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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2020
William H. Williams’ slave jail, the Yellow House, garnered a great deal of controversy as the abolitionist movement gained momentum. Abolitionists decried the slave coffles that marched through the District of Columbia, yet from the mid–1830s to mid–1840s, the "gag rule" stymied debate over the antislavery petitions submitted to Congress. Shortly before the presidential election of 1844, Thomas Williams flew a flag of the Democratic Polk/Dallas ticket above the Yellow House. The banner ignited a newspaper war in the nation’s capital, as the Democratic organ, the Washington Globe, claimed the move a clever Whig ruse to smear the Democratic Party with the odium of slavery. Washington’s Whig mouthpiece, the National Intelligencer, made the much simpler argument that Thomas Williams flew the Polk/Dallas flag because the slave dealer was, in fact, a Democrat.
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