1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [231]
4. Register of Debates in Congress, 22nd Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 264–312; Georgia Telegraph, Feb. 13, 1833.
5. My description of Willis is in part conjectural, based on the Green & Williams newspaper advertisement and on information about Judge Bibb’s own life and habits. The ad describes Willis as thirty-three years old, the late judge’s “body servant” and “a good cook and dining room servant, etc.” The duties I describe were those typical of an antebellum body servant, especially in an urban setting where the family kept only a few slaves. (The U.S. Census Slave Schedules for 1850 recorded Bibb as owning three slaves in Washington: a twenty-four-year-old woman, a twenty-four-year-old man, and a twenty-three-year-old man. Based on the ages, it is quite possible that one of the two men was Willis.) Bibb’s final illness was pneumonia; President Buchanan and cabinet members did attend the funeral at his house on the afternoon of April 17, 1859.
6. George M. Bibb to John B. Bibb, Feb. 24, 1839, quoted in Goff, “The Last Leaf,” p. 342.
7. An English visitor in the 1850s, Laurence Oliphant, sniffed that the capital was “a howling wilderness of deserted streets running out into the country and ending nowhere, its population consisting chiefly of politicians and negroes.” Alice Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, His Wife (1892), vol. 1, p. 109, quoted in Mrs. Roger Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1908), p. 3.
8. Josephine F. Pacheco, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Rescue Attempt on the Potomac (Chapel Hill, 2005), pp. 15–18, 23; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (London, 1856), pp. 12–13; Felicia Bell, “ ‘The Negroes Alone Work’: Enslaved Craftsmen, the Building Trades, and the Construction of the United States Capitol, 1790–1800” (PhD dissertation, Howard University, 2009), p. 235; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), p. 10; William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (London, 1863), vol. 1, pp. 32, 50; Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 2nd ed., (Westport, Conn., 1997), p. 192; Daily National Intelligencer, Aug. 29, 1849; June 21, 1850; July 8, 1852.
9. Pacheco, The Pearl, p. 20.
10. Ten of the first fifteen U.S. presidents were or had been slaveholders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor. However, Washington never lived in Washington, D.C., and Van Buren and Harrison both freed their slaves long before taking office.
11. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, 1967), pp. 41–42; Pacheco, The Pearl, pp. 18–24. In fact, Shadd’s predecessor at the restaurant, a free black man named Beverly Snow, did spark a riot in 1835 when rumors spread that he had made disrespectful remarks about white women. A mob destroyed the restaurant and almost lynched him; Snow sold the business to Shadd and moved to Canada.
12. Russell, My Diary, vol. 1, p. 46.
13. Daily National Intelligencer, June 21, 1858.
14. Description based on Josephine Cobb, “Mathew B. Brady’s Photographic Gallery in Washington,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vols. 53/56 (1953/56), pp. 28–69.
15. Leech, Reveille, p. 19; Speech of Mr. Clement C. Clay, Jr., of Alabama, on the Contest in Kansas and the Plan