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 has an observatory as well as the nation’s master clock . At the beginning of her stay, she saw traces of excavations near her house and, after inquiring, she learned that an archaeological team had recently discovered part of the foundations of an Italianate villa, known under the name of North View, which existed there for over a century and a year. half before.
Near the villa, the team had found something else: the brick foundations of a smokehouse used for curing meat. There was no need to tell Ms. Harris who had used it. Long before moving to the new residence, the nation’s first black vice president was briefed by his aides about the 34 people who once lived on the property against their will. A subsequent opinion essay for CQ Roll Call was the first mention of it in the media.
The names of the slaves were recorded in a document from the time. 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. Marie Brun. John Chapman. William Cyrus.
They ranged in age from 4 months to 65 years and had skills ranging from winemaking to carpentry. Five of them would leave for the Civil War as Union soldiers. Another would flee at age 13, destination unknown. For those who remained at a property known at the time as Pretty Prospects, the abject conditions of their lives are recounted in documents now held at the National Archives.
Mortimer Briscoe, 30, “had one of his toes frozen, but is otherwise in good health.” John Thomas, 41, “has three fingers on his left hand injured by a corn huller” but “can drive the car and work as well as before.”
Until these slaves 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 owned by a widow, Margaret C. Barber, who lived in the North View villa. . Together, they constitute a largely unknown chapter of a historic property whose famous resident is now believed to be descended from a Jamaican slave.
After hearing about the smokehouse, aides said Ms. Harris asked if any other evidence regarding the 34 slaves had been discovered. No, he was told. But the discovery, which has now been 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 map viewed by the archaeological team, dated 1882, which showed the exact location of North View and the neighboring smokehouse. About a quarter mile from where she now lives was a long-gone dwelling called the “Negro House,” where the 34 slave workers lived.
Ms. Harris then began poring over photographs taken on the property over the past half-century. The subjects were vice presidents, all white men, with their families and guests. The images revealed nothing about the role black people played in the history of the nation’s capital, much less about the property itself.
A widow on a farm
The story of a slave farm that later became the U.S. Naval Observatory and today the home of the nation’s first black vice president has previously been told only in fragments. This account is based on interviews with associates of Ms. Harris. It is also based on information provided by the naval archaeologist who unearthed the smokehouse, Brian Cleven, and on a wealth of historical literature, much of it culled from archives and libraries by Washington historian Carlton Fletcher .
Ms. Harris has never mentioned the residence’s legacy of slavery in public remarks. Aides said the very idea of moving to such a place only became acceptable to her once she was assured that her new home was not the same structure as the one where Ms. Barber’s servants once worked , and that they had been emancipated three decades before its construction.
The Obamas might understand. Michelle Obama, in her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, cited living in the White House as a black first lady as “the story of generations of people who have felt the lash of the slavery, the shame of servitude, the sting.” of segregation, but who continued to fight and hope and do what had to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves and look at my daughters – two beautiful young women smart black women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.
CR Gibbs, a local historian, said many tourists ignore this chapter of Washington history. “What people don’t realize when they come to visit the Smithsonian Museum, the Washington Monument, the Capitol or the White House is that they are on land worked by slaves,” he said. declared. “And so is the vice president’s residence.”
North View was built in the early 1850s for a wealthy Baltimore planter, Cornelius Barber. His wife, Margaret, was the offspring of a winemaker, John Adlum, whose vineyard on the banks of Rock Creek attracted admirers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Five of the Barbers’ six children died of illness, as did the father in 1853, leaving the 43-year-old widow to take care of the estate.
But she had help. The 34 farm workers and domestic servants enslaved under Mrs. Barber’s leadership made them second among the city’s slave owners. (The first, tobacco planter George Washington Young, owned 68 people of African descent.) Mrs. Barber frequently rented her men to neighbors who owned farms, tanneries, and slaughterhouses. Throughout the 1850s, she earned an annual income of about $1,600, or about $61,000 in today’s currency.
One of Mrs. Barber’s servants, Ellen Jenkins, had been bequeathed to her by her winemaker father in his will, with the stipulation that Mrs. Jenkins would be freed from servitude at the age of 50. But Mrs Barber described Mrs Jenkins in a document as a “good cook” and only abandoned her servant when the 1862 Act emancipated Mrs Jenkins, when she was 60.
Ms. Barber abandoned Ms. Jenkins and her other slave laborers only after hiring a lawyer, who argued before a government committee that the widow was entitled to compensation for her loss. She was asking $750 each for them. In the end, Ms. Barber settled for $270 per worker, for a total of $9,000, or about $336,500 today. She left the villa, whose grand paintings and chandeliered ballrooms were later desecrated by Union soldiers. Mrs. Barber died of influenza at the age of 80 in 1892, around the same time that North View was being demolished.
A return to black history
Today, Ms. Harris lives in a three-story, white-turreted Queen Anne-style building, whose history is less fraught than that of the villa it replaced.
Built in 1893 for the Superintendent of the Naval Observatory and later as the residence of the Chief of Naval Operations, it was designated in 1974 by Congress as the official residence of the Vice President. Walter F. Mondale moved in with his family three years later, good-naturedly respecting the not-yet-updated plumbing. He laughed about it in interviews and said the family became friends with the plumber. Hot water came out often.
At some point during the 1980s, Vice President George HW Bush added a horseshoe pit to the property. His successor, Dan Quayle, installed a putting green and a swimming pool, which later endeared Mr. Quayle to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who, with his wife, Jill, enjoyed swimming there in evening. Vice President Dick Cheney preferred the hammock at the residence, where he supervised the antics of his Labradors, Jackson and Dave. The Pences contributed to a beehive and organized pumpkin decorating activities on Halloween.
A notable first occurred two years ago, when Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, hosted a gathering of predominantly black Washington families to celebrate Juneteenth. In her off-the-record remarks that day, the vice president made passing reference to the 34 people who once lived on the property against their will.
Ms. Harris sought to reconnect the residency with the Black American experience and highlight 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 reinvent the interior.
In decorating her walls, Ms. Harris passed on the landscape paintings given to her by the Smithsonian and instead installed artwork that included works by black photographers. Carrie Mae Weems and Roy DeCarava, a painting by Cherokee artist Kay Walkingstick, and a quilt of the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who are descended from enslaved cotton pickers.
To this day, Ms. Harris has no plans to commemorate the 34 black men and women. Their individual stories have all but disappeared. The remains of only two have been found.
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. Mrs. Jenkins became a nurse and lived to be 80 years old.
Both women were buried in a black cemetery that is now the site of Walter Pierce Park, two miles east of where Ms. Harris lives today.
