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By Root 1738 0

politicians—were all mixed up here in the shadow of the Capitol. Census takers recorded only a few thousand slaves in Washington just before the Civil War, a figure that nearly all modern historians have accepted unquestioningly. But most of the District’s slaves didn’t belong to Washingtonians, and so they weren’t counted in the census.9 Some were the property of Southern senators, congressmen, and even presidents, who brought them along as butlers, chefs, and body servants.10 Many more were owned by Maryland and Virginia planters who rented their Negroes out, often for years at a time, to work in the city. Other masters simply sent slaves off to seek employment on their own, demanding only a share of the earnings. The lives of such men and women, though often squalid and impoverished, could occasionally seem like freedom. The District’s large population of free Negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, lived in what sometimes seemed like slavery. In countless small ways each day, they were reminded that Washington was the capital of a country not their own. Any person of African descent was barred from entering the grounds of the Capitol—except, of course, for the servants and laborers whose work was in many respects more indispensible than that of the congressmen. Socializing publicly with whites was almost unthinkable: if Absolom Shadd had tried to sit down for a meal in his own restaurant, it might have sparked a riot. And each night at ten o’clock, when the bell of the Perseverance Fire Company at Eighth and Pennsylvania rang, all blacks—whether slave or free, ash haulers or restaurant owners—had to get off the streets or face arrest, followed sometimes by flogging.11

Curious foreign travelers often found themselves at a loss to understand the intricacies of local racial codes, or even to guess who was a slave and who wasn’t. Early in 1861, an English journalist was standing by the front window of Willard’s Hotel when he saw a tall, handsome young black man, elegantly attired from head to toe, strolling proudly up the Avenue. The Englishman turned to a white American who stood nearby: “I wonder what he is?” he inquired. “Well,” the stranger drawled, “that fellow is not a free nigger; he looks too respectable. I dare say you could get him for fifteen hundred dollars with his clothes off.”12

What, then, were these Negro men and women? The Supreme Court had ruled that they could never be citizens, and that they had no rights whatsoever that whites were bound to respect. Were they therefore simply property, as anyone might conclude from reading the classified ads in the Intelligencer or the ponderous folios kept by the recorder of deeds, where sales of human beings were duly inscribed among the real estate transactions? Or was it possible that they were simply people? Was it even possible that they could, one day, be Americans?

Such were the questions that had for decades bedeviled the capital city’s Old Gentlemen: the senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries, justices, and presidents whose steady hands kept the ship of state on course. These matters had, indeed, bedeviled America’s elder statesmen ever since the nation’s founding, when a previous generation of wise men, sitting in a shuttered room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, had ruminated and decided that the new Constitution would reckon each slave as three-fifths of a human being for electoral purposes, and more or less ignore them otherwise. That had seemed to settle the issue—at least to the extent of freeing the new federal union to turn its attention to other things.

Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the Old Gentlemen of the antebellum period were preoccupied not with the question of what black men and women were or might ever be, but with how to avoid the question entirely. Toward that end, they, and much of the nation, had mastered the art of circumlocution. In the best of times, in the politest Washington circles, slaves were mentioned rarely; the relative abstraction of slavery, only slightly more often; while “our peculiar