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Three years ago this month, Vice President Kamala Harris moved into her official residence in a quiet 73-acre enclave in northwest Washington. The U.S. Navy maintains an observatory and the country’s main clock here. Early in her stay, she found evidence of excavation near her home, and upon asking around, learned that an archaeological team had recently discovered part of the foundations of an Italianate villa known as Northview. I knew. This villa was built there over 100 years ago. Half ago.
Near the villa, the team discovered something else. It was the brick foundation of a smokehouse used to preserve meat. Ms Harris did not need to be told who used it. Long before the country’s first black vice president moved into his new mansion, his aides told him about the 34 people who once lived there against their will. A subsequent opinion essay on CQ Roll Call was mentioned for the first time in the news media.
The names of enslaved people were recorded in documents of the time. Peter, Mary and Ellen Jenkins. Chapman, Sarah, Henry, Joseph, Louisa, Daniel and Eliza Toyer. Towry, Jane, Regin, Samuel, Judah, and Andrew Yates. Kitty, William, Gilbert and Philip Silas. Susan, Dennis, Ann Maria, and William Carroll. Becky, Millie, Margaret and Mortimer Briscoe. Richard Williams. Mary Young. John Thomas. Mary Brown. John Chapman. William Silas.
Their ages ranged from 4 months to 65 years, and they had skills ranging from winemaking to carpentry. Five of them would go on to serve in the Civil War as Union soldiers. The other, aged 13, ran away, but his destination was unknown. The dire living conditions of those who remained on the site, then known as Pretty Prospect, are hinted at in documents now held in the National Archives.
Mortimer Briscoe, 30, said: “One of my toes was bitten by frost, but other than that I’m healthy.” John Thomas, 41, has “injured three fingers on his left hand with a corn sheller” but is “able to drive a horse and do his job as well as before.”
Until April 16, 1862, when these enslaved people and about 3,000 others in the capital were freed by an act of Congress, the 34 residents of Pretty Prospect lived in the home of a widow who lived in a summer home in North View. It was the property of Margaret C. Barber. . Together they constitute a little-known part of the historic building, whose famous inhabitants now believe themselves to be descendants of enslaved Jamaicans.
When Harris learned about the smokehouse, aides said, she asked if any other evidence had been found about the 34 enslaved people. No, she was told. But the discovery, documented in a new report soon to be released by the District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Office, prompted Harris to do some research of her own.
Aides said the archeology team examined an old map dated 1882 that showed the exact location of Northview and a nearby smokehouse. About 400 meters from where she now lives, there is an ancient residence called the “Negro House” where 34 enslaved laborers lived.
Harris then began poring over photos taken on the property over the past half century. The subjects were all white male vice presidents, his family, and his guests. These images tell us nothing about the role black people played in the capital’s history, much less the land itself.
farm widow
The history of the slave farm, which later became the U.S. Naval Observatory and now the home of America’s first black vice president, has been told only in fragments. This account is based on interviews with Harris’ associates. It is also based on information provided by Brian Kleven, the naval archaeologist who excavated the smokehouse, and on a trove of historical documents culled from archives and libraries by Washington historian Carlton Fletcher.
Harris has never mentioned the mansion’s legacy of slavery in her public statements. Aides would move into such a place only after they were convinced that the new home was not the same building where Barber’s servants once worked, and that it had been liberated 30 years before it was built. She said that the very idea became appealing to her.
The Obamas may also empathize. In her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama said that the fact that she lived in the White House as a black first lady was “a reminder to generations of people who have felt the whip of bondage, the shame and sting of servitude.” The story was quoted as “The story of people who have crossed the borders.” Because of my efforts, my hopes, and my persistence in the face of racism, I now wake up every morning in a house built by slaves and my daughters (two beautiful, intelligent black men). young women) are playing. Their dog is on the White House lawn. ”
Local historian CR Gibbs said many tourists were unaware of this chapter of Washington’s history. “What people don’t realize when they visit the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the White House, is that they’re standing on the land of slave labor,” he says. “The same goes for the vice president’s residence.”
North View was built in the early 1850s for Cornelius Barber, a wealthy Baltimore planter. His wife, Margaret, is a descendant of grape grower John Adlam, whose vineyards on the banks of Rock Creek attracted fans like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Five of the barber’s six children died of illness, and his father also died in 1853, leaving the 43-year-old widow to worry about her country estate.
But she had help. Mr. Barber’s 34 enslaved farm owners and domestic servants made him the second largest slave owner in the city. (George Washington Young, the first tobacco planter, owned 68 people of African ancestry.) Mr. Barber enlisted his neighbors, who owned farms, tanneries, and slaughterhouses. It was rented out frequently. Throughout the 1850s, she earned an annual income of approximately $1,600, or approximately $61,000 in today’s currency.
Ellen Jenkins, one of Mr. Barber’s female domestic servants, was bequeathed to her by her viticulturist father in his will, with the stipulation that Mr. Jenkins would be freed from slavery when he turned 50. However, Barber said of Jenkins: She said that Ms. Jenkins was recorded as a “good cook” and that she did not let go of her servant until an 1862 law freed her until Ms. Jenkins was 60 years old.
Barber only let go of Jenkins and the other slave laborers after hiring a lawyer, who argued before a government commission that the widow was entitled to compensation for her losses. She asked for her $750 each. In the end, Barber settled for $270 per worker, for a total of $9,000, or about $336,500 today. She moved out of her summer home, but her ballroom, with its grand paintings and chandeliers, was later desecrated by Union soldiers. Ms. Barber died of influenza in 1892 at the age of 80, around the same time Northview was demolished.
The return of black history
Today, Harris lives in a three-story Queen Anne-style building with a white turret, but it has less history than the converted villa.
Built in 1893 to oversee the Naval Observatory, it was later used as the residence of the Chief of Naval Operations, and in 1974 was designated by Congress as the Vice President’s residence. Walter F. Mondale moved in with his family three years later, happily continuing to use the plumbing, which had not yet been updated. He spoke loudly about it in interviews and said his family had become friends with the plumber. There was a lot of hot water.
Sometime in the 1980s, Vice President George HW Bush added a horseshoe hole to the property. His successor, Dan Quayle, installed a putting green and a pool, and Quayle later endeared himself to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who along with his wife Jill would swim there at night. I liked it. Vice President Dick Cheney preferred the mansion’s hammock, where he supervised the frolics of his Labradors, Jackson and Dave. The Pences donated beehives and hosted a pumpkin decorating activity on Halloween.
The first notable moment came two years ago, when Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, welcomed a gathering of predominantly black Washington state families to celebrate Juneteenth. In off-the-record remarks that day, the vice president mentioned 34 people who once lived on the property against his will.
Ms. Harris has sought to reconnect the mansion with the Black American experience and showcase the work of minority artists. Last September, she hosted a hip-hop concert on her lawn where 400 guests danced to performances by Lil Wayne and Q-Tip. She turned to Harlem-based designer Sheila Bridges to reimagine the interiors.
To decorate the walls, Harris borrowed from landscape paintings provided by the Smithsonian Institution, replacing them with works by black photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Roy DeCarava, paintings by Cherokee artist Kay Walkingstick, and Artworks such as quilts by women were installed. Hailing from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, they are descendants of enslaved cotton pickers.
To date, there are no plans by Harris to commemorate the 34 black men and women. Their individual histories have all but disappeared. Only two bodies have been identified.
One of them, Mary Brown, who was about 16 years old at the time of emancipation, worked as a housekeeper in Washington and died in 1886 at the age of 40. The other person was chef Ellen Jenkins. Ms. Jenkins became a nurse and she lived to be 80 years old.
Both women were buried in what is now Walter Pierce Park, a black cemetery two miles east of where Harris lives.
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