Three years ago this month, Vice President Kamala Harris moved into her official residence in northwest Washington, a quiet 73-acre enclave where the U.S. Navy maintains an observatory and the country’s main clock. Early in her stay, she discovered traces of excavations near her home and, after asking around, learned that a team of archaeologists had recently found part of the foundation of an Italian-style villa known as North View, which had been there for more Half of it was 150 years ago.
The team had found something else near the villa: a brick foundation of a smokehouse where meat was smoked. Ms Harris did not need to be told who had used it. Long before moving into the new residence, the country’s first black vice president had been briefed by advisers on the 34 people who had once lived on the property against their will. A subsequent opinion essay for CQ Roll Call was the first mention in the news media.
The names of the enslaved people were recorded in a document from this period. Peter, Mary and Ellen Jenkins. Chapman, Sarah, Henry, Joseph, Louisa, Daniel and Eliza Toyer. Towley, Jane, Resin, Samuel, Judah and Andrew Yates. Kitty, William, Gilbert and Phillip Silas. Susan, Dennis, Ann Maria and William Carroll. Becky, Milly, Margaret and Mortimer Briscoe. Richard Williams. Mary Young. John Thomas. Mary Brown. John Chapman. William Cyrus.
Their ages ranged from four months to 65 years and their skills ranged from winemaking to carpentry. Five of them would go on to fight in the Civil War as Union soldiers. Another would flee at the age of 13 with an unknown destination. For those who stayed on an estate then known as Pretty Prospects, the squalid conditions of their lives are hinted at in documents now held in the National Archives.
Mortimer Briscoe, 30, “had frostbite on one of his toes, but is otherwise healthy.” John Thomas, 41, “injured three fingers on his left hand from a corn sheller,” but “can drive the car and work just as well as before.”
Until these enslaved people and approximately 3,000 others in the nation’s capital were emancipated by an act of Congress on April 16, 1862, the 34 residents of Pretty Prospects were the property of a widow, Margaret C. Barber, who lived in the North View mansion. Together they form a largely unknown chapter in a historic estate whose famous resident now believes she is descended from an enslaved Jamaican.
After learning about the smokehouse, aides said Ms. Harris asked whether more evidence had been uncovered about the 34 enslaved people. No, she was told. But the discovery, now documented in a new report soon to be released by the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, prompted Ms. Harris to do some digging herself.
Aides said she studied the old 1882 map that the archaeological team consulted, which showed the exact location of North View and the nearby smokehouse. About a quarter mile from their current home was a long-vanished home called the Negro House, where the 34 enslaved workers lived.
A map included in the Naval Observatory’s annual report in 1882 shows the North View house on the left and a building labeled “Negro House” on the right.Credit…US Naval Observatory Archives
Ms. Harris then began poring over photos taken at the property over the last half century. The subjects were vice presidents, all white men, with their families and guests. The images conveyed nothing about the role of black people in the history of the nation’s capital, let alone the property itself.
A widow on a farm
The story of a slave farm that became a U.S. naval observatory and is now the residence of the country’s first black vice president has only been told in fragments. This report is based on interviews with Ms. Harris’ employees. It is also based on information from Naval archaeologist Brian Cleven, who excavated the smokehouse, and on a wealth of historical literature, much of which Washington historian Carlton Fletcher gathered from archives and libraries.
Ms. Harris has never mentioned the legacy of slavery at the residence in public statements. Aides said the very idea of moving to such a place only became palatable to her when she was assured that her new home was not the same building where Ms. Barber’s servants once worked and that they had lived there three decades ago were emancipated from the building.
The Obamas could understand that. Michelle Obama, in her speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, cited the fact that she lived in the White House as a black first lady as “the story of generations of people who have felt the whip of bondage, the shame of bondage, the sting .” of segregation, but continued to strive and hope and do what had to be done, so that today I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves and watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women Watching their dogs play on the White House lawn.”
C.R. Gibbs, a local historian, said many tourists are unaware of this chapter in Washington’s history. “What people don’t realize when they visit the Smithsonian Museum, the Washington Monument, the Capitol or the White House is that they are on land worked by slaves,” he said. “And the same goes for the vice president’s residence.”
North View was built in the early 1850s for wealthy Baltimore planter Cornelius Barber. His wife Margaret was the daughter of winemaker John Adlum, whose vineyard on the banks of Rock Creek attracted admirers such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Five of the Barbers’ six children died of illness, as did their father in 1853, leaving the 43-year-old widow to look after the estate.
But she had help. The 34 enslaved farm workers and domestic servants under Mrs. Barber made her second among the city’s slave owners. (The first, tobacco planter George Washington Young, owned 68 people of African descent.) Mrs. Barber often rented her men out to neighbors who owned farms, tanneries and slaughterhouses. In the 1850s she earned an annual income of around $1,600, or about $61,000 in today’s currency.
One of Ms. Barber’s domestic servants, Ellen Jenkins, had been bequeathed to her by her father, a winemaker, in his will, with the condition that Ms. Jenkins would be released from servitude when she turned 50. But Ms. Barber described Ms. Jenkins in a document as a “good cook” and only gave up her servant role when the 1862 Act emancipated Ms. Jenkins at the age of 60.
Ms. Barber gave up on Ms. Jenkins and her other enslaved workers only after she hired a lawyer who argued before a government committee that the widow was entitled to compensation for her loss. She charged $750 each for them. In the end, Ms. Barber settled for $270 per worker, for a total of $9,000, which is equivalent to about $336,500 today. She moved out of the mansion, whose magnificent paintings and chandeliered ballrooms were later desecrated by Union soldiers. Mrs. Barber died of influenza at age 80 in 1892, about the same time North View was demolished.
A return of black history
Today, Ms. Harris lives in a three-story, white-towered Queen Anne-style building whose history is less fraught than that of the mansion it replaced.
It was built in 1893 for the head of the Naval Observatory and later served as the residence of the Chief of Naval Operations. In 1974, Congress designated it as the official residence of the Vice President. Walter F. Mondale moved in with his family three years later and cheerfully retained the not yet modernized plumbing. He laughed about it in interviews and said the family had become friends with the plumber. The hot water often ran out.
Sometime in the 1980s, Vice President George HW Bush had a horseshoe pit built on the property. His successor, Dan Quayle, installed a putting green and swimming pool, which later endeared Mr. Quayle to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who enjoyed evening swims there with his wife, Jill. Vice President Dick Cheney favored the residence’s hammock, where he oversaw the frolicking of his Labradors, Jackson and Dave. The Pences provided a beehive and hosted pumpkin decorating activities on Halloween.
A notable first came two years ago when Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, welcomed a gathering of predominantly black Washington families to celebrate Juneteenth. In her off-the-record remarks that day, the vice president made a passing reference to the 34 people who once lived on the property against their will.
Ms. Harris has sought to reconnect the residency with the black American experience and showcase the works of minority artists. Last September, she hosted a hip-hop concert on the lawn, dancing with 400 guests to performances by Lil Wayne and Q-Tip. She turned to Harlem-based designer Sheila Bridges to redesign the interior.
When decorating the walls, Ms. Harris eschewed landscape paintings offered to her by the Smithsonian and instead installed artworks, including works by black photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Roy DeCarava, a painting by Cherokee artist Kay Walkingstick and a quilt by the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who descended from enslaved cotton pickers.
As of now, there are no plans from Ms. Harris to commemorate the 34 black men and women. Their individual stories have all but disappeared. The remains of only two were accounted for.
One of them, Mary Brown, was about 16 years old at the time of her emancipation and later worked as a housekeeper in Washington before dying in 1886 at the age of 40. The other was Ellen Jenkins, the cook. Ms. Jenkins became a nurse and lived until she was 80 years old.
Both women were buried in a black cemetery that is now Walter Pierce Park, two miles east of where Ms. Harris lives today.
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2024-04-12 12:53:49
www.nytimes.com
