1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [33]
Few people—at least outside of Washington—noticed that the 1850 law did not actually prohibit slave trading itself. It simply banned anyone from bringing Negroes into the District of Columbia for the purpose of selling them out of state. That took care of those embarrassing coffles: Washington would no longer be a major entrepôt for Negroes being shipped off to the slave-hungry Cotton Belt from the overstocked Chesapeake region. But it was still perfectly legal for a Washingtonian to put his house servant up for public auction, and even to advertise the offering, as Green & Williams did, in the pages of the Daily National Intelligencer, the city’s leading newspaper and a semi official chronicle of congressional proceedings. If the unlucky slave happened to turn up the following week in one of the Alexandria slave pens right across the Potomac, ready to be packed onto a New Orleans–bound schooner—well, that too was perfectly within the law.1
The Negro coming up for sale on this particular occasion was a thirty-three-year-old man named Willis. Selling him might even be called a prestige transaction for Green & Williams, which, though large, was by no means known as one of the more genteel auction houses in the capital. For this slave had been, as the firm boasted in its advertisement, the valued property of “the late Hon. Judge George M. Bibb deceased,” one of the District’s most distinguished longtime residents.2
The courtly, white-haired Judge Bibb—known also, depending on whom you spoke to, as Chancellor Bibb, Senator Bibb, Secretary Bibb—had been a fixture of Washington politics and society ever since his arrival as a young senator from Kentucky during President Madison’s first term.3 As his respectful obituaries noted, he had been at various times United States attorney, secretary of the treasury under President Tyler, and—after retiring from government service and taking up practice as a leading Washington attorney—a habitué of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber. In his politics, the late judge had been admirably moderate: both a proslavery man and a Union man, in the hallowed tradition of his native Virginia. His most notable speech in the Senate had been back in 1833, when South Carolina had threatened to secede over nullification, one of those almost ceaseless sectional crises and compromises that had preoccupied the federal government throughout recent decades. “My voice is still for peace,” Bibb sonorously began, and then spent three and a half hours professing his belief in peace and the Union, the Union and peace. Making frequent allusions to the Founding Fathers, he spoke of states’ rights and “the horrors of civil war,” and of freedom-loving South Carolina “smarting under the rod of injustice and oppression”—a speech so worthy and so boring, one newspaper noted, that by the time it concluded, every living creature in the Senate chamber, with the exception of the satisfied orator himself, had either fallen asleep or fled.4
This is not to say that the late Judge Bibb had been a drab figure. Indeed, he was well known around town for his distinctive ways. Until the end of his life, he clung steadfastly to the fashions of Jefferson’s day: silk stockings, buckled knee breeches, and a ruffled white cravat. People saw him, sighed sentimentally, and knew beyond all doubt that they were gazing upon a true gentleman of the old school. The judge was an accomplished musician; his Georgetown neighbors were used to strolling past his fine brick house on a warm evening and hearing the strains of his violin through the open study windows. Then one spring the violin was heard no more.
As for Willis, the Negro, he had been for some years the old gentleman’s trusted body servant. It had been he who neatly laid out the silk stockings and knee breeches each morning; who put the violin away in its case; who shaved the grizzled jowls and attended