Abolitionism and Freedom Seeking in the National Capital Area, 1815–1859

From the National Park Service series "A Timeline of Resistance: The Perseverance of African Americans from the Revolutionary War to the Civil Rights Era".

Sojourner Truth, an advocate for social reform, abolition and women's rights from 1843 until her death in 1883. Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, 1864, Library of Congress.

The fight for freedom did not end with the Revolution or the War of 1812. The young country's states were divided between those pushing to expand slavery and those pushing to limit it. The Atlantic slave trade had been legally banned in 1808, but the trade inside the country thrived, especially as enslavers in the north sold Black people south. Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, became major centres of that trade, even as Washington's free Black population grew.

Resistance grew too, becoming more organised through the Underground Railroad. Enslaved people challenged slavery by seeking freedom in free states, through revolts and in the courts. Free Black people and white allies such as the Quakers ran routes of help for freedom seekers in the capital area until the end of the Civil War, using waterways such as the C&O Canal, the Potomac River from Harpers Ferry to Washington, and the wider Chesapeake Bay.

Arlington House, where more than 100 enslaved African Americans were held until the end of the Civil War. J. F. Gedney and W. H. & O. H. Morrison, 1868, Library of Congress.

Timeline

• 1820 — According to John Jay Janney's 1901 memoirs, Black people living on Quaker farms attended school with white children at the log schoolhouse in Purcellville, Virginia, and at the Goose Creek Friends' Schoolhouse in today's Lincoln, Loudoun County — an early case of integrated schooling.
• 1827 — James Pennington, known then as James Pembroke, escaped slavery at Rockland near Hagerstown, Maryland. Seeking a first-rate education, he became the first Black student admitted to Yale, though he was barred from formally enrolling. A powerful abolitionist and tireless fighter for civil rights, he published an account of his enslaved youth, The Fugitive Blacksmith, in 1849.
• 1828 — Work began on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which carried cargo and people between Georgetown and Cumberland, Maryland, until 1924. Free and enslaved African Americans helped build it, worked for the canal company, and a few captained their own boats. Before emancipation the canal was also a route of escape. At the earlier Patowmack Canal at Great Falls, George Pointer, once an enslaved labourer, gained his freedom and became the company's last Superintendent Engineer — an extraordinary position of trust.
• 1831 — Seventy or more enslaved people in southern Virginia rose in revolt under Nat Turner. The state responded with armed force, and the federal government sent troops, showing that it treated the defence of slavery as a national and constitutional duty.
• 1835 — In the Snow Riots, white mobs attacked Beverly Snow's Epicurean Eating House at 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, owned by a free man of colour, destroying his property and terrorising him on the pretext that he had insulted a white woman. The rioters, mostly white mechanics and labourers, went on to burn and loot the nearby free Black community, especially its schools and churches, this time over claims that a young enslaved man had threatened an older white woman. Behind the violence lay white working men's resentment of free Black workers competing for jobs. It began on August 12, 1835, and lasted for days until President Andrew Jackson intervened.
• 1830s — Leonard Grimes, a free Black carriage driver, led several people to freedom, once carrying seven in a single barouche, a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage. That last escape, along the Leesburg Pike in Loudoun County, led to his arrest and a two-year prison sentence — the minimum, because of his "former good character".
• 1844 — John W. Jones and his half-brother George Jones escaped slavery near Leesburg to Elmira, New York, and through the early 1860s helped some 800 people escape to Canada. In Loudoun County, Samuel M. Janney of Springwood wrote anti-slavery letters to the Alexandria Gazette, calling for an end to the domestic slave trade and arguing for the superiority of free labour.
• 1845 — In July, groups of armed enslaved men from Charles, St. Mary's and Prince George's counties in Maryland — between 38 and 74 in all — met near Washington and marched boldly for Pennsylvania under Mark Caesar and Bill Wheeler, through the District and into Montgomery County. Near Gaithersburg armed local whites confronted them; several were killed and others fled. Some 31 were captured, most of them sold out of state. Caesar, a free man, was sentenced to 40 years for helping enslaved people escape; Wheeler, sentenced to hang, escaped again after four months.
• 1847 — A Virginia law declared that "every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly," allowing any justice to have those present seized and whipped.
• 1848 — In the Pearl incident, 77 African Americans fled slavery — from 40 enslavers, among them a former first lady — aboard the schooner Pearl, with a white crew, in what was then the largest such attempt. Foul weather and still winds let pursuers catch the ship and bring it back, and the freedom seekers were sold south; after public outcry, some were bought back by abolitionists and family members and freed.
• 1850 — The Fugitive Slave Act, one of the harshest laws passed to stop escapes and protect enslavers' "property", became law as part of the Compromise of 1850, which also banned the sale of enslaved people in the District of Columbia.
• 1855 — Henry Cole, married to a daughter of Sally Bates, was considered the largest Black property owner in Prince William County, with 155 acres.
• 1856 — Benjamin Drew's book The Refugee published the first interviews with George Johnson, from near Harpers Ferry, and Peyton Lucas, from Leesburg, who described conditions, whippings and other degradations under slavery, and their escapes.
• 1857 — On March 6 the Supreme Court issued Dred Scott v. Sandford. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who had begun his legal career in Frederick County, Maryland, ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, striking down the Missouri Compromise, and that Black people were not citizens — people who, he wrote, had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect". That phrase haunted the nation and its Black citizens for more than a century, licensing white people and institutions to ignore Black Americans' rights.
• 1859 — Daniel Dangerfield, who had escaped in 1853 from work at Aldie Mill, was arrested in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, under the Fugitive Slave Act; despite strong feeling in Loudoun County for his return, Pennsylvania refused to send him back. On October 16, John Brown and his raiders seized the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, seeking weapons for a colony in the mountains of western Maryland where people escaping slavery could shelter. When enslaved people nearby did not rise up as he had hoped, the plan collapsed.

John Brown hoped to spark a slave rebellion, but townspeople and militiamen stopped him. David Hunter Strother ("Porte Crayon"), Harper's Weekly, 1859, Library of Congress.

The raid deepened the country's political split and can be seen as a first step towards the Civil War. People were willing to shed blood, or die, for freedom, and the stage was set for war.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Abolitionism and Freedom in the National Capital Area", in A Timeline of Resistance. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/abolitionism-and-freedom-in-the-national-capital-area.htm
• The timeline draws on two National Park Service studies: Cheryl LaRoche, Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer and Lauren Hughes, Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area (2021), and John Bedell and Andrew Wilkins, African American Experience Before Emancipation (2022).
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.