Abolitionism and Freedom in the National Capital Area

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Prince William Forest Park

Abolitionism and Freedom in the National Capital AreaChesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, Prince William Forest Park

Freedom Seeking and Abolitionism
1815 to 1859

The fight for freedom did not end with the Revolutionary War or War of 1812 but continued through the 1800s. The political landscape of the young nation’s states was divided as some states pushed for and some against the expansion and limitation, respectively, of slavery. Though the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been legally barred in the United States in 1808, the internal slave trade thrived, especially as northern states’ enslavers sold Black people south. Washington, DC and Alexandria, Virginia, both became major centers of this trade even with the free populations in DC increasing.

With the internal slave trade, more resistance rose. More organized resistance with the Underground Railroad is apparent over the nineteenth century. From seeking freedom in free states, revolts and political action in the courts, the institution of slavery was challenged. Free Blacks and White allies, such as the Quakers, established routes of assistance to freedom seekers in the national capital area till the end of the Civil War. Using wide-reaching routes through waterways like the C&O Canal, the Potomac River through Harper’s Ferry to Washington DC, and throughout the greater Chesapeake Bay, self-liberation was made possible.

Information from this timeline is provided by Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area by Cheryl LaRoche Ph.D., Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer, and Lauren Hughes; and African American Experience Before Emancipation by John Bedell and Andrew Wilkins. It highlights the struggles of freedom seekers, and the internal struggle for equality in the United States of America in the years leading up to the Civil War.

From 1815 to 1859

1820 – In the first instance of school desegregation, John Jay Janney in his 1901 memoirs asserted that Blacks living on Quaker farms attended school with whites in the log schoolhouse in Purcellville, VA (once at Bethany Circle), and the Goose Creek Friends’ Schoolhouse at today’s Lincoln, in Loudoun County.

1827 – James Pennington, known as James Pembroke, escaped slavery at Rockland near Hagerstown in Washington County, MD. In his quest for a first-rate education, he was the first black student admitted to Yale University although he was barred from officially enrolling in the school. He was a powerful abolitionist and fought tirelessly for African American civil rights. He published his account of his early enslaved life, The Fugitive Blacksmith, in 1849. An online copy of the book is available here at Gutenberg.org.

1828 – The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was started in 1828 and operated until 1924, ferrying cargo and people to and from Georgetown and its terminus in Cumberland, MD. African Americans, free and enslaved, helped construct the canal, several worked for the canal company in various capacities, and a few even captained their own canal boats. George Pointer was an enslaved laborer at the Patowmack Canal at Great Falls and became the last Superintendent Engineer. He was an extraordinary case of an enslaved African American not only gaining his own freedom but living a life where he was entrusted with a position of leadership. Before the Civil War and emancipation, the C&O canal also served as an useful avenue of escape for enslaved people seeking their freedom.

1831 – The attempted revolt of seventy or more enslaved persons in Southern Virginia led by Nat Turner in 1831 was met not only with immediate armed defensive action by the state, but also by the federal government. In dispatching federal troops to the scene, the United States government demonstrated that the defense of slavery was a national and constitutional responsibility.

1835 – The Snow Riots in Washington, DC occurred when White mobs attacked Beverly Snow’s Epicurean Eating House at 6th and Pennsylvania Avenue, owned by a free man of color, and went on to destroy his property and terrorize him. The pretext for trampling Snow’s civil rights was that he had insulted a white female patron. Rioters, primarily white mechanics and laborers, then moved on to burn and loot the nearby free African American community and especially the schools and churches, this time because a young enslaved Black man had threatened the life of an older white woman.

The larger context of the murderous rampages was the white working-class men’s frustration over free Blacks’ ability to work, and their resentment of Black competition for jobs. The clear result was the unleashing of white terror against Blacks. The riot began on August 12, 1835 and continued for days until President Andrew Jackson intervened and stopped it.

1830s-1839 – Free Black carriage driver Leonard Grimes conducted several slaves to safety, including seven in one barouche, a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage. This last daring escape, along the Leesburg Pike in Loudoun County, led to his arrest, trial, and two-year prison sentence—the minimum penalty, due to his “former good character.”

1844 – The enslaved John W. Jones and his half-brother, George Jones, escaped from near Leesburg in Loudoun County to Elmira, New York, and through the early 1860s assisted some 800 slaves to escape to Canada. Samuel M. Janney, of Springwood, near Lincoln, in Loudoun County, wrote a series of anti-slavery letters in the Alexandria Gazette. He proposed an end to domestic slave trade and argues for the “superiority of free labor.”

1845 – In July, several groups of armed bondsmen left their homes in Maryland’s Charles, St. Mary’s and Prince George’s counties and met near Washington. The total number ranged from 38 to 74. Headed to Pennsylvania, they marched boldly under the leadership of Mark Caesar and Bill Wheeler through the District and into Montgomery County where they encountered armed local whites near Gaithersburg.
A battle ensued leaving several of the Black men dead and others in flight. Some 31 were captured and most were sold out of state by their owners. Caesar, a free man, was sentenced to 40 years in the penitentiary for “abetting slaves” to escape. Wheeler, not so easily caught, was finally captured, tried and sentenced to hang but escaped again after four months.

1847 – A 19th-century Virginia law specified: “[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to . . . enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes.”

1848 – The Pearl Incident involved the attempted escape of 77 African Americans fleeing slavery (and from 40 slaveholders including a former first lady), considered the largest such attempt at the time. The schooner Pearl, piloted by a white crew, was beset by bad weather and still winds and was captured and returned to Washington where the freedom-seekers were sold south. Due to public outcry, some were repurchased by abolitionists and free family members and manumitted.

1850 – The Fugitive Slave Act among the most punitive of laws enacted to curb freedom-seeking by enslaved persons and protect the “property” of enslavers, was passed as one of five provisions of the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise also included the prohibition of slave sales in the District of Columbia.

1855 – Henry Cole, who had married a daughter of Sally Bates, was considered the largest Black property owner in Prince William County in 1855, owning 155 acres (Bedell, Wilkins, 2022).

1856 – Benjamin Drew’s book, The Refugee, presents the first interviews with George Johnson, who lived near Harpers Ferry, and Peyton Lucas, of Leesburg, who had escaped from slavery. They describe conditions, whippings, other degradations, and escape.

1857 – March 6 the Dred Scott v Sandford decision, in which the Missouri Compromise was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, was issued. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who had started his legal career in Frederick County, MD, ruled that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories.

The decision stated in part that Blacks were not citizens and that they “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 inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…” That final phrase would haunt the nation and its African American citizens for more than a century and give license to white citizens and institutions to disregard any civil rights that Blacks may have had.

1859 – Daniel Dangerfield, a slave helper at Aldie Mill, escaped in 1853 and was arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Sentiment was strong in Loudoun for his return, but Pennsylvania refused to extradite.

John Brown and a group of raiders wanted to establish a colony in the mountains of western Maryland as an outpost for enslaved people escaping from the South. Brown needed a large supply of weapons to secure such a colony. On October 16, 1859, he and his men seized the US armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. When enslaved people in the area did not revolt against their masters as Brown had hoped, the plan fell apart.

The raid on Harper’s Ferry opened the political split in the United States open and can be seen as the first step into the Civil War. People were willing to spill blood or die for freedom. The cloud of war began to cover the nation pitting neighbor against neighbor, American against American, all in the hopes that the country would live by its ideals of justice and liberty. The Civil War’s stage was set.
Works Cited

Bedell J and Wilkins A. 2022. African American Experience Before Emancipation: Historic Context Narrative. Historic Resource Study. National Park Service. Washington, DC
DataStore -African American Experience Before Emancipation

LaRoche CJ, Fletcher P, Hughes L, Spencer C. 2021. Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area. NPS Special History Study. National Park Service. Washington, DC
DataStore – Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area