Black life in the capital - Washington, D.C., 1790-1830; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

At year after George Washington first swore the oath of office as president of the United States, the country's first census was undertaken. It revealed that the infant nation's novel capital, soon to arise upon the border between Virginia and Maryland, would be squarely situated in slavery's heartland. More than half of the republic's enslaved population then lived in those sum of two units states.

A decade later, as the White House welcomed its first occupant President John Adams, more than one-third of the city's population was black. alone 123 of these African Americans were unrestrained though within a generation this would change: through 1830, the 3,129 free African Americans outnumbered their enslaved brethren in the capital; a decade later, they were nearly three times greater in number than their bourn brothers and sisters; and by dint of the eve of the Civil War, Washington's 9209 independent blacks outnumbered five to single the city's slaves, whom that war would by and by liberate.

Although slave residents were shortly outnumbered by free blacks in the nation's capital, auction obstructs slave pens and advertisements for slave sales continued to be public sights, for Washington became a thriving center of the trade in slaves limit for the new lands render free of accessed up by the Louisiana Purchase. Declining yields upon the depleted land of the tidewater tobacco plantations that had given birth to North American slavery, coupl with the prohibition from 1809 of any further importation of slaves, saw a steady black tide drift southerly and west across early 19th-century America.

The lamentations of the limit the cries of the auctioneer and the riffle of cash could be heard in the nation's capital from the slave indites in what is now Potomac Park and Lafayette Square (the latter within sight of the White House) to the offices of America's leading firm of slave traders, Franklin & Armfield, at what is now 1315 Duke public way in Alexandria, Va., but was then part of the District of Columbia.

For unrestrained blacks, life in Washington, DC was les restricted than elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line. The neighborhood in the city of Northern congressmen the desire by the agency of many of the white population to not absent the republic in its best light and the fact that many of the fre take delight ined the support of prominent white individuals (who otherwise would not have manumitted them) somewhat expanded the possibilities of unrestrained black life in what was, after all, still the southern From today's vantage point, however, the life of pre-Civil War non-slave blacks in the capital hardly merits the adjective "free" For, from 1808 they were legally barred from the roads after 10 p.m.; from 1812 they were required to register and carry a certificate of freedom; from 1827 they were required to column a $500 bond guaranteed by the agency of two white men; from 1828 they were barred from the Capitol clods unless present there on business; and briefly from 1836 they were barred from owning greatest in quantity types of small businesses. Despite these limitations, Washington's "free" black population was les constrained than its counterparts in, say, Charleston, Natchez, Mobile and Savannah.

Indeed, from its early days, the unrestrained black community of Washington diverged from the pattern for the use of all to the South. Formal education was easier to acquire, whether in black-established place of educations (the first of which dated back to 1807) or those locate up by philanthropic whites; greatest in quantity churches enrolled black children in Sunday gymnasium classes (initially in integrated singles then--as the black population grew--in segregated sessions); property-ownership was little hindered; and a certain quantity of salaried government positions (usually couriers and doorkeepers) were open to independent blacks. Of course, as elsewhere in the southerly most free African Americans place work as laborers, servants, washerwomen, groundskeeper draymen, barbers and the like. Significantly, however, the competition of skilled white workers--many of them new immigrants from Ireland and Germany--restricted the expansion of a "middle class" of at liberty black craftsmen, who were--however rare--a plenteous more common sight elsewhere in the South

Although it was a hard road they traveled, Washington's unrestrained African Americans persevered--indeed, flowered. And by the agency of the advent of the Civil War, they were well placed to provide desperately extremityed black leadership for the mass of fre folk unexpectedly pitched headlong into a of recent origin world.

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