The National Mall, Slavery, and U.S. Presidents
People come from everywhere to visit the National Mall, but there is a lot about our nation’s capital that most people do not know. According to historians, the National Mall was the best place in town to sell slaves. Africans were herded across the mall, some heading to Virginia for sale, and others toward the slave pens and markets surrounding the area. One of the most well-known slave markets here was the Yellow House.
It was a three-story brick building painted yellow and owned by a man named William H. Williams. He made so much money that he was able to purchase two slave ships called the Tribune and the Uncas. Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Washington, D.C., described the conditions he experienced in a book called: “Twelve Years A Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, A Citizen of New York Kidnapped in Washing ton in 1841 and Rescued in 1853 from a Cotton Plantation Near Red River in Louisiana.”
Northrup wrote that the Yellow House was a dark, damp place with underground rooms and iron bars on the windows. The arms and legs of the slaves were chained. The other slave pens in Washington included the St. Charles Hotel, Robey’s Slave Pen and Tavern where the slavehold ers wined and dined while enslaved Africans suffered. There was a very brutal case of a female slave who was beaten without mercy. Her cries were heard throughout the slave pens. The book called “The Hidden History of Washington, D.C. written by Tingba Apdita sheds light of this history that so many Americans have not been introduced to in our country.
President George Washington was a major slaveholder. His home in Virginia was a prime breeder of Blacks for the domestic slave trade. Washing ton held a large number of children as slaves. He gave them such names as Lame Alice, Jupiter, Hercules, Paris-Boy, Sambo, Winny, House Sall, Caesar, and Cupid. Washington sold and bought slaves. He even raffled off children. In his struggle to control his slaves, he used violence. He left it up to his overseers to give out the punishment. The whip was used often.
The more slaves a person owned, led to owning more land and greater wealth. The most devastating impact of enslavement was the destruction of family life, and Washington contributed to this with the division of Black families at Mount Vernon.
Half of the Black men did not live with their families. The women and children lived in separate areas. On his property, there was not a single intact family. In the book “An Imperfect God, George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencer, the following statement appears: “From time-to time Washington responded to individual pleas and rescinded orders that would have separated spouses, but as a general management practice he institutionalized an indifference to the stability of the slave families.”
George Washington was not the only president to own slaves. The list of president slaveholders included: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Andrew John son, Ulysses S. Grant. James Madison proposed the three-fifths compromise which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of taxation and legislative representation. Madison did not free his slaves in his will.
At the end of his life, Washington did leave provisions to free his slaves. His wife freed them within a year of his death. Although Washington expressed regrets on owning slaves later in life, the record he left behind as a slaveholder contributed to the destruction of many black lives. Despite the enslavement history of Washington, D.C. African Americans have made tremendous contributions to the U.S. Capitol.
The Capitol Building would not exist as we know it today with out slave craftsmanship and labor. Records show that slaves made up a good portion of the labor pool that worked on the Capitol. They cleared trees, baked bricks used for building foundation walls, worked in the Virginia quarries where the sandstone was cut, and laid the stones that held up the Capitol building that we see today.
Constance McLaughlin Green in her book “The Secret City: Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital” pointed out that slaves rebuilt many of the buildings in Washington that were destroyed by the British in 1814 including the White House.”