Anna Thornton, cooped up in her house on F Street, had to take care of her clueless mama and the terrified Maria Bowen and could not sleep.
“Noises in the street that alarmed me very much,” she wrote in her diary. “As soon as I began to doze something awoke me in affright & I had a nightmare.”
On C Street, Francis Scott Key could take little consolation. Yes, he had acted swiftly to detain Reuben Crandall and talked down the mob around the jail. His constables had brought charges against two dozen rioters. He did not care about the attack on Snow’s restaurant, but he was determined to punish destruction of property. He still had a chance to redeem himself. In his view, the capital had fallen victim to the abolitionists’ pamphlet campaign, a serious attack from wily and well-funded white men who acted in the name of so-called human rights. If the city’s excitement was unfortunate, the struggle was not yet over. Francis Scott Key would go to court to defend the legal system of slavery in Washington City.
. . .
Washington was not unique in its chaos. During the month of August 1835, cities and towns across the Upper South rallied to meet the threat of the pamphlet campaign. Postmasters in many towns had received the bundles of tracts, individually addressed, from New York. The claims of these publications—about the beatings, the mutilations, the rapes, and the robberies endemic to the slave system—libeled the southern way of life, they said. Torchlight parades, protest meetings, and outraged rhetoric greeted the arrival of the pamphlets in every major city and many smaller ones. Citizens formed vigilance committees to patrol areas where free Negroes lived and to track down rumors of “Tappan’s emissaries” moving about in the countryside. The mob was everywhere.
“The state of society is awful,” wrote Hezekiah Niles, editor of Niles’ Weekly Register, a national newsweekly based in Baltimore. Niles accepted slavery as a political reality but not lawlessness. “Brute force has superseded the law, at many places, and violence become the ‘order of the day.’ The time predicted seems rapidly approaching when the mob shall rule… ,” he wrote. “The time was when every citizen of the United States, would ‘rally round the standard of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good’—when a person, armed only with a small piece of paper, could proceed a thousand miles through the country, and bring the strongest man to answer to the law, for the law was honored. But is it so now? Alas, no!”
The rule of law was buckling under the realities of a slaveholding democracy. The need to defend the slave system overwhelmed the protections written into the Bill of Rights.
“There is something extraordinary in the present condition of parties throughout the Union,” wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary. “Slavery and democracy, especially the democracy founded, as ours is, upon the rights of man, would seem to be incompatible with each other. And yet at this time, the democracy of the country is supported chiefly, if not entirely by slavery.”
The former president feared for his country.
“The elements of an exterminating war seem to be in vehement fermentation, and one can scarcely foresee to what it will lead.”
Francis Scott Key could not foresee it either.
32
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, August 17, President Jackson returned to Washington City on the steamboat Columbia. While basking in the breezes off the Chesapeake Bay, Jackson had frolicked with nieces and nephews and read the newspaper reports on how the American Anti-Slavery Society’s pamphlet campaign had inflamed popular feeling. He loathed the abolitionists for stirring up the blacks and thought they should pay for such insolence. He had approved Postmaster Amos Kendall’s proposal to give local post offices the right to refuse to deliver antislavery literature. But the president was none too pleased to hear of rioting against the free people of color in Washington City. “This spirit of mob-law is becoming too common and must be checked or, ere long, it will become as great an evil as servile war, and the innocent will be much exposed,” he wrote to Kendall.
The day Jackson returned was warm with a light breeze. He disembarked at the dock on the Potomac with his niece Emily Donelson and her husband, Andrew, who served as his private secretary. The president climbed into his carriage and headed for the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was time to get back to work.
That same day a group of mechanics sent the president a message. They resented the fact that the ladies and gentlemen of the city blamed workingmen for the breakdown of public order. With the help of Duff Green and the Telegraph, they called for a public meeting at City Hall, open to all the mechanics “and other citizens friendly to the labouring classes.” By three o’clock, fifteen hundred men had gathered. It was, said the organizers, “one of the largest and most respectable meetings which ever assembled in this city.” These men felt insulted that they were considered part of the drunken rabble that had rampaged. They chafed at the reality that many white people attributed the mob’s destruction to them. They were mechanics and they had nothing to do with the mob. They formed a committee to draft a series of resolutions for public approval.
“We have viewed with feelings of deep regret, the excitement and riotous proceedings that have prevailed for some days past in this city,” the committee declared.
Their first resolution asserted that the mechanics, “having a large stake in the advancement and peace of this city,…view the late excitement and riotous proceedings as highly detrimental to our prosperity and well-being.”
But the truth was that no small portion of the white workingmen felt the rioting was a justifiable response to the murderous Arthur Bowen, the treacherous Reuben Crandall, and the obnoxious Beverly Snow. The problem, these men believed, was not the rioters but those who sought to suppress them. A man in the crowed named James Haliday rose to offer a substitute resolution that spoke more directly to why the mechanics were so angry: because the combined forces of General Jones’s irregulars and the U.S. Marines had restored order at gunpoint—as if the mechanics had been doing something wrong in chastising the free Negroes. President Jackson should order the U.S. troops to return to their barracks, Haliday said, “their presence evincing a want of confidence in the freemen of this Metropolis to protect public and private property.” The meeting, he went on, should “highly reprobate the conduct of all those who have been in any way instrumental in ordering [the troops] here.”
This sally, directed at Mayor Bradley and General Jones, went over well. The organizers of the meeting said Haliday’s substitute resolution was adopted “by a large majority,” although one mechanic later protested that at least half of the crowd did not understand what they were approving. Haliday sat down satisfied.
The next resolution was less controversial: that the mechanics were “ready and disposed, at all times, to risk our lives in the protection of [public and private property] from a foreign or domestic enemy.” But the crowd’s patience had run out. The assembled men hooted down three more resolutions before the meeting broke up.
Jackson got word of the mechanics’ meeting later that afternoon. Michael Shiner, always close to the center of action, said the president “sent a message to those gentlemen mechanics to know what was the matter with them and if there was any thing he could do for them, in any way to promote their happiness, he would do it.”
A meeting was arranged for the next day. A delegation of mechanics went to the President’s House. In Shiner’s account, they told Jackson “that the Negroes had made different threats.” The president’s response was blunt. He expected justice to be served by the legal system.
“By the eternal god in this City there is a Jail and a court and if those negroes had violated any law whatever they shall be tried by the court and punished severely,” Jackson roared. According to Shiner, the president expressed sympathy for the mechanics’ anger, going so far as to suggest he might join in their cause the next time. “Gentlemen,” he said, “if you have in any disposition to rebellion to let me know it, and I will lend you a hand.”
Bu
t for all his bluster, Jackson rejected the primary demand of his visitors: the removal of the federal troops from the streets of Washington. On that question, editor Edgar Snowden reported that Jackson gave them “a preemptory answer in the negative.” Jackson may have sympathized with the mechanics, but he was not taking any chances on the return of Mobocracy.
With the restoration of calm, the recriminations began.
“What causes have produced the declension in American character and the present supremacy of Mobocracy?” asked the Richmond Whig, one of the most widely read newspapers in the country. In an editorial headlined “CAUSES OF THE PUBLIC DISORDERS,” the rival Richmond Enquirer replied that President Jackson and “the policy of the ruling dynasty and its demagogue adherents” were to blame.
In the view of editor Thomas Ritchie, the source of the problem was not the free Negroes, who constituted a small portion of the population, or the antislavery agitators who had little public support. The problem was Jackson’s appeal to the common man and his supporters’ hostility to traditional elites.
“In pursuit of a majority to sustain their power, they have classified the rich and intelligent and denounced them as aristocrats,” Ritchie wrote. “They have caressed, soothed and flattered the heavy class of the poor and ignorant, because they held the power which they wanted.”
“The Republic,” Ritchie famously declared, “has degenerated into a Democracy.”
Rubbish, replied Francis Blair in the Globe. The Washington disturbances, he insisted, should be blamed on antislavery financier Arthur Tappan, “the arch enemy of the Jackson administration.” Arthur Bowen’s attack on Mrs. Thornton had been instigated by Tappan’s pamphlet campaign, which had “stimulated the servant, cherished in the bosom of families, to immolate those who have protected and reared him from infancy.” Tappan’s incitements had forced white men to act in their own self-defense, prompting “the father, the husband and master to rush beyond the laws to destroy the instigators of a servile war, to save himself and the hapless inmates of his household from its horrible consequences.” The mob, he insisted, was an expression of American self-defense.
The violent summer of 1835 had diverse and subtle causes, but one stood out. Amidst the disorder, it was clear that the burgeoning antislavery movement had forced Americans to consider its core message: that democracy could not coexist with the right to property in people. The northern abolitionists insisted that American slavery and the democratic government of the United States, based in Washington, were intertwined, mutually reinforcing, and ultimately incompatible.
That was a radical and disconcerting thought in the capital city. The emancipationist alternative proposed that Negroes should be free to become citizens, equal to whites before the law. The white men of Washington responded violently because they had seen the results of partial emancipation. Some black men like Beverly Snow wound up with more money and prestige than the average white man. That was the problem, and Mobocracy was the answer.
Francis Scott Key continued to seek justice through the law. On August 24, he told Anna Thornton of a scheduled hearing for Arthur. “You need not come,” he said. “The object is to commit him for trial.” Perhaps the district attorney wanted to spare Anna the need to relive the night of the incident. Perhaps he did not want to hear her view, which she had already conveyed to him through Bayard Smith and General Jones, that she did not want to see the boy punished. More likely, he did not think her view was relevant. In any case, Anna did not attend the hearing. It was a pleasant day and she chose to read a novel instead.
Arthur was led from the jail to the courtroom in City Hall. He was not entirely alone. Anna had retained General Jones to serve as his attorney, and his mother, Maria, was there as well. As three justices of the peace listened, Key called his witnesses: Dr. Huntt, General Gibson, and the constables, Madison Jeffers and Henry Robertson. Maria Bowen was allowed to testify, but the court did not hear Anna Thornton’s account of what happened on the night of August 4, just as the district attorney intended. He wanted no obstacles to justice. He wanted a trial date and he got one.
“The desperate fellow who attempted the life of Mrs. Thornton was reexamined on Thursday last,” the Mirror reported. “. . . The prisoner was fully committed for trial at the Circuit Court in November next.”
33
THE MOST WANTED man in Washington was ambling his way down the Virginia turnpike. Beverly Snow rode one horse and held the reins to a second. He was headed for Fredericksburg. How he had managed to escape the city is not known. Mostly likely he found refuge with friends, then waited for an opportunity to head south with his two steeds.
Beverly reached Fredericksburg around one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, August 17, at the very hour President Jackson returned to his desk and the mechanics gathered in City Hall. Beverly’s arrival was not entirely unexpected. He had colored acquaintances in the town, and when people heard he was the cause of the excitement in Washington, they figured he might show up seeking shelter. The Mechanics Association of Fredericksburg, a dues-paying group that provided training to white workingmen, held a meeting and resolved there would be no mob in Fredericksburg. Beverly, it seems, had some friends among the white men of the town.
No sooner had Beverly appeared than a friendly crowd surrounded him. He explained to his well-wishers that he wanted to see the sheriff, and the people escorted him to the jail. He told the sheriff he wanted to voluntarily commit himself for his own safety, pending the allegations against him in Washington City. He asked the sheriff to contact Mayor Bradley to learn if there were any charges against him in the capital. The sheriff agreed.
“BEVERLY SNOW TAKEN!” shouted the headline in the Lynchburg Daily Virginian the next day.
In Washington, the Intelligencer reported, “Snow, the obnoxious free mulatto who fled from this city last week, was arrested there [Fredericksburg] on Monday and committed to prison.” According to the article, Snow had been charged with circulating incendiary pamphlets and would be sent to Washington within a day or two—neither of which was true. In Alexandria the Gazette said Snow was “taken and lodged in Jail to be delivered when demanded.” That was wrong too.
Some expected Snow would be hanged shortly.
“We think it probable,” said the Fredericksburg Arena, that “he may ultimately suffer at the tribunal of Judge Lynch.”
In fact, Snow had not been taken, arrested, or charged with anything. He avoided most of the perils his enemies hoped or imagined had befallen him. The disarming strategy of turning himself in served to give him the initiative on the question of his freedom, which he would never lose. Snow had friends in Fredericksburg. Newspaper editor William Blackford described them as free Negroes “who have by a proper demeanor gained the confidence of all who know them.” That was probably an allusion to Fredericksburg’s wealthiest free men of color, Thomas Cary Sr. and Benjamin DeBaptist. Thomas Cary was the father of Beverly’s friends Isaac Cary and Thomas Cary Jr. He had owned property in the Fredericksburg area since 1808. DeBaptist came from a black family that had been free for generations and owned his own slaves. If necessary, free men of color like Cary and DeBaptist could credibly vouch to white authorities about Beverly’s good character.
Still, it took nerve for Snow to consign himself voluntarily to the Fredericksburg jail. He was probably remanded to “the dungeon,” a basement cell secured with an iron gate, wooden door, and strong locks. Unlike the jail in Washington City, there was little chance of getting a dram of liquor there, but there was also little chance of getting hanged. Snow would just have to wait for word from his friend Mayor Bradley. As he passed the time in his voluntary cell, he might have taken solace from a maxim favored by Epicurus:
“The Wisest of Men is not sheltered from Injustice and Envy. He may be Calumniated, tis true, but it shall not work upon him because he knows his own Probity and Virtue; and Malice, whose current he cannot stem, is not capable of discomposing his Tranquility.”
. . .
If Beverly was calm, white people were agitated. The arrival of the notorious Beverly Snow, and the story of his supposedly shocking comments about white women, prompted much talk of the proverbial Judge Lynch in Fredericksburg, nowhere more than at the Mechanics Association. With Snow now in custody, the mechanics called another meeting to make clear to the gentlemen of the town and to one another that they would not tolerate abolitionists or lawlessness. The shame of Washington City would not be Fredericksburg’s. At a public meeting, the mechanics adopted a resolution indignantly rejecting reports that they were organizing search committees “or endeavoring in any manner to promote or get up a Mob.” They vowed, in writing, that if the civil authorities would not guard Beverly Snow in jail, they would “protect him from the populace until the authorities of Washington City demand him.”
Then word came from Mayor Bradley in Washington. He told the sheriff there was no charge against Snow for the distribution of incendiary pamphlets or anything else. In the dungeon, Snow put pen to paper. He addressed his letter to William Seaton and Joseph Gales at the Intelligencer, two men who knew him well. They had published an article that attributed coarse comments about white women to him.
“Gentlemen,” he began. “Listen to the voice of the innocent which cries aloud for justice.” The Intelligencer’s story, he wrote, “struck a death blow to all that I held dear to me in this world, my character and my liberty.”
Snow had tired of this persecution. “What is life without character?” he asked. “It is worth nothing; it’s a burden to me.”
He considered the whitewashed walls, the locked wooden door.
“Sirs, so thick are those dangers that I have voluntarily retired to prison for my safety, and shall remain in prison until every mind is satisfied of my innocence.”
Snow-Storm in August Page 17