The Black History of the White House (5 page)

In a letter dated August 4, 1797, Washington stated that he hoped that the institution would end over time by congressional action: “I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State [Virginia] could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery.”
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However, George Washington also believed that his slaves would not benefit from freedom. The view that blacks were not ready for liberation was a common one among those who publicly condemned the institution but privately profited from their slaves. Whatever may have been the case with his claimed moral aversion to slavery, in action, George Washington did not free a single slave during his lifetime. Instead, he pledged that all of his slaves would be freed upon his and Martha's death. In fact, Martha released all of his slaves and her own before she died in 1803.

Perhaps not privy to George Washington's Hamlet-like dilemmas, at least one of the people kept in bondage by the First Family did not trust the Washingtons' far-off promises for liberation. In 1796, sometime between late May or early June, Oney got away. Unfortunately for her, shortly after arriving in New Hampshire, she was recognized on the streets of Portsmouth by Elizabeth Langdon, the daughter of New Hampshire Senator John Langdon. The Langdons were friends of the Washingtons, and word of Oney's whereabouts got back to the president.

According to researcher Helen Bryan, Martha Washington was extremely eager to re-enslave her reliable maid and pressed George to have her captured.
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Like every successful escape plot, Oney's not only incurred loss to her owner but undermined the entire system of brutality, coercion, and fear needed to maintain it. From a slaveholder's point of view, inaction on the Washingtons' part would only embolden the field slaves; it wouldn't be prudent to allow a “privileged” house slave to run
away without severe consequences. Rather than use the Fugitive Slave Act (which he had signed into law) and patronize the thriving but undignified slave-catcher business, Washington decided to first employ a more secretive approach. Through his treasury secretary, Oliver Wolcott Jr., Washington initially attempted to have New Hampshire Collector of Customs John Whipple detain her and have her shipped back to Virginia. On September 1, 1796, Washington wrote Whipple a note demanding that he “seize her and put her on board a Vessel bound immediately” to either Mount Vernon or Alexandria.
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He added, “the ingratitude of the girl, who was brought up and treated more like a child than a Servant (and [given] Mrs. Washington's desire to recover her) ought not to escape with impunity if it can be avoided.”
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The Whipples were an important and well-known family of the Revolution. John's brother William had been one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. As with the Langdons, there were personal as well as political ties connecting them to the First Family. According to a letter he wrote to Washington on September 10, 1796, Whipple initially appeared willing to comply with the request. Conscious of the strong antislavery sentiments in the city and of the protective stance of the black community, he could not publicly arrest her. Instead, he secretly arranged to trick her into boarding a ship that would begin her journey back to Mount Vernon.

Whipple's initial ruse was to offer Oney a job and invite her to an interview. She accepted the invitation, and in the course of the interview Whipple clearly sensed what he described as her “thirst for compleat freedom.”
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Because, perhaps, her status as a perpetual fugitive would deny that thirst from ever being completely satisfied, Whipple initially managed to convince her to return to the Washingtons under her two conditions that
she would be freed upon their deaths and would at no point be sold or given to someone else. Whipple pledged to help her get her eventual freedom, and Oney seemed ready to return. An intervention by one of Oney's friends, however, made her reconsider the plan, and at the last moment she decided to reject Whipple's offers. As a result, Whipple informed Washington that his only recourse was to send a direct order to the attorney general of New Hampshire to have her apprehended. Whipple also made it clear that the increasingly strong antislavery atmosphere made it extremely difficult for escaped individuals to be captured and returned.

President Washington's response on November 28, 1796, was full of rage at Oney for even proposing such a compromise and railed that her “unfaithfulness” deserved punishment, not rewards.
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Now more determined than ever, the president turned to his nephew, Burnwell Bassett Jr., and sent him to Portsmouth. Bassett was able to track down Oney and meet with her as well. In what he and Washington surely thought was a grand and honorable gesture, he informed her that if she came back willingly, Washington would grant her freedom back in Virginia. Oney wisely replied, “I am free now and choose to remain so.”
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Rebuffed, Bassett left empty-handed.

After being informed of Oney's intransigence, Washington commanded Bassett to return to Portsmouth and bring her back by force. Before going after Oney a second time, Bassett was entertained by the Langdons at their home in Portsmouth. Perhaps out of guilt for having either intentionally or accidentally let Oney's whereabouts be known, and apparently fearless of breaking the law, they secretly sent a message to Oney while Bassett was dining. As a result of the Langdons' advice, Oney traveled to Greenland, a town about eight miles from Portsmouth, and hid there. Unable to locate her, Bassett once
again returned empty-handed. In December 1799, only three months after this last attempt to capture her, Washington died, and Oney was never bothered again. Although Washington designated in his will that all 124 of his legally owned slaves be freed upon his wife's death, two years later on January 1, 1801, Martha Washington decided to grant freedom to all of them and to the one enslaved individual she owned outright. None of the other 153 dower slaves could be freed by the Washingtons without reimbursement to the Custis estate, which Martha was unwilling or unable to make, and they were distributed among Martha's heirs.
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Washington's promise to free Oney upon his death was a deception. As a dower slave, Oney could not be granted her freedom by the Washingtons unless they purchased it for her, and there were no instructions in his will to compensate the Custis estate for her release. Faced with the prospect of lifelong slavery, Oney Judge fled the most powerful man in the United States, defied his attempts to trick her back into slavery, and lived out a better life. After her successful attempt became widely known, she was a celebrity of sorts. Her escape from the Washingtons fascinated journalists, writers, and others, but more important, it was an inspiration to the abolition movement and other African Americans who were being enslaved by whites.

Oney lived another fifty years, and though poor, she thrived in ways she could not have under slavery. She learned to read, although teaching literacy to blacks was illegal in many states. Through her talents as a seamstress she became self-employed and, to some degree, independent. She eventually married a sailor, Jack Staines, had three children, and enjoyed the luxury of being active in her community. She died in New Hampshire on February 25, 1848, 75 years old, still a fugitive from the president's house, but
free
.

From Oney Judge's successful escape from slavery to Barack Obama's successful election to the presidency, African Americans' engagement with the White House has been a story of unheard journeys, unheralded struggles, and unacknowledged efforts for full political, economic, and cultural equality and citizenship. The saga of the White House and the politics of the presidents who have occupied it is also the saga of the nation's racial history and struggles. The black history of the White House begins in the pre-revolutionary period during which future occupants of the White House first laid the foundation of what was to become more than two centuries of race-based cruelty, exclusion, and violence.

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Well, I think white men were 100 percent of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100 percent of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100 percent of people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Probably close to 100 percent of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks. . . .
—Pat Buchanan on the
Rachel Maddow Show
, July16, 2009

Of course, there never would have been a White House or a United States if the rebellion against Great Britain had failed. The American Revolution, a rebuke to the oppressive regime of England's King George, claimed to be driven by the principle of equality and freedom for all, but in fact embodied all the contradictions of a society destructively divided by race, contradictions that would haunt the nation and the White House for centuries. Buchanan disingenuously and shamelessly ignores
the fact that black slave labor and the murderous theft of native lands were the foundation of the U.S. economy. And not only did the labor and land resources of people of color build the economy, but black hands literally built the country's most important national symbols: the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and the city of Washington, D.C., itself.

Despite Pat Buchanan's inaccurate, crude, and brazenly racialized (and gendered) view of the history of the United States, there was a black presence at the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution. It was a presence of shame manifest in the people of color who accompanied their white enslavers at gatherings where plans to overthrow British rule and create a new nation were formulated. The black personae at these monumental moments of U.S. history included, for example, Richard and Jesse: The former served Thomas Jefferson his tea each evening as he sat and wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776; the latter rode postilion along Jefferson's journey to the Second Continental Congress. They included Billy Lee, who attended to George Washington's “every need day in and day out for the better part of the general's life” and who served Washington during the deliberations over the Constitution.
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James Madison, flustered and embarrassed by his enslavement of blacks, chose not to bring any of his slaves to the Constitutional Convention. In spite of his shame and public condemnation of slavery as “evil,” President Madison, like many of the early U.S. presidents, died a slave owner.

Despite slavery, African Americans did play a role in the founding of the nation beyond just laboring for the founding fathers and mothers. Blacks were involved in the revolutionary movement as activists and leaders. Historian Douglas Egerton notes that in New York, Joseph Allicocke, a man of mixed race,
played such a key role in the Stamp Act riots that he was dubbed a “general” of the Sons of Liberty, a key prewar guerrilla band.
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Further, Allicocke and other Sons met and planned their revolt at the Queen's Head, a tavern owed by “Black Sam” Fraunces, a mixed-raced Jamaican.
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If he really knew his history, Pat Buchanan might have also noted that John Adams himself referred to Christopher “Crispus” Attucks, a fugitive from slavery who was of black and Nantucket Indian heritage, as the first “martyr” of the American Revolution.
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On March 5, 1770, a crowd of angry colonists gathered near Boston's Old State House after a British sentry hit a boy. After a season of protests against Britain's oppressive tax policies, British soldiers were a familiar and unwanted sight, and some in the crowd began to taunt the soldiers stationed there. Eight soldiers found themselves pelted by snowballs and rocks from a crowd that included Attucks. Outnumbered and nervous, the soldiers fired into the crowd. When the smoke cleared, Attucks, rope maker Samuel Gray, and sailor James Caldwell lay dead or dying, and two others, leather worker Patrick Carr and joiner's apprentice Samuel Maverick, died later. At least six others were wounded. The killings would become infamous as the “Boston Massacre,” an incident that helped spark the Revolution.

Attucks, a fugitive from slavery would have been wise to allow others to taunt the British soldiers, whose presence was not only an affront to the sovereignty of the colonies but also an economic drain on the local economy, as soldiers took jobs that the city's underemployed and unemployed, including Attucks, felt they deserved. His sense of injustice, however, drew him out in protest and put him on the front line of a tragic confrontation. Attucks and the others killed by the soldiers were taken to Boston's Faneuil Hall, where they lay in state for three
days. They were buried as heroes March 8, and approximately 10,000 people gathered to honor them by following the funeral procession to the Granary Burying Ground, Boston's third-oldest cemetery.

Though he would later become a committed abolitionist and revolutionary, John Adams successfully defended the British soldiers in court and referred to the group that was attacked as a mixture of “saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack-tarrs.”
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Thirty years later, Adams would be the new nation's second president, the first to command from the newly built chief executive's residence in the District of Columbia—the building we would come to know as the White House.

The White House was born from the Revolution and embodied all of its triumphs, contradictions, and flaws, particularly those regarding racial relations and power. Understanding the black history of the White House requires an exploration of the racial culture and politics that fundamentally shaped the nation.

Revolution and the Failure to End Slavery

Three central documents emerged that shaped the new nation and defined the principles upon which it was built: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution. At decisive moments, these writings served to unite and brace the revolutionaries who were committed to supplanting Britain's rule with a new system rooted in principles operative in few other countries at the time, i.e., one in which those residents recognizing the documents' language would be citizens rather than subjects, individuals whose rights would be respected and enshrined in law rather than violated arbitrarily by those in power. Indeed, democratic participation by these citizens would rule rather than absolute religious or monarchical authority.
More than half the population—women, slaves, blacks, indigenous people, and for the most part, men who did not own property—were not recognized in these founding documents and were not granted the same rights as the property-owning white men—many of whom owned hundreds of slaves—who wrote the documents and would soon run the new country.