The Hillsdale Petitioners: Black Suffragists and Settlers in 19th Century Washington, D.C.
By Chelsea Lundquist-Wentz, independent historian
Forty-two years before the passage of the 19th Amendment, a group of 33 black suffragists living in the shadow of the United States Capitol petitioned Congress for women's right to vote. The 1878 petition came from modern-day Anacostia in the southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C. In the 1870s, these suffragists lived in a new, fast-growing neighborhood they called Hillsdale. The community was home to an active independent press, with a newspaper notably run by Frederick Douglass's sons; Hillsdale resident Solomon G. Brown, a writer, poet and the first black Smithsonian employee, often championed his neighbors in newspaper editorials. Even so, the current historiography of southeast Washington, D.C. does not reflect its role in the suffrage movement or identify the impact women had in founding this influential community. Despite the notoriety of much-published males, almost everything known about Hillsdale's female suffragists and residents comes from government records. These women interacted with the federal government in multiple ways, most notably via the Census and the Freedmen's Bureau. Demographic and infrastructure changes in 19th-century Washington, D.C. are also a key component to understanding the trajectories of their lives and how they came to the suffrage movement. The following pages explore the factors that affected most of the female petition signers, hereafter referred to as the Hillsdale petitioners.[1] This background, combined with the biographical sketches of individual petitioners, demonstrates how single, black women in the 19th century used their money to build a piece of the United States capital in the wake of the Civil War.
Many of the Hillsdale petitioners were born in Maryland and Virginia, emigrating to Washington, D.C. in the mid-19th century, bringing their young families or starting them in the District. The city's population boomed during the Civil War and the African American population more than doubled during the 1860s, swelling to over 35,000 people.[2] Thousands of enslaved people from Virginia and Maryland descended on the city due to a legal loophole allowing self-emancipation. In 1861, three enslaved men, Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend, sought protection at Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia; Union Major General Benjamin Butler declared them contraband of war instead of returning them to the Confederacy and the bonds of slavery. This action led to a federal policy granting freedom to thousands of enslaved people who made it to Union-controlled areas. An estimated 40,000 people self-emancipated by this mechanism, many making their way to Washington, D.C.[3] The Hillsdale community was built with the money and physical labor of many such refugees.
In 1862, the Senate passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which Abraham Lincoln signed into law on April 16. The legislation compensated slaveholders for their perceived economic and property loss, with an Emancipation Commission granting enslavers an average of $300 for each of the 2,989 formerly enslaved people.[4] When issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five months later and the final Proclamation effective January 1, 1863, Lincoln declared his intention to emancipate enslaved people in the rebellious Confederate states but did not follow the examples of remuneration and relocation in the District of Columbia Act. The District's neighboring state of Maryland was not addressed under the proclamation; slavery was only abolished two years later when a new state constitution took effect in November 1864.[5] Frederick Douglass, later a prominent resident of Hillsdale and Anacostia, criticized Lincoln for these stutter steps rather than eliminating slavery in one fell swoop, calling Lincoln the "slow coach in Washington."[6] For the majority of the Civil War, the District of Columbia remained a place of refuge and opportunity for people in both Confederate and Union territories. As early as 1861, as enslavers appeared in front of commissioners seeking compensation, land in southeast Washington, D.C. became known as a place for Black people to safely settle, build and conduct business.[7] For many of the Hillsdale petitioners whose early lives and parental lineage are not documented, it is likely that their moves from neighboring states were in direct pursuit of freedom, employment and opportunity.
Shortly before the end of the War, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands; President Andrew Johnson appointed as Commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, the 'Christian General, who was tasked with overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom.[8] Nine months later, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, officially abolishing slavery throughout the United States on December 18, 1865. Life remained difficult for many in the District of Columbia; conditions were crowded and unsanitary with limited opportunities for employment. The Freedmen's Bureau operated most often with short term fixes including rations, employment assistance and temporary housing, but it was a far bigger challenge to dramatically reduce the number of individuals reliant on this assistance long term.[9] The Hillsdale petitioners utilized the Freedmen's Bureau in three major ways: short-term relief payments; savings in the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company; and loans and the opportunity to purchase property in the Barry Farm subdivision in Hillsdale.
In the Bureau's early years (1865-1868), many of the Hillsdale petitioners received relief payments from the District of Columbia branch, headed by Freedmen's Bureau Assistant Commissioner Charles H. Howard, the younger brother of Commissioner O.O. Howard. Howard established the Special Relief Commission with $25,000 in congressional appropriations, to be administered to relieve the suffering of poor citizens in Washington, D.C.[10] These payments, typically given in $2-5 allotments, were distributed for specific short-term uses like clothing, fuel, or food to District of Columbia residents, both black and white. Mary Farmer-Kaiser notes that the Bureau attempted to focus its ever dwindling resources on individuals it considered worthy, including orphans, the elderly, the infirm, and unmarried women; District of Columbia Freedmen's Bureau reports specifically noted that able-bodied men were not allowed to receive ration relief.[11] Even as they sought relief payments, most of the Hillsdale petitioners were employed and on the eve of becoming property owners; if not for their gender and marital status, they would not have been identified as "deserving poor."[12] The Hillsdale petitioners, especially the single mothers, likely used the Bureau's gendered policies to their advantage, supplementing their incomes during times of illness or hardship.
To address the increasingly dire housing strain in the District, the Freedmen's Bureau established two planned communities, the Freedman's Village in Arlington, Virginia and Barry Farm in the southeast quadrant of the District of Columbia. At Barry Farm, African Americans were provided loans to purchase 1-acre lots and enough lumber to construct an A-frame home on an undeveloped plot of land; these loans were typically paid back in monthly $10 installments.[13] Profits from these sales were to be reinvested in institutions of higher education, including Howard University.[14] From 1867-1871, many Hillsdale petitioners purchased and constructed their homes in Barry Farm, joining the ranks of the first-wave settlers of this community. Single, widowed and married woman purchased lots with their own money, typically earned from domestic service wages. Among the Hillsdale petitioners, a mother Caroline Chase and daughter Elizabeth Chase, washerwomen and seamstresses, each purchased her own lot on the same street.
In the 1860s and 1870s, almost all the Hillsdale petitioners worked in domestic service, and some made enough funds to save, depositing small amounts into the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company. The Hillsdale petitioners were representative of the typical District of Columbia Freedmen's Bank client; in the first six months of 1870, female depositors made up 27% of all new accounts and there was a proliferation of funds earmarked for community and church-based construction projects.[15] Hillsdale residents, as was typical of other black communities in the District of Columbia, ultimately were forced to save outside of the formal banking system to fund community projects such as schools and churches.v Congress failed to maintain proper oversight of Freedmen's Savings and Trust administration and by the summer of 1874 the bank, in financial ruin, was closed by an Act of Congress. While depositors could petition to recoup their funds, only half received amounts less than the full value of their accounts, and the rest received nothing.[17] There is no evidence that any of the Hillsdale petitioners recouped monetary savings this way, though they did retain their property and homes in Barry Farm, making this investment the long-term legacy the Bureau had aspired to. Political machinations and dwindling support had shuttered the Freedmen's Bureau in 1872; as an institution of the national government and reflecting contemporary social norms, the Bureau had also been instrumental in encouraging and affirming segregation. The Freedmen's Bureau had provided a means to acquire property, but the first-wave settlers of Barry Farm literally and figuratively built the community whose achievement far outlasted the Bureau.
The early years in Barry Farm were spent clearing and building on the undeveloped land; residents purchased lumber and constructed their homes, in addition to their day jobs, with work by lamplight often going late into the night. The lumber provided by the Freedmen's Bureau was enough to build a simple A-Frame home with two stories, the downstairs a combined living, dining and cooking room and upstairs a sleeping room.v Community assets, primarily churches and schools, were of equal importance to the new settlers as their personal homes. Within three months of Barry Farm's founding, residents established a community fund and, with some assistance from the Bureau, purchased land to build the Mt. Zion Hill School, before many homes were even constructed. Many formerly enslaved men hired to construct the school used their earnings to purchase their own lots in the neighborhood.[19] Only two years in, Frederick Douglass and his sons had established a local independent press via the New National Era newspaper, which reported both national news and neighborhood goings-on.
In 1874, residents changed the name of the community to Hillsdale, disassociating from the name originally given by the Freedmen's Bureau, though the name ultimately never appeared on an official map.[20] The 1870s was a critical decade for politics and representation in the District of Columbia, as the federal government tested whether the city could rule itself, passing an "Act to Provide a Government for the District of Columbia" in February 1871.[21] Even though it was a new community, with the first homes less than five years old, Hillsdale dominated Anacostia politics in this first era of home rule. As members of the territorial government, Solomon Brown and Frederick Douglass represented the First District, both black and white residents, and southeast D.C. held outsized sway in city politics.[22] In 1874, Congress abolished home rule, returning the entire city to a commissioner-led government. Subsequent actions to re-establish a community voice specific to Hillsdale, including the signing of the 1878 suffrage petition, can be viewed as a direct response to the stripping of representation from its black residents.
The issue of women's suffrage had surfaced among Hillsdale residents before: famously, with Frederick Douglass's attendance at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in July 1848 and the 1866 founding of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony;[23] and locally, with community discussions and lectures, like Augustus Straker's 1874 speech, "Citizenship, Its Rights and Duties: Woman Suffrage," held at Hillsdale's Pioneer Lyceum.[24] The Hillsdale petitioners were likely attendees, if not organizers, of such community events, which were held in the evenings or on weekends in the local schools, which had been funded and built by residents. By 1870, AERA had disbanded and Frederick Douglass split ties with Stanton and Anthony, amidst their racist remarks and actions upon the passage of the 15th Amendment. Where white women denounced black male suffrage, black women supported and incorporated it as an important step to their own enfranchisement.[25] In Hillsdale, black women and men together petitioned Congress in favor of women's right to vote; the 1878 petition, signed by 15 women and 18 men, was addressed to the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The Hillsdale petitioners used a form document, printed and distributed in mass by the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), though they made several key edits. The signers noted their race on the petition, by writing in "Colored" twice to show the signers, separated by gender, as "Colored Men" and Colored Women." The petitioners also listed themselves as residents of Uniontown, which at the time was the nearby white section of Anacostia, though Frederick Douglass became the first black resident the same year when he purchased the nine-acre estate of John Van Hook.[26] Finally, the page noting the association to NWSA is not present in the surviving Hillsdale petition located in the National Archives; copies of this form petition from other localities include the NWSA instruction page and a letter mailing the petition to the appropriate state NWSA representative.[27] The Hillsdale petitioners may have intentionally made these changes to identify themselves as independent suffragists representing the interests of black women in the District of Columbia. The Hillsdale petitioners were more likely inspired by their community and shared experiences with female neighbors than a national movement. Most lived within blocks of each other; next-door neighbors Eliza Spencer and Mary V. Berry, and family members like the Chase women appear consecutively on the petition document. While two of the Hillsdale petitioners signed using their husbands' names, notably Frederick Douglass's daughter Rosetta Douglass Sprague, the rest did not identify themselves in relation to any man. Census and Freedmen's Bureau records show that many of the Hillsdale petitioners were unmarried, widowed or had otherwise purchased their property alone and conceivably contributed to the funding and construction of Hillsdale's public spaces in the same manner. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, in her history of the black women's suffrage movement, notes that the Hillsdale petitioners were not active members of the greater suffrage movement but exerted their political influence independently.[28] Biographical research on individual petitioners supports this inference and shows that most of these women spent their remaining years working and participating in Hillsdale's active community life; most died in the homes they built well before the 19th Amendment was passed.[29]
The 1878 Hillsdale petition was exhibited at the National Archives Museum from May 2019 to January 2021 as part of "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," noting that the petitioners represent an African American community though not outright identifying Hillsdale. Because the signed petition references Uniontown, only biographical research of the individual petitioners revealed the connection to Hillsdale. The Hillsdale petitioners were contributing members of an activist community and used their money to build the very spaces where they would sign a suffrage petition, demonstrating a desire to benefit black women nationally. However, their daily skills and organization efforts were community-based; the legacy of the Hillsdale petitioners lies in the benevolent societies, churches and schools that directly benefited the families and children in their neighborhood. The Hillsdale petitioners' part in the suffrage movement should reflect the full breadth of their lives as the women who bought, built and settled Hillsdale, which anchored the community of Anacostia into the 21st century.
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Notes:
1. In this essay, the term "Hillsdale petitioners" refers specifically to the fifteen female signers of the 1877 suffrage petition. Though there were also male signers, they are not the subject of this research, which seeks to highlight the role of women in the Hillsdale community.
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2. Robert Harrison, "Welfare and Employment Policies of the Freedmen's Bureau in the District of Columbia." The Journal of Southern History 72, no. 1 (2006): 75.
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3. Harrison, 75.
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4. United States Senate. "Landmark Legislation: The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act," accessed November 2019. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/DCEmancipationAct.htm.
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5. Steven F. Miller, "Chronology of Emancipation during the Civil War," last modified August 26, 2019. Freedmen & Southern Society Project, University of Maryland History Department. http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/chronol.htm.
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6. Louise Daniel Hutchinson, The Anacostia Story, 1608-1930. Washington: Published for the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum of the Smithsonian Institution by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977. https://archive.org/details/anacostiastor1600hutc
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7. Ibid., 71.
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"8 Records of the field offices for the District of Columbia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1863-1872."
9. Harrison, 87. For more on women's contribution to debates around "dependency" and the Freedmen's Bureau, see Carol Faulkner, "How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves during and after the Civil War, 1863-1891?" Women and Social Movements in the United States, 3 (1999).
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10. Harrison, 87.
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11. Mary Farmer-Kaiser, ""With a Weight of Circumstances like Millstones about Their Necks": Freedwomen, Federal Relief, and the Benevolent Guardianship of the Freedmen's Bureau." The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 115, no. 3 (2007): 419-20. www.jstor.org/stable/4250398.
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12. Ibid.
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13. Hutchinson, "The Anacostia Story," 82.
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14. Harrison, 80.
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15. Barbara P. Josiah, "Providing for the Future: The World of the African American Depositors of Washington, DC's Freedmen's Savings Bank, 1865-1874." The Journal of African American History 89, no. 1 (2004): 7. doi:10.2307/4134043.
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16. Ibid., 10.
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17. Josiah
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18. Hutchinson, "The Anacostia Story," 82.
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19. Ibid., 85.
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20. Alcione M. Amos, and Patricia Brown Savage. "Frances Eliza Hall: Postbellum Teacher in Washington, D.C." Washington History 29, no. 1 (2017): 42-54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90007373.
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21. Hutchinson, "The Anacostia Story," 92.
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22. Ibid.
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23. Benjamin. Quarles, "Frederick Douglass and the Woman's Rights Movement." The Journal of Negro History 25, no. 1 (1940): 35-44.
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24. D. Augustus. Straker, "Citizenship, its rights and duties--woman suffrage." Lecture delivered at the Israel A.M.E. Church and before the Pioneer Lyceum, Hillsdale, Washington, D.C., April 1874. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, African American Pamphlet Collection http://www.loc.gov/item/09032738/.
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25. Sharon. Harley, "African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment." The 19th Amendment and Women's Access to the Vote Across America. National Park Service, accessed December 2019. https://www.nps.gov/articles/african-american-women-and-the-nineteenth-amendment.htm
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26. Hutchinson, "The Anacostia Story," 110.
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27. Residents of Melrose, Middlesex, Massachusetts. "Petition for Woman Suffrage." Petitions and Memorials, 1813-1968. Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789 - 2015, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, DC. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117874757
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28. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850-1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 46.
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29. See biographical sketches for these petition signers in the Black women suffragists section of this database.
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