From the Philadelphia Inquirer, on 11 July 2002, Jane Eisner reported "How to tell Philadelphia slavery story" -- The story of slavery in Philadelphia will be told. That much seems certain.
Now that a House committee voted Tuesday to "appropriately commemorate" the eight slaves who toiled in President Washington's official residence near Independence Hall, the National Park Service is sure to comply.
This uncomfortable paradox of history - that, just steps away from the birthplace of freedom, the father of freedom owned other human beings - can no longer be brushed aside.
But as historians argue over how to tell the story of Washington's slaves, it's worth remembering another occasion on which controversy over slavery made headlines and jarred sensibilities in this Northern city. What happened a century and a half ago may have a telling message for today.
For about a month in 1855, John Hill Wheeler became perhaps the most famous slaveholder in the United States, all because of an escaped slave and a notorious trial in Philadelphia.
I read of Wheeler in the fascinating introduction written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates to The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts. Gates purchased the narrative at auction and vigorously authenticated that it was, indeed, written by an escaped slave just before the Civil War. He concluded that the "Mr. Wheeler" in the narrative was John Hill Wheeler of Washington and North Carolina, a federal bureaucrat and plantation owner who was a staunch - and, in the end, foolhardy - defender of the entire system of slavery.
Wheeler, it turns out, was no match for Jane Johnson, the slave who accompanied him when he sailed into Philadelphia on July 18, 1855. Johnson, traveling with her two sons, had wanted to escape and sent a message to William Still, a free black man who ran the Underground Railroad. Still and Passmore Williamson, a white abolitionist, met Johnson and her sons on the boat and implored her to leave with them.
"If you prefer freedom to slavery, as we suppose everybody does," Still told her, "you have the chance to accept it now. Act calmly - don't be frightened by your master - you are as much entitled to your freedom as we are, or as he is."
Wheeler was the one who was frightened - and furious. When he tried to stop Johnson's escape, a minor scuffle ensued, and Williamson put his hands on Wheeler. That was enough to get them all charged with riot, forcible abduction, and assault.
Not only that, but Wheeler also filed a civil and a criminal complaint against the men who, he contended, violated the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act by "stealing" Johnson, his "property." The trial was a cause célèbre - especially when Jane Johnson made a daring appearance in court. In the end, Johnson stayed free, and Still was acquitted, though Williamson spent a much-publicized three months in jail.
Perhaps most important, Wheeler failed spectacularly in his claim that, even in Philadelphia, the slaves were his property. "The trial forced Northerners to address the troublesome issue of slavery brought onto Northern territories," says local historian William C. Kashatus.
It may also change the way we tell the Philadelphia story of slavery. It's not only a tale of victimization and indignity. It's also a tale of courageous human beings - slave and free - taking history into their own hands.
Years before Washington and his slaves came to live on Market Street, Benjamin Franklin carried a petition to the Continental Congress to abolish slavery. The antislavery society he helped establish in 1775 - the same one Passmore Williamson later belonged to - still is in existence today.
In fact, two of the eight slaves owned by Washington made daring escapes before their owner returned to Virginia.
David Moltke-Hansen, president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, says scholars have come a long way from viewing slaves merely as infantilized victims, stripped of personality and humanity. "There's a good deal of discussion now about how slaves negotiated space for themselves, asserted themselves," he says. "But the popular imagination hasn't caught up with that."
Archaeologists working on the site for the new Liberty Bell Center uncovered the remains of an ice house from the mansion used by Presidents George Washington and John Adams while Philadelphia was the nation's capital from 1790-1800.
The mansion, which belonged to Robert Morris, was demolished in 1832. It was located on what is now the 500 block of Market Street, near the site of the current Liberty Bell Pavilion. The Liberty Bell will be moved to Sixth and Chestnut Streets, as part of the project to revitalize Independence Mall. The interpretive area for the Liberty Bell will run along Sixth Street and will end at what was the rear of the Morris Mansion property.
Prior to the start of construction, federal law requires the NPS to conduct a thorough archeological investigation of the construction area. If we find archeological features that will be damaged or destroyed during the construction process, we are required to fully excavate them. If the features will not be harmed by the construction, standard archeological practice and NPS regulations require the features and their contents be preserved in place. This allows for preservation of the feature plus the opportunity for excavation by future archeologists with potentially better techniques and technology.
Morris Ice House Pits
During these archeological investigations we identified a total of nine shaft features within the footprint of the new Liberty Bell Center (LBC). Five of these were completely excavated as they are located within the planned basement mechanical room space (which extends only partially under the building) for the LBC. These five features yielded some 30,000 items that are presently being processed and catalogued. Based on preliminary analysis, no items related to distinctive African American cultural practices were found within these five features. The other four features, including the well-publicized remains of the icehouse, are slated for in-place preservation in accordance with the NPS policy and archeological practice cited above. Contrary to the impression one might get from what has previously appeared in print, other than the above cited ice house, there were no other features directly tied to the Morris Mansion encountered during our archeological excavations. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied this site given the significant level of development that took place in Block One during the 19th Century. Implications that "the old slave quarters" have been uncovered, or deliberately not excavated, as part of this process, are incorrect.
While the LBC archeology did not yield any information directly tied to distinctive African American cultural practices, over one million items were excavated from the third block of Independence Mall. Analysis of these artifacts will add to our knowledge of a very diverse population, including African Americans, who lived in this section of Philadelphia.
The Morris Mansion was used as the Executive Mansion by Presidents Washington and Adams when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. At the site, the NPS will interpret several aspects of the house, including its use by two presidents and the people in the household, including slaves owned by George Washington. We also plan to denote along the sidewalk of Market Street the approximate location of the Morris Mansion. There are no plans to rebuild the Morris Mansion. While the National Park Service did reconstruct several buildings, such as the Declaration House and the City Tavern, during the early 1970s, current policies no longer permit us to do so. Moreover, we have no intention to outline at full-scale the floor plan of the Morris Mansion as some have suggested, not only because it remains conjecture, but because we genuinely believe it would be confusing rather than revelatory.
Independence National Historical Park (INHP) has long recognized both the existence of the Morris Mansion and the slaves in Washington’s household while he served as president. The story of slavery in our nation is a story told throughout INHP. We tell the story at the Liberty Bell, named by abolitionists, and at Independence Hall, the site of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the 3/5ths Compromise. During our walking tours, rangers speak of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration and slave owner, and of Benjamin Franklin, a former slave owner turned ardent abolitionist.
Other sites at INHP where slavery is noted include Congress Hall, site of debates over slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act; Franklin Court, with samples of ads in the Pennsylvania Gazette regarding runaway slaves and selling slaves; the Treasurer’s Office in Old City Hall where people would submit paperwork to sue for freedom; the Second Bank of the United States, with its interpretation of Moses Williams, the physiognotrace artist, as well as portraits of the nation’s founders whose views on race and slavery ranged the entire spectrum, and the New Hall Military Museum, which discusses the colored troops in the military. In the future, the Independence Park Institute, the park’s educational facility to be built on Independence Mall, will tell the stories of the struggle for freedom and the fight against slavery to school children and life long learners.
Our interpretation of life in 18th Century Philadelphia also deals with slaves, as part of the diversity that existed in Philadelphia at the time. Beyond 1800, a number of sites within INHP have a direct relationship with the Underground Railroad, from Independence Square, where Frederick Douglass preached his abolitionist oratory, to Carpenters’ Hall, where the First Continental Congress banned the further import of slaves to the colonies. In 2000, INHP submitted an amendment to the National Register of Historic Places to obtain recognition for these and other sites in the struggle against slavery. Former NPS Director Robert Stanton launched the National Underground Railroad network at a press conference on Independence Square.
The Deshler-Morris House in Germantown, Philadelphia, PA
The Deshler-Morris House in Germantown is the oldest surviving presidential residence in the nation. While not adjacent to the Liberty Bell, the Deshler-Morris House is an intact, complete residence where Washington held state dinners and cabinet meetings, and where the slaves of his household also lived. With the current emphasis on heritage tourism in the region, the Deshler-Morris House could well be one of the "crown jewels" of an area rich in historic sites.
While the stories of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall are part of our heritage of freedom, we know it is also our task to tell the stories of those who were not free. We will continue to tell that story throughout the park and at the Robert Morris Mansion site. (source: The National Park Service)
Statue of President George Washington Outside of Independence Hall
From the New York Times, "Reopening a House That’s Still Divided," by Edward Rothsetin -- PHILADELPHIA — The convulsive currents that roil the telling of American history have become so familiar that they now seem an inseparable part of the story itself. Here is a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition of human equality, that, for much of its first century of life, countenanced slavery, institutionally supported it and economically profited from it. The years that followed have been marked by repair, reform and reversals; recompense, recrimination and reinterpretation. Extraordinary ideals and achievements have been countered by extraordinary failings and flaws, only to be countered yet again, each turn yielding another round of debates.
Constance the Constitution Cow, Philadelphia, PA
And here, in this city where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were signed; where a $300 million Independence National Historical Park has been created, leading from the National Constitution Center to Independence Hall; and where the Liberty Bell, as a symbol of the nation’s ideals, draws well over a million visitors a year, a great opportunity existed to explore these primal tensions more closely on a site adjacent to the Liberty Bell Center in Independence park. Unfortunately, those opportunities have been squandered in “The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” which opens on Wednesday.
It is almost painful, given the importance of this site, to point out that the result is more a monument to these unresolved tensions than a commemoration of anything else. After $10.5 million and more than eight years; after tugs of war between the city and the National Park Service and black community organizations; after the establishment of a contentious oversight committee and street demonstrations, overturned conceptions and racial debates, it bears all the scars of its creation, lacking both intellectual coherence and emotional power. On Wednesday the Park Service takes over the site with its work cut out for it, since rangers will have to weave the competing strands together.
Public Restrooms on the site of the President's House in Philadelphia, PA
But consider what opportunities there were. The construction of a new $9 million exhibition space for the Liberty Bell drew attention to this adjacent site, where the nation’s first two presidents — George Washington and John Adams — had lived between 1790 and 1800, when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital.
The house had long ago been demolished — much of it in the 1830s — and in the 1950s the site, near Sixth and Market Streets, was the location of a public restroom. But the house was once one of the grandest mansions in Philadelphia. Its inhabitants included Richard Penn (grandson of the Pennsylvania colony’s founder); the British general William Howe (who occupied Philadelphia while Washington’s army licked its wounds in Valley Forge); Benedict Arnold (who may have begun his espionage here); and Robert Morris (a financier of the Revolution). All vanished history.
Then, in an illuminating 2002 article in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the historian Edward Lawler Jr. mapped out the house and its probable dimensions, and pointed out the irony that just steps from the new Liberty Bell Center was a site that had once sheltered Washington’s slaves.
George Washington's Statue, Outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Park Service contested some of his conclusions and refused to outline the footprint of the lost President’s House in its designs for the center. But the issue was soon taken up by scholars, including Gary B. Nash, author of the new book “The Liberty Bell,” as well as by political activists like the lawyer Michael Coard and his Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, who argued that the existence of slave quarters adjacent to the city’s paean to liberty demanded major commemoration.
There was a cascade of events, chronicled by The Philadelphia Inquirer, including Congressional legislation and financing, city oversight and funds, an expansion of the Liberty Bell exhibition, the establishment of an oversight committee and the solicitation of redesigns. In 2007 an archaeological dig began, revealing the foundation and the remains of a tunnel once used by servants and slaves. The dig, viewed by the public, ignited debate.
Washington ultimately took nine slaves to Philadelphia from Mount Vernon, where more than 200 slaves were held. And they were part of a household staff that may have numbered two dozen, including white indentured laborers and servants. Though the slaves were part of a population of nearly 4,000 others in Philadelphia, there were also more than 6,500 free blacks in the city in 1790, and Washington’s slaves were exposed to the experience of liberty.
George Washington's Statue, Outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
We know some astonishing details about the effects. Ona Judge (here called Oney), a servant to Martha Washington, and Hercules, the household cook, both escaped to freedom.
Some of Washington’s most unattractive characteristics also emerge. He and Martha Washington pursue Judge for years, though she later establishes herself with her own family in New Hampshire. And though Washington expressed his opposition to slavery, and freed his own slaves in his will, he went through bizarre machinations to ensure that the slaves he took to the nation’s capital would not be subject to local laws granting them freedom after six months. He exchanged them with others at Mount Vernon, issuing instructions: “I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public.”
So here we not only have the father of our country showing his darkest side, we also see the foundations of the nation at their darkest. Yet here is where Washington invented the executive branch, conducting affairs of state. Here is where it became clear that a democratic ruler was no king, had no claim on his dwelling place and was himself meant to serve the people.
How, then, should such a site be developed? A 2005 call for designs stressed that it would have to pay attention to many themes: the house, its workers, the executive branch, African-American Philadelphia, escapes to freedom. In addition, it noted that community discussions led to five “cultural values” that should be clear: identity, memory, agency, dignity, truth. There was also a requirement that the site be open 24/7 to visitors.
As ultimately designed by Kelly/Maiello, the site is a space bounded by a low wall roughly outlining the footprint of the house (but often departing from it), marked by protruding rectangular slabs into which are inserted mock fireplaces and video screens. In the house’s heart, a transparent wall allows visitors to view the archaeological work in progress. And attached to the walls are either long panels surveying historical themes — the executive branch, slavery in the President’s House — or rudimentary illustrations. A few show the escape of Judge, a few give some glimpse of foreign policy in the house (protests over the Jay Treaty with England), and more give some sense of slavery (including Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act, which put all escaped slaves in danger).
“History is not neat,” we read. “It is complicated and messy. It is about people, places and events that are both admirable and deplorable.” And the President’s House, we are told, “exposes the core contradiction at the founding of this nation: enshrinement of liberty and the institution of slavery.”
But what precisely is being exposed? A few yards away, the Liberty Bell Center discusses abolition and slavery; the park’s visitor center has an exhibition about the Underground Railroad; the nearby African American History Museum has a powerful audio and video history of blacks in Philadelphia. Accounts of slavery are even found at Mount Vernon.
Here, though, we get neither a sense of the place, nor a sense of the issues (and much of the year, the open air will be inhospitable). We don’t learn about the differences between Washington and Adams. We don’t learn much about the pictured events. There is no real narrative. Illustrations can also be melodramatically contentious: we see a seemingly disdainful Washington dangling a “peace medal” before a suspicious Seneca Indian leader
As for slave life, it is also difficult to piece together. The video screens that come to life above the fake mantels give the impression of a half-finished 21st-century home. The videos themselves (with scripts by Lorene Cary), in which slaves and servants provide first-person accounts of experiences, at least provide some sense of life. But how do we put these experiences in context? What was Philadelphia’s free black community like? How did white workers and black slaves live together here?
We are told that the President’s House “offers an opportunity to draw lessons from the past.” But what lessons? That Washington was flawed? That slavery was an abomination? Are these revelations? A memorial to the practice of slavery is mounted here, inscribed with the names of African tribes from which slaves derived, but it has no particular relationship to Philadelphia or this site. The need for some such memorial is keen, but here it seems thumped down as an intrusion.
So what is learned? Not what makes this site special, but what makes it ordinary; not the foundations of what led to the overcoming of slavery, but a sense of its enduring presence. Would this display be any different if presidents had not lived here? And would our understanding be any different without it?
“The President’s House” opens on Wednesday in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia; phila.gov/presidentshouse. [source: New York Times]
RON'S RANT: Here is a presentation that exposes the disjointedly amateurishness of the Slaves at the President's House in Philadelphia. Everything about this presentation is painful to watch, the lighting is bad, the audio is bad, the powerpoint is bad and preparation is a big WTF didn't ANYBODY prepare their remarks!
I visited this site a couple of weeks ago with my family (Middle of May in 2012). The above New York Times article, expresses my disappointment in the execution and presentation of the narration. George and Martha Washington's slaves follow the trajectory of American History. They are like the "Forrest Gump" of slaves. They served George Washington's family before the Revolution, his body servant was like his sidekick in all of the battles that George Washington fought. They show-up in Martha Washington's correspondence with Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison. George Washington kept impeccable records regarding his slave property. Martha Washington's dowry slaves became the slaves of General Robert E. Lee in Arlington, Virginia.
The group that did the President's House Project needed to do more research at Mount Vernon and Arlington National Cemetery -- I'll bet that the remains of the dead slaves are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The slaves of George and Martha Washington are some of the most documented enslaved people in the USA. How and Why the committee didn't do their research baffles me for sure.
The slaves of George and Martha Washington tell a great story of American History from the French and Indian Wars through the Civil War (remember Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania, too). Why was this group chosen to tell their story so poorly? Nobody can say it was about money. I'm a nobody from nowhere, flat broke and I don't earn a freaken dime from this site, but it's a labor of love. I do my homework and research to try to add heat as well as light to the story of slavery. I do this for NOTHING, yet these clowns waste millions upon millions of dollars to produce a disappointing mishmash of history. -- Ron Edwards, US Slave Blog
History as Cultural Work: The President's House Project in Philadelphia
Louis Massiah, founder and director of Scribe Video Center, will talk about the five-channel video installation that will be part of the President's House site at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia, slated to open in December 2010.
These dramatic vignettes look at the lives of the nine enslaved Africans brought to Philadelphia by George and Martha Washington during the first presidency (1790-1797) and the resistance of the free African American community, and explore the contradictions of freedom and slavery in establishing a new nation.
Special Guests: Karen Warrington, Member of the Project Oversight Committee and Director of Communications for U.S. Congressman Bob Brady; Lorene Cary, Scriptwriter; Novella Nelson, Actor; Beth Warshafsky, Digital Media Painter and Computer Graphics Art Director; and W. Tre Davis, Actor.
History as Cultural Work: The President's House Project in Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Inquirer culture writer, Stephan Salisbury, reports "Glitches bedevil President's House," on 25 September 2011:
The President's House is broken.
That should not come as a surprise to most of the tens of thousands of visitors who have passed through the exhibition and slavery memorial on Independence Mall.
More often than not, they've been greeted by blank video screens.
In fact, since "The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation" opened to the public in December 2010, key elements of the exhibition have not functioned properly.
The video screens, which tell much of the story of enslaved Africans associated with the site, repeatedly have shuddered and died. The large glass box that encloses archaeological remains of the house where George Washington and John Adams served most of their presidencies and where Washington held nine enslaved Africans has fogged up and leaked.
Officials at Independence National Historical Park, steward of the exhibition, say the city, as construction manager, is responsible for shepherding repairs.
City officials say they are chagrined.
"It's an embarrassment," said Gary Knappick, deputy commissioner of public property, who hastened to add that when repairs are made, the city is determined "to get it right, and get it right the first time."
Repairs may be on the way, but visitors have been complaining for months.
"People, visitors to the site, have been concerned because the videos were not operating," said Karen Warrington, director of communications for U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa.) and a member of the committee that oversaw development and construction of the site.
The finicky screens have been swapped out, in some cases repeatedly, but replacements haven't worked any better.
The problem is highly technical, Knappick noted, but can be summarized succinctly: The President's House environment is too hot and wet for the current video configuration.
Emanuel Kelly, principal of Kelly/Maeillo Architects & Planners, designer and builder of the President's House exhibition, said the pace of repairs had been slowed by complicated warranty coverage on various parts and by less-than-enlightening responses from far-flung subcontractors. Late summer's relentless rain did not help.
He said he persisted in trying to get the original units to function, and they just as persistently refused to do so.
Different parts of the video system are covered by different warranties, and no single manufacturer could be held responsible when a screen went dark, Kelly said.
So who would be on the hook for non-warranty costs?
"Probably we are," Kelly said, adding that he didn't yet know what those costs would be.
After months of tinkering, architect, park, and city officials met in August and agreed that complete replacement of the screens seemed appropriate.
"They were giving it such a college try to make what was there work," Knappick said. The city, to nudge things along, suggested an outside evaluation, and Kelly agreed.
In the evaluation, Kelly said, "we found the design and manufacturing were flawed"; tests on how the original units would perform in the face of "water and heat were not all done before bringing these units to site."
A new test screen, made by a different manufacturer, will be installed, possibly by late November, Knappick said. If it works, all the screens will then be replaced. The new units, manufactured in California, will not sit flush with the exhibition's masonry elements, which will help prevent the electrical components from overheating.
If the demo screen works correctly, replacing all the screens will take perhaps three months, Knappick said.
The problems with leakage at the glass archaeological box, Kelly said, "are minor."
The glass began fogging as soon as the site opened, largely because of moisture within the excavated area. Dehumidification equipment seemed to be improving that situation.
Then, on July 3, the top of the box fractured, and now leaks have appeared within what is supposed to be a dry area.
Knappick said the city brought in a consultant who determined the glass fractured because of a "rare" manufacturing flaw.
The California manufacturer will ship replacement panels within the week, and Knappick said installation should be complete by mid-October.
There also have been leaks through the seals between the glass panels, which Knappick said have been repaired. Other leaks have been traced to an area near the foot of the glass box. Water has been seeping through a weatherproof barrier beneath and making its way into the excavated area below.
"We're waiting for dry weather" to repair that leak, Knappick said, adding that the repairs might be completed in the next week. Kelly added that "you need at least two days of dry weather" in order to effect the repairs, which should not be costly.
There are reports of other possible water issues inside the archaeological area, but examination of them also awaits drier weather, according to park officials.
Once the site is functioning as intended, it will be transferred completely to the care of Independence National Historical Park.
"We're doing the best we can under the conditions," Kelly said.
Fergus M. Bordewich writes: Seventy-five years old, with less than two years left to live, and in almost constant pain from a variety of ailments, Stevens focused his efforts on a new amendment to the Constitution, the Fourteenth, which would prohibit states from abridging equality before the law, and bar former Confederates from office and from voting in national elections until 1870. Although Stevens felt that the measure did not go far enough, it would totally change the states’ relationship to the federal government, by making it explicit that Americans were citizens of their nation first, and of their respective states second, and that states were therefore bound to abide by federal law. It was a truly revolutionary measure in the South where, in the pre-war effort to suppress criticism of slavery, states had passed laws limiting freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, and even imposing censorship of the U.S. mail.
THE RADICALS WERE APPALLED when they realized that Lincoln’s successor, Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson, intended to allow the rebel states to speedily reenter the Union, without significant punishment of rebel leaders, or plans to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, the President permitted elected assemblies of former Confederates to enact new laws designed to reduce freedmen to semi-slavery, as anti-black rioting swept Southern cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead. Stevens had himself carried in a chair onto the floor of the House, and in a voice so weak that his colleagues had to crowd around him to hear him, he pleaded with his colleagues to consider what was at stake in the South. “While the South has been bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there, white or black, either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property,” he whispered. Stevens got what he wanted, and federal troops returned to the South. It is said that the speech was one of the few ever delivered in Congress that resulted in the changing of votes on the spot. Stevens’s last battle was a losing one, however. He led the effort to impeach Johnson for firing the Radical members in his cabinet, a movement that failed—by a single vote—to oust the president from office.
Thaddeus Stevens
“Stevens was ahead of his time because he truly believed in racial equality,” Says Hans Trefousse, author of “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian”. “Without Stevens, the effects of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage to the freedmen, would have been impossible.” Although he would not live to see the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, no one had worked harder or longer to make it a reality. Says Trefoussse, “In practice, those amendments were effectively nullified in the South, in the years after the end of Reconstruction. But they were still in the law. In the twentieth century, they would remind Americans of what they had once stood for: they were still there as the standard that the nation had set for itself.”
Thaddeus Stevens
The North won the Civil War, but lost the remembrance of it. By 1877, federal troops had been completely withdrawn from the South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were systematically undone by a combination of harsh discriminatory laws and the terrorism of vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The South, and indeed most of the nation, slumped into almost a century of entrenched racism and institutionalized segregation. In the memory of a country committed to reconciliation at the expense of the rights of African-Americans’ rights, there was little place for the furious idealism of an egalitarian like Stevens.
The nadir in Stevens’s reputation was reached with D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film “The Birth of A Nation,” a Civil War epic which heroized the Klan, and smeared blacks as clownish and lascivious monsters whose freedom endangered American democracy. (President Woodrow Wilson liked the film so much that he gave it a private showing at the White House.) Stevens was portrayed as a vengeful hypocrite, plotting with his diabolical black mistress to instigate a race war against helpless Southern whites. Someone who learned about Stevens only from the film might have supposed that he and Lydia Hamilton Smith were the source of all the nation’s racial problems. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, James Buchanan’s stock steadily rose, at least in Lancaster, and in the 1930's Wheatland was restored to its luxurious mid-nineteenth century splendor. When the Lancaster Historical Society published a guidebook to important sites in the city’s downtown, in 1962, Stevens’s home wasn’t even included on the map.
Law Office and Home of Thaddeus Stevens, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1868
AS SNOWFLAKES SWIRLED and danced over the streets of Lancaster, Jim Delle and I walked through the row house where Thaddeus Stevens lived, just a block from Penn Square where in times gone by crowds of supporters once roared to his surging oratory. The years have taken a heavy toll. The house’s modest Georgian facade has been covered over with ugly white modern bricks, and a garage door has been punched through the front of Stevens’s front parlor. Decrepit industrial carpeting, broken plaster, and scrawled graffiti cast a mournful pall through his one-time law office. Behind the house, Delle scraped the snow off the sheet of plywood that covered the broken crown of the cistern, and we climbed down into it on an aluminum ladder. In the dank brick compartment, Delle pointed out the small aperture through which fugitives had crawled from the tunnel that led to the tavern basement next door. The cistern was more than an exotic hiding place. It was physical proof of Stevens’s personal commitment not just to the abstract principle of emancipation, but in the most personal way possible to the men and women who suffered under slavery.
Wheatland - Home of James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States
Wheatland was built by William Jenkins, a lawyer, who built and named the Federal mansion in 1828. Buchanan purchased the property - three tracts totalling 22.45 acres (90,900 m2), including the mansion and several outbuildings, in December 1848 from William Morris Meredith, a Philadelphia lawyer.Buchanan resided here on occasion as President and after his term until his death
I kept thinking of the fiery, iron-willed, silver-tongued man who had made this refuge possible, at a time when harboring fugitive slaves was a federal crime. He had died thinking himself a failure. But he had paved the way for the civil rights advances of the twentieth century. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nation would have to learn again the lesson that Stevens tried to teach in the 1860's, that the rights of African-Americans could only be protected by the power, and occasionally the armed force, of the federal government. Had land been distributed to the ex-slaves as Stevens wished, the nation might well have been spared much of the shameful racial history that followed, and might instead have created a stable, economically and politically independent black middle class. After generations of neglect, however, his greatest work, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, still lay waiting for Americans to rediscover their meaning, and they became the foundation upon which was erected virtually all the civil rights legislation that reshaped the country since the 1960's.
Whether enough of Stevens’s home survives intact to become a museum dedicated to him and to the regional activities of the Underground Railroad, as local preservationists wish, is still an open question. Developers agreed after considerable local protest to leave about half of Stevens’s house standing, but they maintain that the rest must be leveled to make room for the new convention center. “We can’t just walk away from this house,” says Randy Harris, the former director of the Lancaster Preservation Trust, who has fought to prevent the demolition of the house and the adjoining properties that belonged to Stevens. “Stevens is way too important a figure in our history to abandon once again.” —Fergus M. Bordewich
(source: "Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan: How their Historic Rivalry Shaped America," by Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Was James Buchanan Our Worst President? Digging into a Historic Rivalry” in Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004.)
William Penn owned at least 12 slaves. During his life he gradually came around to advocating abolition, but when he died in 1718, Pennsylvania was a long way from ending the practice.
In the mid- to late 1760s, 1,500 blacks lived in slavery in Philadelphia. Statewide, there were an estimated 5,600. The number of slaves peaked in the early 1780s at 6,855, according to historian Gary B. Nash.
Among the people who owned slaves in Philadelphia were Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Chew, John Dickinson, Thomas Cadwalader, Samuel McCall, Samuel Mifflin, Robert Morris and Edmund Physick. They are some of the most prominent ones, whose names recur in accounts of the colonial city and for whom streets and counties and institutions are named. Many of Philadelphia's slaveholders were tradesmen - barbers, brewers, sailmakers, leather workers. According to Nash, "about one-quarter of the households in the city were involved in slavekeeping in the closing years of the 1760s."
By 1790, the number for the state had fallen to 3,760. And by 1810, to 795.
"Of the states south of New England, slavery died first in Pennsylvania and it died there the fastest," write Nash and Jean Soderlund in the 1991 book, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath.
The motivations were complicated, the authors say. Quakers had been debating the morality of slavery for a century, and the first recorded North American protest against slavery was signed by a group of Quakers in Germantown in 1688 and sent, to no immediate effect, to other Quaker groups. But moral outrage was only one factor in slavery's demise in Pennsylvania, and not always the overriding one. Economics, politics and a propensity for slaves to free themselves had a lot to do with it.
Slavery withered more rapidly in Philadelphia than in surrounding areas, in part because slaves did not live as long, nor have as many children, as they did on farms. In 1810, 94 percent of the slaves in Pennsylvania were in seven rural counties.
Slavery was even more common in neighboring states. In 1790, Delaware had 8,887 slaves, New Jersey had 11,423, and New York 21,193.
In 1779, Pennsylvania passed the first abolition law in America. The measure was praised for embodying the spirit of enlightenment at the time, but its gradual terms were no godsend.
The law did not emancipate a single slave - anyone who was a slave the last day before it went into effect March 1, 1780, remained a slave until death unless freed by his or her owner. All children born of slaves after the law took effect could be kept enslaved until age 28. So it would have been possible for a slave girl, born on the last day of February 1780, to live out her life in slavery. And for her children, theoretically born as late as 1820, to remain slaves until 1848.
Total abolition didn't come to Pennsylvania until 1847.
Why doesn't Chris Matthews know that Pennsylvania was a slave state? Pennsylvania was a slave colony, in fact ALL 13 original colonies were slave colonies. The full power of the USA government protected the system of slavery, and black subjugation after emancipation. Every branch of the government supported slavery. Pennsylvania was a slave state. Grow-up Chris Matthews and read some history of slavery in Pennsylvania. Start here with the website Slavery in the North.
