse room of a free man of color named James Hutton. Ironically, Francis Scott Key had helped Hutton win his freedom a decade before with a clever legal argument. At the time Hutton was a servant owned by a naval officer named Bell. Hutton had served Bell on a navy ship during an overseas tour of duty, but since official regulations forbade the use of slaves on navy ships, Hutton was paid for his work. Upon their return to the United States, Hutton filed suit for his freedom, saying the fact he had been paid meant he was no longer a slave. Key, in his self-appointed role as “the Black’s lawyer,” submitted a letter to the court saying that Hutton’s paid tour of duty amounted to “implied manumission.” The court ruled in his favor, and Hutton became a free man in 1825. Ten years later, the rampaging mob ransacked his room and found a copy of The Emancipator, one of the sheets that Reuben Crandall had brought to town. A constable accompanying the mob took this as proof that Hutton was in league with Crandall and hustled him off to jail amidst cries that he be lynched too.

  Another mob went after William Wormley, the livery stable owner who had been friends with William Lloyd Garrison when the abolitionist editor lived in Washington. Wormley’s sister Mary had run another school for Negro children on Vermont Avenue before falling ill and passing away a few months before. A teacher friend of the Wormleys named William Thomas Lee had taken over the school. The mob came for Wormley and Lee and they fled the city. Wormley’s schoolhouse was trashed as well.

  Another target was William Jackson, who worked as a messenger at the Post Office and supported abolition. “It seems there was some danger of the mob getting hold of him,” a colleague recounted. “He had been a great patron of the abolition journals and used to get a leave of absence every summer to attend the negro Congress at Philadelphia.” Jackson too had to clear out.

  The only Negro school spared was Louise Parke Costin’s academy on A Street on Capitol Hill, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Her father was William Costin, the most respected free Negro in town. He was close to the family of Martha Washington, avoided involvement in abolitionist activities, and worked as a porter for rich men at the Bank of Washington. Costin’s friendships with leading white men gave him a degree of protection, and the mob recognized it by staying away from his daughter’s school.

  The pattern of the disorder indicates that the white mob tormenting Washington City in August 1835 was not out of control and not solely concerned with Beverly Snow. The mechanics did not attack all free blacks or all schools. They pursued the small group of black men who were doing the most to undermine the slave system in the seat of the American government. The Snow-Storm was not just a riot. It was also a manhunt.

  The carnage continued into the night, a display of ferocity that was directed at free blacks but also meant to send a message to all the people of the city. The mechanics would be heard. In the words of the Metropolitan, “The populace of Washington, once elevated into the dignity of a sovereign mob, seemed resolved not to separate without giving the remaining inhabitants convincing proof of their power and letting them feel the blessings of their sway.” The mob would teach the city, and its leaders, a lesson.

  Key himself was targeted. One gang gathered around his house on C Street and noisily reviled him as an abolitionist, which he most certainly was not. The crowd might have sacked the home had it not been for the presence of armed guards. Mercifully, Polly and the younger children were safe at Terra Rubra.

  Other marauders wandered around town taking their pleasure.

  “The property of every colored person who rendered themselves obnoxious to them was devoted to destruction,” said the Metropolitan. “The African churches and schools shared a similar fate and then the insurrectionary and violent spirit which was prevalent singled out other objects on which to wreak its fury.”

  The Intelligencer noted the mob had burned a house of ill fame in the First Ward that was frequented by blacks. The Globe chastely reported that they had set fire to a “hut,” whose proprietor was “an old negro woman” and a “regular conjurer of the blacks of this city,” a veiled way of saying she was a madam.

  The assailants’ goal—their pleasure—was to annihilate the black man’s playground. They dragged the beds and the chairs of the bawdy house out into the open. They smashed these cradles of paid love into kindling, and then they piled it high and torched the whole building. The result was a gigantic bonfire that could be seen a mile and a half away at City Hall.

  When the sentries for the militia saw the light of the flames in the western sky, Mayor Bradley and General Jones led a patrol to investigate. The armed men went out onto the Avenue, past the darkened presidential mansion, and into the First Ward (in the area now known as Foggy Bottom) and found the site of the blaze. The fire had burnt down to cinders. The house of ill fame was no more. The whores, their customers, and the arsonists had all vanished. Even the conjurer was gone.

  31

  COME MORNING, THE mood in Washington City was desolate. Not since Ross and Cockburn led the British troops in burning the Capitol and the President’s House in August 1814 had the capital seen such widespread lawlessness and destruction of property. And this rampage had been inflicted not by foreigners, but by Americans. Seaton and Gales described the civic humiliation in a lead editorial for the Intelligencer: “THE STATE OF THE CITY.”

  “We could not have believed it possible that we should live to see the Public Offices garrisoned by the Clerks with United States troops posted to their doors, and their windows barricaded to defend themselves against citizens of Washington,” they wrote.

  “It is certainly mortifying as well as disreputable,” they went on, “that a handful of People, some of them, and the most active amongst them, not residents even of the city, and a large portion of them boys, should ha
ve the power and have been permitted to commit any depredations with impunity, and keep the whole population of a large town in a state of anxiety for twenty-four hours.”

  In the pages of the Globe, Francis Blair expressed “extreme regret that we have to state that our wide-spread and hitherto peaceful City, has been the scene of riotous excitement.…We hope and believe that its peace will not be again disturbed.”

  In the Telegraph Duff Green displayed a previously unknown reservoir of moderation. As for “the excitement in our city,” he acknowledged he would have felt no pity if Crandall had been hanged but said he preferred that a jury, not a mob, hand down the sentence. He lauded the arrest of Andrew Laub and the disorderly mechanics. He saluted General Jones for “his persevering exertions in restoring the wonted peace and harmony of the Metropolis.”

  The misdeeds of abolitionists and the free Negroes were no excuse for rioting, said the Metropolitan. The editor, John O’Sullivan, execrated Beverly Snow as “a scoundrel scarce removed from slavery.” He also said the free-floating violence was unacceptable.

  “We now hope there is an end to this kind of work. All parties have become disgusted with it,” he wrote. “Whatever circumstances and under whatever provocation, any tardiness of a certain justice is infinitely better than the destructive and irresponsible legislation of a mob.”

  Yet the sense of disorder had not dissipated. Over the next few nights, gangs of young white men and boys reassembled around town, looking for trouble. One mob demolished the Sabbath schoolhouse of the AME church on South Capitol Street, just a block from where the U.S. Congress met.

  The authorities remained vigilant. The city of Alexandria sent two companies of volunteers, who took over the guarding of the jail. The U.S. troops continued to fortify the government offices. And the volunteers from Georgetown continued to guard Mr. Key’s home.