Of Slaving Blacks and Democratic Whites

Abstract

This chapter describes the founding of Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States. The area that became Washington was a fully functioning slave society, and the city that grew atop those fields incorporated slavery into every aspect of life. From its inception Washington embodied the contradiction endemic to America itself, the paradoxical juxtaposition of freedom and slavery that bedeviled the nation and ultimately led to the Civil War. Enslaved people worked on public construction projects, they were bought and sold within sight of the Capitol, they drove the hacks that crisscrossed the city, and they waited on the men who ran the nation. Early Washington was a Southern city that was immersed in slavery and benefited immensely from it. Another contradiction embedded into the fabric of the city was that its citizens lacked democracy’s basic unit of currency: the right to vote. The city became a political colony, a district whose fate rested not with the local people who called it home but with the national political leaders who resided there temporarily.