EPILOGUE
THE STRUGGLE FOR universal emancipation, which began about the time Beverly Snow arrived in Washington City in 1830, had taken root, broadened, and deepened by the time he left six years later. The core ideas of the new antislavery movement—that there was no property in people, that citizenship should be open to all Americans, and that freedom of expression was the cornerstone of a free society—had begun to transform American politics. As they spread, these ideas proved deeply unpopular in Washington and in many parts of the United States. But, after just six years, these same ideas were also much more commonly and respectably argued in many other places where they had never been heard before, including the halls of Congress. The fight against slavery that would cause and culminate in the Civil War was under way.
In barely half a decade, the abolitionists had established Washington City as a battlefield for their cause. In 1830, slavery was rarely debated in Congress. Six years later, it was the subject of fierce contention. The passage of the gag rule in May 1836 set off a three-year struggle, led by former president Adams and the small but determined antislavery bloc, to force the pro-slavery majority to accept petitions calling for abolition in the district. From December 1838 to March 1839, the Twenty-Fifth Congress received almost fifteen hundred petitions signed by more than one hundred thousand people. Eighty percent of the signatories supported abolition in the capital. Among the handful of congressmen who stood up for the petitioners’ right to be heard was a first-term representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. The pro-slavery majority ultimately prevailed, but the South’s refusal to hear citizens petitioning their government did not go unnoticed among whites of the North and West. Most northern whites did not care much for the enslaved blacks, and even less for their free brothers and sisters, but they did care about the threat that southern ambitions posed to their own civil liberties. Sectional hostility was growing.
In 1830, the opponents of slavery had no national organization, no champions in the popular press or the Christian pulpit. By 1836, the names of William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan were known across the land. Reuben Crandall was, at least for a few weeks, a nationally known martyr to the cause. And on the eastern shore of Maryland, a young enslaved man about the same age as Arthur Bowen made his first attempt to escape from bondage. His name was Frederick Douglass. Within a decade he would become the movement’s most famous black leader.
In 1830, the free people of color in Washington City and the rest of the United States were politically isolated and inert. That began to change with the emergence of the anticolonization movement that met at the AME Church on Capitol Hill in April 1831. The simultaneous emergence of the Negro convention movement, joined by the likes of John Cook, created a national network of activists seeking to improve the condition of black people by education and emigration. With the arrival of Ben Lundy in 1831, blacks and whites started to make common cause in the struggle against slavery.
In 1830, African colonization was the most plausible and appealing proposal to ameliorate the problem of slavery in America. By 1836, the idea of universal emancipation had eclipsed colonization in popularity and influence. In the interim, the upstart American Anti-Slavery Society had attracted more followers, formed more chapters, and collected more money than the well-entrenched American Colonization Society. Along the way, the African colonization scheme lost its reputation as the most realistic way to handle the bondage of several million people of African descent. Among blacks, the idea of emigrating from the United States retained appeal, as long as people of color, not the slaveholders and their allies, would determine the destination. They chose Canada or the Caribbean much more often than they chose Africa.
The colonization society outdid its more radical rival in one area only: support from elected officials. For example, Congressman Lincoln, while he loathed slavery, was politically ambitious and prejudiced against blacks. He declared himself a supporter of African colonization and he would remain one even after he was elected president two decades later. But in April 1862, Lincoln, seeking to fortify the capital and gain advantage over the Confederacy’s army, oversaw the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Eight months later, on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the rest of the country and settling finally the issue of whether emancipation or colonization was more realistic. Emancipation was.
Of course, the sudden coalescing of the antislavery movement in the 1830s had also triggered a wave of popular feeling that would become familiar in American politics: the white backlash. The revival of the revolutionary ideals of the Declaration of Independence by the new antislavery movement provoked a counterrevolution of majoritarian reaction that culminated in the violent summer of 1835.
The effects were especially pronounced within Washington City. Among white people, public support for the abolition of slavery evaporated. In the wake of the Snow-Storm of August 1835, the city council passed new restrictions on the free people of color, barring them from buying most commercial licenses needed to do business. In November 1836, Isaac Cary, blocked from renewing his license to sell perfume, sued to have the law overturned. Judge Cranch ruled in his favor, saying that while Negroes did not have all the political rights of whites, they had certain civil rights, including the right to pursue harmless professions. In 1836, the council passed an early curfew for all free Negroes. The legality of that was challenged too, but Judge Cranch upheld it.
In the District of Columbia and throughout the South, the pro-slavery forces, supported by most whites, suppressed the antislavery movement with a mixture of legality, intimidation, repression, and discrimination. But the acquittal of Reuben Crandall and the pardon of Arthur Bowen and the survival of Beverly Snow showed that the anti-abolition red majority could not always impose its will on the emancipationist blue minority, even in a southern bastion like Washington.
Resistance to slavery in Washington City would only increase. The number of enslaved and free blacks in the capital was roughly equal in 1836. By 1860, free blacks would outnumber bondsmen four to one. Antislavery sentiment in Congress remained a constant. While the movement’s most public voice, William Lloyd Garrison, scorned the idea of working within the political system, more moderate antislavery leaders formed the Liberty Party in 1840, which evolved into the Free Soil Party and then, in the 1850s, into the Republican Party, which enlarged the antislavery bloc in Congress from an outgunned minority to a militant plurality.
Others in the National Metropolis spurned the legal tyranny of the U.S. government altogether. Thomas Smallwood, an ornery shoemaker from Prince George’s County, and a white friend, Charles Torrey, began organizing large-scale escapes from plantations in the Chesapeake region. They arranged for groups of people, sometimes including whole families, to move from safe house to safe house, heading north to the free states, and they attracted support from respectable whites such as Joseph Bradley, the attorney who had defended Reuben Crandall. The flamboyant lawyer lent his house on Louisiana Avenue across from the courthouse to their efforts. While Bradley was away on legal business, Smallwood and Torrey would bring escaping slaves to stay in his rooms as they made their way north. Smallwood and Torrey were among the first conductors of what would be dubbed the Underground Railroad, and they were not alone. In 1848, abolitionists in Washington organized a mass escape of up to eighty slaves on a boat called the Pearl, which very nearly succeeded. The sheer scale of the Pearl endeavor increased the Chesapeake slaveholders’ sense of insecurity.
The suppression of free speech in the capital city would not endure. In 1848, editor Gamaliel Bailey established The National Era, the first antislavery publication based in the capital since Benjamin Lundy ran the Genius of Universal Emancipation out of his office on E Street. The offices of the weekly paper would be mobbed and trashed, but the publication survived until the Civil War commenced.
Few could imagine the possibility in 1836, but within a generation the proud and ve
hement defenders of slavery in Washington City would be vanquished, self-exiled from Congress, defeated in national elections and then on the battlefield. Within half a lifetime, the genius of universal emancipation, once touted by only a few dreamers like Ben Lundy, Isaac Cary, and John Cook, would become national policy in the Emancipation Proclamation and the constitutionally sanctioned right to due process.
These ideas did not prevail simply because they were just or because of the might of the Union Army or the leadership of Abraham Lincoln. They prevailed because they were practical and attractive to growing numbers of Americans. Beverly Snow had proved by his menu, his hospitality, and his sheer Epicurean existence that all Americans deserved citizenship.
Washington City would experience another racially motivated riot in July 1919, with the unrest stoked by sexual rumors. The blacks, led by soldiers returning home from the Great War in Europe, fought back instead of fleeing, and at least six people were killed. Two generations after that, in April 1968, the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. provoked black rioters to take revenge by rampaging up the same Fourteenth Street corridor where the white mechanics had attacked John Cook’s school in August 1835.
By 2008, the capital had recovered again, emerging as a true national metropolis of marble and glass, and its early history had all but vanished beneath the architecture of power and influence. The only sign of Beverly Snow in the entire city was an unobtrusive plaque on the side of a downtown office building at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. When Barack Obama, the country’s first mixed-race president, rode in his ceremonial motorcade down the Avenue on Inauguration Day 2009, his limousine stopped and the new president emerged to stroll past the cheering crowds that thronged the very corner where Snow had tended his stove and greeted his customers 175 years before.
The formative history of the capital had been forgotten, and so had the secret of the Epicurean Eating House. The secret was that the struggle against slavery that culminated in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments had actually begun in Washington City about the time Beverly Snow came to town. The man from Lynchburg did not start this struggle, and he was not around to finish it. But in the fullness of time, his creation of a convivial meeting place open to people of all colors endured as an example that would eventually prevail in the life of Washington City, even as the man who invented it was all but forgotten.
POSTSCRIPT: WHO
In June 1837, the still-enslaved Arthur Bowen wrote to his mother from Pensacola, Florida, to complain about how his new owner, William Stockton, was treating him. The letters, Anna observed, left his Maria “very gloomy and dissatisfied.” So Anna decided to arrange for Stockton to sell Arthur to a kinder master, an older man who worked in the Pensacola Navy Yard. Within a year, Arthur wrote to “say he was doing well and [was] liked on board the steamboat at Pensacola.” Anna Thornton never mentioned Arthur Bowen again in her diary. What happened to the young man who detonated Washington City in August 1835 is not recorded in American history.
Reuben Crandall had contracted tuberculosis during his stay at the Washington City Jail. After winning his freedom, he booked passage to Kingston, Jamaica, thinking the tropical climate might help. He died there on January 18, 1838. Most people soon forgot his sacrifice for the antislavery cause, but not poet John Greenleaf Whittier. After the Civil War, Whittier wrote a poem called “Astraea at the Capital,” in which the Greek goddess of justice visits Washington during the time of slavery. She stops at the City Jail.
Beside me gloomed the prison-cell
Where wasted one in slow decline
For uttering simple words of mine,
And loving freedom all too well
That was Reuben Crandall.
. . .
Francis Scott Key seemed to lose his ambition after his setbacks in 1835 and 1836. He continued to serve as district attorney for Washington City after the election of Martin Van Buren in the 1836 election, but he was no longer a presidential confidant. In May 1837 he suffered the painful loss of another son, John Ross, who succumbed to a quick-acting disease. Key resigned from the district attorney’s job in 1840 and spent the rest of his years in private law practice, still a keen advocate of African colonization and sharp opponent of the antislavery movement. Key died of complications from pneumonia in his daughter’s home in Baltimore on January 11, 1843.
The news of his death, said the Intelligencer, created “a very general painful sensation” in Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court suspended its proceedings for a day. At City Hall, Judge Cranch presided over a brief ceremony that was attended by the entire district bar, including Richard Coxe, Joseph Bradley, and Walter Jones. Cranch praised Key as one of the bar’s “oldest and most respected members, and one of its brightest ornaments” who was always animated “by an overbearing sense of duty.” In his eulogy Cranch did not mention “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Key’s song was not formally adopted as the national anthem of the United States of America for another century. The designation came about after newly elected left-wing members of the Erie City Council in Pennsylvania opened a meeting in 1929 by singing the “The Internationale,” a socialist anthem. A member of the American Legion took exception and organized a campaign to designate “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem so such a disgrace could never happen again. Congressman John Linthicum, a Democrat from Baltimore, introduced a bill to do just that. More than 150 organizations supported the move, and a petition attracted more than 5 million signatures. President Herbert Hoover signed the bill into law on March 3, 1931.
Roger Taney served as chief justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864. In 1856 his Supreme Court heard the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott was a middle-aged bondsman who had worked for the Sandford family in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, where slavery was outlawed. Scott sued for his freedom, saying he lived in free territory. By a seven-to-two majority, the court dismissed Scott’s argument and affirmed the plaintiff’s right to coerce his labor. Taney took the lead in rejecting Scott’s bid for freedom. In a passage that would become notorious, he declared that people of African descent
had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
The court’s ruling effectively legalized slavery nationwide, even in states that had outlawed it for decades. Taney’s ruling alienated public opinion across the North and hastened the coming of the Civil War in 1861.
The war was still raging when Taney died on October 12, 1864, but the North was winning. Three weeks later, slavery was officially abolished in his home state of Maryland. “His death at this moment,” said one biographer, “seemed to mark the transition from the era of slavery to that of Universal Freedom.” While his wisdom would be questioned, his influence would not. Roger Taney had shaped American law as surely as his brother-in-law Francis Scott Key had shaped American patriotic feeling.
John F. Cook returned to Washington in the fall of 1836 after spending one year teaching at a school in Columbia, Pennsylvania. In the words of one historian, “He resumed his work with broad and elevated ideas of his business.” He would teach in the schoolhouse at Fourteenth and H streets for the next seventeen years, educating a generation of Negro children all by himself. Along the way, he founded the Union Bethel AME Church and the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, located at Fifteenth and R streets, both of which still exist 175 years later. His two sons grew up to become professors and would play a leading role after the Civil War in the founding of Howard University, the first African American institution of higher learning. Cook died in March 1855. His funeral, said one account, was attended by “clergymen of no less than five denominations, many of the oldest and most respectable citizens, and a vast concourse o
f all classes, white and colored.”
Benjamin Lundy published the Genius of Universal Emancipation from Philadelphia until 1838, when supporters of slavery destroyed his printing press and other possessions. Lundy moved to Lowell, Illinois, where he died on August 22, 1839.
Richard Mentor Johnson was elected vice president of the United States of America in 1836 under President Martin Van Buren. According to one historian, he “served without distinction and continued to scandalize his party by more dalliances with slave women.”
Andrew Jackson retired from the presidency in March 1837. He died at his Tennessee estate, the Hermitage, on June 8, 1845. He bequeathed his property in scores of enslaved persons to his heirs.
John Sherburne was haunted by his slaying of Daniel Key. He took to drink, made lieutenant, and died in an asylum in Boston on November 2, 1849.
Maria Bowen and her mother, Nelly, were given their freedom in 1844 by Anna Thornton. Maria Bowen died in Washington City in March 1864. She was sixty years old.
Julia Snow, Beverly’s widow, died on February 7, 1865. She was buried next to her husband in the Toronto Necropolis.
Beverly’s friend Isaac Carey returned to Washington after the Civil War and became a deputy marshal and a member of the school board.
Anna Maria Thornton lived another thirty years after the Snow-Storm as her fortune slowly declined. She died in a rented room in Washington City on August 16, 1865. She was ninety years old. Mrs. Thornton was “remarkable for her beauty and accomplishments,” said the Intelligencer and “one of the most distinguished ornaments of society.” Her marriage was childless, the paper noted, “and she leaves no inheritor of her name and her virtue.”
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