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

The Capitol building was an appropriate symbol of slavery-related strife, for throughout the antebellum years, the most rancorous debates on the issue of involuntary servitude in Washington took place under its dome. Only a few months after Torrey's visit, for example, John Randolph, the fiery Virginia slave owner, called the attention of the House of Representatives to "a practice . . . not surpassed for abomination in any part of the earth; for in no part of it, not even excepting the rivers on the coast of Africa was there so great and so infamous a slave market as in the metropolis, in the very Seat of Government of this nation, which prided itself on freedom."(27) Randolph would appear an unlikely candidate to agitate against the Washington slave trade, but there were actually quite a few citizens, particularly in the earlier decades of the century, who, while supporting the buying and selling of African slaves in the abstract, were reluctant to witness it in the nation's capital.

Throughout the first half of the century, but beginning especially in 1828, such citizens began expressing their views through the First Amendment right of petition. In a concerted campaign organized by abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker activist who published the antislavery newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation in Washington, petitions by the thousands began to flood the House of Representatives (and, to a lesser degree, the Senate). These petitions varied in scale and scope from the so-called monster petition of 1,100 citizens of the District of Columbia of 1828 to a single letter from one Jabez C. Woodman, of Portland, Me., in 1850. The former, a scroll composed of over eight yards of signature pages carefully waxed together at top and bottom, called the attention of members of Congress to "an evil of serious magnitude, which greatly impairs the prosperity and happiness of this District, and casts the reproach of inconsistency upon the free institutions established among us." The latter began more colorfully,

The undersigned humbly represents that it is commonly reported in this part of the country, that the city of Washington is so much like the ancient city of Jericho, that many persons in the former city, some white, some black, and some yellow, but all members of the human family, have fallen among thieves, who strip them of all their earnings, wound them by scourging, and not only rob them of their property, but frequently steal from them their wives and children and sell them for slaves and thereby deprive them of half their humanity or leave them half dead.(28)

In what one historian has described as "the greatest project in propaganda that had ever been conceived in our history," citizens from every Northern state buried the Capitol in a mountain of petitions against slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. In the 1835-36 congressional session, some one hundred thousand signatures arrived favoring abolition in the district. In the following years, with a renewed campaign from the American Anti-Slavery Society, the numbers increased fivefold; one petition alone from Massachusetts women was forwarded in the 1836-37 session with 21,000 names condemning slavery in the district, and a total of half a million such signatures are estimated to have arrived on the Capitol steps in the 1838-39 session. Although records in succeeding decades were kept less carefully, petitions against Washington slavery continued unabated through the 1850s, up to the time of the unveiling of Negro Life at the South and, subsequently, the outbreak of the Civil War.(29) Abolitionist newspapers helped by fanning the flames of public outrage: William Lloyd Garrison's Boston Liberator lamented, for example, "The District is rotten with the plague, and stinks in the nostrils of the world."(30) Broadsides, such as Slave Market of America [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED], with maps, illustrations, and descriptions of district slave prisons in what it termed "The Home of the Oppressed," were also distributed as part of the campaign. In addition, state legislatures, such as those of Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan, passed resolutions condemning slavery in the capital.