Escaping Slavery, Building Diverse Communities

Topographical Map of the Original District of Columbia and Environs, 1862, Courtesy of Library of Congress

"Over all this land the day star of liberty shines clear and bright."

So read one of the banners that fluttered in Franklin Square on Thursday, April 19, 1866 as 15,000 black Washingtonians celebrated the anniversary of DC emancipation with a jubilant parade. Musical bands, regiments of black soldiers, civic organizations, ward-level political associations, and schoolchildren had marched proudly from Georgetown to Franklin Square, down I Street past the Freedmen's Bureau Headquarters and War and Navy Departments, to Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and Capitol and then past the home of lawmakers Schulyer Colfax, Lyman Trumbull, and Charles Sumner as they made their way to and by the Department of the Interior, the Post Office, and back to Franklin Square. Crowds cheered and the triumphant mood seemed to match the "clear and bright" optimism on so many of the banners.

But the parade was actually occurring three days later than planned, postponed because of bad weather, and even when it did take place, it did so under ominously cloudy skies.

The juxtaposition between achievement and hope on the one hand, and delay, disappointment, and shortcoming on the other tells us something important about the aftermath of slavery, and also about the communities of freedpeople in the nation's capital who would struggle to translate the end of slavery into meaningful freedom. The thousands of men, women, and children newly emerged from slavery knew that they had helped bring about emancipation, and they knew precisely what a revolution it was. But they also knew, and would continue to be reminded, that powerful forces remained stacked against them.

In the spring of 2018, the National Park Service came to Professor Chandra Manning with questions about connections between DC today and the contraband camps of the Civil War era. Those questions were the genesis of this project. With the cooperation of the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians, we are telling the story of formerly enslaved people who came to Washington DC during the Civil War in search of freedom. What they found –and helped to bring about—was an end to slavery. They turned slavery’s end into the beginning of a struggle over what freedom would mean, and they built the communities that would wage that struggle long after war’s end.

This project follows the conversations and contests over the meanings of freedom that freedpeople and their descendants brought to the capital, and to the heart of the nation. It follows the twists and turns that their hopes and aspirations took both geographically and thematically, ranging from military camps and DC neighborhoods to locations across the river in Virginia. Emerging from the shadow of slavery, freedpeople encountered questions of housing, health, employment, education, religion, and relations with the federal government.

In and around Washington, DC, freedpeople and their descendants faced those questions by building community among themselves. The story maps that make up this project trace some of those communities and their fights to make freedom real on the ground and over time. Each story map is different because the story of slavery’s end and the struggle to create meaningful freedom is a story of multiple, often differing, experiences.

No single account, no map, no website, no project can tell the whole story. We certainly do not claim to tell the whole story here. But while nothing can tell us everything, everything tells us something. Each neighborhood, each individual, each incident, each institution chronicled here is part of the story, a story that begins even before the onset of Civil War.

The story of freedpeople in Washington is important, but it should not blind us to the existence of a free black community before the war. That community, in fact, was one reason so many former slaves fled to to the capital once war came. The  AMBUSH FAMILY  was part of this free black community.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed quickly by six additional states. For months, stand-off ensued, but when Confederate troops, under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, fired on U.S. forces garrisoning Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to "put down the rebellion." War ensued, Washington, DC became a massive site of mobilization. Enslaved people recognized that usual power relations were disrupted, and seized opportunities to parlay war into their own freedom. They ran to wherever Union troops were, including to Washington, D.C.

Despite the risks, enslaved men, women, and children by the thousands ran to the Union Army as well as Navy, determined to build a path out of slavery. They did so on battlefields, in camps, and in hospitals, including in Washington, D.C.

From Virginia and Maryland, and sometimes from even further away, men, women, and children fled to Washington in even greater numbers after Congress outlawed slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862. It was this DC emancipation that freedpeople celebrated with a parade in April 1866. Yet once they arrived in Washington, their struggles were far from over. Thousands had to find a place and a way to live in a city made overcrowded by war. The conditions they found would look familiar to inhabitants of refugee camps today. Camp Barker was one of the most significant contraband camps right in the district.

One way out of Camp Barker's refugee camp conditions was to find paid employment. Many worked directly for the Army, but wages, like soldiers' wages, were usually months late and in freedpeople's cases, even more unreliable. Others found work in domestic service, sometimes even for President Lincoln and his family as well as other prominent lawmakers. Still others found their way into other types of government employment, helping (along with nurses and others working for the military) to lay groundwork for federal employment, which would emerge as one of the comparatively least discriminatory sources of employment for freedpeople after the war. This next map looks at black labor in the center of wartime power and high society.

As Camp Barker closed and conditions for freedpeople throughout the city continued to deteriorate, authorities sought and established new locales for refugees from slavery. While new locations might have escaped some of Camp Barker's problems (such as lack of a fresh water supply), many more of the dangers and challenges reappeared in the new locations. One such location was located in the middle of the Potomac River, on an island now known as Theodore Roosevelt Island, but known in the 19th century as Anastolan or Mason's Island. This next feature tells its story.

Mason's Islands as an encampment for freedpeople proved shortlived. But other locations in and around Washington persisted. One of the longest-lived was Freedmen's Village across the river on the grounds of the Arlington, Virginia estate that Confederate General Robert E. Lee obtained upon his marriage to Mary Custis Lee. When the Lee family abandoned the property in the opening weeks of the war, Union troops quickly occupied it, using its high ground location as an ideal spot from which to guard Washington. Enslaved people from surrounding areas began to arrive almost immediately.

"In the morning we learned, and saw, the cause of the alarm in the form of two negroe women --a mother and a daughter, the latter was to be sold South that day, and she and her mother determined to hazard whatever fate might have in store for them within our lines."

---A soldier of the 7th Wisconsin Infantry stationed at Arlington in December 1861 to his hometown newspaper. Source: E.B. Quiner Corresepondence of Wisconsin Volunteers, Reel 1, Wisconsin Historical Society.

For practical and symbolic reasons, the site seemed an ideal location for the establishment of Freedmen's Village. This next feature tells the story of Freedmen's Village.

Just south of Arlington lies Alexandria, Virginia, which was also occupied by the Union Army. On the very same day that General Benjamin Butler refused to return three enslaved men to their owner at Fort Monroe, Union soldiers marched down Duke Street and opened the doors to the "Slave Pen" where the lucrative slave trading firm of Price, Birch, and Co. (formerly Franklin & Armfield) had done business. Between the presence of the Union Army and the presence of a longstanding and determined free black community, Alexandria stood out as another potential refuge from slavery once war broke out. This next feature tells the story of this important port city just outside the capital before, during, and after the war.

Georgetown, which predated Washington and became part of the District of Columbia in 1789, had also long been home to a free black community. Like Alexandria, it became home to even more African Americans as war brought the Union Army and emancipation to the capital. Also like Alexandria, it also remained home to many white Southerners and other white residents of Confederate sympathies. This mixture of political leanings as well as racial communities made for a unique wartime experience of as black Georgetown residents took in so many former slaves that there was

"literally a substratum of negroes living in cellars and basements, from Georgetown to the Navy Yard"--New York World, Feb. 25, 1865

The next features tells the story of how longtime residents --white and black-- and newcomers coped with change, continuity, war, and its aftermath in Georgetown.

The heart of downtown Washington, DC also grew and changed during the war in ways both caused by and affecting African Americans. The 1860 census counted a total population of 61,000 in the national capital, 18% of which was black and fully 25% of which was immigrant. Of the African American population, 3% was enslaved, with fully 2/3 of enslaved black Washingtonians being women, and 15% consisted of free African Americans, giving DC one of the nation's largest free black populations. Then came war, and the population shifted. Confederate lawmakers left. Armies came. And so did men, women, and children fleeing slavery--about 40,000 of them before the war was over. Not all would still be there at war's end--many would enlist in the Union Army, some would move on, and tragic numbers of them would die of disease or other wartime hardship--but they still helped to remake the city. By 1870, Washington's total population reached 200,000. The heart of the city and its black population, in other words, both grew dramatically over the course of the war, a time when national attention as well as that of local authorities focused necessarily on fighting a war, not accommodating a growing population. Freedpeople disproportionately bore the brunt of the resulting dislocations, as this next feature reveals through a close look at a neighborhood known in the 1860s as "Murder Bay." Sources: U.S. Census 1860, U.S. Census 1870, Kenneth J. Winkle, Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC (NY: Norton, 2013).

"Forcibly deprived of education in a state of slavery, the freedmen . . . pay no charge more willingly than that which assures them that their children shall reap those advantages of instruction which were denied to themselves. "

The American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, Final Report, June 22, 1864, p. 109.

Chief among freedpeople's priorities as they emerged from slavery was finding and reuniting with loved ones separated by sale and putting their families back together again. Nearly as important was access to education for adult freedpeople themselves and for their children. Makeshift schools had cropped up in contraband camps where literate freedpeople and free black men and women, northern aid workers, Union soldiers, and later Freedmen's Bureau agents all taught eager learners. Former slaves expressed the clear preference to be taught by African Americans, and the first of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities arose initially to meet this need. The local Washington, DC expression of this national phenomenon was Howard University, whose story is told in the next feature.

Given the emphasis that freedpeople and their children placed on education, Howard University in one sense stands as an enduring monument to the meaning of emancipation. Its legacy of graduates streaming into Washington and throughout the nation stands out as a perhaps more meaningful tribute to the aspirations of freedpeople and their descendants than any sculpture or structure could do. Yet in Washington, DC, a city full of concrete memorials to the people and moments in their history that Americans have chosen to remember, questions of permanent, built memorials are especially important. This next feature takes us to Capitol Hill--the part of town most famous for its many memorials and monuments--and invites us to contemplate the relationship between the lived experience of emancipation and what a nation has chosen and still chooses to remember.

Questions of who and how to remember, and of the relationship between landscape and community, clearly shape the monumental core of the capital city, but they have also shaped Washington's neighborhoods, none more so than the neighborhood currently known as Tenleytown, initially established in the environs of Fort Reno, which had been hastily constructed to guard wartime Washington against the threat of Confederate invasion. This next feature tells Fort Reno's story.

Throughout Washington, DC, African American communities faced the forces of displacement and erasure, inequality and structural discrimination. Yet they persisted in the postwar and post-Reconstruction decades. Not far from where Camp Barker had once sheltered 4,000 wartime refugees from slavery, the U Street district arose. In this neighborhood, men, women, and children who fled from slavery to Washington during the Civil War joined with their descendants and also with African American migrants who came to Washington fleeing later ills like Jim Crow and lynching to create a vibrant neighborhood at first anchored by churches, families, workers, and black businesses. Even as much of the United States, and much of Washington, sought to erase memories of slavery and emancipation, this vital neighborhood kept those memories alive.

The U Street Corridor would emerge in the early 20th century as a locus of African American cultural influence as well as middle class black entrepreneurship. It did so by drawing on wellsprings of community activism and uplift in the face of persistent structural obstacles. This next feature tells the story of the U Street Corridor, "Black Broadway," in the early 20th century.

One crucial business embedded within the U Street Corridor was the Scurlock Photography Studio. Addison Scurlock moved the Washington as a teenager with his parents and opened his first studio in his parents' house in 1904. By 1911, he had opened a studio on U Street, which would become one of Black Broadway's thriving businesses through his professional life and that of his sons. Most of Scurlock's work focused on black Washington's success stories, but some of his most powerful images, like a photograph of children playing in an impoverished alley with a view of the Capitol in the distance, hint at the more complicated history of freedpeople and their descendants in the nation's capital.

Video courtesy of: Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Institution. "Smithsonian Learning Lab Resource: The Scurlocks and Black Washington." Smithsonian Learning Lab. October 31, 2015. Accessed December 11, 2019.

One community where this more complicated picture, including all themes that unite our story, has played out clearest and longest is Barry Farm, whose history this next feature tells.

As Barry Farm residents fight to protect the memory of their home and their right to live there, many swathes of Washington where former slaves sought refuge, battled their way out of bondage, helped end slavery throughout the nation, and struggled to make freedom meaningful by building families, churches, institutions, and communities are in danger of erasure, just as they have been since the covering of the canal in Murder Bay and the appropriation of Freedmen's Village for Arlington National Cemetery.

We hope you will help us fight this erasure!

If you would like to revisit any of the Story Maps above, simply click on the pin in the map below to go straight to the relevant Story Map.

| Washington's Ambush Family | Navy Yard | National Mall | Camp Barker | Lafayette Square | Mason's Island | Freedmen's Village | Alexandria | Georgetown 1861-1877 | Georgetown 1850-1920 | Murder Bay | Howard University/Shaw | Capitol Hill|  Fort Reno | Barry Farm | U Street 

NAMES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT:  David Kilbridge ,  Matthew Barak ,  Juliette Leader,  Morgan Robinson ,  Tianna Mobley ,  Leigh Bianchi ,  Bryce Kassalow ,  Gabriel Angelini ,  Timothy McNulty ,  Gabby Grossman ,  Maya Moretta ,  Mason Mandell ,  Nick Peang-Meth ,  Eva McGehee ,  Kate Collins ,  Nia Jordan ,  Abby Webster ,  Jocelyn Ortiz , Sajuana Castorena Mares

In the fall of 2019, the members of History 396 at Georgetown University set out to find the communities that men, women, and children fleeing slavery established in Washington, DC, and to trace what became of freedpeople, their descendants, and the communities they built over time. Each student chose a neighborhood and got to work digging through archives, scrolling through digitized newspapers, visiting local museums and landmarks, and learning from local history experts. We did not learn everything we wanted to know, but we learned a lot, and we are thrilled to share, in cooperation with the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians, what we found.

We realize that there are many things we still don't know and plenty of stories that we have missed. We hope that you will fill in our gaps. Roll up your sleeves! Head to the library! Sift through dusty files or cutting-edge databases! Notice the streets and buildings you walk by and wonder who has been there before you! Talk to the keepers of local memory! The struggle to make freedom meaningful persists, and so does the challenge of learning the stories of those who have waged that struggle before us. So let this project inspire you to learn more and find ways to share what you discover.

History 396 and Professor Manning would especially like to thank MEGAN MARTINSEN of Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, for her invaluable support, help, and guidance in all technical aspects concerning this map. We could not have done it without you, Megan!

This project began in response to a call from the National Park Service, the agency that preserves and protects the nation's stories, and proceeded in cooperation with the NPS and the Organization of American Historians. We are grateful to be a part of the work of both organizations because . . .