In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery.

The house belonged to a relatively obscure Washingtonian, a widow named Ann Sprigg. In those days, boardinghouses like Sprigg’s were fixtures of the capital landscape—where congressmen, senators, government officials, and the like tended to live during legislative sessions. Quarters were often cramped. Men rented a room—or just a bed, or even half of a bed—and communed in shared bathrooms and living spaces, with the day’s debates sometimes carrying over to the dinner table. Many houses developed reputations as being favored by certain factions, turning them into political clubs as much as living quarters.

In 1841, Ann Sprigg’s house came to be known as the “abolition house.” Three anti-slavery Whig congressmen—Seth M. Gates, a New Yorker, William Slade, a Vermonter, and Joshua Giddings, an Ohioan—moved in alongside two prominent abolitionists, Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt—a New Yorker from a landowning family who shared a Sprigg House bed with Weld—quickly set about convincing the representatives to work alongside the wider abolition movement as an anti-slavery lobby. The group became the brain trust behind the first significant congressional campaign to combat slavery from the nation’s capital.

The brain trust’s goal was straightforward: to develop a caucus within the legislature, a lobby to influence the legislature, or at the very least an argument that would challenge the power of slavery and slaveholders in the American government. But it was also radical, representing a major sea change in American history, and ultimately a turning point in slavery’s demise. Up until this point, the anti-slavery movement had largely eschewed politics. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the early abolitionists focused strictly on changing hearts and minds—what they called “moralsuasion”—not changing votes. Garrison once even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution (which he called “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell!”) on stage—a flaming, charred reflection of the fact that he preferred challenging slaveholder power from outside the halls of power.

By the time the brain trust moved into the Sprigg House, however, the movement had started to splinter, with more abolitionists taking up the banner of political activism. A year prior, one group of abolitionists broke with Garrison by forming their own political party. Known as the Liberty Party, it was the first ever expressly anti-slavery party in American history, though it never registered more than a blip on the national political radar. As a result, many anti-slavery Whigs like Giddings and Slade opted to remain Whigs, where they could challenge slavery within the existing two-party structure.

This shift within the anti-slavery movement was partly a result of recognizing that as of the late 1830s and early 1840s, slavery’s defenders clearly had the upper hand, especially in the United States Congress. In fact, so great was slaveholder influence in the nation’s capital that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a series of resolutions that became known as the “Gag Rule.” At the time, constituents would send petitions to their legislators to read on the house floor; the Gag Rule barred the reading of the many anti-slavery petitions congressmen received, which left slavery virtually unchallenged in Congress.

Carroll Row, which included Ann Spriggs’ boarding house, was located at the site of present-day Library of Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The first task of the boarders in the Sprigg House was to repeal the Gag Rule. Weld and Leavitt helped prepare anti-slavery speeches and advised the congressmen on strategy, forming what Giddings described as an informal “select committee.” They soon found a key ally in president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams. Though Adams never lived in the Sprigg House, he spent hours there conferring with the boarders. Finally, on December 3, 1844, thanks in no small part to plans hatched at the Sprigg House, Congress repealed the Gag Rule, galvanizing anti-slavery politicians across the country. Many of them later became “Conscience Whigs,” a faction within the Whig Party that opposed slavery, in opposition to their rivals, the pro-slavery “Cotton Whigs.”

While not as radical as many of his “Conscience Whig” colleagues Abraham Lincoln was himself an anti-slavery Whig, and this is perhaps what drew him to the Sprigg House when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1847 as a little-known congressman from Illinois. For the next two years, it was where he slept, ate, and debated his fellow boarders on the major political topics of the day, including the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Though the other members of the brain trust had moved on by then, Lincoln’s fellow Midwesterner in the House, Giddings, still lodged there, and the two most certainly dined together when in session.

Lincoln spent only a single term in Congress, but his time at the Sprigg House was clearly a formative experience, if not also a fond memory for him. When he returned to Washington more than a decade later, this time as president of a fractured nation, he looked in on Ann Sprigg, who had since moved houses and fallen on hard times. When Lincoln learned that she needed help, he got this “most estimable widow lady” a job working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, a position that allowed her to support her family through the war.

Ann Sprigg died in 1870, and her boardinghouse—and the entire block of row houses on which it stood—was demolished in 1887 to build the Library of Congress. Since then, the story of this old D.C. boarding house and the woman who ran it has been largely forgotten. The history of the anti-slavery movement has often focused on bigger, more prominent figures and emphasized the work of activists based in New England or New York and not necessarily a slaveholding city like Washington, D.C.

Yet for the better part of a decade, Ann Sprigg’s abolition house formed the nucleus of a new political attack against slavery. It was there at the dining room table that anti-slavery politicos put together a strategy for combatting slavery within the halls of Congress, a change that thrust anti-slavery activism away from the fringe and placed it right in the heart of American politics.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that while Joshua Leavitt came from a wealthy family, he was not personally wealthy.

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The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought into focus, they reveal a harrowing moment: enslaved men and women being appraised for the last time in their lives, a valuation made with abolition in service of direct payments to their former owners. There’s the record listing the enslaved man Santiago Servacio, possessed by the mistress Tereza Castaño, whose value was set at 9,900 pesos. And there are those described as “Many without names” (Varios sin nombre) claimed by Placida Colón for 2,000 pesos—likely elderly given their low assessment. Thousands more like these are stored away, accumulating dust in Colombia’s national archive, in the capital.

We often think of the abolition of slavery as a single, triumphant moment. But in reality, across the Americas, it was a slow process that was rife with concessions for slaveowners. The documents in Bogotá are one example of this. They are what historians call “compensation records,” which guaranteed government payment to former slaveholders to make up for their “lost property” after abolition. According to economic historians Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, the Colombian treasury invested nearly 2.5 million pesos in compensating the former owners of 16,468 enslaved people after the abolition of slavery in 1852. The records are proof of the great lengths that governments went to in order to appease slaveholders.

A page out of thousands of Colombia’s compensation records. Courtesy of Yesenia Barragan.

Compensation to slaveholders after the abolition of slavery was the political consensus among elite powerbrokers across the 19th-century Atlantic World. After 1838, when the British crown abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, nearly 20 million British pounds were paid out to former masters. In Uruguay, which had a smaller enslaved population, an 1842 abolition law offered indemnification for owners. The French Revolution of 1848 terminated slavery in the country’s Caribbean colonies, again with compensation. Abolition with compensation swept the South American republics—Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru—in the 1850s. The only exceptions to the rule were Brazil and the United States—save for Washington, D.C., which provided slaveholders loyal to the Union $300 for every enslaved person that was emancipated by the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862, as historian Tera W. Hunter has shown.

But even before emancipation, compensation to slaveholders by other means had been taking place. Since the late 18th century, across the Americas, conversations about indemnifying slaveholders for their lost “property” were common when what were called “gradual abolition” or “gradual emancipation” laws started to be passed. “Gradual abolition” was a legislative approach to terminating chattel slavery through gradual, rather than immediate, means.

At the center of gradual emancipation legislation were what were called “Free Birth” or “Free Womb” laws, which sought to gradually end chattel slavery by terminating a long-standing cornerstone of slavery’s logic: partus sequitur ventrem, or the idea that a child’s status as slave or free derives from that of the mother. The Free Womb laws declared that the children of enslaved women born after a specific date would be freed either immediately or after serving their mother’s master for a particular period.

In 1780, the state of Pennsylvania was the first government in the Americas to adopt such a law—“An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” emancipated “Free Womb” children upon reaching the age of 28. It became the blueprint for future gradual emancipation models, followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island, which passed similar laws in 1784. During the Wars of Independence against Spain, the revolutionary governments of Chile and Argentina adopted gradual emancipation laws in 1811 and 1813, respectively. And when the newly christened Colombian republic approved its gradual emancipation law in 1821—in part inspired by these precedents—it legally “freed” the children of enslaved women born after the law’s promulgation, but it kept these children bonded to their mothers’ masters until the age of 18. This decision was the result of incredibly contentious debate, and the question of compensation to slaveholders was at its heart. Colombian statesmen struggled to come to an agreement about the length of bondage that would provide slaveholders with adequate recompense for their eventual loss of their human “assets.”

From late June to mid-July 1821, over 45 delegates from Colombia’s prosperous late-colonial elite debated the composition of the Free Womb law in what would become known as the Congress of Cúcuta. In his opening remarks to the congress, lawyer and author of the gradual emancipation law José Félix de Restrepo argued that Free Womb children’s labor could provide ample compensation to their owners if they were emancipated at age 16 or 18. As part of his argument, Restrepo presented an account of the “standard” life cycle of an enslaved person in their early years, a racial arithmetic that reflected the profoundly violent commodification of Free Womb children.

According to Restrepo, the first two years of an enslaved child’s life imposed little economic burden on the master. As the child aged and their expenses increased, so did their potential productivity. From ages 9 to 12, the enslaved child could perform small but important domestic tasks. Once they reached the age of 12, the youth was considered ready for hard labor, however defined by the individual master; this meant, Restrepo claimed, that masters could retrieve at least double their investment by the time the child reached the age of 14. From 14 to 18 years of age, the investment would quadruple. Slaveholders would consequently be handsomely indemnified for their eventually lost human “properties.”

Other congressional delegates disagreed with Restrepo’s assessments. Delegate Domingo Briceño y Briceño, who argued that the emancipation law would ultimately bring the republic’s downfall, used his own racial accounting to support extending the Free Womb children’s age of bondage. He claimed that masters expended nearly 400 pesos from the moment of an enslaved person’s birth to the age of 8, while they could only produce 144 pesos for their owner from ages 8 to 16, not even half the master’s investment.

After much deliberation, Colombia’s delegates voted 28-17 to set the age of emancipation for Free Womb children at 18. Their gradual emancipation law would serve as a model of white abolitionism with compensation to slaveholders across the continent. In 1824, for example, a few months after the Demerara Rebellion, a massive slave uprising that took place in Britain’s colony in present-day Guyana, Britain’s Marquess of Lansdowne petitioned the House of Lords to pass an abolitionist measure by calling attention to how, in Colombia’s “provisions for the gradual extinction of slavery[, …] care had been taken to secure to all parties compensation for loss.”

As though having benefited from human property for centuries were not enough, freedom for the enslaved people in the Americas came with compensation to slaveholders—first in the form of Free Womb laws, later in direct payouts. It forces us to understand the plentiful ways that slaveholders received reparations during the gradual and final abolition of slavery. The struggles of formerly enslaved people and the enduring stranglehold that slaveholders had over them make clear the need for reparative justice for people of African descent across the Americas. For the thousands of Free Womb children across Colombia and the Americas that were the test subjects of gradual abolition. And for the enslaved men like Santiago Servacio and the “Many without names” whose paper bodies fill the archives of abolition.

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Can democracy stand the test of time? Many factors have triggered the deep schism in American politics today. But a root cause of our faltering democracy may be our failure to grapple with the truth about the nation’s history of discrimination and institutionalized racism. Because Americans can’t even agree on basic truths about our history of exclusion, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation, we have become mired in contentious debates about what role, if any, the government should play in addressing past injustices and their present-day legacies. To forge a path ahead, Americans must acknowledge our problematic past and collectively commit to upholding the principle of liberty and justice for all.

Where could we possibly start? As a first step, we can look to other nations that were once deeply divided, and learn from their efforts to address their difficult histories in pursuit of accountability and justice. The United States might do well to consider transitional justice approaches—the political, social, and legal processes societies use to respond to legacies of systematic or serious human rights abuses, primarily during periods of political transition like changes in leadership after a period of civil war or conflict, or the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. These temporary judicial and non-judicial mechanisms and practices include criminal trials and prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, and institutional reforms to help transform a society and reestablish the social contract. The United States is not undergoing a political regime transition, but transitional justice tools can still help us promote national reconciliation and reinforce our democracy as we reckon with the truth of our history and legacies of systemic harm and oppression.

The “Human rights, universal challenge” room at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, showing a map of human rights abuses around the world. Courtesy of Warko/Wikimedia Commons.

The truth commission is a widely used transitional justice instrument—and one that can offer the most insight to Americans looking to reshape the collective memory and conscience of our nation. These official fact-finding bodies investigate, document, and disseminate accurate information about past wrongdoing and human rights violations authorized or carried out by the state. The United States can certainly learn a great deal from the successes and failures of these commissions in countries like Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, and Timor-Leste (East Timor).

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is one of the best-known national truth-telling and reconciliation processes and has been the model for several other truth commissions. In 1995, South Africa’s newly elected democratic, multicultural Government of National Unity established the TRC to investigate serious human rights violations perpetrated under the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1994. Apartheid was a brutal system of white minority rule and legally enforced racial segregation that formalized and expanded white supremacist and segregationist policies that had existed since the period of colonial rule. Institutionalized racism stripped Black South Africans and other non-whites of their civil and political rights—including their citizenship—and created extreme inequality and poverty. Anti-apartheid protests, demonstrations, and strikes organized by freedom fighters were met with swift and ruthless repression, and an estimated 21,000 people, the majority of whom were Black South Africans, were killed in the political violence during the apartheid era.

The primary purpose of the TRC was to promote reconciliation and forgiveness among all South Africans, while holding perpetrators of human rights abuses accountable for their actions. The commission’s work involved a systematic process of investigating human rights violations, organizing public proceedings where victims and perpetrators could testify, offering reparations to victims, and granting amnesty to perpetrators under specific, limited conditions. The TRC’s mandate covered both violations committed by the state and by anti-apartheid liberation movements. In its comprehensive final report, which the government endorsed, the truth commission outlined detailed recommendations for reforming the political system and civil sector, which included financial and symbolic reparations. President Nelson Mandela also apologized to victims on behalf of the state.

The TRC faced some criticism for its amnesty provision and the limited identification of perpetrators, among other things. Many South Africans later railed against the government for its delay in implementing the TRC’s recommendations, including the reparations program. But despite these critiques, the TRC succeeded in making sure the crimes of apartheid would be fully documented so that South Africa’s horrific history would never be forgotten. And in the decades since, the TRC’s broader emphasis on truth-telling, social transformation, and national reconciliation have made it a standard for other justice and accountability efforts around the world.

Inspired by truth and reconciliation processes in other countries and recognizing the need to educate Americans on the historical context for current racial inequalities, in early 2021, Rep. Barbara Lee (CA-13) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) called for the establishment of a national truth commission in the U.S., proposing legislation to create the United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. The history Americans must reckon with is not as immediate as South Africa’s, and our political system is not in a moment of democratic transition. But similar efforts have succeeded in non-transitional societies, notably in Canada, which established a truth commission in 2008 to investigate, document, and educate Canadians about the abuses that occurred in the Indian residential school system for Indigenous children over the 19th and 20th centuries (between 1894 and 1947 attendance was made compulsory). These residential schools are a legacy of Canada’s colonial system and have been described as a form of “cultural genocide” because of their explicit goal of cultural erasure, and forcible assimilation of Indigenous peoples. The Canadian TRC documented widespread physical and sexual abuse in these schools, and officially recorded the deaths of 3,201 students, though concluded the actual toll is much higher. As part of its work, the commission hosted national events in different regions across Canada to support public education about the residential school system, pervasive discrimination, and the lasting trauma for survivors and Indigenous communities.

Citizens march for justice following the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. Twenty-five years later, community leadership organized the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project to uncover the full harm done to victims of the domestic terrorist attack. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the United States, there have been similar initiatives, organized by grassroots groups, to address abuses and wrongdoing at the local level. In 2013, the state of Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services with the support of the Wabanaki Tribes established the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (MWTRC) to investigate and document state child welfare policies, their compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act, and their effects on the Indigenous Wabanaki people. The commission collected testimony and found compelling evidence of public and institutional racism toward the Wabanaki people, documenting how Native children in Maine were placed in the foster care system at a rate of more than five times that of non-Native children, and concluding that the administration of child welfare by the state constituted a form of cultural genocide. The commission wanted to provide opportunities for truth-telling and healing, give voice to the Wabanaki people, establish a more complete account of the history of the Wabanaki people, and foster deeper understanding and reconciliation between Wabanaki people and the state of Maine.

The city of Greensboro in North Carolina also embarked on a notable truth and reconciliation effort, modeling the 2004 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the South African TRC. Greensboro created its commission to investigate and document the underlying causes and consequences of a single event:  the “Greensboro Massacre,” a confrontation between members of the Communist Workers Party, the American Nazi Party, and the Ku Klux Klan on November 3, 1979. During a “Death to the Klan” rally, Klansmen and neo-Nazis shot into the crowd, killing five demonstrators and wounding 10 others. Suspiciously, there was no police presence at the rally, even though the Greensboro Police Department knew about the planned attack. Despite eyewitness accounts and videotaped evidence, the Klansmen and neo-Nazis claimed self-defense and were acquitted of all charges by all-white juries in two separate criminal trials. During a civil trial in 1985, the Greensboro Police Department, the Klan, and Nazi Party members were found liable for one of the deaths.

After about two years of collecting evidence and holding public hearings, the commission concluded that the decision of the police to stay away from the rally was a significant factor in the violence that unfolded. The commission also found that the police department and city managers deliberately misled the public in order to absolve the police department of any responsibility. They found fault in the two criminal trials as well: Neither jury was representative of Greensboro residents and community members, which contributed to impunity for the killings, distrust of the police department, and further strained race relations. The Greensboro truth commission’s goals were multifaceted—to pursue the truth about racially motivated political violence; to foster healing, reconciliation, and social transformation; and to learn from other truth and reconciliation processes.

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Your intense debate over which year marks the real beginning of the United States—1619 (slavery’s arrival) or 1776 (Declaration of Independence)—has become predictably polarizing. You might even say that this argument over how to understand our history, repeated ad nauseam in school board meetings and on cable TV, has come to resemble what this nation was like before California entered the Union:

Boring as hell.

If we want to find a compelling origin story for the country in which we actually live, then it makes little sense to center the early human horrors of the tiny, pre-industrial 17th-century Virginia colony, or to elevate the propagandistic pretensions of 18th-century white men starting a country with a population as big as today’s Riverside County.

For all the differences between partisans of 1619 (progressives who see America as entirely founded on slavery) and 1776 (conservatives touting the whitewashed nonsense that America was founded on freedom), they share a common and still socially acceptable prejudice: East Coast bias.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project, touted as a more inclusive account of American history when first published in 2019, gives California just three cursory mentions. The Trump administration’s bonkers rejoinder to the 1619 Project, the 1776 report, supposedly devoted to American greatness, doesn’t mention America’s greatest state even once.

To close this culture war battle, the nation must look West toward reality. Much like a party that only truly starts when the coolest kid saunters in, today’s United States—antically ambitious, deliriously diverse, violently war-mongering, maniacally money-grubbing, and kaleidoscopically cruel—did not really get rolling until California arrived in 1848.

If we’re going to have a new historical curriculum built around just 365 (or 366) days, 1848, that year of revolutions around the world, is the obvious choice. Two 1848 events—California’s Gold Rush and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—together constituted an undeclared revolution, essentially re-founding the United States with different peoples, different borders, and far different aspirations.

James Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought people to California from every corner of the world, including a huge, unprecedented influx from Asia. The Gold Rush arrivals were not drab and pious Puritans, seeking religious freedom. They were a motley and largely unrefined lot, fleeing jailers and bad debts in search of fortunes, which they rarely found. What they would find were new debts, in a United States that their descendants would help turn into the world’s largest debtor nation.

The Gold Rush, wrote the historian H.W. Brands, was “one of those rare moments that divide human existence into before and after.” Among the things it changed was the scale and speed of American ambition, lighting a fire in the belly of a slow and dull country.

While “the old American dream…was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, of Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmers: of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year,” Brands wrote in The Age of Gold, “the new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck.”

California would help redefine the reality and perception of the American character—as impatient, intemperate, volatile. “Changes of public sentiment are sudden and violent,” Lord James Bryce, the British political scientist, and student of the U.S., would write in his classic The American Commonwealth. “The most active minds are too much absorbed in great business enterprises to tend to politics; the inferior men are frequently reckless and irresponsible; the masses are impatient, accustomed to blame everything and everybody but themselves for the slow approach of the millennium, ready to try instant, even if perilous, remedies for a present evil.”

The Gold Rush also ushered in a bigger and more brutal economy. Gold mining, by requiring more capital and mechanization, hastened the arrival of the Industrial Age, and the rise of the larger banks and financial institutions that rule us to this day. It spurred entrepreneurial efforts in food and clothing (like Levi Strauss’s blue jeans), created demand for new transportation networks, and established a working class of wage laborers. In Europe, a writer named Karl Marx, having just released a manifesto in 1848, made notes on California’s creation of a “new stage of development” and began work on Das Kapital.

The second great event of 1848—the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, between Mexico and the U.S.—reinforced the seismic shifts of the Gold Rush with a change in borders. The U.S. expanded its territory by one-third, for just $15 million. California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado entered the union. The treaty, which ended the Mexican-American War, also made legal the 1845 annexation of Texas, which would become the only American state with credible pretensions as a California rival.

This land grab, one of the largest in world history, all but negated the country’s founding fairy tale of underdog colonists pursuing righteous revolution to overthrow the tyranny of big, bad Britain. The treaty also established a pattern of expansion by bullying and militarism. It was an unjust ending to what Ulysses S. Grant called “the most unjust war ever waged against a weaker nation by a stronger.”

That sin, and the expansion it enabled, launched a new era of American horrors. Many of these undergird our society today, but we don’t think nearly enough about this context. One irony of the deeply pessimistic 1619 Project is that, by focusing so extensively, on slavery and the African American experience, it lets the nation off the hook for the full scope of its awfulness.

The conquest of the West, and the settler ambitions inspired by gold, accelerated the extermination of the continent’s indigenous population. Historians have recognized official slaughter of California’s Indian population—which dropped from 150,000 in the 1840s to 30,000 by 1873—as a genocide. The Gold Rush began a wave of Chinese immigration and a new American method of discrimination: exclusion. This era also saw the U.S. turn Mexican Americans, whose citizenship had been guaranteed by the treaty, into a lower caste. And this was the beginning of California inventing rationales as diverse as its people to justify their imprisonment, en masse.

California’s defenders have long pointed to its ban against slavery in its 1850 constitution, 15 years before the United States prohibited slavery in 1865. But many of the American horrors invented in 19th-century California have never gone away. Mass incarceration remains a fact of life. The powerful and lawless police and sheriff’s departments that originated in 19th-century California still do violence, often with impunity, to people of color. Violence and hatred against people of Asian heritage is on the rise again. The Southern border is still militarized, and is still used as an excuse to deny the rights of mobility and citizenship to migrants and their loved ones. And wage slavery is as 21st-century as an Inland Empire logistics warehouse.

Contemporary politics, which has come to obsess the country, is also rooted in 1848. California and Texas are, of course, the two giants that determine much of what passes for governance in the U.S. these days. They also represent the giant industries—technology and energy—that both empower and threaten human civilization.

In 1619, this wasn’t even a country. In 1776, we were inventing a myth, rather than a nation. 1848 was the year that the United States became an oversized monster—the land that we love, and love to hate.

The post The United States Didn’t Really Begin Until 1848 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some brought enslaved African Americans with them. Others purchased workers in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis, which had been stocked by traders who brought laborers from the Southeast, where owners supplemented their income by selling children away from their parents, and husbands and wives away from each other. Motivated by the possibility of getting rich quickly, planters drove their enslaved people without mercy, displaying little of the paternalism sometimes shown by well-established Southern planters to the east.

In all, more than 750,000 of these unwilling African American immigrants were brought to the Mississippi Valley between 1820 and 1860, their new lives far more difficult than their old ones had been. And so, they frequently fled. There were “heaps of runaways” living near Natchez, Mississippi in 1854, an elderly enslaved man told the future landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, then a correspondent working for the New York Times. They were seeking freedom from oppression—but also, like any other Americans, the opportunity to build better lives, in grand and small ways.

The history of these most persecuted of escapees is chilling. But it also gives us some idea of how people in impossible situations still managed to shape their own destinies.

Enslaved men and women fled for many reasons, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles from home. Courtesy of McPherson & Oliver, photographer/Library of Congress.

Today we associate escapes from slavery in the United States with the Underground Railroad and heroic flights to Canada. But white Southerners used the word “runaway” to describe any enslaved person absent from his owner’s control without permission—and escapees sought freedom in many different ways.

Many left plantations for only a night or two to visit friends and lovers, or to attend clandestine parties and religious services. Others “lay out” in nearby swamps and forests for weeks or even months, or fled to cities and blended into Black communities made up of both free and enslaved people. Some who left for good tried to return to the places from which they had been taken. A few attempted to reach Mexico, which abolished slavery in the 1820s. Some headed north on steamboats.

Most runaways didn’t get far. In the memoir Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup tells the story of his friend Wiley, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, with a responsible job operating a ferry, before being sold to a trader who carried him to Louisiana. During the 1830s, Wiley wound up on Edwin Eppes’ small plantation on Bayou Boeuf in the northern part of the state, where Northrup lived as well.

One night, Wiley went out without permission to visit a friend. The local slave patrol caught him, unleashed their dogs on him, whipped him, and then took him back to Eppes—who whipped him again. Several weeks later, having had enough of his new home, Wiley tried to return to South Carolina. He escaped an early pursuit by fleeing into a nearby swamp, and made his way to the Red River, 20 miles away. He was captured and jailed in nearby Alexandria. Soon again he was working in Eppes’ cotton fields.

A few escapees managed to return home. In 1836, a man named Sam fled on foot from Mississippi to South Carolina, where he was from, only to be seen by local residents in Barnwell County, who armed themselves and gave chase. Hunted like an animal and armed only with a knife and club, Sam was hit by bird shot but refused to surrender until receiving a mortal wound.

Ginny Jerry was a determined runaway who fled often but always remained close to owner Bennett Barrow’s large plantation in Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish. Barrow kept track of Jerry’s frequent escapes in his diary, sometimes getting angered when Jerry came back from prolonged escapes heavier than when he left, presumably thriving. An 1856 editorial in a Baton Rouge newspaper raged about the way runaways like Jerry fed themselves. “These runaway slaves kill your cattle … they do not remain all night in the dark, dreary swamp … they visit your servants in your own yard … there is scarcely a night of the week that your poultry yard is not inspected by some black rascal.”

In the fall of 1837, Jerry was gone for six months until Jack, likely another of Barrow’s enslaved workers, found him, beat him badly with a club, and brought him home. But Jerry persisted. Once in 1839 he claimed to be sick, and Barrow told him to “work it off,” but the servant instead chose “to woods it off.” Ginny Jerry’s last recorded escape occurred in 1845. It ended after three months when Barrow hired professional slave catchers to find him. Their dogs tracked Jerry and forced him into a tree; Barrow allowed the animals to pull Jerry down and savagely bite him.

The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole brought their enslaved people with them on the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma. In one noteworthy account of escape, an enslaved named Ben, who had been left on the eastern side of the Mississippi, ran away from his owner to follow his wife, who had been sold to a Choctaw man who took her west. Ben was captured and jailed in St. Francis County, Arkansas, but broke out and continued his journey.

Enslaved people in the Lower Mississippi Valley were less closely supervised than those in the country; urban owners relied on their enslaved servants to shop, run other errands, and bring in money while “hired out” to work for other people. This was especially true in New Orleans, where the population in 1850 included 90,000 white people, 10,000 free Black people, and 17,000 enslaved people. In a typical 12-month period in 1853 and 1854, some 1,300 enslaved people were arrested as runaways—although most of them might be better described as walkaways, since they left one part of the city only to relocate in another.

Advertisements for escapees in the New Orleans Daily Picayune suggest that many intended to pose as free people and use their previous experience to get paying jobs. Among them was a young woman named Lucy, who was well-known to customers in her owner’s “Soda, Pie, and Cake Shop.” George Anderson’s pre-escape career included work as a livery stable hand, a horse-drawn cab driver, and the operator of a milk wagon for Citizens Dairy. An enslaved man named Gus did carpentry work, Dennis built barrels, Philina was “a superior dressmaker and seamstress,” Susan dressed hair, and Ben Nash unloaded bales of cotton from steamboats.

A reward posted in the Daily Piayune for capturing an escapee. Courtesy of the Daily Picayune (New Orleans), September 17, 1841.

Some fled for the North on steamboats, often assisted by boat crews that included enslaved people and free Blacks. The Daily Picayune was convinced that “colored stewards, or cooks, or hands on boats use their cunning and the means peculiar to their positions to conceal slaves on board boats till they reach safe places for landing.” The ease of steamboat travel created an opportunity for individuals not suited for long escapes on land. Eleven-year-old Harry, who was 4 feet 5 inches tall, managed to avoid discovery until his boat got north of Vicksburg. He wound up in the Chicot County jail in southern Arkansas. Peggy, a “delicate and small” woman who worked as a milliner in New Orleans, fled with four dresses as well as what the Adams County jailer in Natchez, Mississippi, called “many other articles of clothing too numerous and too tedious to enumerate.”

The people best positioned for successful escapes were those who worked on steamboats. John Scott had already fled from one boat and been captured on another when John McMaster of New Orleans purchased him at a bargain price. McMaster, anxious for the $25-a-month that Scott earned as a cook, sent him out on at least three different steamboats, and the upwardly mobile man rose to second steward on the Louisiana before he jumped ship in Louisville, in the slave state of Kentucky. The record stops there, but he may have gotten someone in the Black community there to ferry him to freedom on the north side of the Ohio River.

Enslaved people often faced violence when they tried to flee. White southerners viewed apprehending runaways as a civic responsibility. Many were also attracted by the $10 they received by law for taking captives to jail, as well as rewards sometimes privately offered by owners. Non-owners were not supposed to damage other people’s property except in self-defense, but the law was seldom enforced, and many Blacks were killed while on the run. In the early 1850s, for example, near Marksville, Louisiana, the Picayune reported, “a young man shot a negro boy, supposed to be a runaway,” and a young man in Union Parish who killed a runaway was said by the Picayune to be “justified in the act”—without further explanation.

Fugitives sometimes fought to prevent being captured. One runaway killed the overseer who found him entering a slave cabin on a plantation near Woodville, Mississippi. A man was ferrying Bill and Roland to jail in a rowboat on Bayou Salle in 1842 when the two captives got loose, threw him overboard, and shot him in the water with his own gun. In New Orleans a runaway escaped after stabbing two men who tried to capture him; participants at a Congo Dance threw bricks at three police officers who attempted to arrest a fugitive among them; and someone murdered a slave catcher, targeted because of his profession.

From “fugitive slave” to “runaway,” the historical language used to describe these people who were fleeing from injustice and oppression does not adequately describe their experience. Risking life and limb for the chance at various degrees of liberty from bondage, today they are being recognized for who they really were: “freedom seekers.”

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There’s a long-standing equestrian tradition at Sweet Briar College, one that is touted in contemporary marketing brochures and on the college website homepage alongside its engineering program and U.S. News & World Report ranking. There’s also a long tradition of honoring the founder of the Virginia women’s college, whose family is buried under large granite and marble memorials at a site called Monument Hill. At the heart of both of these traditions is antebellum slavery. The superficially bucolic liberal arts campus, with its stables and fields, was once a thriving plantation; Sweet Briar College was established in 1901 by a daughter of the plantation’s owner, an heir to his wealth.

The memorial at the slave cemetery. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

I was a visiting instructor of anthropology and archaeology in 2001 when the director of the riding program shared his concern about a possible graveyard on the riding grounds. The dean of students asked me to help assess the observation. Over the next year, I worked with several faculty colleagues to map the dislocated gravestones and sunken burial depressions of over 60 souls: African and Native Americans, all enslaved people and free laborers who had worked for the white family buried about a mile away. Throughout this work and in the years that followed, no below-ground burials were disturbed. The horse trails and jumps were relocated to preserve the integrity and sacredness of the site. We located a descendant, Rev. Jasper “Eddie” Fletcher, who had heard stories about his great-grandfather being enslaved on the plantation.

As the college’s horticulturalist and her team cleared the overgrown part of the graveyard, the president of the college and the board of trustees decided to commemorate the slave cemetery with a plaque. The college was reluctant to use the term “slave” or “slavery,” so the 26-word inscription avoided both terms: “Sweet Briar Plantation Burial Grounds—Sacred Resting Place of Unknown Founders Who Labored to Build What Has Become Sweet Briar College. We Are In Their Debt.” The words were etched in metal and added to a large boulder at the edge of the cemetery.

On April 24, 2003, Sweet Briar College held a memorial service to unveil the plaque. For the first time in its 102-year history, the college officially recognized its connection to an antebellum plantation and the enslavement of men, women, and children. The plaque was important, but the activities centered around it that day were what mattered: the gospel choir’s songs, the speech given by Rev. Fletcher, which exhorted individuals to pray for the unidentified souls buried in the graveyard, the college president’s pledge to “claim our past, and to acknowledge and embrace many of the unknown people who labored as slaves on the Sweet Briar Plantation,” and the discussions that occurred among townsfolk, students, faculty, and administrators as they pieced together parts of local history and the origins of the college.

Yet the initial interest in the cemetery for enslaved families faded between 2004 and 2014. The site in the forest became overgrown. Fewer and fewer visitors came.

Ironically, this decade of declining engagement by students and administrators was a critical and successful period of research into the cemetery and its stories. Faculty in the history department transcribed archival documents, a pair of geologists studied the environmental setting of the graveyard and the plantation itself, and I started a decade-long effort to study the lives of the enslaved families and trace their descendants. I worked with local historians to uncover the earliest African and Native Americans who were enslaved at Sweetbrier Plantation. I was able to share with their descendants never-before-public photographs and archival documents from the Sweet Briar library. And I realized that about a quarter of the college’s hourly labor force could trace their ancestry back to people buried in the cemetery.

The Fletcher family visits the slave cemetery during a second reunion in 2010. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

We best remember individuals from the past when we combine memorials with rituals, like lighting a candle for a deceased relative on their birthday or bringing flowers to a loved one’s headstone. The descendants of Sweetbrier’s enslaved and free laborers know this. In 2008, two cousins hosted a large family reunion at Sweet Briar for descendants of the Black Fletchers. As people gathered around the rough-hewn fieldstones, Rev. Fletcher led them in a Christian ceremony while another relative performed a West African-inspired libation ceremony, blending two traditions, just as enslaved families had done.

The administrators of Sweet Briar College know this, too: They hold an annual procession along gravel roads up to Monument Hill where the white Fletchers are buried. When Indiana Fletcher Williams willed money and land to establish the college in honor of her deceased 16-year-old daughter Daisy, she added a handful of conditions. One instructed the college trustees to ensure that her family’s graveyard was cared for. The college took this one step further and designed “Founders’ Day,” held every October on or near the date of Indiana’s death to honor and remember the bequest.

Generations of Sweet Briar students have brought daisies to lay at Daisy’s grave while campus leaders give speeches of gratitude. Some graduates may have forgotten the details, but it is doubtful that they would forget an elaborate commemoration that included white dresses, pearls, and a long walk up a steep hill to a marble headstone. The ritual of that procession memorializes the college’s founders for perpetuity.

In 2015, the college faced the threat of closure. The initial shock and then all-out battle to “save Sweet Briar” reenergized generations of alumnae. Perhaps not surprisingly, part of the emotional connection that these women felt to their alma mater revolved around traditions. And for some, the absence of commemorations that recognized the forgotten founders of the school was a glaring absence. Accordingly, alumnae and students took the lead in crafting rituals to honor and remember the cemetery for African and Native Americans in the Founders’ Day rituals. Several versions of new traditions were attempted: a sunrise service at the graveyard, a procession the day before or after Founders’ Day to lay daisies on the graves of the enslaved individuals, and a continued focus on inviting descendants to speak at these ceremonies.

A walk to the slave cemetery, Founders Day, 2020. Courtesy of the Sweet Briar College Cochran Library/Sweet Briar College photographers.

The 2020 version of the annual Founders’ Day ceremonies was a culmination of years of experimentation. I was invited back to campus to share some of the accomplishments and contributions of the “invisible founders.” But the most powerful speech was given by Dwana Waugh, the first tenure-track African American professor at the college, who also led a procession to the historic graveyard. “On this walk, we reflected on the hands that helped to build and sustain Sweet Briar with their labor. The cemetery, which until more recently, has remained part of the college’s hidden history, is now more visible,” she reminded the college community. “This walk represents a way to acknowledge those who would have been excluded from campus life for much of Sweet Briar’s earliest years.”

Practically, cemeteries house the dead, but more powerfully, they serve as physical reminders of the contributions of our ancestors and as outdoor museums. A community chooses how to reinterpret or even deliberately forget certain events. Physical markers, such as statues or plaques, can withstand the passage of time, but without active engagement from the living, the memories they represent can fade into neglect and even be lost.

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Many politicians of the period avoided serious talk of sectionalism and slavery at such “mixed” gatherings, in the interest of keeping things civil. But the holiday atmosphere lent itself to informality, and the men haphazardly started proposing ideas. Some favored letting individual states and territories decide whether or not they should have slavery within their borders, while others wanted to simply draw a geographic line from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, prohibiting slavery above the line and allowing it below. The conversation grew heated—and within minutes, two of the politicians came to physical blows, their colleagues pulling them apart as they rolled around on the floor like a pair of angry schoolboys. But despite the topic of discussion, sectionalism and slavery had little to do with this fistfight. It was the physical manifestation of an already strained relationship between two politicians who should have had a lot in common: Mississippi’s U.S. senators, Henry Stuart Foote and Jefferson Davis.

In the history of American politics there have been many ugly rivalries—Andrew Jackson versus John C. Calhoun, Lyndon Johnson versus Robert Kennedy—but none was more bitter than the animus between Foote and Davis, which lasted from the 1840s until Foote’s death in 1880. The two men despised one another, and the higher they rose in political circles, the greater their hatred became. Both were ambitious political climbers, but in different ways. Foote was a street fighter, while Davis, who would later become president of the Confederacy, was calculating and somber. Foote was more publicly aggressive, never missing an opportunity to prod Davis. Davis, who was more famous, met Foote’s jabs with intimidating, withering glares and steely silence. Foote resented Davis for his natural aloofness; Davis bristled at the venomous personal barbs that punctuated Foote’s rhetoric. For Davis, the violent encounter at the Washington boarding house was an uncommon loss of self-control, a rare emotional display of barbarism from a man who was accustomed to public formality. For Foote, the fight was business as usual.

Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 and moved with his family to Mississippi when he was a small boy. He attended the United States Military Academy and later became a successful planter. Born in 1804, Foote was a native Virginian who came to Mississippi while in his twenties. He practiced law and owned a newspaper. Both men became involved in politics during the Jacksonian period, and both were very ambitious. The genesis of their feud lay in the 1844 trial of local district court clerk John T. Mason, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mason was accused of killing Davis’s brother-in-law in a duel, and Foote, then a successful attorney, led his defense. His closing argument dazzled the jury, who voted to acquit, ruling that the killing was an “excusable homicide.” As was his way, Foote trumpeted his success to anyone who would listen, angering Davis and his family, who naturally felt that the killer should be punished.

Davis and Foote both entered the U.S. Senate during the late 1840s, at a time when slavery was becoming the dominant national issue. Mississippi was one of the leading cotton-producing states, and its politicians joined the rest of the South in pushing back on perceived threats to slavery posed by Northerners, creating a siege mentality that dominated daily life. During these volatile times, both Foote and Davis wanted to be the leading political voice of their state on the Senate floor, which set them on a collision course.

Both men were pro-slavery ideologues, but aside from that, they agreed on almost nothing. During the months-long, tumultuous debates that culminated in the Compromise of 1850, the last political deal over slavery between the North and the South prior to the Civil War, Foote and Davis were consistently hostile toward one another on the Senate floor. At a time when some Southerners were already talking about secession, Foote was a unionist: He took a moderate position that secession was dangerous and claimed that slavery could be protected without alienating the North, and that compromise was possible. Davis was less willing to make any sort of compromise, taking a harder line. One witness who heard them both speak later compared Davis’s “dignified and commanding, soft and persuasive” oratory to Foote’s “[f]iery torrent of fierce invective and brilliant declamation.” In heated moments, Davis labeled Foote “a Constitutional liar,” while Foote claimed that Davis “speaks only for himself, and under the promptings of his own ambition.”

During all the turmoil, most Southern politicians, in Mississippi and beyond, rallied around Davis, whose honeyed pro-slavery oration on the Senate floor helped him emerge as one of the primary spokesmen for the South—a rational, stable presence during an angry, uncertain period. Davis’s increased national profile irritated Foote, who was also well known, but not as well respected. Foote exacted his revenge in 1851, when the two men faced each other in a contest to become Mississippi’s governor. Foote won the election, but his tenure as governor was a disaster, in part because Davis and his allies in the state worked tirelessly to undermine him. They held up legislation and funding for almost every initiative Foote advanced, and blocked his appointments to government posts.

After Foote’s term ended in 1854, he relocated to California, hoping to get a new political start. Davis likely thought that he would never have to worry about his rival again—but if so, he was sadly mistaken. Still hoping to capitalize on his name recognition in the South, Foote moved back east to Nashville, Tennessee in 1859. He arrived just in time to watch the nation come apart on the eve of the Civil War. The seceding Southern states formed the Confederacy, electing Davis as president, and Foote decided to run to represent Tennessee’s 5th District in the new Confederate Congress.

Foote’s hostility toward Davis was well known, and some political observers believed that his run for Congress was little more than a ploy to put him in position to continue his feud with the Confederate president. Foote won the race—and indeed, his tenure as a Confederate lawmaker seemed driven by his hatred for Davis. He was an instant critic, delivering verbal broadsides against the Davis administration that became more frequent and bitter as time wore on. He blamed Davis for Confederate military failures and for weaknesses in the Confederate economy, and frequently questioned his personal integrity. He called the president a despot and tyrant, and during one notable tirade, a “fiendish character responsible for more barefaced acts of corruption than any single individual has ever been known to commit in the same space and time in any part of Christendom.” (Foote admitted after the war that “not a day passed while I occupied a seat in the Confederate Congress that was not more or less signalized by my vehement opposition to Mr. Davis.”) Davis did his best to ignore the inflammatory rhetoric, but his allies did not—and tangled often with Foote on the floor of Congress, in verbal confrontations and at least two fistfights.

As the Confederacy began to crumble during the war’s latter stages, Davis became an easier target for abuse. Foote continued his rhetorical assaults on the president, and also demanded investigation after investigation of the administration’s conduct of the war. He attacked Davis’s political allies, his appointees, and anyone with whom the Confederate president was friendly. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, who was Jewish, was a favorite target, inspiring a number of Antisemitic rants. Foote questioned the competence of Davis’s preferred generals in the field, going so far as to call Major General Thomas C. Hindman, Jr. a “fiend in human form.”

While other Confederate congressman disparaged Davis and complained about some of his decisions, few were as long-winded as Foote. Eventually, open sighs greeted Foote every time he stood up in the House chamber to speak. Newspaper reports of his tirades against Davis filtered into the North, where they were employed as propaganda, proving that the Confederate government was in disarray.

The end of the Confederacy, in 1865, did little to temper the ill will between Foote and Davis, who continued their sniping until Foote’s death in 1880. Davis lived until 1889, long enough to enjoy his own elevation to hero status throughout the South—an outcome that would have appalled Foote.

In the years immediately after the war, Davis slowly tried to rebuild his reputation, and Foote remained in Nashville practicing law. Both men also joined a battle of the books that took place in the years following the Civil War, as principal players in the conflict rushed to tell their sides of the story. Foote wrote a history of the Civil War and an ominously titled memoir, Casket of Reminiscences. Both of Foote’s books devoted a good deal of space to sharp criticism of Davis, calling him “a shameful, hypocritical and tyrannical chief executive,” and condemning “that compound of weakness, and corruption, and servility in the form of a cabinet which Mr. Davis so stupidly called around him.”

For his part, Davis privately criticized Foote for being “faithless to his trust as a representative in the Congress of the Confederate States”—but continued ignoring his rival in public. The former Confederate president also produced a massive, post-war tome, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It did not mention Foote at all.

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Slave dealers bought enslaved individuals whom owners deemed surplus and warehoused them at pens in the District of Columbia until they had assembled a full shipment for removal southward. Half a mile west of the U.S. Capitol, and just south of the National Mall, sat William H. Williams’ notorious private slave jail, known as the Yellow House.

By the mid-1830s, the Yellow House was one more piece of the machinery that controlled slave society. Whip-wielding owners, overseers, slave patrollers, slave catchers with vicious dogs, local militias, and a generally vigilant white population, who routinely asked to see the passes of enslaved people whom they encountered on the roads, all conspired against a freedom seeker’s chances of a successful flight. Private and public jails lent further institutional support to slavery, even in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Some slave owners visiting or conducting business in Washington detained their bondpeople in the Yellow House for safekeeping, temporarily, for a 25-cent per day fee. But mostly it was a place for assembling enslaved people in the Chesapeake who faced imminent removal to the Lower South and permanent separation from friends, family, and kin. Abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier condemned “the dreadful amount of human agony and suffering” endemic to the jail.

The most graphic, terrifying descriptions of the Yellow House come to us from its most famous prisoner, the kidnapped Solomon Northup, who recounted his experiences there in Twelve Years a Slave. Northup, a free Black man from the North, was lured to Washington in 1841 by two white men’s false promises of lucrative employment. While in the capital, the men drugged their mark into unconsciousness, and Northup awoke enchained in the Yellow House’s basement dungeon. He vividly described the scene when his captor, slave trader James H. Birch, arrived, gave Northup a fictive history as a runaway slave from Georgia, and informed him that he would be sold. When Northup protested, Birch administered a severe thrashing with a paddle and, when that broke, a rope.

Northup, like most who passed through the Yellow House’s iron gate, was destined for sale in the Deep South. A few of William H. Williams’ captives attempted to evade that fate. In October 1840, Williams’ younger brother and partner in the slave trade, Thomas, purchased an enslaved man named John at Sinclair’s Tavern in Loudoun County, Virginia, for $600. Twenty years old, less than five feet tall, but referred to by the National Intelligencer as “stout made,” John escaped from Williams’ clutches while still in Virginia, but he was eventually apprehended in Maryland and retrieved by someone under William H. Williams’ employ. Despite his efforts to resist, John, like thousands of other enslaved people who ended up in the Williamses’ possession, was conveyed to the New Orleans slave market for auction to the highest bidder.

For the Williams brothers, every man, woman, and child they bought and sold were commodities in which they speculated. Their entire business was based on assuming the risk that they could buy low in the Chesapeake and sell high in the slave markets of the Old South. Occasionally, they even tried to profit by betting on people fleeing their owners. In 1842, Thomas Williams purchased two escapees from Auguste Reggio of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. According to Williams’ agreement, “It is … understood that … Enoch and John are sold as runaway slaves & are now absent.” Nevertheless, Williams was so confident that the police state of the Old South would soon apprehend them that he paid $650 apiece for two absconded men he might never see. In an undeniable gamble, the slave dealer wagered that they would both be recovered and fetch a far more handsome price in the New Orleans slave market than what he had paid for them.

Despite the odds against them, certain enslaved individuals who fell into the Williams brothers’ orbit determined to resist the system that oppressed them. In 1850, William H. Williams placed advertisements in the Baltimore Sun to alert the public to five enslaved people who had evaded his grasp. In May, Williams offered a $400 reward: $100 apiece for 26-year-old James; 25-year-old Sam, who was missing a front tooth; 20-year-old George; and the ailing Gusta, described as “ruptured,” likely indicating that he was suffering from a hernia.

In August, Williams again sought public assistance, this time in the recovery of “my MAN JOE,” a six-foot-tall 26-year-old who had been recently purchased from a doctor in Fauquier County, Virginia. Joe absconded near Fredericksburg and was heading, according to Williams’ prognostications, for Pennsylvania by way of Winchester, Virginia, where he had a grandmother and other relatives. Neither runaway ad mentioned whether the escapee had fled while in transit to Williams’ Washington slave pen or from the Yellow House itself.

One dramatic escape attempt from the Yellow House was documented in 1842 by Seth M. Gates, an antislavery New York Whig in the U.S. House of Representatives. Writing as an anonymous “Member of Congress” in the pages of the New York Evangelist, Gates described an unnamed “smart and active” woman deposited in Williams’ private prison who, the evening prior to her scheduled departure from Washington for sale in the Deep South, “darted past her keeper,” broke jail, “and ran for her life.”

She headed southwest down Maryland Avenue, straight toward the Long Bridge that spanned the Potomac and led to that portion of the District of Columbia ceded by Virginia. “It [was] not a great distance from the prison to the long bridge,” Gates observed, and on the opposite side of the river lay the Custis estate and its “extensive forests and woodlands” where she could hide.

Her flight took the keeper of Williams’ jail, Joshua Staples, by surprise. By the time he secured the other prisoners and set off in pursuit, she had a sizeable head start. Also working in her favor, “no bloodhounds were at hand” to track her, and the late hour meant that Staples had no horses available. A small band of men at his immediate disposal would have to overtake her on foot.

Although they “raised the hue and cry on her pathway” to summon the public’s aid, the woman breezed past the bewildered citizens of Washington who streamed out of their homes, struggling to comprehend the cause of all the commotion along the avenue. Realizing the scene unfolding before their eyes, residents greeted this act of protest in starkly different ways. Those who were antislavery prayed for her successful escape, while others supported the status quo by joining the “motley mass in pursuit.”

Fleet of foot and with everything to lose, the woman put still more distance between her and her would-be captors. In this contest of “speed and endurance, between the slave and the slave catchers,” Gates related, the runaway was winning. She reached the end of Maryland Avenue and made it onto the Long Bridge, just three-fourths of a mile from the Custis woods on the other side.

Yet just as Staples and his men set foot on the bridge, they caught sight of three white men at the opposite end, “slowly advancing from the Virginia side.” Staples called out to them to seize her. Dutifully, they arranged themselves three abreast, blocking the width of the narrow walkway. In Gates’s telling, the woman “looked wildly and anxiously around, to see if there was no other hope of escape,” but her prospects for success had suddenly evaporated. As her pursuers rapidly approached, their “noisy shout[s]” and threats filling the air, she vaulted over the side of the bridge and plunged into “the deep loamy water of the Potomac.” Gates assumed that she had committed suicide.

The unnamed woman who leaped from the bridge would not have been the first enslaved person imprisoned in the Yellow House to engage in a willful act of self-destruction. Whittier, the abolitionist, mentioned that among the “secret horrors of the prison house” were the occasional suicides of enslaved inmates devoid of all hope. One man in 1838 sliced his own throat rather than submit to sale. The presumed, tragic death of the woman who fled down Maryland Avenue, Gates concluded, offered “a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes” as it testified to “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart of the slave may inherit.”

In antebellum Washington, D.C., African Americans were smothered by a Southern police state that treated them as property and demanded that they labor for the profit of others. Thousands upon thousands were swept up in the domestic slave trade, their lives stolen for forced labor in the Deep South. But a few, like the woman who fled the Yellow House, courageously transformed Washington’s public streets into a site of protest and affirmed their personhood in the face of oppression. Now, more than a century and a half later, echoes of that struggle can still be heard.

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The idea for Manhattan, Kansas, was born in the turbulent years of the early 1850s, when America was alive with ideas, yet divided as never before—and lurching toward civil war. A call to take direct action to oppose slavery inspired this curious transplanting of architecture and people from New England to the far-flung frontier.

At the time, Southern states were grasping ever more tightly at their insistence that no changes could be made to the compromises that had permitted slavery to persist since the time of the Founding Fathers. An 1852 convention in South Carolina denounced “the fiendish fanaticism of an abolition spirit” and declared the state’s right to secede from the United States if the federal government sought to change existing slave laws.

Meanwhile, New England was percolating with progressive thought. This “American Renaissance” advanced not just the idea of a unique national literature, but larger convictions about racial and gender equality. In 1850, the first National Women’s Rights Convention met in Worcester, Massachusetts, featuring addresses by Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. And by 1852, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a sensation, described as the “finest picture yet painted of the abominable horrors of slavery” in a Boston Post review.

It was in this divided atmosphere that the May 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to settlement and eventual statehood. The assumption was that Nebraska Territory would become a free state, while Kansas, under the sway of its pro-slavery neighbor Missouri, would become a slave state. The Act infuriated Northerners because it undid the Missouri Compromise of 1830 and allowed for the expansion of slavery.

New England Emigrant Aid Company trade sign made of sheet metal, painted black with gold lettering. The sign was most likely used at the Boston headquarters of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Courtesy of Kansas Memory.

But the assumptions of the Act were disrupted by the social movements and civil rights discussions occurring in New England. An organization called the New England Emigrant Aid Company hatched a bold plan to transport New England settlers to the open hills and plains of Kansas Territory in 1854 and 1855, for the purpose of voting for Kansas to become an anti-slavery “free state.” In line with the ideals of the American Renaissance in New England, the principal founder of the Company, Eli Thayer, wrote that its goal was “to go and put an end to slavery.”

Thayer later wrote that the idea of an organization to support New England emigration to Kansas Territory struck him as divine inspiration, a way to respond with positive action to an intolerable political situation. As the U.S. Senate debated the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Thayer obtained the first corporate charter for his company from the Massachusetts governor.

Thayer was a Yankee reformer who had earlier founded a college for women in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s not clear where Thayer, the son of a failed Massachusetts shopkeeper, found his zeal for progressive causes, but it fits squarely in line with his purported Unitarian faith and his lifelong appreciation for his education at the Worcester Manual Labor High School, which provided poor children, like him, a quality education in exchange for work on its farm.

By the time the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed into law on May 30, 1854, the idea of emigration to Kansas Territory was becoming widespread. In a speech, New York Senator William Seward declared: “We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side that is stronger in numbers.” Thayer had been the first to propose the idea of organized emigration to Kansas; following his lead were the Union Emigration Society in Washington, D.C., and the American Settlement Company in New York City. (Pursuing a somewhat different approach was the Vegetarian Kansas Emigrant Company, founded in 1855.) Because the vote for the Kansas Territorial Legislature was coming in March 1855, Thayer and others wanted to place as many settlers as possible in Kansas by that time.

Throughout 1854, Thayer was extremely active in fundraising, speaking, and organizing parties of settlers. By December, Thayer’s company succeeded in sending off more than 600 New Englanders to Kansas Territory and had established one settlement, Lawrence. But the company needed even more colonists and wanted a second settlement in 1855. Fortunately, Thayer soon found the right man to help him fulfill those plans.

That month, Thayer spoke in Providence, Rhode Island, on the importance of Kansas emigration. “We have seldom listened to a more effective speech on any subject,” the Providence newspaper Freeman wrote of Thayer’s speech. Sitting rapt in the audience, his words captured the attention of a thin, stern Vermont native by the name of Isaac Goodnow. Goodnow was a 40-year-old teacher of Natural Science at an academy in nearby East Greenwich. After hearing Thayer’s speech and holding a private 90-minute conversation with him afterward, Goodnow became determined to support the movement by emigrating to Kansas Territory himself. He would go on to become the driving influence in gathering the group of settlers who would found Manhattan, Kansas—authoring speeches, letters, and newspaper columns supporting the movement. He was the acolyte that Thayer needed to ensure the new settlement’s success.

While Thayer saw the colonization of Kansas as an opportunity to achieve a worthy cause, he also recognized it as a potential moneymaking operation for its investors. On the other hand, Goodnow cared only for the cause. He viewed the settling of Kansas as one of the few ways a New Englander could live by his or her lofty ideals. In January 1855, Goodnow wrote a column in East Greenwich Weekly Pendulum pleading for action: “Kansas is, and may be for years to come the great battle ground of Freedom and Slavery! … While we talk, slave holders act. We have had enough of abstract, easy-chair speculations, it is now time for every man to show his principles by his works…. The only way to save the territory from the curse of human bondage, is for the men of … New England to rouse themselves, and emigrate by hundreds and thousands…. [W]e must be willing to endure hardship and privations. But who would not make sacrifices in one of the most philanthropic enterprizes of this age?”

Isaac Goodnow. Courtesy of Kansas Memory.

Shortly afterward, Goodnow was besieged with letters containing questions about Kansas Territory and requests to join the movement. “I am truly happy when I hear of men of influence who … go on to the ground with companies of men and contest the battles of freedom. Action is what is wanted,” one acquaintance wrote to him. Ultimately, through Goodnow and Thayer’s efforts, hundreds of New Englanders were motivated to make the trip in early 1855.

On an unseasonably warm March 6 afternoon, Goodnow and an advance group of 68 boarded a smoky coal-fired train in Boston to begin the first leg of their journey. It was a “tedious and tiresome” trip that would require more than two weeks of travel by rail, steamboat, and wagon. Crowding, lack of sleep, and dirty drinking water caused many illnesses along the way, some fatal.

The New Englanders had to pass directly through increasingly hostile Missouri to reach Kansas Territory, and the steamboats carrying the 1855 emigrants were sometimes stormed by drunken and armed mobs of pro-slavery Missourians. The pro-slavery newspaper Squatter Sovereign wrote of the New Englanders, “We hope the Quarantine Officers along the borders will forbid the unloading of that kind of Cargo.” The paper added, ominously, that “horrible disease, and one followed by many deaths … may be the consequence if this mass of corruption … is permitted to land and traverse our beautiful country.”

For some New Englanders, the discomfort and threats were too much. Although hundreds began the trip in early 1855, many turned back. Goodnow wrote in his diary that he “had to spend much time almost every day in encouraging the young men & keep[ing] them from going home.” Goodnow optimistically spun the situation, writing that the journey “has been so trying, owing to the dust, wind, and scarcity of provisions and fodder, that we get the wheat, while the chaff of emigration blows away, or does not reach us.”

When the New Englanders finally reached the spot Goodnow had selected for the settlement, many slept on the open prairie, unprepared for the cold early spring nights. Just days after their arrival, more than a dozen armed Missourians, described as “fierce, ignorant partisans,” stormed their camp on horseback, firing guns at their tents, intending to drive them out of Kansas. Ultimately, only about 50 New England settlers remained in Manhattan when it was officially established in April 1855.

But more continued arriving throughout 1855 and 1856, and the combined forces of nature and hostility did not succeed in driving all of the settlers out. The few hundred that remained throughout Kansas Territory from the estimated 2,000 who initially set off with the New England Emigrant Aid Company proved sufficient in number to create the anti-slavery stronghold of Manhattan and to decisively swing Kansas to become a free state.

The victory wasn’t immediate, and it wasn’t easy. When the vote was held for the first Territorial Legislature in March 1855, Manhattan was the only settlement in Kansas to vote for anti-slavery delegates, as pro-slavery men from neighboring Missouri flooded the territory’s other election sites. Things grew even worse in 1856, with bloody violence throughout Kansas Territory as pro-slavery and anti-slavery zealots battled. In August, a band of armed Georgians marched through Manhattan threatening violence, and troops from nearby Fort Riley were promptly dispatched to protect the town. Despite the threats and violence, Manhattan’s settlers remained committed to a peaceful process.

Through it all, Goodnow’s company kept their faith in the future, and in the end, Thayer’s audacious plan for New England Emigrant Aid Company worked.

Though they could be unrealistic and overly idealistic, the New England founders provided Manhattan with a powerful sense of purpose, as well as amenities that other frontier settlements rarely offered, such as a schoolhouse, a sawmill, and private college, which was converted into Kansas State University in 1863. Fortuitously, a group of 75 settlers arrived by steamboat from Cincinnati in June 1855 and focused on developing commerce in the new village. The combination served the town well. Goodnow later wrote, “The union of the two companies, of the East and of the West, produced a grand practical combination, the best kind of business compound to make the right kind of a town to live in and to educate our children.”

Ultimately, the New Englanders left a lasting imprint. Even 25 years after Manhattan’s founding, during Kansas’s Wild West era, visitors to the town opined that it presented a refined “Eastern” appearance. Beyond its physical aspect, to this day, the city continues to embody ideals and visions that the New Englanders carried to the plains in the 1850s—notably an emphasis on religion and progressive education.

Contemplating the long-term legacy of the New England Emigrant Aid Company settlers, Eli Thayer wrote in 1889: “Justice, though tardy in its work, will yet load with the highest honors the memory of the heroic Kansas pioneers who gave themselves and all they had to the sacred cause of human rights.”

The post When Idealistic New Englanders Moved to Kansas Territory to ‘Put an End to Slavery’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I do not remember how old I was when my grandmother showed me Phillis Wheatley’s poetry. Ten, maybe 11? Young enough that my hands were open to everything she put in them: a crochet needle and thick hot pink yarn, a sewing needle, a gingham apron. Young enough that I obeyed, old enough to roll my eyes in secret when I didn’t want to listen. My grandmother used Scrabble to sharpen my spelling, fed me Du Bois and folktales about people who could fly. Things I needed to know; things they wouldn’t teach me. And so she laid Phillis in my lap like fine linen. Something like An Anthology of Fine Negro Poems or The Best Black American Poems. Does it matter? It was hardbound. It felt important. Langston Hughes was there, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, people she said I needed to know. She turned the thin pages until she was satisfied, and had me read aloud. In my grandmother’s house, recitation was just as important as the reading. Was it a nice day? I do not remember.

The poem was “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” written by a 14-year-old Phillis in the late 18th century. It is one of her most (if not the most) anthologized poems, often accompanied by a bio-paragraph in praise of her genius and publication, despite enslavement and the (unmentioned) complexities of her brief life. Eight lines, sharp end rhymes, it is a verse of passage and piety, of gratitude (but to whom?).

’Twas Mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.

As a child I stumbled through its meaning; I did not understand why I had to read it or why this enslaved poet I wanted to praise seemed to praise God for her captors. How was this “Mercy”? How was being brought and bought a saving grace? And what of that July heat in 1761 when the small slaver docked in Boston? Was there a stage set, an auction block? Was it a storefront? Did someone grab hard her frail wrist when she was brought before the gawkers, the could-be purchasers, the soon-to-be-masters John and Susanna Wheatley?

2

“Was it a nice day? Does it matter?” These are two seemingly innocuous questions June Jordan poses in her essay “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America, or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley.” In Jordan’s rumination the miracle is Phillis, her persistence on being, and the “intrinsic ardour” through which she names herself a poet. These miracles continue still with Phillis’s figurative children, Black women who insist on living in ink. The repetition of Jordan’s inquiry leaves a trail of wonder in its wake—how what appears so simple is not ever quite that. Wonder is what filled me years later, stretched across an orange tweed couch in Oregon and later cross-legged on a porch in Texas. Again I sat, facing the insistent lines of the poet-child—’Twas Mercy brought me from my Pagan land—it was like sucking salt, I pursed my lips, clicked my tongue in refusal. Was it a nice day to be “snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat?” Was it a nice day to be bought by the Wheatleys? What matters is I could not accept this “bringing.” I did not trust the poem’s face. Bondage was not liberation. The more I read and reread, the more I was forced to return to the resonating horrors of Middle Passage, to the reality that despite slavery’s attempt at erasure, it’s intention to strip language, personhood, and cultural memory—something always survives. There was a gnawing ache go back to that dank “Pagan land.” I was like a child caught in a rough current of verse. And I cried. I tossed in anger like a wild wave. I refused the words’ surface and stared into the ink like ocean, first blue-green, then purple, black, until something else stared back at me. Remember, she said, and I wanted to, I needed to. Because if I could, I could see her.

The thing about “being brought” is that it implies neither here nor there, neither departure nor arrival, Africa or America, but an in between, a crossing from here to there, from free to fettered. It is about being in the middle—of the ocean, of passage, somewhere between life and death. On being on the Atlantic. On being brought by ship, by slave ship. Surely this maritime world swabbed with blood and loss is indeed a “Pagan land.” When my eyes—by which I also mean my mind, my spirit—adjusted to this, my stomach settled. Such a read felt right. It was then that I could hold Mercy in a new way, as something that remembers what endures, what comes before capture, conversion, censorship, before a crossing that was tumultuous and deadly. And I could see her, a child tossed on the high seas, a child who by all accounts should not have been onboard the Schooner Phillis, because the captain had been told not to bring any women or girls. Regardless, she became a part of that “disappointing cargo,” and once purchased was named for that very vessel. How could she not write of being brought? It was a long day; the sun surrendered to night. This does not matter. What is important is that the girl who became Phillis Wheatley began to come more and more into view. It was the complexity of “being brought”—those words, that action (what comes with it and is left to sink or float)—that brought Phillis Wheatley to me, that brought me to her, and to her poems, her letters, her spirit. All of this brings me closer to the work I am here to do. These relationships are deftly intertwined. A girl can be a poem, a map; all of this I am learning to name.

I find myself reading Phillis’s poems about water and mythology: muses, gods and goddesses, the celestial and ethereal. I read her instructive elegies, how she churns grief into consolation and cream, soft white seraphim, calla lilies for Bostonian elites, but no mention of the daily dying of “our sable race,” those still being brought, those who did not make it alive. Restraints of a conditional fame. Inside each one I envision rows of obsidian stone, a guttural melancholia, quietly shaped into prayer.

3

I live inside her lines. Take my time walking their halls and opening doors (maybe) I shouldn’t touch. There is so much there and ostensibly not there, but peering closer leads me to all that lives in between. It leads me to Phillis. I sat with her Mercy years ago, and she has not left me since. Phillis feels like kin, and our connection reciprocal, sacred. It is entrenched in passage and memory, in archives of possibility and imagination.

Sometimes she speaks and I listen; she is a storyteller while I scribe. Sometimes we inhabit the same space. When I dream of death-rotting wood, blood-slick and smelling of iron and shit, I see a child’s eyes in the dark. Even when it is day it is dark and the eyes are glassy and shining, with tears of sickness or disbelief. In dreams, sounds echo from the hold, Bantu, Fulani, Yoruba, words unfamiliar when I wake, moans that stay with me through the day. Sometimes I wake covered in sweat that smells like the sea. In those dreams she is mine, a girl with bony hips and no front teeth, a sister by blood or by boat, or she’s a woman on the precipice of freedom, a mother cradling afterbirth.

There is a bird scar on my left hand. I was told as a child I cracked a mirror trying to pull the girl on the other side through. In some dreams my fist is bloody. In others one of us always tugs the other’s arm. There is glass everywhere. Phillis enables me to remember something I should not, and should not forget. Sometimes she is losing, but always she is fighting and survives. On any day, this matters.

4

At the Boston Women’s Memorial, Phillis Wheatley stands across from Lucy Stone and Abigail Adams. Resting a finger against her temple, frozen and pensive, she stares out into the Back Bay. This morning, my third visit this week, a fresh bouquet rests in the crook of her arm: red and white carnations wrapped in pink tissue paper and plastic. An envelope is tucked into it, and someone has carefully written, “To the African Poetess/From Your Children.” For a moment I think to check if the cowrie I laid in her hand some time before is still there, though that matters less than what is there now. The note brings me joy, because there is something implicitly regal in the handwritten address, something inherently beautiful in the signature. The blooms are bright, and all of it declares she lived, and we exist. Her children. Bringing offerings of gratitude and shells, ribbon and petals and candies.

It is a nice day. Does it matter the sun glints off her cast bronze face, or that light pushes against her still lips? It does. She seems to smile. I wonder what she is thinking, where her bones are buried. At Copp’s Hill or Granary, or near a neighbor’s house somewhere in between? Such loss is bedeviling.

When a stroller is leaned against her tucked legs, when a child beats against her skirt and a dog stops to squat, I feel protective. I watch a woman pick through Phillis’s flowers, turn over the envelope to inspect it, then snap a picture, I stand up. This is a subtle violence, though nothing here is intentionally malicious. It is just a nice day, and people run through parks, children squeal in curiosity, dogs do their business. People pose, and lean against, and walk up and touch. What right do I have to scream, That ain’t yours! Or, Don’t beat her like that, don’t gawk, put that somewhere else, sit and listen awhile. Who am I to dictate how anyone moves through sculptures? Each woman is nearly six feet tall, thick-limbed, cast larger than life. They are entrancing, and it is difficult not to reach out. Public art is made for interaction, the artist wants these women to be accessible. But this one, this one, in all ways already was. Even on nice days people are made into property, this one a gilded-caged prodigy.

This would be easier—the touching, the taking, if there were a place to lay flowers undisturbed. Instead, what I have is a whining heart at a monument that is the closest thing to a place of reverence and memoriam. What I have is something like anger bubbling in my spit, a quaking hand and a praise poem for a girl grown into an unmarked grave. What kin are you that leaves me like this?

5

Here is what matters. What I feel with Phillis is not all about the body: of the poem, the ship, this statue, her lost bones. It is the condition and connection of the spirit—a feeling that is ancient and deep, a desire that spreads and saturates and leads to new ways of knowing. My relationship with Phillis is composed of a kind of love and disaster that pushes me through and into gaps toward ancestral and personal healing. It feels right to me, even the most gnarled and tenuous spaces. Relationships are complicated. Like a poem by a child that seems to begin in honor of abduction and ends by naming “Negroes, Black as Cain” as divine. In this one I am both protective and protected, taught to mind and master my tongue, listen to what else I am told, to find what I am feeling in my lines and breaks. It teaches me how to move through the murkiness of passage, how to reckon with all that lies in between, to unhinge the contradictions of a nice day. Where shall I dig, I wonder. Where might I lay flowers for the girl/African Poetess/(fore)mama in memoriam.

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