How enslaved Black people helped make Washington our nation’s capital

By Colbert I. King,

Jan. 6, 2021, was not the first time that a Congress in our nation’s capital was confronted with a serious domestic threat. Yes, during the War of 1812, British troops did march on Washington and set fire to the U.S. Capitol. But that was an attack from foreign shores.

The first domestic threat emerged in 1783 when the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, which served at the time as the nation’s capital.

As with so much that occurred during that era, enslaved Black people had much to do with the reason Washington became our nation’s capital. How is recounted in this column. Read on.

The siege of the Continental Congress and the decision to abandon Philadelphia are chronicled by the National Constitution Center. The immediate problem in 1783 was money, of which the new federal government had little. That mattered greatly because the federal government was responsible for paying the Continental troops who took up arms against the British.

Federal troops in Lancaster, Pa., angry at not being paid for their service, took off to Philadelphia to meet with their compatriots for an exchange of views about how to get their hands on what was owed. That gathering produced what became known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783.

About 400 disgruntled federal troops decided to march to Congress — much as pro-Trump supporters two weeks ago did — to press their case. And how they did.

They didn’t trash Independence Hall, break bodies and leave people for dead, as was achieved by the Trump-provoked mob.

The federal troops just blocked the doors to the Continental Congress and, stationing themselves outside, demanded that those on the inside find a way to produce the back pay. It also didn’t help matters when locked-in lawmakers got word that the highly agitated federal soldiers had taken control of weapons storage areas.

Young Alexander Hamilton, a former federal soldier himself and member of Congress, met with the troops and persuaded them to free the legislators so they could work out a solution. As backup, Hamilton managed to send a secret note to the Pennsylvania state government asking that the Pennsylvania militia be deployed to Philadelphia to protect the Congress from the rowdy federal troops.

Pennsylvania’s top leader, John Dickinson, talked it over with the state militia, which didn’t think much of the idea. Thus, Dickinson advised the congressional lawmakers that they were on their own. That same day, Congress managed to find a way out of Philly and thus embark on a long odyssey to find a new home. Eventually, some of the Founding Fathers — Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson — got together over dinner and agreed that Congress needed a safe location where whenever Congress called for help, rescue would come.

Which gets us to Black people held in servitude and how Washington became the nation’s capital.

Southern members of the Continental Congress had feared that locating the new capital in the North would diminish Southern clout and weaken their hold on slavery. The three Founding Fathers agreed to place the capital along the Potomac in exchange for the federal assumption of states’ war debts from the American Revolution.

Congress got land from Maryland and Virginia to establish a federal district where the nation’s capital would no longer be at the mercy of a state government, and slavery could flourish: the District of Columbia, a place on the Potomac where Congress could dwell in sweet repose. And as it did, more or less — with some exceptions such as 1812 and the 1954 attack on the House by four Puerto Rican nationalists — until Jan. 6, when an angry, nasty and violent pro-Trump mob invaded the nation’s first branch of government. They didn’t block doors; they tore them off the hinges. The U.S. Capitol was desecrated, lawmakers humiliated, democracy damaged.

And America watched and discovered that the first move of the U.S. Capitol police force was way, way too slow.

Ironically, it fell to the city’s Metropolitan Police Department, many of which are descendants of Black people formerly held in bondage, to rush to Capitol Hill to help free the federal captives.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Another bit of nonfiction: The Pennsylvania Munity of 1783 was sparked by the nonpayment of federal troops. The Washington Insurrection of 2021, said Republican leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor on Tuesday, was carried out by a mob that “was fed lies” and “provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

Which was the more ominous impetus, for a republic that is no longer new?

Read more from Colbert King’s archive.

Read more: Catherine Rampell: Right on schedule, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again Alexandra Petri: Joe Biden is president now and everything has happened just as we were warned David Ignatius: Some of Trump’s foreign policies are worth sustaining. Biden should keep that in mind.