CHAPTER II. THE EMERGENCE OF A SELF-RELIANT NEGRO COMMUNITY, 1791-1831.
In: Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital; 1967, p13-34, 22p, 1 Chart
Buch
Zugriff:
The article focuses on the emergence of a self-reliant Negro community in Washington from 1791 through 1831. In 1791, when former U.S. President George Washington selected a site for a national capital on the Potomac River below the small port of Georgetown, some Negroes were already living in the ten-mile square newly ceded to the U.S. by Maryland and Virginia. Most of the colored people were slaves owned by the proprietors of the tobacco plantations, farms and woodlands that occupied the countryside. A few free Negroes may have lived in Georgetown or in the tiny hamlet of Hamburg across Rock Creek or in Carrollsburg on the shores of the Potomac's Eastern Branch, where Daniel Carroll hoped to develop a trading center. On the far side of the Potomac, Virginia law forbade freedmen to remain in the state more than six months after manumission on pain of being sold back into slavery; hence any free Negroes who lived in or near the city of Alexandria must either have been there on sufferance or have been born free for until the U.S. Congress was ready to make laws for the new federal territory, Virginia law was to govern the trans-Potomac part of the D.C. and Maryland law was to rule the rest. That arrangement left colored people subject to racial restrictions imposed by slave-holding agricultural states. Certainly no Negro in 1791 owned a patch of ground or a dwelling within the area where the new city was to rise. By agreement with President Washington, each of the proprietors of that land received sixty-seven dollars an acre for the property he sold to the U.S.
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CHAPTER II. THE EMERGENCE OF A SELF-RELIANT NEGRO COMMUNITY, 1791-1831.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Green, Constance Mc ; Laughlin |
Quelle: | Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital; 1967, p13-34, 22p, 1 Chart |
Veröffentlichung: | 1967 |
Medientyp: | Buch |
ISBN: | 978-0-691-00568-3 (print) |
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