Kate Chilton’s chapter explores the unique experience of women in the District of Columbia and argues that Black women drew on women’s strong position in the urban economy to choose work that allowed them to help support their families and demand respect and reciprocal obligations from their husbands. The strategies practiced by African American women during and after emancipation reveal the continuities between the prewar and post–Civil War periods that made urban freedom in the District of Columbia different and distinct. Despite the dislocations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction and the attempts of agents of the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to impose Republican ideals on Black women, emancipation ultimately served to reinforce prewar patterns of gendered behavior in former slave households. While Black men experienced great demand for their labor during the war, the resumption of a peacetime employment market meant that the majority of Black women would have to work in freedom.

American incarceration takes two distinct forms. People locked up for a short time are typically placed in a local jail, not a State prison. The primary benefits of jails are logistical. Jails are close to the police stations that generate arrests and the courts that process them. For prisoners, jails are nearer to home, family, and friends. There is, however, little to do in jails, since jails are intended for short-term stays. People locked up for longer periods, generally more than a year, are sent to a prison. Prisons are usually larger and more centralized and thus likely to be farther from the scene of the arrest, the sentencing court, and the prisoner’s home and loved ones. Since prisons are intended for longer stays, they have, or at least should have, more programs, like jobs and education.

The first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress saw the tensions over slavery in the District of Columbia erupt on the floors of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In both chambers the presentation of abolitionist petitions became a point of controversy As actors in the Senate and House groped for a path around the polarizing and consuming issue of abolition, they moved away from reliance upon the text of the constitutional document and toward a constitutional spirit – embodied in the idea of “the compact” – as a way to navigate the apparent incompatibility of Southern and Northern understandings of the Constitution’s guarantee of rights of property. This chapter traces the process of the debates within each chamber of Congress before turning to a closer analysis of the constitutional issues raised by them. The chapter outlines the manner in which the invocation of “the compact” in the debates and in Pinckney’s Report of May 1836 met the challenges of the abolitionist petitions and erected an understanding of constitutional faith that rested upon the reanimation of values deemed present in the debates of 1787–88.

This chapter follows the transformation of the issue of slavery in the nation’s capital into the 1830s across four sections. The first section provides the broad setting of a growing sense amongst abolitionists of the “Americanization” of slavery following the initiation of a gradual emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. Given the importance of the District for the domestic slave trade, examined in the second section, this reconceptualization was not without merit. The third section traces the ways in which immediate abolition and its reconceptualization of slavery within the District, in light of the trends discussed in the first and second sections, saw continuities but also important departures from the antislavery position on the District of Columbia in the 1820s. The final section examines the ways in which the District of Columbia grew in significance for defenders of slavery over roughly the same period.

This chapter explores the emergence of the question of abolition within the District of Columbia in the presidential campaign of 1836. Over the course of the presidential campaign, Martin Van Buren sought to hone his position on the question of abolition in the District in response to the pressures he faced from southern Whigs. From an early position that abolition in the District would be inexpedient or impolitic, Van Buren shifted by his inaugural address to the position that such action was counter to “the spirit that actuated the venerated fathers of the republic,” while through campaign materials, public meetings, and official addresses, the Democrats developed the view that abolitionist activity aimed at altering the extant inter-State settlement on slavery was counter to the “spirit of deference, conciliation and mutual forbearance” that underwrote the federal compact. This approach enabled Van Buren and the Democrats to successfully navigate the 1836 election, but it also legitimized an appeal to spirit as a method of resolving constitutional disputes that had significant longer-term effects.