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Article Excerpt
The District of Columbia, said a late-nineteenth-century historian, "has always been a kind of experimental station, from law-making to rain-making, for the country." Although most nineteenth-century readings of the Constitution considered that the federal government possessed only a limited authority over domestic policymaking, there were no restrictions on its sovereignty within the boundaries of the federal District. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to "exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" in the territory that houses the seat of government. There it holds plenary power, serving as national, state, and municipal authority all in one. Unencumbered by the rival claims of other governmental authorities, it is free to formulate its own social and municipal policy. Although Congress has not always troubled itself greatly with the management of local affairs, the policy decisions that are made, or not made, for the federal District have more than a local significance. The social and political institutions that are established there might be said to carry the imprimatur of the United States. That means the affairs of the District are, at least potentially, the business of all Americans, and at certain junctures in the nation's history that has mattered a great deal. (1)
The changes brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction gave congressional policy for the District of Columbia an added significance. Repeatedly, Republican congressmen tested reforms in Washington before applying them to the Southern states. Washington's few slaves were emancipated in April 1862, months before the general Emancipation Proclamation and years before the Thirteenth Amendment. Black suffrage came to the District months before it was imposed, through the Military Reconstruction Acts, on the South and years before the Fifteenth Amendment ruled out racially discriminatory voting qualifications throughout the nation. Racial distinctions were eliminated from local charters and ordinances, segregation was eliminated on the city's street railroads (though less consistently in other public places), and Congress waged a relentless and ultimately successful struggle to create a system of public schools for African American children. (2) "The District of Columbia" declared the New National Era, an African American newspaper published in Washington, "is the place where all the great reforms of the war have begun. It is the experimental garden and nursery where all the generous plants have been tried." The metaphor was used as often to condemn innovative lawmaking. Thus, the chairman of the city's Board of Aldermen complained in 1868 that the District had been "specially set apart by the Government as a sort of experimental garden for the propagation of political hybrids of every conceivable description." (3) Whatever the interpretative slant, the idea that the District might be employed to carry out experiments in lawmaking for the benefit of the nation as a whole was part of the common currency of political discourse during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The peculiar status of the District forced Republican congressmen to consider, early and unequivocally, the implications of emancipation and the attributes of citizenship. "The war ... has made a new slate in many things relating to law as well as politics," observed Pennsylvania representative M. Russell Thayer in January 1866. And their deliberations led them, with surprising rapidity, to quite radical conclusions. Most Republicans concluded that freedom meant more than the mere absence of slavery but brought positive entitlements, and they found it difficult to define those entitlements in terms that fell short of full citizenship rights. They could not easily identify an intermediate stage between emancipation and enfranchisement. In the District of Columbia the Republicans, untroubled by the competing jurisdictions and political calculations that applied elsewhere, could work through the implications of their political ideas and carry them through to their logical conclusions. (4)
An analysis of congressional legislation for the District of Columbia during the years immediately following the end of the Civil War therefore provides a useful illustration of the political dynamics of Reconstruction. It enables us to watch congressional Republicans as they thought out the implications of their commitment to emancipation and equal rights. Although it was eventually pushed aside by other considerations and soon ceased to be the guiding principle behind Republican policymaking, a study of congressional policy toward the District of Columbia reminds us just how radical that commitment was for a few brief moments during and after the Civil War.
The abolitionist movement hit upon the special significance of the District at an early stage. The presence of slavery in the nation's capital and the prosecution of the slave trade in close proximity to the heart of American government had long appeared as an embarrassment to the institution's critics. "Slave coffles" in the nation's capital, said Don E. Fehrenbacher, were "shameful symbols of oppression that soiled the image of the United States before the rest of the world." A petition campaign, aimed at the eradication of slavery in the District of Columbia, served as an effective mobilizing device for the abolitionist movement--all the more so when, in May 1836, the House of Representatives resolved to reject abolitionist petitions without consideration, thereby widening the issue beyond the emancipation of black slaves to embrace the political rights of freeborn white men and women. The ongoing controversy over the "gag rule" kept the issue before the country until its repeal in December 1844. Abolition of slavery in the District formed part of the platform of the Liberty party and later antislavery parties. Although proposals for the abolition of slavery received precious few congressional votes, a prohibition of the most public manifestations of the slave trade formed part of the body of legislation that went to make up the Compromise of 1850. In other respects, slavery in the District remained intact until the outbreak of the Civil War. (5)
Once they had taken control of Congress, Republicans took early action to eliminate slavery in the District of Columbia. Legislation to that effect was reported early in the first full session after the beginning of the Civil War. "Slavery is tolerated at the capital of no other civilized nation," noted Lot M. Morrill of Maine in presenting the bill to the Senate. He added that "it is unbecoming the freest government on earth longer to allow the practice of it here." According to Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, "For two generations, the statesmen of republican and Christian America have been surrounded by an atmosphere tainted by the breath of the slave, and by the blinding and perverting influence of the social life of slaveholding society." The barbaric laws and ordinances that went with slavery "should not be permitted to insult the reason, pervert the moral sense, or offend the taste of the people of America." The influential senator William Pitt Fessenden linked abolition in the District securely to the broader purpose of the Republican party, which was "to place this Government in a position where it should not lend its aid to the support of slavery." Wherever Congress had the power legally to weaken the institution, it had a duty to do so. In that sense, emancipation of the District's slaves formed part of a larger emancipatory process. (6)
The act passed by Congress in April 1862--although bending to administration pressures and moderate Republican opinion by allowing compensation to loyal slaveholders and providing for the voluntary colonization of those freed--required that emancipation should proceed immediately. No effort was made to seek the consent of local electors. Whether influenced by abolitionist pressure at home, an awareness of the new political conditions created by the war, or the demands of their own consciences, congressional Republicans took a step that not only initiated a wider legislative war against slavery but also marked a decisive change in the practical relationship between the national government and the capital city in which it sat. (7)
Congress moved with commendable speed to sweep away the more visible legal traces of slavery. Washington's black code was repealed in 1862, shortly after the local emancipation act. African Americans were now entitled to engage in any form of economic activity; their social life was no longer obstructed by the imposition of a curfew, their freedom of assembly no longer curtailed. (8) During the same year, Congress took preliminary steps toward providing educational facilities for the District's African American population. The local authorities were ordered to set aside 10 percent of the tax revenues from black property to pay for them and, when that proved insufficient, to divide the school fund between black and white schools according to the relative school-age population. Further action was taken in succeeding years to overcome the recalcitrance of the Washington Corporation and ensure a fairer allocation of resources. (9) Charles Sumner, who was more closely associated than any other leading member of his party with the cause of equal rights and the welfare of the District's black population, persuaded the Republican majority to use the congressional power to grant franchises to compel the city's street railroad companies to desist from their usual practice of discriminating against black citizens, leaving them to wait in the rain and snow for specially marked vehicles, or forcing them to ride exposed to the elements on the outside of the carriages. Sumner insisted that the right of African Americans to enter the streetcars be affirmed "because any other conclusion authorized a corporation to establish a caste, offensive to religion and humanity, injurious to a whole race ... and bringing shame upon our country." A series of amendments to corporate charters eventually opened the streetcars to all passengers. (10)
With the elimination of slavery, Congress faced the question of how the civil and political status of the freed people should be defined, and in the District of Columbia that was a question Congress could not avoid facing. It could not avoid confronting the thorny issue of black suffrage. Radicals like Sumner and Wilson already had attempted to remove racial qualifications for voting from the city charter during the winter of 1864, and it was certain that a suffrage bill would come before Congress when it reassembled for its first postwar session in December 1865. (11) Radical Republicans were by that time committed to black suffrage, believing it necessary both to protect the interests of freed people and to strengthen the forces of Unionism in the former Confederacy. It was, said Senator Jacob Howard of...
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