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4. The First Arrest
- Louisiana State University Press
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THE FIRST ARREST Charles Torrey arrived in Washington in early December 1841. His ostensible job was to be a Washington reporter for the Boston Daily Mail, the New York Evangelist, and several other small abolitionist papers. Joshua Leavitt, the former editor of the Evangelist, may have helped Torrey get the assignments. As an accredited reporter, Torrey applied for and was given a desk in the House of Representatives. At this time, Washington was a city of forty-four thousand people. It had been planned in a grand design by Pierre L’Enfant, a Frenchborn architect, and the cornerstone for the Washington Monument had just been laid; the city, however, was notably unfinished. Torrey viewed it as “a cluster of four or five villages . . . owing to the nature of the site which is low and marshy.” Charles Dickens, who visited Washington three months after Torrey arrived, called the city “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva” and described it as follows : I walk to the front window [of the hotel room] and look across the road upon a long, straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country that has taken to drinking , and has quite lost itself. . . . It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which 70 the first arrest | 71 only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town for ever with their masters. . . . Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who are not obliged to live there. Among Torrey’s initial impressions were the ubiquitous “grog-shops . . . and the free drinking of very many occupying stations of the highest influence” as well as gambling houses that “occupy many prominent points between the Capitol and the White House.” Torrey’s strongest impression of Washington, however, was the conspicuous curse of slavery. Washington was the center of the nation ’s interstate slave trade. Two large slave pens, known by their owners’ names, Robey and Williams, stood at Eighth and B Streets (B Street is now Independence Avenue) and Seventh Street and Maryland Avenue SW, just off the National Mall. An English visitor described one of them as set “right against the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no house intervening.” From these pens and from slave auctions, slaves were often taken to the Franklin and Armfield slave pen at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria, part of the District at that time, from which over a thousand slaves a year were shipped for sale in New Orleans, the nation’s third largest city at that time. When Torrey arrived, the Williams slave pen was in the news because of a “daring November escape” of several slaves. On the streets of Washington, pedestrians were regularly confronted with slave auctions. The fact that such sales took place in the shadow of the Capitol highlighted the hypocrisy of slavery, “the voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slaves’ chains comingled.” One northern newspaper described the scene: “Under the very dome of the Capital, beneath the stars and stripes of the nation, women, Christian women, are sold by the appointed officer of the President, and the money put into the bag of the United States Treasury. Judas, for his thirty pieces of silver, hardly did worse than this.” Profoundly disgusted by what he saw, Torrey described Washington as “that mock metropolis of freedom, and sink of iniquity.” Torrey’s decision to go to Washington had been a deliberate one. [54.173.214.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:57 GMT) 72 | the martyrdom of abolitionist charles torrey The city had long been the center of the interstate slave trade; when the District of Columbia had been created by carving pieces out of Maryland and Virginia, these two...