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

30. "District of Columbia," Liberator, Jan. 1, 1831.

31. Remarks of Mr. Dickson, of New York, on the Presentation of Several Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1835), n.p.; Speech of Mr. Slade, of Vermont, on the Subject of Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade within the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: National Intelligencer, 1836), 4-5.

32. Remarks of Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, on the Question of Receiving Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Duff Green, 1836), 17; and Richmond Inquirer, n.d., quoted in The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (1836; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 224. The same threats were made in later years. On Sept. 10, 1850, for example, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi announced, "No man in the world can doubt that any attempt now, on the part of the Congress of the United States, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, if successful, would dissolve the Union"; Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 1850, app., 1644.

33. The gag rule was largely a punitive and antagonistic gesture on the part of Southern legislators, for the abolitionist petitions were in no danger of being acted on, thanks to the skewed majority of proslavery votes in the House. Northern Democrats largely voted proslave, and Southern states at the time were permitted to count their nonvoting slaves when calculating population figures for the purposes of apportionment of representatives in the House; every five slaves counted as three additional "constituents," ensuring a Southern voting bloc disproportionately powerful to the numbers of actual voting citizens.

34. On the Pearl controversy, see Stanley C. Harrold, Jr., "The Pearl Affair: The Washington Riot of 1848," Records of the Columbia Historical Society 50 (1980): 140-60; and Richard C. Rohrs, "Antislavery Politics and the Pearl Incident of 1848," Historian 56 (Summer 1994): 711-24.

35. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 2d sess., 1849, app, 80. The Compromise of 1850 allowed the addition of one slave state (Texas) and one free state (California). It also appeased Southerners by strengthening the fugitive slave laws. The final measure, abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, did no such thing in reality. It did not forbid the sale of slaves resident in the district; it only prevented dealers from bringing them in from elsewhere for sale.

36. Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 1850, app., 529, 1642.

37. Horace Mann, Slavery Letters and Speeches (1851; repr., New York: Butt Franklin, 1969), 122; and Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 2d sess., 1849, app., 127.

38. Green, 180.

39. Some of the most significant political events impacting the slavery debate of the 1850s were the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which nullified the Missour Compromise of 1820 and made possible the introduction of slavery in new western states; the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857, which essentially ruled that blacks could not be citizens; and the Lecompton crisis of 1858, which led to significant bloodshed in Kansas.