The American amnesia is perhaps understandable. It is unsettling to remember that, in the cold winter of 1836, Francis Scott Key sought the death penalty for an 18-year-old, apparently as a civics lesson to the people of Washington and the nation. It is harder, but perhaps healthier, to recall what has been lost history. Key, a founding father of the American spirit, was quietly thwarted by a better sort of woman, a Washington socialite with unsuspected political skills, driven by love and family secrets, a woman named Anna Maria Thornton.
ARTHUR FLED ON TUESDAY NIGHT. On Saturday morning, August 8, the Washington Mirror newspaper reported that he had been arrested.
Anna Maria Thornton as painted by her friend Gilbert Stuart in 1804. In August 1835 Thornton was reportedly assaulted by a young ax-wielding Negro slave in her F Street home in August 1835. The incident set off Washington's first race riot.
(Courtesy National Gallery of Art)
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In a city already on edge with racial tension, the first reports of a Negro slave entering the boudoir of a white woman with an ax in hand evoked still-fresh memories of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Va., 180 miles south of Washington. Turner and a band of runaway slaves had killed upwards of 50 white people with axes before being rounded up and hanged by local authorities. The Washington Globe newspaper declared that Anna was "a kind and indulgent mistress" who had "just been saved from butchery in her own chamber."
The changing racial composition of the city fed those fears. During the 1830s, free blacks would outnumber slaves in Washington for the first time. Entrepreneurs of color were running restaurants, driving horse-drawn taxis and working as government messengers. To make matters even more tense, the capital was awash that week with rumors of abolitionist peril. Petitioners from up north were demanding that Congress abolish the slave trade in the federal district. In an early version of a political direct-mail campaign, abolitionists began sending their publications -- bursting with illustrated stories of slavery's cruelties -- to the president, to congressmen, to professors and to other leading citizens. The open circulation of such stories struck many white people (and more than a few Negroes) as a challenge to the law and order of the community, an incitement to slaves to slaughter their masters.
The prominence of the victim made the story all the more sensational. At 60 years of age, Anna was among the best- known ladies in Washington. Her mother, Ann Brodeau, had been an accomplished schoolteacher who had moved from England to Philadelphia when Anna was a baby. A renowned beauty in her youth, Anna had been married at age 15 to William Thornton, a brilliant architect who was on friendly terms with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the new nation. After William Thornton won the 1792 contest to design the Capitol, he and his wife moved to Washington, where they became fixtures of the town's elite.
In 1804, Anna sat for her friend Gilbert Stuart, the painter who made his name portraying George Washington. Stuart's portrait of her reveals a handsome, proud woman with a strong nose and bright eyes, outward indicators of quick perception, womanly graces and determination. She and her husband had no children, so she devoted herself to the household economy, throwing dinner parties, hosting out-of-town visitors and managing the family farm in Bethesda. "In affairs of business, she was equal to a man," a friend later recalled.
Now Anna was distraught at Arthur's arrest, and no doubt regretful of her role in bringing it about. "Oh I am grieved indeed at this business," Anna wrote in her diary that Saturday night. "The people are incensed against Arthur as he is thought to be one of a party instigated by some white friends to raise an insurrection . . . Oh God protect us -- still as thou has done & give me fortitude & resolution."
Before her prayer could be answered, a crowd of angry young white men gathered around the city jail in Judiciary Square that weekend. They were mostly Irish, mostly drunk. Known as "Mechanics," these manual laborers were poor and insecure. The institution of slavery, with its low-cost labor for well-to-do whites, constantly undercut the value of their work. But they did not direct their rage at the slave masters. They turned on the Negroes and the abolitionists, seeing them as dire threats to be repelled.
Watching the tumult in Judiciary Square was a free Negro named Michael Shiner, who worked for the Navy and kept a diary. The Mechanics, he wrote, "swore they would pull the jail down and they continued making their threats and they said their object was to get Mrs. Thornton's mulatto and hang him without judge or juror."
District Attorney Key struggled to restore order. At 56, he was, in Ben Perley's words, "a small active man, having an earnest and even anxious countenance, as if care sat heavily upon him." Accustomed to leading his family in prayer twice a day, Key was not prepared for a defiant mob shouting obscenities. And all he had to protect himself and city property was the city's police force, which consisted of exactly 10 constables. So, according to newspaper accounts, Key asked for military help. A detachment of Marines was sent from the Navy Yard. By nightfall, scores of Marines, carrying bayoneted guns, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Judiciary Square, where the clamoring Mechanics were temporarily cowed but not calmed.
Key apparently thought he had to do more. He shared the Globe's view that Arthur Bowen's alleged attack was the "first fruit" of the circulation of abolitionist literature. This is not the modern-day view of Key. On a historical marker in Francis Scott Key Park in Georgetown, he is described as "active in anti-slavery causes." That is technically accurate but hardly the whole story. Key was an active leader of the American Colonization Society, a group popular among right-thinking members of the capital elite, which, while repudiating slavery in principle, also sought to encourage Negroes to move to Africa. The city's legally sanctioned slave trade did not stir Key to action. He was far more offended by the outside agitators from the North who sought to abolish it.
On August 10, Key persuaded a justice of the peace to write a warrant for the arrest of one Reuben Crandall, a white man who was said to be in possession of abolitionist literature. Crandall was a 29-year-old botanist and doctor from New York who had recently opened an office on High Street (now Wisconsin Avenue) in Georgetown. Crandall was a plausible suspect because of his notorious sister, Prudence Crandall. She was a Connecticut schoolteacher who had stirred controversy nationwide the year before by welcoming a free Negro girl into her classroom. (The Connecticut legislature promptly passed a law forbidding integrated schools.) According to newspaper accounts, Reuben Crandall cut a stodgier figure than his outspoken sister. He opposed slavery but not openly. As a teetotaler, he cared more about the prohibition of liquor than the abolition of slavery.
When two constables went to Crandall's office, he allowed them to search the premises. As they later testified in court, the constables found a box full of copies of the Anti-Slavery Reporter and the Liberator, the two publications that had been mass-mailed to the city's leading citizens. Crandall was arrested on charges of sedition. As the constables emerged on the street with their prisoner, one bystander later testified that someone in the crowd had said, "We ought to take the damned rascal and hang him up on one of the trees."
The constables rushed Crandall to the jail in Judiciary Square for his own safety. But, with two prisoners they loathed in custody, the Mechanics grew more agitated and refused to disperse.
"THE PUBLIC INDIGNATION IS RISING HIGH
and the general impression is that the culprit will not go unpunished," one visitor wrote of Crandall's arrest. The dozens of Marines garrisoned around City Hall and the jail, however, meant the mob could not lynch either Bowen or Crandall. So, soon the Mechanics turned their fury on a new target: Beverly Snow, a free man of mixed race who ran a popular restaurant at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the Epicurean Eating House. A rumor spread that Snow had, in the words of the Washington Mirror, "used very indecent and disrespectful language concerning the wives and daughters of Mechanics."
Snow, as his name might imply, was a cool customer who seemed to blend in with whites. His finely appointed restaurant sat amid several busy hotels on Pennsylvania Avenue. By day, Snow served Washington's better white families.
Snow and Walker's Oyster House stood on the northwest corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Proprietor Beverly Snow, a free man of mixed race, escaped the mob and declared his innocence. ( Courtesy Historical Society of Washington)
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At night, he offered parlors for "gentlemen forming private parties." The newspaper advertisement that he ran that week declared that his menu included "a fine green turtle . . . a very fine Sheep's Head and every other luxury of the season." As the mob descended on his restaurant on August 11, Snow, in the words of one account, "escaped unharmed, through management of white friends."
