Eastman Johnson's 'Negro Life at the South' and urban slavery in Washington, D.C

Joshua Giddings responded even more directly to the assertions of representatives who had "no personal knowledge" of the Washington slave pens:

But the gentleman denies that there are slave prisons in this city. If he will go to either of these front windows, and cast his eye down Maryland avenue as far as Seventh street, he will see a large brick building, standing back from both streets, its out-buildings surrounded by a high brick wall. Sir, I hesitate not to say, that if he will ask any colored person in the city of ten years of age, they will tell him "That is a slave pen." . . . The Gentleman from Indiana said that he had seen nothing of this slave-trade, and sneeringly remarked that "gentlemen who had looked for it may have seen it." Sir, I receive his taunts with humility. I am one of those who feel it my duty to look around me, and learn the effect of the laws which we enact. . . . There is no doubt that great pains are taken to prevent the promulgation of facts which illustrate the barbarous character of this traffic. This caution has increased as the public attention has been turned to the subject, until now but few of its enormities are witnessed by the public.(37)

Local Politics on F Street

The stimulating language of these quotations, still only a fraction of the general public rhetoric on the subject, gives an adequate sense of the high stakes surrounding the representation of slavery in the District of Columbia. As Giddings describes it, a concerted campaign of suppression was succeeding in rendering Washington's slaves invisible, a political strategy aided by the peculiar topography of the city, whereby the large blocks designed by Pierre L'Enfant at the end of the eighteenth century permitted the development of significant interior alley spaces, invisible to the street. These nonpublic zones had always been the spaces assigned to slaves, and many antislavery writers over the years had bemoaned the fact that exterior walls kept them from contact with the daily lives of slaves, without, however, muffling their telltale cries and moans. Indeed, it is largely the forgotten privacy of the interior of a block that kept the last Washington slave jail standing unmolested until the end of the nineteenth century [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].

Particularly among the Washington populace, silence on the issue of slavery prevailed in the 1850s. As historian Constance Green describes it, the local policy was: "Abide by the law, but say nothing, do nothing, that might upset the precarious sectional balance. The fiercer the storm blew roundabout, the greater the quiet at the center. It was like the stillness at the eye of a hurricane."(38) How surprising, then, that amid this willful muteness and blindness, Eastman Johnson would have chosen to tear down the wall, to expose to view the inner spaces of Washington slavery in Negro Life at the South. Indeed, close inspection of the exposed roof beams, the remnants of a perimeter foundation at the feet of the banjo player, and the plaster-coated walls, once obviously belonging to a protected interior space, leaves the impression that an entire architectural facade has been ripped away, sheared off so as better to display the activities and squalid living conditions of those who inhabit this hovel. Southern legislators wanted most to hide the face of slavery from view in the capital; in light of the extremely sensitive feelings on the subject, Johnson's painting almost takes on the air of muckraking journalism. This gives rise to several questions. What were the conditions of the 1850s, the decade in which Johnson made his return to Washington from extended study abroad? And what can we learn about the site of the painting, the specific neighborhood of F Street, where the Johnson family was surrounded on all sides with the physical evidence of slavery?