Laboratory of Freedom

Our first story begins in Washington DC during the Civil War itself. The capital, as it turns out, showed the promise of Reconstruction for African-Americans more than any other place in the country. So here’s the scene. DC is in wartime chaos.

The city has been transformed into a giant army camp. There are tens of thousands of Union soldiers stationed there. Now DC had always had a considerable free black population, but now thousands of slaves from surrounding plantations in Maryland and Virginia are following soldiers into Washington.

A group of lawmakers known as the Radical Republicans see this chaos as their chance to do something, well, radical. This group is a prominent faction in Congress, and Congress pretty much calls the shots in DC. They want to turn Washington into what they call an example for all the land.

KATE MASUR: Well, that quote, the example for all the land is something that Charles Sumner said.

ED: This is historian Kate Masur.

NATHAN: And she’s referring to Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist leader from Massachusetts.

JOANNE: He’s the senator who is caned on the floor of the Senate in 1856 before giving a speech in which he denounced the slave power.

ED: Yep, that’s the guy, Joanne. He was one of the chief architects of this Radical Reconstruction.

KATE MASUR: He was one of the main people in Congress to keep pushing for more and more legislation, equalizing legislation. And he said, we want to make the District of Columbia an example for all the land. Washington DC really illuminates for us the will of Congress and what the nation’s legislators would like to do if they had a chance because just they have so much power there. And so when the Republicans are in control during the 1860s and beginning of the 1870s, they experiment on Washington and kind of use it as a laboratory for what they believe should happen in terms of civil rights and voting rights.

JOANNE: So Ed, why don’t you explain what the Radical Republicans actually thought should happen.

ED: You know, Joanne, what’s interesting is they wanted what those African-American petitioners from Nashville, Tennessee were wanting, and it turned out what African-Americans across the entire South wanted. And these Radical Republicans knew that they could make it happen and do it quickly too. And so here are some of the changes that really in just a few years African-Americans experienced in Washington DC.

KATE MASUR: First of all, emancipation, legal emancipation, in Washington happens in spring 1862. The Congress also passes a law establishing public education for African-American children and outlawing the city’s or the district’s black codes which have been discriminatory, racially discriminatory laws that prevailed and defined the city before the war.

ED: Black Washingtonians have a new voice in the city’s public life. They attend sessions of Congress, they lobby sympathetic law makers such as Sumner and the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and they persuade Congress to desegregate the district streetcars and railroads. And by 1863, the United States Army was recruiting black soldiers, and those soldiers marched in formation down the muddy avenues of Washington DC.

KATE MASUR: I mean, just think about how amazing it would be in a city where just a year earlier slavery had been legal, where it was still possible for Maryland slave owners to come into the city and demand to have their property back, and now you have African-American men in uniform drilling in the streets. Soldiers themselves feel that they have the standing and the right to demand more than they’re already getting.

JOANNE: Now, here’s a question, Ed.

ED: Yeah.

JOANNE: You’ve talked about it as a laboratory, setting out here’s a high that we can aim for.

ED: Right.

JOANNE: Are they doing that partly just to see if it can work or are they really intending to publicize this to make a strong public message. Look at what can happen, world, or certainly, look at what can happen, the rest of the United States. Look at what we’re doing here.

ED: No, I think that what they are doing is they recognize that there’s a skeptical audience out there. Now, most white Americans aren’t sure what will happen to enslaved people as soon as they are free. There’s widespread prediction that they will die like the American Indians had. There’s others who are saying that they’re going to pick up these guns that we’re handing them as soldiers and wage war against us because, well, they would have adequate reason.

And there are other people who are saying, well, they won’t work, and they don’t care about educating their children. So I think that, Joanne, they are proving to themselves as well to the outside world that what they believe in is true. Is that there is this innate capacity in African Americans to live up to the standards of American citizenship, to take care of themselves, to take care of each other, and to really establish a new kind of progress in the country.

NATHAN: And I would add that DC’s black residents show that they’re more than ready for full citizenship. As you mentioned, even before they had the right to vote, they’re lobbying Congress. They’re establishing churches, mutual aid societies, schools. They’re building institutions to help freed people and newly freed people build their lives.

ED: And all that, Nathan, pressures Congress to give them more rights, to make them full citizens.

KATE MASUR: By 1869, the City Council passes a public accommodation law that bars discrimination in theaters and restaurants as well. And then, of course, there’s voting rights. In 1867, Congress passed voting rights for African-American men in DC. In addition to all of that, new employment opportunities begin to open up.

So with the rise of black voting, African-American men are more likely to get jobs on city streets and city improvements. And then federal employment opens up. African-American men in particular, but also some women begin to have federal clerkships and white collar positions. So those are just some of the many ways that things really open up in terms of rights and equality in Washington in this period.

ED: But African-Americans didn’t have to travel very far to discover that these new rights were actually quite tenuous.

KATE MASUR: This is the story of Kate Brown, and her story was one that I became really, really interested in.

ED: Brown was a free black woman living in Washington.

KATE MASUR: She was an employee in the United States Capitol building. She staffed what was called the ladies’ restroom, the ladies retiring room, in the US Senate. One day in February 1868, she decided to go visit a relative in Alexandria, and she left on the railroad that actually passed in front of the United States Capitol building.

NATHAN: Now, let’s just be clear. That’s Alexandria, Virginia. That’s like 10 miles from the Capitol just across the Potomac River.

KATE MASUR: She had bought a round-trip ticket on the ladies’ car. And in Washington, because of these laws that Congress had passed earlier, there was no racial discrimination on public transportation. And so she rode in the ladies’ car on the way down to Alexandria. Well, the situation was completely different on the way back.

ED: The conductor refused to seat her because the ladies’ car was understood to be reserved for white women.

KATE MASUR: She wouldn’t get off, and they tried to physically get her off that car. And she grabbed onto the pole, and she resisted being kicked off the car. And eventually, though, two men overcame her with their strength and threw her off. And she ended up on the platform and really injured.

ED: As it turned out, some government employees saw Brown get thrown off the train and actually helped her to get home. Now, she worked at the Capitol building, remember. And it was long before some sympathetic congressmen– including that Charles Sumner senator we talked about before– heard what had happened to her.

KATE MASUR: She was injured. She was in bed. A couple of senators had gone to her house, and took her testimony about what had happened. And they also took testimony from witnesses who had seen what had gone down there. And that formed the basis of a report published by the Senate that Sumner wanted to use to argue for more legislation to protect African-American riders on railroads.

ED: Kate Brown sued the railroad. The railroad says, no, no, no, look. It’s entirely legal because we’re providing separate but equal accommodations. Now, the courts rejected that argument at that time, and Kate Brown won her case.

JOANNE: One of the things that’s striking about it is just the almost literal line in the sand that really the sort of little subset of Washington that it really is, in a way, still a laboratory, and it’s not extending necessarily very far out. So that at the beginning of a train ride is one set of circumstances, and at the end of the train ride is another.

NATHAN: Right. And it also is proof positive that in the era of Reconstruction it matters a great deal who your friends are.

JOANNE: Right.

NATHAN: The fact that Kate Brown has these relationships with legislators who can effectively try to enforce rights she should already have. Her rights are only as good as her access to politicians who can do something about it. And that strikes me as a consistent theme running through the late 19th and into the 20th century that it’s one thing to have laws on the books. It’s another altogether to get those laws enforced.

ED: Kate Brown, like African-Americans all across the South, learned all too quickly that there are limits to the promises of Reconstruction. And that sets the stage for our next story.