Selling Human Beings in Washington, D.C.

An image used by abolitionists to rally support for their cause.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Nearly 75 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the federal government still permitted highly professional, ruthless slave traders to buy and sell people only a stone’s throw from the Capitol and the White House. Abraham Lincoln observed slavery’s brutality and violence from the steps of the Capitol building when he was a congressman. He described seeing “a sort of Negro livery stable” where “negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses.” In the capital of a nation that Lincoln would 13 years later proclaim was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” this cruel commerce served as a stark reminder of the bitter divisions and unfulfilled promises at the heart of the national experiment. 155 years ago today, on September 20, 1850, President Millard Fillmore took steps to finally abolish the slave trade in Washington—but only after a bitter fight.

The abolition was a particularly contentious element of the Compromise of 1850, a deal brokered in Congress between proand anti-slavery forces to allow several new states and territories to join the United States. Few members of Congress were pleased by the Compromise. Jefferson Davis, a pro-slavery senator and later president of the Confederacy, attacked its supporters as “sycophants, deserters, and ambitious demagogues.” Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Lincoln’s future Treasury Secretary, charged that it provided “sentiment for the north [and] substance for the south.” When President Fillmore signed the document ending Washington’s slave trade, he did so in an atmosphere of division and hostility. But he substantially changed the character of America’s capital city.

By then people had been trying to end the slave trade in Washington for decades. Northern abolitionists were lobbying Congress on the matter by 1820. Advocates of slavery argued that the federal government had no authority to regulate the internal commercial practices of slave states like South Carolina; abolitionists, recognizing the political strength of this argument—though they disagreed with it—turned their attention to the nation’s capital, which the Constitution explicitly places under federal control. Surely there, they reasoned, the government could act. Abolitionists delivered numerous petitions to the Capitol until 1836, when a committee headed by South Carolina Representative Henry Pinckney instituted a rule to automatically table all such petitions without consideration. Of course, this rule change only further incensed the petitioners, fueling additional and more energetic activism.

A great obstacle for them was the fact that Washington was an essentially Southern city. John F. Kennedy famously called it “a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.” Though the thirty-fifth President was being glib, his comment reflects a serious tension in the soul of the country’s capital. In 1850 blacks outnumbered European immigrants there by two to one, and they occupied a broad swath of service jobs that immigrants would have held in a typical Northern city. Many of these blacks were free, but their preponderance in the District’s laboring class gave the city something of the feeling of a slave-driven Southern town. This would be a hard place for the abolitionists’ petitions to find acceptance.

After their setbacks in 1836 and the years that followed, the abolitionists found themselves in a new political landscape in 1850. The country’s victorious campaigns in Mexico had left the nation with a great deal of new territory. Should the new land allow slavery? Southern leaders, former Vice President and current Senator John C. Calhoun chief among them, believed that the expansion of slavery was vital to the survival of the institution. Northern politicians felt that any such thing was unacceptable. Much as he had done some decades earlier during the admission of Missouri to the Union, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay stepped in to mediate the dispute. Setting out a slate of almost 40 resolutions, he tried to assemble a group of bills that would sufficiently, if not totally, satisfy all parties. By September, his resolutions had been attacked and debated and honed down to five bills. These would placate slavery’s defenders by setting up the new districts of Utah and New Mexico with no restrictions on slavery, and by strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law, but would also admit California as a free state and abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C.

The Washington bill turned out to be the longest-debated piece of the package. Pro-slavery politicians saw it as an implicit condemnation of slavery everywhere and feared that it would represent the falling of the first domino in a series ending with nationwide abolition. And that was just what slavery’s opponents hoped. Still, many Southern members of Congress understood the measure to be a comparatively painless concession to abolitionists, in return for which they stood to gain much more. While they opposed it—only 10 Southern votes were cast in Congress in favor of the bill—they were willing to let it pass as an element of Clay’s broader program of compromise.

In a sense, pro-slavery politicians had the last laugh, since abolishing Washington’s professional slave trade did not actually succeed in altogether halting the informal buying and selling of human property in the District. However, with the end of the Civil War just 15 years later, the adversarial Senator Chase would be proven right in his declaration that the abolition of slavery in D.C. represented “a step towards the abolition of slavery itself.”

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com