Slavery in the District of Columbia

It was not until the departure of the legislators from the seceding states that Congress could pass in 1862 the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act.

Some slave owners, rather than manumitting (freeing) their enslaved workers for this small compensation, took them to Virginia and more profitably sold them there, which was completely legal.

Abolitionists, led by Massachusetts Representative and former President John Quincy Adams, focused on eliminating slavery in the District.

The drive to eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia was a major component in the anti-slavery campaign that led to the Civil War.

Congress, under the leadership of former president John Quincy Adams, now Representative from strongly anti-slavery Massachusetts, was flooded with many petitions for action on the subject.

Each state could determine whether slavery was permitted, and make such laws to govern the enslaved and the slave trade as it saw fit.

While the federal government could have regulated the extensive interstate commerce in enslaved people that emerged after 1808, there was not support for this in Congress, controlled by Southerners until 1861.

[9] William Lloyd Garrison began, on January 1, 1831, what would be the principal organ and community bulletin board of the American abolitionist movement, The Liberator.

Though it is the Seat of our National Government, open to the daily inspection of foreign ambassadors, and ostensibly opulent with the congregated wisdom, virtue, and intelligence of the land, yet a fouler spot scarcely exists on earth.

[11] Dr. Reuben Crandall, after a jury trial, was acquitted of the charge of distributing abolitionist literature in the District, which was a crime under federal law.

One day I went to see the "slaves' pen"—a wretched hovel, "right against" the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening.

The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its owner (a man of the name of Robey) and his unfortunate victims.

It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet [3 to 4 meters] in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air.

At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared, looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze; the weather being extremely hot.

In this wretched hovel, all colors, except white--the only guilty one—both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to all the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion.

The inmates of the gaol, of this class I mean, are even worse treated; some of them, if my informants are to be believed, having been actually frozen to death, during the inclement winters which often prevail in the country.

Within sight of the Capitol, not far from the lower gate, and near, if not upon, the land where the public garden now is, was a building with a large yard around it, enclosed with a high fence.

[13]Overwhelmed with the number of petitions arriving, the House of Representatives set up a Select Committee to consider what to do, headed by Rep. Henry L. Pinckney of South Carolina.

The Committee endorsed the House's existing position that Congress had no authority to interfere in any way with slavery in the District of Columbia, or in any state.

In March 1840, both houses of the Legislature of Massachusetts passed a group of "Resolves" (Resolutions) calling for Congress to use its Constitutional authority and immediately end slavery and the slave trade in the District, and prohibit interstate commerce in enslaved persons.

[16] Garrison, who reproduced the now-rare pamphlet on the front page of his newspaper The Liberator,[17] described this as a victory, the first time any government anywhere in the United States had taken an official position calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.

Maryland freed its enslaved in 1864, and Missouri early in 1865, but those in Delaware and Kentucky were not liberated until the national ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865, seven months after the end of the Civil War.