1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [34]
Perhaps it was a bit unseemly for a fine family like the Bibbs to advertise their loyal household retainer for sale in the public prints—and then to make poor Willis stand on the block at that shabby auction house as Messrs. Green and Williams hovered assiduously, pointing out his finer qualities to whoever cared to look. As a man approaching middle age, Willis may well have had a wife and children, perhaps members of the District’s large free-Negro community, who would be heartbroken if he were sold south. But then, what use had the widow Bibb for a gentleman’s valet? Manumission was out of the question: had not the judge himself often declared his staunch opposition to the practice, calling free blacks “a nuisance to society”?6 There were estate taxes to think of, too; the deceased had left no fewer than seventeen children, and how, pray tell, was a Negro to be divided seventeen ways? Wasn’t the sale perfectly legal? Wouldn’t the good people of Washington, in any event, forget the matter quickly, remembering the late Hon. George M. Bibb only as a selfless public servant, a kindly neighbor, an honest gentleman?
Money, in the end, was money. So the advertisement appeared in the Intelligencer for “One Negro man, named Willis, about thirty-three years of age, and a slave for life.” Below that, a shorter line of type: “Also, one Gold Watch.”
WASHINGTON IN THE YEARS before the Civil War often seemed like a city of slaves and old gentlemen.7
Black men and women were everywhere: their labor, to a large degree, made the engine of the city run. Northern newcomers in the capital, imagining that slavery meant Negroes toiling by hundreds in the cotton fields, were often surprised at what they saw. Washington’s slaves shoveled coal and carried water; carved stone and split wood. Perched on the drivers’ seats of hackney cabs, enslaved men solicited fares outside the main railway station; trudging alongside creaking wagons, enslaved women converged on the Central Market each day before dawn, bringing their masters’ cabbages and country hams from Maryland farms. It was slaves who, to a considerable degree, were building the grand and gleaming new extensions of the Capitol, just as they had built the old Capitol and the White House more than half a century before. And it was slaves who hauled up Sixteenth Street the daily cartloads of human dung—patrician and plebeian waste all democratically commingled—to be dumped onto a stinking field ten blocks north of the presidential mansion.
Like today’s Washington, the nineteenth-century capital attracted both foreign and American tourists. Visitors sometimes remarked that the big hotels—Willard’s, Gadsby’s, Brown’s—seemed like intricate machines run wholly by the Negro servants, who tended fireplaces, waited at table, emptied chamber pots and spittoons, and slept on the bare hallway floors outside guests’ rooms. In the city’s barbershops, it was almost exclusively black men who shaved the whiskers of lowly and mighty Washingtonians alike: “The senator flops down in the seat,” one traveler noted with amusement, “and has his noble nose seized by the same fingers which the moment before were occupied by the person and chin of an unmistakable rowdy.” When customers dined at Absolom Shadd’s National Eating House on Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the District’s finest restaurants, slaves tucked napkins into their collars before serving up specialties of the house: steamed Chesapeake crabs, spit-roasted game birds, and a buttery green soup made with sea turtle meat freshly imported from the Bahamas. Three of those slaves belonged to the hospitable Mr. Shadd himself—who happened to be a free colored man.8
Indeed, the usual categories of slave and free, black and white—terms that seemed so simple and stark in the speeches of abolitionist preachers or proslavery