Reconstruction in the National Capital Area

Thomas Nast's celebration of the emancipation of Southern slaves with the end of the Civil War.

King & Baird, engraver; Nast, Thomas, 1840-1902, artist; Bott, S., publisher;
Umpehent, J. W., copyright claimant. - Library of Congress

When Reconstruction began after the Civil War in 1865, America was attempting to right its wrongs. The Freedman’s Bureau, established in 1865, along with Northern missionaries and free Blacks undertook the task of structuring and building self-reliant African American communities.

Washington DC already led the way with its DC Emancipation Act of 1862 which abolished slavery in the district nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Freedom seekers from Virginia and slave states before the war’s end made their way to freedom and shelter. While many came to the district looking for work, others came to find family members, and all came to begin the transition into citizens of America. The Freedman’s Village at Arlington House served as a place of transition as communities developed there and in neighboring areas such as Washington, DC's Reno City, a neighborhood that grew and thrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Homes, a hospital, a schoolhouse and more necessities were built there to provide the tools needed to create self-reliance. Harper’s Ferry’s African American communities in places like Camp Hill took to the opportunities presented by the availability of positions once held in enslavement, now for wages, such as labor as farm-hands, working in stone quarries, housekeeping and domestic work, and the growing entrepreneurism found in a world of new possibilities.

Education was on the minds of many African Americans who wanted to break the “mental chains” of slavery. After years of brutality against those that had learned to read and write, it became a symbol of true freedom and liberty in the United States. The Black church's sphere of influence surpassed the religious rituals and practices developed in their walls. From social reformation and education, political involvement and participation, Black religious leaders served their communities beyond the pews (Wallace, 2021). Black churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, popularly known as A. M. E., and the Methodist Episcopal had educated African Americans in their own walls throughout the national capital area before the Civil War. A. M. E. Conference records from 1845 recorded a Sabbath School in Quinn Chapel in Frederick County, Maryland with two teachers and twenty-five students. These Sabbath Schools foreshadowed the public school system. The creation of schools such as Storer College in Harper’s Ferry, Manassas Industrial School in Virginia, and Howard University in Washington DC provided a place of learning and community, opening new paths for the formerly enslaved. Schools were also created to educate the many formerly enslaved throughout Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia, as well as in Maryland, such as Sharp Street School in Sandy Spring, and Union Institute in Prince George’s County. The Freedman’s Bureau provided the funds and land for African Americans, but it was the labor and efforts of Black people and cooperation with various mutual aid societies and missionaries that faced the storm of discrimination and hardships to make them succeed.

Representing Mississippi, Hiram Revels was the first African American Congressman. The respect given to him surpassed even the hate passed his way, as he was chosen among his fellow politicians to represent the state.

Brady-Handy photograph collection, 1870. Library of Congress.

African Americans achieved Black political representation during Reconstruction through unrivaled determination. Up to 2,000 African Americans held public office between the late 1860s to 1900. Hiram Revels from Fayetteville, North Carolina, born free in 1827, became the first African American senator in 1870. From local alderman to Mississippi state senate, the respect that Mississippian politicians held for him made him a top candidate to represent the state. His arrival in Washington DC was met with scorn by Southern politicians, but his resolve stayed firm, and he was accepted unanimously as a senator in the end. This reality was no different for other Black politicians who had to face the same prejudices.

Now think about if you had been denied education, knowledge itself, and then had to subject yourself to obstacles that you were never prepared for. Though African Americans were denied their right to self-fulfillment, that was no longer the case, at least for the time. The legal protections established with the passage of the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1875, made Congress able to defend those same rights. But White Southerners were not happy with the influx of Black voters and were devoted to ending all gains. Southern states that were once demographically White and politically Democrats were now being challenged by the Radical Reconstruction-backed Republicans who logically held the Black vote. But with the election of President Andrew Johnson, his administration placed the power to control the political landscape back into the hands of those who had used it to deny and disenfranchise Black people. From 1865 to 1900, violent and manipulative acts by White agitators to undermine Black social, political and economic growth and power were also executed on local and state levels. Through poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence and fraud, White supremacists could keep Black Americans from political involvement and ultimately from participating as citizens. The Ku Klux Klan rose from the discord and anger of White people in the South. They were intent on terrorizing African Americans through fear and violence at the voting polls and lynching anyone deemed a threat.

From 1863 to 1877, Black growth was not only possible, but achieved. African Americans were able to represent themselves with dignity in the face of hate and pursue their own livelihoods by their own hands. However, Military Reconstruction met its demise with the Compromise of 1877 that saw the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. At that point, there was nothing that could stop Southern states from rolling back all civil rights gained in the years before. White domestic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan caused a shift in the atmosphere, as fear and death became their voice of oppression. White mobs throughout the national capital area executed vigilante justice regardless of proof or the process of the judicial system. The lynching of Benjamin Thomas in Alexandria, Virginia proved how cooperative law enforcement was with the killings when a policeman on the scene knew some of the people among the lynch mob. There would be no conviction of any of the people involved. The lynching of Joseph McCoy in the same place reflected the same goal. The White mob broke into the jail, all being encouraged and led by White professionals and businessmen.

The Reconstruction period had all the potential to be a great time of coming together, where Americans, Black and White, recognized and cooperated with one another. The first ten years showed the promise of a better future. African Americans had finally claimed freedom and a sense of equality. Education, business enterprise, and political office became a part of life. Sadly, just as law made it unconstitutional to prohibit Black social, economic and political equality, it would undo it all with other laws. White supremacists nailed the coffin of radical Reconstruction shut with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and the failures of Reconstruction were made reality with the coming Jim Crow era.

Information from this timeline is provided by Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area and Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area by Cheryl LaRoche PhD, Patsy Fletcher, Caroline Spencer, and Lauren Hughes.

Triumphs and Trials 1865-1900

1865 - On March 3, 1865, Congress passed “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” to provide food, shelter, clothing, medical services, and land to displaced Southerners and newly freed African Americans. Schools, churches, and communities grew throughout the NCA with the help, guidance and support of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude. This would be the first mention of slavery in the U.S Constitution.

Formerly built in 1848 as the home of the Armory Paymaster, Lockwood House served as a hospital to treat wounded Union soldiers. It was purchased by Freewill Baptist Missionaries to be used to educate formerly enslaved people. John Storer, a wealthy businessman from Maine, developed an interest in the school, matching $10,000 to the missionaries collected $10,000 through donations, assets and government funding. The school would become Storer College and grow to include three more buildings across Camp Hill in Harper’s Ferry.

1866 - On February 7, Frederick Douglass led a delegation of 13 representatives of the Colored Convention to the White House to meet with President Andrew Johnson. Their intent was to discuss the necessity for African Americans to be recognized as American citizens. The intent of the New England Convention in sending “a discreet, intelligent and refined delegation of colored men” to Washington was so they would have “great influence in creating due respect for the entire colored people” (LaRoche et al, 2021)

Located near the Antietam Battlefield, Tolson’s Chapel, a member church of Methodist Episcopal Church, like other Black churches served a dual purpose as a place of worship and learning during Reconstruction. The support displayed among African Americans shows throughout the period, as the land that was needed to build the church was provided by Samuel and Kate Craig. Support from the Freedman’s Bureau, benevolent societies and other Black Americans maintained the school well into the late 1890s.

Senator Charles Sumner encouraged legislators to enact a civil rights bill for African Americans over President Abraham Lincoln's veto, but the Supreme Court promptly found this act to be unconstitutional.

On April 9, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted to Blacks the privileges and rights of American citizenship. The Act made systems of involuntary labor such as peonage or indenture that were being introduced to replace slavery illegal unless due to imprisonment and extended the rights of emancipated people by stating that any person born in the United States regardless of race is a US citizen and as such is entitled to equal treatment before the law.

The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed to intimidate blacks and other ethnic and religious minorities, first met in Maxwell House, Memphis. The Klan was the first of many secret terrorist organizations organized in the South for the purpose of reestablishing white authority and denying rights of Black citizens.

Senate Bill 60, extending the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and expanding its services, was vetoed by President Johnson.

1867 - On January 8, overriding President Johnson's veto, Congress granted the Black citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote. It wasn’t until Jan. 23, 1867, that the Maryland General Assembly outlawed “the sale of negroes into slavery as punishment for crime,” reported The New York Times. “There will hereafter be no distinction in the State in the mode of punishing white and black criminals,” according to the article.

1870 - The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, a defining moment in granting voting suffrage for Black men. The Equal Rights League had been victorious in its long quest to achieve suffrage, “the crowning right of citizenship.”

The New Era newspaper was founded in Washington, DC. The newspaper was edited by J. Stella Martin. Frederick Douglass was its corresponding editor.

1872 - The first school in the Jefferson District of Arlington County opened for African Americans in the Convalescent Camp located in what is now the Army Navy Country Club. In 1872, a permanent schoolhouse was erected and was used until 1889, when it was replaced, on property in Johnson’s Hill.

First Baptist Church was established in Manassas, Prince William County, VA and is the oldest African American church in the county.

Founded in 1872, Rock Creek Baptist Church was the oldest congregation in Reno, where African Americans in surrounding communities regularly attended for church service. Aside from religious activities, Rock Creek Baptist Church organized pageants, lawn parties, picnics, and Sunday School trips to the Washington Zoo (Taylor, 2021).

1873 - V. Cook Nickens, a Leesburg, Loudoun County barber, became the first elected black official, serving for a year as a constable of Leesburg Magisterial District.

1879 - In Strauder v. West Virginia the US Supreme Court ruled that West Virginia had singled out Blacks and had “expressly denied by a statute all right to participate in the administration of the law, as jurors, because of their color, though they are citizens." The West Virginia law which forbade Blacks from serving on juries was the first decision of the US Supreme Court to use the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to invalidate a state law. Taylor Strauder, a Black man convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white woman, appealed to the Supreme Court alleging that the exclusion of people of color from juries violated his equal protection under the law. In its October 1879 decision, the US Supreme Court had found the West Virginia law forbidding Blacks from serving on juries to be unconstitutional.

The restrictions put on African Americans during enslavement did not dim any ambitions of Black political representation. Around 2,000 African Americans held some form of public office from local to federal level.

J. Hoover. Philadelphia, 1881. Library of Congress.

1880s - As US Marshal, Frederick Douglass warned African Americans that they needed to form vigilance committees in light of rising “Black on Black crime” and any brutal acts white people may commit.

1881 - The West Virginia governor approves a bill allowing all eligible voting citizens, including Blacks, to be jurors.

1884 - After several unsuccessful attempts to join the American Medical Association (AMA), a group of Black and white physicians formed the National Medical Society of the District of Columbia. Following three attempts over the next four years to gain recognition by the AMA, a group of white physicians who belonged to Washington’s AMA affiliate organization announced its disapproval of the organization's racial policy and joined with Black physicians in organizing a biracial group in 1884 called the Medico-Chirurgical Society of the District of Columbia.

1888 - John Syphax requested that residents who were being removed from Freedmen’s Village in Arlington, which the government was trying to close, be compensated $350 each. The displacement and demolition finally took place in 1900, whereupon the government compensated the villagers a total of $75,000 based upon an 1868 valuation.

1889 - The first National Black Catholic Congress was held in Washington at St. Augustine Church, considered the “Mother Church” of Washington Diocese Black Catholics. The activities and session topics included a meeting with President Grover Cleveland, the need for labor organizations and trade unions to permit African Americans to join, education, and housing.

1890 - Jim Jackson opened his store in Oak Grove, Loudoun County, VA; when it closed in 1930s, it had been the longest running black business in eastern Loudoun.94 The Loudoun County Emancipation Association was founded in Hamilton by a group of men to commemorate the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 but also to promote the “betterment of the race - educationally, morally, and materially.” At least one USCT veteran served as a director of the Loudoun County Emancipation Association.

The Second Morrill Act stated that funds would be allocated to states only if they provided the same educational opportunities for Black students as were provided to white students. Private normal schools such as Storer in Jefferson County found themselves competing with newly established agricultural and mechanical colleges for state funds.

The New Negro Movement began in the 1890s, heralding a cultural revolution focused on racial pride and uplift and demanding the abolition of racial discrimination. This Movement would reach its apex of expression as a cultural movement during the Harlem Renaissance. Newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune and Bishop Alexander Walters, born in Washington, DC, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, were key members of the National Afro-American League (NAAL). In 1890 NAAL became the first national black organization specifically created to challenge racial segregation and discrimination. The organization sought equal opportunities in voting, civil rights, education, and public accommodations. The end of lynching across America was ever present on the minds of civil rights organizers and was one of the key tenets of their platform.

1892 - The Colored Women’s League was organized in Washington, DC. Founders included the organization’s first president, Helen Appo Cook, and Josephine Wilson Bruce, Anna J. Cooper, Anna Evans Murray, Mary Church Terrell, and Fannie Barrier Williams. The quest for a quality education was foremost. This became The National League of Colored Women.

1893 - The 1892 election resulting in the defeat of Harrison, a Republican, by Cleveland, a Democrat, made more visible breaches in the solid Black Republican front. Several prominent leaders switched allegiance, leading to an editorial in the Washington Bee which read in part, “If certain color men have as idea that there is as much for them in the Democratic Party as there is in the Republican Party, why can’t they have the same privilege of selecting their choice of exercising such right as white men? Colored men have the same right to apply for positions under this administration as white men, especially when they have supported the party in power.”

The Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth was founded by Jennie Dean. It is now a five-acre archaeological park in Prince William County, VA.

1896 - The United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that for the next 70 years would shape the United States into defined and unequal racialized spaces. The ruling in the case of Homer Plessey in Plessy v Ferguson declaring the “separate but equal” doctrine distorted the civil rights of Black America. Its lasting effects can be seen today in the housing, wealth and education disparities for African Americans that continue to plague the country. The decision marked the onset of “Jim Crow” laws and legal racial segregation in America. Segregation, the denial of equal access to public accommodations, was neither a uniform nor a consistent practice throughout the United States, but it was the norm for the National Capital Area.

The National Association of Colored Women was founded in Washington with the motto “Lifting as We Climb” establishing its mission of self-help. Its first national conference was held in 1896 at Storer College in Harpers Ferry with Mary Church Terrell as president.

Black churches during Reconstruction were places of community, politics and education. African American religious leaders served in roles beyond religion, often serving as the voices of their congregations, their communities in politics and social reformation in the national capital area.

J.H. Daniels, 1876. - Library of Congress

1898 - The National Afro-American Council (NAAC), considered the first truly nationwide civil rights organization, convened in Washington in December. Though it had been formed some months earlier, NAAC met to reorganize with local branch chapters and to continue the agitation in the press to fight discrimination. Three of its eight main issues centered around the denial of political participation, peonage, and the increased number of lynchings.

African Americans achieved social, political and economic power, but were still far from fully recognized citizens. White Southerners and Northerners held contempt for the growing Black representation. It was in this environment that Jim Crow laws took root. White politicians would roll back on the protection of rights established through the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments and Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. The Ku Klux Klan and other White supremacist groups would go on to terrorize Black communities, as they intended on stalling and subjugating African Americans through fear. But instead of instilling hopelessness, they inspired the next generation of civil rights activists. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new dawn was rising, and the seeds of the modern civil rights movement were planted.

Works Cited

LaRoche CJ, Fletcher P, Hughes L, Spencer C. 2021. Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area. NPS Special History Study. National Park Service. Washington, DC
DataStore – (Thematic Framework for the History of Civil Rights in the National Capital Area)

LaRoche CJ, Fletcher P, Spencer C, Hughes L. 2021. Historic Resource Study: Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area. Historic Resource Study. National Park Service. Washington, DC
DataStore – (Reconstruction and the Early Civil Rights Movement in the National Capital Area)

Taylor B. 2021. “On the Fort”: The Fort Reno Community of Washington, DC, 1861–1951. Historic Resource Study. National Park Service & Organization of American Historians. Washington, DC
DataStore - (On The Fort: The Fort Reno Community of Washington, DC, 1861-1951)

Wallace EB. 2021. “They Have Erected a Neat Little Church:" A Special History Study of the Rural African American Experience, 1865–1900, in the National Capital Area. NPS Special History Study. National Park Service & Organization of American Historians. Washington, DC
DataStore - (They Have Erected a Neat Little Church: A Special History Study of the Rural African American Experience)