The Black History of the White House (11 page)

Historian Maurice Jackson has argued that the Quaker opposition to slavery was rooted in their theological beliefs. First, he contends, Quakers rejected both the notion of “original sin” and the practice of enslaving newborns. Second, they also rejected the notion of “just war” that was used by some to argue that individuals and communities could be taken as part of the booty of war and then enslaved. Linked to that notion, Quakers also preached nonviolence and that no institution was as violent as that of slavery. And third, according to Jackson, Quaker leaders such as Anthony Benezet criticized the institution of slavery
on the grounds that it was driven by greed and a lust for money at any cost.
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For Quakers and others, such values were immoral and ungodly, and fighting to end slavery was not an option but an obligation.

In April 1775, led by Benezet, the Quakers and others formed the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Their activities apparently got under the skin of then General George Washington who, in 1786, wrote a letter supporting a friend and fellow Virginia slaveholder who had to deal with “a vexatious lawsuit respecting a slave of his, which a Society of Quakers in the city (formed for such purposes) have attempted to liberate.”
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The war and the untimely death in 1784 of Benezet, the Society's intellectual and political leader, forced a curtailment of their activities.
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The group persevered, however, renaming itself the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1787, and pledged to “use such means as are in their power to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of the human race.”
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The group's members achieved a coup when they convinced the ever popular Benjamin Franklin, aged but still energetic, to join the cause. They quickly selected him to become the Abolition Society's president, a position he accepted and held until he died in 1790. Like most of the founding fathers, Franklin had been a slaveholder for many years, but unlike most, he came to see the evil and immorality of the slave system and vigorously spoke out against it in his later years. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society helped to buy freedom for some, provided legal aid to runaways or those who were unlawfully abducted by slave catchers, and promoted pro-abolition legislation. As the Pennsylvania Abolition Society developed, it also formed networks with other abolitionist groups and movements around the world, including groups in Canada and parts of the Caribbean.

Despite its groundbreaking efforts to end slavery, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society had several glaring weaknesses. First, its strategy relied primarily on petitions and legal remedies. The former had propaganda and educational value, but little real-world impact to end slave system. Congress and state legislatures put them on the shelf never to be seen or heard of again. In legal efforts, on the other hand, the Society played a central role in the development of the Gradual Abolition Act (discussed in Chapter 1) and sought other legislative and legal solutions, achieving more than expected given the national and even local social climate. But slavery continued to grow, and other efforts began to overshadow its work, such as those of the American Colonization Society, whose members advocated sending blacks to Africa, or those supporting more radical demands such as slave uprisings or establishing maroon societies. While the Pennsylvania Abolition Society settled for a gradualist policy, others advocated for what writer Richard Newman termed “immediatism”—an immediate end to slavery and the establishment of full equality for African Americans.
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Second, and perhaps most telling, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was segregated and did not allow black members until the 1830s, by which time other integrated or all-black initiatives were well established. The segregationist policy of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society was not that different from that of any other political or social institution of the period. Despite genuinely seeking an end to slavery, its policies reflected the underlying reality that blacks were not seen as equals by even “progressive” whites. The benevolence of the organization might best be seen, then, as more patronizing and moralistic than as part of a political movement for genuine racial equality. That demand would come from the black community itself.

Black Activism Then and Now

At the same time the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia to frame the terms of the slavery-permissive U.S. Constitution, the city's black community was actively organizing to abolish slavery. Living in the largest enclave of free blacks in the nation, African Americans in Pennsylvania consolidated and began a concerted push to end slavery and ensconce equal rights and social justice. Movement activity took many forms—speeches, petitions, pamphlets, public gatherings, and the development of black newspapers.

Religious leaders were particularly important in these campaigns. In fall 1787, Methodist convert and former slave Richard Allen, along with Absalom Jones and Peter Williams, knelt down to pray in Philadelphia's St. George Church. The church had recently begun to segregate the increased number of blacks who attended, many of whom came to hear Allen preach. Coordinating segregation, however, became more and more difficult as the black congregation grew. On that particular November Sunday there was confusion regarding exactly where Allen and the others should worship. As the men were kneeling in prayer, church officials first implored them to move and then, when they refused, literally lifted them off their knees and physically removed them from the church.

These churchgoing black men entered separately but left united. Allen's response, with assistance from Jones, was to form the Free African Society and later to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Getting thrown out of Philadelphia's St. George Church only served to make the men more defiant never to return. “They were no more plagued with us in the church,” said Allen.
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The Free African Society was a broad-based network of African Americans that was formed “without regard to religious
tenets, provided, the persons lived an orderly and sober life, in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”
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It sought to unite the black community—free and enslaved—to fight for justice and to take a stand against racism. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. referred to it as an “embryonic political cell.”
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Although the group was nondenominational, differences grew between Allen and Jones, and the former left the group in 1789 and established the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794.

By the time President Washington arrived to stay at the president's residence in Philadelphia, he was entering the one area in the new nation where the confluence of militant abolitionism and the struggle for black liberation was at its strongest. Because he did little to abate slavery, he became a target of antislavery campaigners. Pro-abolition Quakers, for example, had met with Washington after he was elected president, lobbying him to end slavery,
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and in 1797, black Philadelphians petitioned the federal government to prohibit slavery and repeal the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which Washington had signed into law in their city.
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Their efforts were unsuccessful.

Embarrassed by his complicity in the business of human trafficking, Washington apparently made efforts to shield his slaves from public view as much as possible. He was rarely seen with them publicly (except for William Lee, until he was sent to Mount Vernon), and as Washington's tenure went on, visitors noticed a decline in their presence at the president's house. Hundreds of miles from the pro-slavery culture of the South, the first president of the United States must have experienced constant discomfort, possibly accounting for his frequent visits to his sprawling estate in Mount Vernon.

Washington was not the only person shamed by the presence of the black people he kept enslaved in Philadelphia. Over
the years, the city of Philadelphia itself quietly erased all historical traces of slavery from the president's residence, or at least attempted to do so.

The Movement to Honor Washington's Enslaved

While ignored by city and national officials, the story of Washington's enslavement of men and women in Philadelphia did not die out in the black community. African Americans there have passed on the stories of that era from generation to generation. But it would take the city's effort to honor another part of its history to trigger contemporary black Philadelphians to organize a movement demanding that the saga of the black people Washington enslaved be included in the city's official history.

In 2002, the National Park Service began its effort to move the Liberty Bell to a new $12.6 million pavilion.
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The move ignited a firestorm of protests when it was discovered by researcher Edward Lawler Jr., who was doing some digging of his own, that the proposed location for the new pavilion was the exact site where the president's house once stood—the residence where the blacks whom President Washington held enslaved
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had also lived and toiled.
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Building on Lawler's research, in 2007 archaeologists uncovered the precise location of the slave quarters. The planned entrance to the pavilion would be situated exactly there, atop the area where Washington's slaves once lived.
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The uproar began in January 2002 when Lawler broke the story about the “president's house” in an extensive and detailed article in
The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
The article identified the location where Washington quartered the black men and women he enslaved—a part of the residence called the “smokehouse.” Dramatically, Lawler noted that the walkway entrance to the Liberty Bell Center was going to be
built directly over the place where Washington kept his slaves
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and that people visiting site would have to walk over the precise spot where black people belonging to the first president of the United States once slept.

Outrage was compounded by the fact that the Liberty Bell itself had been a symbol of the abolitionist movement since 1837, when it became the frontispiece of
Liberty
, a journal published by the New York Anti-Slavery Society.
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In fact, it was the abolitionists who first began to refer to it as the “Liberty Bell,” supplanting its previous title of “State House Bell,” and who adopted the militant words inscribed on it: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
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Response to Lawler's article was swift. A number of groups formed to challenge the plans of the National Park Service, whose initial reaction to criticism over its omission of the slavery issue was stunningly underwhelming. The National Park Service sought first to minimize the concerns being raised and, when that did not work, to divert them. According to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, National Park Service officials implied that a focus on slavery would perhaps give undue significance and publicity to the issue, since Washington also had indentured servants and other workers at the house. Some National Park Service officials also suggested that any reference to the people Washington enslaved be displayed at the Deshler-Morris House, another much less prominent National Park Service facility that reportedly receives only around 2,000 visitors a year compared to an estimated 1.2 million annual visitors to the Liberty Bell.
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By mid-May 2002, the National Park Service had a change of mind and began to move toward involving scholars, historians, elected officials, and community activists in an effort to determine how best to acknowledge the history of the
people Washington enslaved. Park Service officials met with Lawler and another local historian, Charles Brockson, as well as with Representative Bob Brady (D-PA). It also sought input from nationally known historians and academics including the revered John Hope Franklin, the Smithsonian Institution's Faith Ruffin, George Washington University's James Horton, and Spencer Crew, director of Cincinnati's Underground Railroad Museum.
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The National Park Service's new attitude was driven by activism on the part of the black community, including a letter-writing campaign led by “Radio Courtroom” host Michael Coard.
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A group called the Ad-Hoc Historians formed and called for “commemorating the lives of eight enslaved Africans, telling the full and complex history of American freedom.”
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Events began to move quickly. Congress became involved, and on July 9, 2002, the House Appropriations Committee added an amendment to the $19.7 billion budget bill for the Interior Department (under which National Park Service operates) calling for the Park Service “to appropriately commemorate” those who had been enslaved by Washington in Philadelphia as well as the house itself.
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The amendment also demanded that the Park Service report on the progress it was making toward fulfilling that obligation by March 2003.
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By then, it was generally agreed by all the parties that at least a memorial should be constructed. In fall 2003, then-Philadelphia Mayor John Street committed $1.5 million in city funds to the memorial.
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And Independence National Historic Park, where the Liberty Bell Center is located, raised $4.5 million to pay for the conceptual plan for the memorial. Representatives Chaka Fattah (who played an early role in pushing for the memorial and supporting local initiatives) and Bob Brady announced that the congressional allocation to the project had grown to $3.5 million.
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Significantly, the mayor's office and the park formed a committee to oversee the development of the memorial dedicated to the black people President Washington enslaved. Members of the committee represented a broad array of scholars and activists, including: