Reconstruction in the National Capital Area, 1865–1900

Thomas Nast's celebration of emancipation at the end of the Civil War; King & Baird, engravers. Library of Congress.

When Reconstruction began after the Civil War in 1865, the country set out to right its wrongs. The Freedmen's Bureau, Northern missionaries and free Black people set to work building self-reliant African American communities. In the National Capital Area — Washington and the nearby parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia — the era brought real gains, and then watched them undone.

Freedom came early to Washington

Washington, DC, led the way. The DC Emancipation Act of 1862 ended slavery there nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Freedom seekers from Virginia and other slave states came for work, to find family, and to begin life as citizens.

• Freedman's Village, at Arlington House, was a place of transition, with homes, a hospital and a school.
• Reno City, in Washington, grew and thrived into the early twentieth century.
• Harpers Ferry's Black communities, such as Camp Hill, took up paid work as farmhands, quarrymen and domestic workers, and started businesses.

Schools and churches

After years of brutal punishment for learning to read, education became a symbol of true freedom. Black churches led the way, far beyond worship: in social reform, schooling and politics. The A.M.E. and Methodist Episcopal churches had taught African Americans around the capital before the war; an 1845 A.M.E. record lists a Sabbath school at Quinn Chapel, in Frederick County, Maryland, with two teachers and twenty-five students — forerunners of public schools.

New schools opened: Storer College in Harpers Ferry, the Manassas Industrial School in Virginia, Howard University in Washington, schools in Alexandria and Fairfax, and in Maryland the Sharp Street School in Sandy Spring and the Union Institute in Prince George's County. The Freedmen's Bureau gave funds and land; Black labor and mutual aid, with missionaries, made them work.

Office, and backlash

Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first African American senator. Brady-Handy collection, 1870. Library of Congress.

Up to 2,000 African Americans held public office between the late 1860s and 1900. Hiram Revels, born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1827, rose from alderman to the Mississippi state senate and in 1870 became the first African American U.S. senator — met with scorn by Southern politicians, but seated in the end.

The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 gave Congress power to defend these rights. But many white Southerners set out to undo every gain. Under President Andrew Johnson, power over Southern politics went back to those who had denied Black rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence and fraud kept Black citizens from voting, and the Ku Klux Klan used terror at the polls and lynching.

The Compromise of 1877 withdrew federal troops from the South, and nothing stopped the rollback. Lynch mobs struck in the capital area too: in Alexandria, Virginia, Benjamin Thomas was lynched while a policeman on the scene knew members of the mob, and no one was convicted; Joseph McCoy was taken from the jail there by a mob led by white professionals and businessmen.

Timeline, 1865–1898

• 1865 — Congress passes "An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees" (March 3) for food, shelter, medical care and land. The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery — the first time the word "slavery" appears in the Constitution. At Harpers Ferry, Lockwood House (built 1848), a wartime hospital, becomes a Freewill Baptist school; John Storer of Maine matches $10,000 raised by the missionaries, founding Storer College.
• 1866 — Frederick Douglass leads 13 delegates to the White House (February 7) to press Andrew Johnson on citizenship. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (April 9) makes anyone born in the U.S. a citizen with equal treatment under the law and bans peonage. Johnson vetoes an extension of the Freedmen's Bureau. Near Antietam, Tolson's Chapel, on land given by Samuel and Kate Craig, serves as church and school.
• 1867 — Over Johnson's veto, Congress gives Black men in DC the vote (January 8). Maryland outlaws selling Black people into slavery as punishment for crime (January 23).
• 1870 — The 15th Amendment secures voting rights for Black men. The New Era newspaper starts in Washington, with Frederick Douglass as corresponding editor.
• 1872 — The first Black school in Arlington's Jefferson District opens; First Baptist Church, Manassas, the county's oldest Black church, is founded; so is Rock Creek Baptist Church, the heart of Reno.
• 1873 — V. Cook Nickens, a Leesburg barber, is elected constable, a first for a Black official there.
• 1879 — In Strauder v. West Virginia, the Supreme Court strikes down West Virginia's ban on Black jurors, its first use of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause against a state law. (1881: West Virginia opens juries to all eligible voters.)
• 1884 — Shut out by the American Medical Association's local affiliate, Black and white doctors form the biracial Medico-Chirurgical Society of the District of Columbia.
• 1888 — John Syphax asks $350 for each family being forced out of Freedman's Village. The village is razed in 1900, with $75,000 paid in all, on an 1868 valuation.
• 1889 — The first National Black Catholic Congress meets at St. Augustine Church in Washington and sees President Grover Cleveland.
• 1890 — The Second Morrill Act ties federal college money to equal provision for Black students. The National Afro-American League, led by T. Thomas Fortune and Bishop Alexander Walters, becomes the first national Black organization built to fight segregation, with an end to lynching central to its platform.
• 1892 — The Colored Women's League forms in Washington; founders include Helen Appo Cook, Anna J. Cooper and Mary Church Terrell.
• 1893 — Jennie Dean founds the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, now an archaeological park.
• 1896 — Plessy v. Ferguson approves "separate but equal", opening the Jim Crow era; segregation became the norm in the capital area. The National Association of Colored Women is founded in Washington, motto "Lifting as We Climb," with Mary Church Terrell as president.
• 1898 — The National Afro-American Council reorganizes in Washington, fighting disfranchisement, peonage and lynching.

Richard Allen and the bishops of the A.M.E. Church. J.H. Daniels, 1876. Library of Congress.

What followed

By 1900, African Americans had built schools, businesses and political power, but white politicians were rolling back the protections of the Reconstruction amendments, and the Klan and other groups terrorized Black communities. Terror did not bring hopelessness. It shaped the next generation of civil rights activists, and by the start of the twentieth century the seeds of the modern movement were planted.

Blanche K. Bruce, Frederick Douglass and Hiram Revels. J. Hoover, Philadelphia, 1881. Library of Congress.

Sources

Based on "Reconstruction in the National Capital Area," part of the series A Timeline of Resistance, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Cheryl LaRoche, Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer and Lauren Hughes, Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area and Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area; B. Taylor, On the Fort; and E. B. Wallace, They Have Erected a Neat Little Church. The source's closing "twenty-first century" is read as the twentieth; its line on a civil rights bill passed over Abraham Lincoln's veto is left out (Lincoln had died, and the 1866 act passed over Andrew Johnson's); it places the Klan's first meeting at the Maxwell House in Memphis, a Nashville hotel; and it spells the New Era's editor "J. Stella Martin," usually J. Sella Martin.