Let's start from the beginning. The year was 1835, and Washington DC in the 1830s was growing fast. It used to just be a dirt road with a few houses, but in 1835, Washington DC had a population of 20,000 people. The majority of Black folks living in Washington DC were free Blacks, 25 years before South Carolina fired the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter.
The location of where Washington DC itself would be located was a political decision. It had been speculated that the federal Capitol should be on the Susquehanna River, in between Pennsylvania & Maryland. But the slave owners and their politicians didn't like that, because Pennsylvania had almost abolished slavery for everybody by 1800, and the slave owners and their politicians in Congress did not want to have the capital of the United States on free territory: symbolically, this suggested that there was something wrong with the institution of slavery. So the slave owners & their politicians pushed Alexander Hamilton to move the capital site farther south, cutting a federal district out of Maryland and Virginia, where slavery was legal. For the time being, slave owners were happy with this arrangement, since this preserved the legitimacy of slavery.
During the 1830s, free blacks would outnumber slaves in Washington for the first time.
Entrepreneurs of color were running restaurants, driving horse-drawn taxis and working as government messengers.
Slavery still existed too, and even in Washington DC, there were still slave auctions, and slave pens around DC too. Slave pens were where slave traders gathered their human cargo to be shipped south from the docks of Georgetown.
Abolitionist petitioners from the free states were demanding that Congress abolish the slave trade in the federal district. They conducted a political direct-mail campaign, where abolitionists sent their publications--bursting with illustrated stories of slavery's cruelties--to the president, to congressmen, to professors and to other leading citizens.
What the abolitionists brought to Washington in the 1830s was not, Hey, let's abolish slavery in the whole damn nation; no. The abolitionists were saying, Let's abolish it in Washington DC. Because both abolitionists and the many white American slave owners and their politicians understood how important that would be symbolically to the rest of the nation.
President Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves who worked in the White House while he was President, some of them slept in the attic, appointed ol Frank Key to be the state's attorney, the chief prosecutor, for Washington DC.
And Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton lived in DC with her slaves too.
In 1790, Anna Maria Brodeau, 16, married William Thornton, 31. William Thornton was the architect of the US Capitol.
Unlike her husband, Anna Maria Brodeau was not a Quaker, and because of that, William Thornton was expelled from the Quakers, from the Society of Friends, for marrying Anna Maria Brodeau. William Thornton came from a slaveholding family based on the island of Tortola, and after he died in 1828, although William Thornton's will granted freedom to his slaves, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & her mother, his mother-in-law, liked having the comforts of the free labor offered to them by the Black backs & Black hands.
One of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's slave boys, John Arthur Bowen, had once served in President's House, as a footman for Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's friend.
But on August 4, 1835, President Andrew Jackson wasn't in DC; he was vacationing that summer at a seaside retreat in southern Virginia, accompanied by his slaves.
xxx
A story went around Washington DC that John Arthur Bowen, a young 18-year-old enslaved mulatto man, had attacked his female overseer in her own bedroom with an axe while she was sleeping.
The Washington Globe newspaper declared that 60 year old Anna Marie Thorton was "a kind and indulgent mistress" who had "just been saved from butchery in her own chamber."
While that wasn't true, John Arthur Bowen didn't attack anybody that August 4, 1835 night, the mere implication that a Black person was going to use violence in order to secure their freedom was enough to stoke the fears of some gangs of whites in DC to start a race riot, called the Snow White Race Riot of 1835 aka the August Snow Storm of 1835.
Violent oppressive slave owners have always been worried about a slave uprising since the very moment they began their violent oppression against them... since you know, who in the fuck wants to be violently oppressed? Give me liberty or give me death... which lots of folks erroneously attribute to Patrick Henry, even though William Wirt actually put those words into Patrick Henry's mouth in 1817, decades after Patrick Henry had supposedly said it. Even Thomas Jefferson was there, and he said he was persuaded by Patrick's speech, but he wasn't exactly sure what in the fuck he said. Nobody did. And nobody wrote it down. So William Wirt embellished, ie lied... and put some kick ass words into Patrick Henry's mouth.
Not only were slave owners worried, but poor white supremacists were afraid too, of not being able to feel superior to somebody.
I remember one such anonymous KY douchebag once typed online that: "I may be poor & dumb, but at least I'm white." How does being white make up for being poor & dumb? Oh yeah, you're a white supremacist... which is also the reason why KY votes in bigots into higher office, even if it fucks their own self-interests.
Ok...
xxxxxx
The precise story of John Arthur Bowen, a young 18-year-old enslaved mulatto man, who had supposedly attacked his female Massuh oppressor in her own bedroom with an axe while she was sleeping, is this:
On the hot summer day of August 4, 1835, at 11pm, or 1am the next morning, somewhere in the dead of night, John Arthur Bowen, the 18 year old mulatto slave of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, was walking around Washington DC, on Lafayette Square (called the "President's Square" back then, Lafayette Square today), drunk out of his gourd, past the 10pm curfew, and he then went into the house of his female Massuh commander/oppressor, 60 year old Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton.
Inside the Thornton house, on F Street between 13th and 14th streets, John Arthur Bowen stumbled across an ax left on the basement stairwell. Arthur had picked it up so he could put it away in it's proper place. John Arthur Bowen then walks into the bedroom where both Arthur's mother Maria Bowen & Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & Mrs. Brodeau were sleeping.
Arthur's mother Maria Bowen was a the longtime slave & personal servant of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton.
While Arthur was standing in the doorway, with the ax in the crook of his arm, Anna wakes up, frightened, & she runs by Arthur, and out the bedroom, then out of the house, in order to go to get some help from the neighbors.
Arthur's mother Maria Bowen, the longtime slave & personal servant of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, wakes up, takes the ax away from Arthur, and then kicks him John Arthur Bowen out of the house.
Anna comes back, with two neighbors -- Henry Huntt, the president's physician, and Walter Gibson, an attorney who lived in Huntt's house... and Maria told them that she was able to kick him out.
Outside the house, Arthur was pissed off about being locked out of the house, and about being a slave. John Arthur Bowen picked up a scrub brush and started banging on the door with it.
"I'll have my freedom," Arther shouted. "I'll have my freedom, you hear me? I have as much right to freedom as you do."
"I've got just as much right to freedom as you!"
Where in the hell did John Arthur Bowen get that notion? Who told John Arthur Bowen about freedom!?!
After getting nowhere with shouting about his human rights, John Arthur Bowen left. John Arthur Bowen stumbled back through the garden, into the alley, and then he disappeared into the night.
And that's it.
Eventually, John Arthur Bowen goes back to Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's home, and then he's put in jail, and then put on trial, and sentenced to be hung by his neck until he dies.
Was it a crime? Could it have been a crime? What was John Arthur Bowen's intent?
& really none of this has much to do with the biography of Dr. Reuben Crandall, who was 29 years old when the August snow storm, the Snow White Race Riot of 1835, happened in Washington DC, the first race riot in Amerika.
xxx
Anna Maria Brodeau Thorn-ton, who is about as much fun as a ton of thorns, was so startled by that August 4 1835 night, "oh... I do declare! he might a killed lil ol me! and I'm just a good ol Christian girl, with my dead husband's fortune, and his slaves..." that the next day, she couldn't even bring herself to go to a musical party in Kalorama that she had planned on going to.
First, she's awoken in the middle of the night during her beauty sleep & now she's missing musical parties!?!
Could anything else go wrong for Miss Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton?
Anna Maria Brodeau Thorton put out an advertisement and offered $100 reward for the capture of John Arthur Bowen. The Constables, aka the police, in those days, were usually the ones responsible for catching runaway slaves, and bringing them back to their violent oppressors. Hence, the police have anti-black origins, as well as being the original strike breakers... look at that protest in North Dakota. Which side are they on? They're defending the land, and the people? Or the corporations & the capital?
Seaton & Gales' newspaper "The Intelligencer"; reported the incident such:
"First Fruit" ... a circumstance of a shocking character, which was within a second of time of resulting in the perpetration of a most bloody tragedy, occurred in this city two nights ago."
"On Tuesday night last, an attempt was made on the life of Mrs Thornton, of this city (the much respected widow of the Late Dr Thornton, superintendnent of the patent office), by a young negro man, her slave, which, from the expressions he used was evidently induced by reading the inflammatory publications referred to above."
"About half past 1 o'clock, in the dead of night, Mrs T's chamber in which slept herself, her aged mother, and a woman servant, was entered by the negro, who had obtained access to it by forcing the outer door. He approached the bed of Mrs T with uplifted axe"
Arthur didn't break into the house; he didn't rush towards Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, nor did he have an upraised ax;
"During the whole time that he was endeavoring to force a second entrance into the house, he was venting the most ferocious threats, and uttering a tissue of jargon, much of which was a literal repetition of the language addressed to the negroes by the incendiary publications"
"The Intelligencers" report was repeated verbatim in the "Telegraph", and the "Metropolitan" embellished the story even more with the sensational yellow journalistic headline: "Desperate Attempt at Murder, by a Negro in Washington"
The Metropolitian disagreed on the motive for Arthur's attempted murder... they said, "We believe the negro was incited to this foul deed by the hope of plundering a large quantity of valuable plate belonging to the Lady... and not, as some would represent it, by the effect of any incendiary publication or language whatever".
And in a way... that may have been a defense.
John Arthur Bowen wasn't an enlightened educated negro who wanted freedom for himself because he read the anti-slavery newspapers & pamplets... no sirree... instead, he was nothing more than an opportunist & a thief!
xxx
Some men started speculating where John Arthur Bowen, clearly an inferior silly ol negro, would have got the ideas to think of himself as a freeman.
Dr Henry King, a doctor who had an office on First and High streets, had paid a call on his fellow physician earlier in the summer and noticed that Crandall kept an antislavery newspaper lying in his room. Henry King told this to William Robinson, who admitted thta he had borrowed a copy of an abolitionist newspaper from Dr Reuben Crandall. Well, once George Oyster, a butter maker & landlord of Dr. Reuben Crandall, found out about these stories of abolitionist newspaper, he wondered if perhaps Dr. Reuben Crandall had something with filling John Arthur Bowen's head with ideas of "land of the free, home of the brave" bullshit to the negros.
"Did you hear the news" Oyster asked Dr. Reuben Crandall.
"No", said Reuben.
"A slave boy tried to murder Mrs. Thornton," Oyster said. "He failed but he got away. We got nobody to blame by the New Yorkers" Oyster added pointedly, "They say the boy had been excited by these New York publications."
"I do not approve of putting them into circulation," Reuben said, turning away. "The excitement is too high anyway."
George Oyster was now more suspicious than ever. Who was talking about putting them into circulation?
The location of where Washington DC itself would be located was a political decision. It had been speculated that the federal Capitol should be on the Susquehanna River, in between Pennsylvania & Maryland. But the slave owners and their politicians didn't like that, because Pennsylvania had almost abolished slavery for everybody by 1800, and the slave owners and their politicians in Congress did not want to have the capital of the United States on free territory: symbolically, this suggested that there was something wrong with the institution of slavery. So the slave owners & their politicians pushed Alexander Hamilton to move the capital site farther south, cutting a federal district out of Maryland and Virginia, where slavery was legal. For the time being, slave owners were happy with this arrangement, since this preserved the legitimacy of slavery.
During the 1830s, free blacks would outnumber slaves in Washington for the first time.
Entrepreneurs of color were running restaurants, driving horse-drawn taxis and working as government messengers.
Slavery still existed too, and even in Washington DC, there were still slave auctions, and slave pens around DC too. Slave pens were where slave traders gathered their human cargo to be shipped south from the docks of Georgetown.
Abolitionist petitioners from the free states were demanding that Congress abolish the slave trade in the federal district. They conducted a political direct-mail campaign, where abolitionists sent their publications--bursting with illustrated stories of slavery's cruelties--to the president, to congressmen, to professors and to other leading citizens.
What the abolitionists brought to Washington in the 1830s was not, Hey, let's abolish slavery in the whole damn nation; no. The abolitionists were saying, Let's abolish it in Washington DC. Because both abolitionists and the many white American slave owners and their politicians understood how important that would be symbolically to the rest of the nation.
President Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves who worked in the White House while he was President, some of them slept in the attic, appointed ol Frank Key to be the state's attorney, the chief prosecutor, for Washington DC.
And Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton lived in DC with her slaves too.
In 1790, Anna Maria Brodeau, 16, married William Thornton, 31. William Thornton was the architect of the US Capitol.
Unlike her husband, Anna Maria Brodeau was not a Quaker, and because of that, William Thornton was expelled from the Quakers, from the Society of Friends, for marrying Anna Maria Brodeau. William Thornton came from a slaveholding family based on the island of Tortola, and after he died in 1828, although William Thornton's will granted freedom to his slaves, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & her mother, his mother-in-law, liked having the comforts of the free labor offered to them by the Black backs & Black hands.
One of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's slave boys, John Arthur Bowen, had once served in President's House, as a footman for Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's friend.
But on August 4, 1835, President Andrew Jackson wasn't in DC; he was vacationing that summer at a seaside retreat in southern Virginia, accompanied by his slaves.
xxx
A story went around Washington DC that John Arthur Bowen, a young 18-year-old enslaved mulatto man, had attacked his female overseer in her own bedroom with an axe while she was sleeping.
The Washington Globe newspaper declared that 60 year old Anna Marie Thorton was "a kind and indulgent mistress" who had "just been saved from butchery in her own chamber."
While that wasn't true, John Arthur Bowen didn't attack anybody that August 4, 1835 night, the mere implication that a Black person was going to use violence in order to secure their freedom was enough to stoke the fears of some gangs of whites in DC to start a race riot, called the Snow White Race Riot of 1835 aka the August Snow Storm of 1835.
Violent oppressive slave owners have always been worried about a slave uprising since the very moment they began their violent oppression against them... since you know, who in the fuck wants to be violently oppressed? Give me liberty or give me death... which lots of folks erroneously attribute to Patrick Henry, even though William Wirt actually put those words into Patrick Henry's mouth in 1817, decades after Patrick Henry had supposedly said it. Even Thomas Jefferson was there, and he said he was persuaded by Patrick's speech, but he wasn't exactly sure what in the fuck he said. Nobody did. And nobody wrote it down. So William Wirt embellished, ie lied... and put some kick ass words into Patrick Henry's mouth.
Not only were slave owners worried, but poor white supremacists were afraid too, of not being able to feel superior to somebody.
I remember one such anonymous KY douchebag once typed online that: "I may be poor & dumb, but at least I'm white." How does being white make up for being poor & dumb? Oh yeah, you're a white supremacist... which is also the reason why KY votes in bigots into higher office, even if it fucks their own self-interests.
Ok...
xxxxxx
The precise story of John Arthur Bowen, a young 18-year-old enslaved mulatto man, who had supposedly attacked his female Massuh oppressor in her own bedroom with an axe while she was sleeping, is this:
On the hot summer day of August 4, 1835, at 11pm, or 1am the next morning, somewhere in the dead of night, John Arthur Bowen, the 18 year old mulatto slave of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, was walking around Washington DC, on Lafayette Square (called the "President's Square" back then, Lafayette Square today), drunk out of his gourd, past the 10pm curfew, and he then went into the house of his female Massuh commander/oppressor, 60 year old Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton.
Inside the Thornton house, on F Street between 13th and 14th streets, John Arthur Bowen stumbled across an ax left on the basement stairwell. Arthur had picked it up so he could put it away in it's proper place. John Arthur Bowen then walks into the bedroom where both Arthur's mother Maria Bowen & Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & Mrs. Brodeau were sleeping.
Arthur's mother Maria Bowen was a the longtime slave & personal servant of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton.
While Arthur was standing in the doorway, with the ax in the crook of his arm, Anna wakes up, frightened, & she runs by Arthur, and out the bedroom, then out of the house, in order to go to get some help from the neighbors.
Arthur's mother Maria Bowen, the longtime slave & personal servant of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, wakes up, takes the ax away from Arthur, and then kicks him John Arthur Bowen out of the house.
Anna comes back, with two neighbors -- Henry Huntt, the president's physician, and Walter Gibson, an attorney who lived in Huntt's house... and Maria told them that she was able to kick him out.
Outside the house, Arthur was pissed off about being locked out of the house, and about being a slave. John Arthur Bowen picked up a scrub brush and started banging on the door with it.
"I'll have my freedom," Arther shouted. "I'll have my freedom, you hear me? I have as much right to freedom as you do."
"I've got just as much right to freedom as you!"
Where in the hell did John Arthur Bowen get that notion? Who told John Arthur Bowen about freedom!?!
After getting nowhere with shouting about his human rights, John Arthur Bowen left. John Arthur Bowen stumbled back through the garden, into the alley, and then he disappeared into the night.
And that's it.
Eventually, John Arthur Bowen goes back to Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's home, and then he's put in jail, and then put on trial, and sentenced to be hung by his neck until he dies.
Was it a crime? Could it have been a crime? What was John Arthur Bowen's intent?
& really none of this has much to do with the biography of Dr. Reuben Crandall, who was 29 years old when the August snow storm, the Snow White Race Riot of 1835, happened in Washington DC, the first race riot in Amerika.
xxx
Anna Maria Brodeau Thorn-ton, who is about as much fun as a ton of thorns, was so startled by that August 4 1835 night, "oh... I do declare! he might a killed lil ol me! and I'm just a good ol Christian girl, with my dead husband's fortune, and his slaves..." that the next day, she couldn't even bring herself to go to a musical party in Kalorama that she had planned on going to.
First, she's awoken in the middle of the night during her beauty sleep & now she's missing musical parties!?!
Could anything else go wrong for Miss Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton?
Anna Maria Brodeau Thorton put out an advertisement and offered $100 reward for the capture of John Arthur Bowen. The Constables, aka the police, in those days, were usually the ones responsible for catching runaway slaves, and bringing them back to their violent oppressors. Hence, the police have anti-black origins, as well as being the original strike breakers... look at that protest in North Dakota. Which side are they on? They're defending the land, and the people? Or the corporations & the capital?
Seaton & Gales' newspaper "The Intelligencer"; reported the incident such:
"First Fruit" ... a circumstance of a shocking character, which was within a second of time of resulting in the perpetration of a most bloody tragedy, occurred in this city two nights ago."
"On Tuesday night last, an attempt was made on the life of Mrs Thornton, of this city (the much respected widow of the Late Dr Thornton, superintendnent of the patent office), by a young negro man, her slave, which, from the expressions he used was evidently induced by reading the inflammatory publications referred to above."
"About half past 1 o'clock, in the dead of night, Mrs T's chamber in which slept herself, her aged mother, and a woman servant, was entered by the negro, who had obtained access to it by forcing the outer door. He approached the bed of Mrs T with uplifted axe"
Arthur didn't break into the house; he didn't rush towards Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, nor did he have an upraised ax;
"During the whole time that he was endeavoring to force a second entrance into the house, he was venting the most ferocious threats, and uttering a tissue of jargon, much of which was a literal repetition of the language addressed to the negroes by the incendiary publications"
"The Intelligencers" report was repeated verbatim in the "Telegraph", and the "Metropolitan" embellished the story even more with the sensational yellow journalistic headline: "Desperate Attempt at Murder, by a Negro in Washington"
The Metropolitian disagreed on the motive for Arthur's attempted murder... they said, "We believe the negro was incited to this foul deed by the hope of plundering a large quantity of valuable plate belonging to the Lady... and not, as some would represent it, by the effect of any incendiary publication or language whatever".
And in a way... that may have been a defense.
John Arthur Bowen wasn't an enlightened educated negro who wanted freedom for himself because he read the anti-slavery newspapers & pamplets... no sirree... instead, he was nothing more than an opportunist & a thief!
xxx
Some men started speculating where John Arthur Bowen, clearly an inferior silly ol negro, would have got the ideas to think of himself as a freeman.
Dr Henry King, a doctor who had an office on First and High streets, had paid a call on his fellow physician earlier in the summer and noticed that Crandall kept an antislavery newspaper lying in his room. Henry King told this to William Robinson, who admitted thta he had borrowed a copy of an abolitionist newspaper from Dr Reuben Crandall. Well, once George Oyster, a butter maker & landlord of Dr. Reuben Crandall, found out about these stories of abolitionist newspaper, he wondered if perhaps Dr. Reuben Crandall had something with filling John Arthur Bowen's head with ideas of "land of the free, home of the brave" bullshit to the negros.
"Did you hear the news" Oyster asked Dr. Reuben Crandall.
"No", said Reuben.
"A slave boy tried to murder Mrs. Thornton," Oyster said. "He failed but he got away. We got nobody to blame by the New Yorkers" Oyster added pointedly, "They say the boy had been excited by these New York publications."
"I do not approve of putting them into circulation," Reuben said, turning away. "The excitement is too high anyway."
George Oyster was now more suspicious than ever. Who was talking about putting them into circulation?
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