Snow-Storm in August Page 2

  Beverly figured Washington City could not treat him worse than that. The capital lay in the District of Columbia, located 180 miles northeast of Lynchburg, a ride of several days by coach. Such proximity generated some awareness of its attractions and dangers. Yes, the capital city was known as a perennially indebted municipality of dubious morals. Yes, its haphazard streets and well-hidden charms evoked laughter among European tourists and Virginia squires alike. And yes, there were stories of free colored men who had visited the capital of liberty only to be kidnapped and sold into slavery. But the capital was changing. In the recent presidential election, General Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, had won more votes than incumbent John Quincy Adams. The first westerner elected to the presidency, Jackson was inaugurated in March 1829 before a vast and adoring crowd. If nothing else, Beverly and Julia could live and work there legally. The capital beckoned not as a promised land but as a refuge, a haven where a colored man just might have room enough to prove himself.

  In November 1829, Beverly’s day came. Susannah Norvell Warwick did her part to end the stain of slavery on herself and her state by agreeing to manumit her bondsman. Beverly and her husband walked two blocks to the Lynchburg courthouse, where John handed the justice of the peace a handwritten deed of freedom. The justice of the peace copied its standard language into a big bound volume. In exchange for five dollars, John Warwick attested that he did “emancipate, set free, and relinquish all Manner of right to the personal Services of my man Slave Beverly, commonly called Beverly Snow.”

  John Warwick signed the deed and set his seal in red wax. Snow walked out onto Court Street a free American.

  2

  BEVERLY AND JULIA aimed to reach Washington City in time for the fall races. In central Virginia, a land known for horses and gambling, this annual autumnal event in the nation’s capital was much discussed, and it became Beverly’s destination. The journey north was neither difficult nor comfortable. The stagecoach left Lynchburg three times a week; the fare was seventeen dollars. Beverly and Julia would have traveled east on the Lexington Turnpike to Richmond, then north. The carriages were indifferent to the frailties of the human skeleton. “They may be likened to the car portion of the swings at an English fair,” wrote Charles Dickens, who made the trip a few years later. They are “roofed, put upon axle-trees and wheels, and curtained with painted canvas. They are covered with mud from the roof to the wheel-tire, and have never been cleaned since they were built.”

  The broad road on which the coaches bounced was a highway to a less bucolic world. Most of the coach drivers were flamboyant free black men. They dressed in coarse pepper-and-salt suits, excessively patched and darned, particularly at the knees. They wore gray stockings, enormous unblacked high-low shoes (a poor man’s boot), and very short trousers. One driver sported mismatched gloves while wielding a short whip and wearing a low-crowned, broad-brimmed black hat. Dickens thought him an insane imitator of an English coachman. The man was right at home on the road to Washington City.

  Fredericksburg came as a relief. It was a neatly laid-out town of three thousand people on the Rappahannock River. Founded in 1728, Fredericksburg was older and more genteel than Lynchburg. A boomtown fifty years before, it had settled into stately respectability. Slaveholding plantation owners lived within its gates while cultivating their lands in the adjacent countryside. Fredericksburg also had a substantial community of free colored people, who were, by reputation, religious in tendency, church-

  going in practice, and Baptist in creed. Beverly Snow was none of those things.

  Like many a sore passenger disembarking in Fredericksburg, Beverly and Julia probably staggered down to the dock in search of gentler transport. The daily steamboat that went down the Rappahannock and up the Potomac to Washington City for three dollars and seventy-five cents offered vistas and ease unknown to the rattled prisoners of stagecoaches. After a few soothing hours, the ship docked in Alexandria, the southernmost city in the District of Columbia. At Gadsby’s Tavern they boarded another coach, which took them to the Long Bridge, a rickety wooden structure that crossed the Potomac in a northeasterly direction. The planked road, passing just ten feet above the river’s turbid waters, was lined with men wielding fishing rods and blunderbusses. Oblivious to the passing horses, these bystanders took aim at the clouds of ducks flying overhead and fired. Fowl fell from the sky as the newcomers sped by in their carriage.

  Washington City stood on the far side of the bridge. Barges, barks, and flat-bottom boats lined the northern shore. Over the waters to the south one could see the outline of the new penitentiary and the finer homes of Greenleaf’s Point. Beyond that flowed the Eastern Branch, also known as the Anacostia River. To the north, one could glimpse the spires of Georgetown College in the distance. Closer was the opening of Tiber Creek, a channel that allowed small boats to sail into a dock at Eighteenth and B streets (a location now under the pavement of Constitution Avenue). And, from almost anywhere, one could see, on a hill to the east, the magnificent white building of the U.S. Capitol, home of the Congress and citadel of American democracy. The building did not yet have the distinctive dome that was added in the 1860s, but its massive profile impressed nonetheless.

  The National Metropolis, as optimistic boosters dubbed it, was promiscuous in its realities. It was the national capital for the slaveholding states of the South. Yet no other American city, with the possible exception of New Orleans, offered free colored people more opportunities. Unlike in Virginia, slavery was receding and liberty growing in the capital city. Between 1800 and 1830, the number of enslaved Negroes had grown faster than the number of free blacks in every southern state. The opposite was true in Washington City. In the year of its founding, 1800, enslaved people had outnumbered free blacks by four to one. When Beverly Snow arrived thirty years later, free Africans outnumbered the enslaved for the first time. Freedom was coming to the federal district.

  Yet the number of white men in Washington trafficking in people was growing too. With the frontier states of the South and West opening up for cotton cultivation, distant landowners contracted with brokers to send them enslaved and able-bodied Negroes who could be forced to do the hard work. White families in the Upper South who owned property in people found they could sell their bondsmen, especially healthy young people, for higher prices. In Alexandria, the firm of Franklin and Armfield, located on Duke Street, ranked as the single largest slave-trading syndicate in the nation. When a northerner called on the proprietor, John Armfield, he was surprised to find him “engaging and graceful.” Buying and selling humans was a respectable business in Washington City.

  There were regular auctions of people at Jesse Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, which occupied most of the block between Sixth and Seventh streets on Pennsylvania Avenue in the heart of the city. “Forty Negroes for sale, in Families,” read one advertisement in the National Intelligencer newspaper. Africans were held in J. W. Neal & Company’s unobtrusive slave prison in the Centre Market. Black people languished at the notorious Yellow House, run by the legendarily cruel William H. Williams, at Seventh Street and Maryland Avenue on the south side of the city. Colored people were sold at a slave pen at Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, others taken in chains from the alley behind G Street, just north of City Hall. When one white man first saw such a coffle of slaves he could not help but stare, and a passing colored hack driver called out to him, “See there. Ain’t that right down murder? Don’t you call that right down murder?”

  Many people did. Most did not.

  The city itself was the result of a dinner table conversation about slaves and money that had taken place just forty years before. In September 1790, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson dined in Philadelphia and came to an agreement about the location of the country’s capital city. The new government of the United States of America, then based in Philadelphia, was struggling for survival. Hamilton, who had
the keenest financial mind of any of the nation’s founders, wanted the national government to assume the debts incurred by the various states during the War for Independence from Great Britain. The southern states understood that such a move would empower the national government and the bankers of Philadelphia and New York rather more than they wanted. Jefferson told Hamilton that southerners in Congress would oppose his debt plan unless the northerners would assent to establishing the national capital in a more southern location.

  The southerners disliked Hamilton’s assumption-of-debts scheme, but they disliked even more the standing proposal to move the capital to a district along the Susquehanna River in southern Pennsylvania in 1800. The problem was that, under the liberal influence of Benjamin Franklin and Quaker merchants, Pennsylvania had largely abolished Negro slavery by 1790. No southern man could ignore the implications. If the new capital stood on Pennsylvania soil, they might not be able to bring their servants to the seat of government. A capital free of African slaves might also be taken as prescriptive, a signal of disapproval of slavery elsewhere in the nation. As they ate their dinner Jefferson told Hamilton the southerners in Congress wanted the site of the future capital moved farther south, to a lightly populated ten-mile square along the Potomac River to be carved out of Maryland and Virginia, both states where slavery was legal. Hamilton had no objection. High finance and human slavery were reconciled in the coordinates of the new capital city.

  Northerners and southerners alike had expected a grand metropolis to emerge on the spot. To that end, President George Washington asked Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French engineer of impressive ego, to lay out a plan for the city. Influenced by his time in Paris, L’Enfant designed a series of broad boulevards radiating out from the city center. The first president also sponsored a public competition to design a building to house the Congress. The sketches of architect William Thornton, a liberty-loving emigrant from Britain via the West Indies, impressed both Jefferson and Washington, and his design was selected. As constructed in the late 1790s, the grandeur of Thornton’s Capitol inspired visions of a grand metropolis. “I doubt not it will be the most splendid and beautiful City in the world in a few years,” William Thornton wrote to a friend in 1796.

  He was off by only a century or two. Within a few years Thornton’s premature optimism gave way to a run-down reality. After its founding in 1800, the capital attracted a transient population of congressmen and senators who lived in hotels and dingy boardinghouses along Pennsylvania Avenue and who returned to their home states when Congress was not in session. Amidst the scattered dwellings, pockets of prosperity emerged. A society of ladies and gentlemen took shape in the presidential mansion at Sixteenth Street and the nearby homes of his cabinet secretaries, as well as the opulent residences of the diplomats of England, France, and Russia. A community of clerks and shopkeepers grew up to serve government officials and local landowners. But the speculative dreams of George Washington and his cronies who envisioned a booming city with rising property values suffered expensive disappointment. Few Americans moved to the capital. The roads were primitive, the accommodations cramped, the attractions minimal, the summers infernal. The speculators went bankrupt, the locals made do, and the contrast between the city’s ambitions and realities often startled visitors.

  “I saw the dome of the Capitol from considerable distance at the end of a straight road,” wrote Harriet Martineau, a popular English author of the day who visited not long after Beverly Snow arrived. “. . . I was taken by surprise on finding myself beneath the splendid building, so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge. We wound round its base, and entered Pennsylvania Avenue, the only one of the grand avenues intended to centre in the Capitol which has been built with any completeness.”

  Three decades after the capital’s founding, Washington was eager to escape its village past. Among the peculiarities of local speech was the term “Washington City.” “We no longer say London town or Paris city,” observed the editors of the National Intelligencer. “Whether this addition be more necessary in the case of Washington, whose claim to it might be forgotten, we do not know.” Dickens thought the motley metropolis resembled a western frontier town in its unkempt appearance and erratic weather. A typical day in Washington, he complained, was “scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust.” Here and there rows of buildings sprang up, but by far the greater number of the houses stood far apart. The streets were unusually wide and unusually empty. “The whole affair,” said another visitor, “looks as if some giant had scattered a box of his child’s toys at random on the ground.”

  Yet the core of an incipient city was visible. Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the presidential mansion was lined with Lombardy poplar trees that shaded hotels and shops, boardinghouses, taverns, apothecaries, bookstores, grog shops, faro banks, jewelers, and tailors. The surrounding blocks were lined with wood-frame and brick houses, hardware stores, milliners’ shops, horse stables, and the anonymous slave pens. To the west, in front of the executive mansion, stood President’s Square, now lined with grand homes. Two blocks north of the Avenue on Seventh Street stood the Patent Office, the Land Office, and St. Patrick’s Church, constituting an almost grand square (in the area now known as Gallery Place). To the east, between Fourth and Sixth streets, the massive unfinished edifice of City Hall anchored Judiciary Square. And above it all, on the eastern hill, stood the ever-present spectacle of the Capitol.

  “The mists of the morning still hung around this magnificent building when it first broke upon our view,” wrote Frances Trollope in her best-selling book Domestic Manners of the Americans, “and I am not sure that the effect produced was not the greater for this circumstance. It stands so finely too, high, and alone.”

  This was the view from Beverly Snow’s new neighborhood.

  Upon their arrival, Beverly and Julia most likely stayed with friends who had migrated from Virginia before and knew the ways of the capital, which were certainly different from those of Lynchburg. Not only were there some four thousand free people of color living and working in Washington City, but also the fortunes of their friends and family who were enslaved varied widely. Washington was not a plantation where hard labor was ruled by brutality. The owners of slaves often hired them out to work in other places. Slaves for hire worked as waiters in the hotels on Pennsylvania Avenue and as masons on the construction of public buildings like City Hall. They helped dig the new Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. While their owners received payment for their labor, the bondsmen enjoyed a degree of independence unknown among people enslaved anywhere in the southern states.

  Beverly and Julia might have noticed that women outnumbered men in the city among the free people of color. In the finer homes, black women worked as domestics and seamstresses. The free men of color earned their money as hack drivers, cooks, and laborers and spent it on their families or favorite pastimes. Many of the free people of color were poor and shiftless. Some were prosperous, and others were getting there. Seventy-five colored people paid taxes in Washington City in 1830, triple the number just six years earlier. A handful of them owned more than one thousand dollars in personal property. The ablest among them enjoyed positions of trust and confidence with powerful white people.

  Colored men, for example, found a particular niche as messengers in the government offices. The city’s burgeoning class of cabinet secretaries, auditors, and officeholders increasingly conducted business in documents delivered by the notoriously insecure U.S. Postal Service. The art of intercepting and reading a gentleman’s letters had reached new levels of refinement. The careful public servant might avoid a world of trouble—even save his own job—by finding a trustworthy colored man to assist him at a salary less than the white messenger’s $350 a year.

  Capital life could be hard for any newcomer, much less a free man of color, but it had consolations too, including many taverns serving endless draughts o
f gin slings, gin cocktails, sherry cobblers, mint juleps, snakeroot bitters, timber doodle, and eggnog, not to mention Madeira wine from Portugal and hock wine from Germany. All in all, Washington City exuded a certain common charm for small-town folk like Beverly and Julia. It might not have loomed as large as legend had it in Lynchburg. The capital did, however, have an amiable virtue: One could easily get drunk there.

  3

  IT DID NOT take long for Beverly to adopt the customs of Washington City. His goal was to work at the fall races, which were sponsored by the Jockey Club, a conclave of local horsemen. If a free man, white or colored, wanted to set up an ordinary—a stand selling food or drink—at the racetrack, he had to get a license. They sold for three dollars, payable to the clerk of the circuit court.

  Beverly made his way to the courthouse, which stood on Louisiana Avenue (later renamed Indiana Avenue) between Fourth and Sixth streets. The building, spanning 252 feet across its front, exceeded anything Beverly had ever seen, both in size and shabbiness. The fragrance of a nearby hog-fattening operation did not improve the atmosphere of the place. When Beverly finally arrived, he was too late to obtain a license for the races that opened on October 20. He had to settle for a license for the November 5 races.

  All the while, Beverly was scouting out possible locations for a more permanent oyster house, something like his operation in Lynchburg, but better. One possibility was Centre Market, which occupied a vast plaza on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventh and Ninth streets. It was home to dozens of farmers’ stalls offering a cornucopia of produce: raspberries, melons, pumpkins, squash, corn, rutabagas, and the newly popular “love apples,” otherwise known as tomatoes. There were also at least ten butchers on the premises. Slave dealer J. W. Neal had an office there as well, peddling a different sort of flesh. On market days—Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday—the place ran thick with people, white and colored alike. Beverly wanted something in the vicinity.