Washington: from slaves and brothels to being the most powerful city in the world

Before being the most powerful city in the world, before hosting the White House and the Capitol, before directly governing the destinies of 330 million Americans, and indirectly, the rest of the planet, the city of Washington was something very different. In 1790, the year of its foundation, and during the first decades of the 19th century, the city was a melting pot for upstarts, a nest of inequality crossed by ropes of slaves, full of brothels and with a devilish urban project. Montserrat Huguet, professor at the Carlos III of Madrid, has just published Washington, the city of mud and slaves (Comares), an exciting journey through the founding process of the city, which summarizes the founding process of the country that hosted it.

"Why Washington City?" Asks Huguet. The city intrigued him on the account of a little-known writer in Spain, Margaret Smith Bayard, whose 1824 novel Washington in Winter had fallen into his hands. “This little novel made me interested first in the author, and then in her best-known work: The First Forty Years of Washington Society. There I discovered a very unusual time and world in the studies of contemporary history that we are used to in Spain ”. Some texts led him to others until he realized that there was a good theme, “because the history of the first decades of the city was also that of the formation of the federal state, of the legal and regulatory fabric, of community tensions and social".

But let's start the time machine. In that 1790 when it was decided to fix the American capital at that point on the map, the land on which it was going to be built was private: one hundred square miles that were mostly farms. 19 owners, gathered at Georgetown's Suter Tavern, decided to sell their land for £ 25 on 35 hectares. There was already land on which to build a city. "The biggest names in the initial project were, of course, George Washington and Pierre Charles L'Enfant," Huguet explains. L'Enfant was the architect of French origin who designed the city. And Washington, well, the first president of the United States and the one who would end up giving his name to the city.

George Washington, on his slave farm on Mount Vermont, in a painting by Junius Brutus Stearns (1851).

However, urban planning ran aground. Unlike the European capitals, Washington was not an evolution of a settlement, but an objective to be achieved in record time. A city that was built around various architectural landmarks, and not a traditional center. There was the President's House (designed by James Hoban), who would only acquire Blanca's later, and there was the Capitol, conceived as a "palace" of popular sovereignty. But in general Washington was in its first decades "a city inhabited mainly by poor people, without jobs and without a home," describes the professor. A sad city, without charm, weighed down by the indifference of the authorities for the urban disorders. An “archipelago of neighborhoods”, as it is said in the book, built on mud, which owes one of the two nouns in the subtitle: the city of mud and slaves .

The other noun is due, according to Huguet, to the fact that the city “was from its beginnings a clear exponent of the paradox existing between the founders' wishes and history. With the exception of President Adams, a declared abolitionist who never had a single slave, the first presidents were slavers, ”he says. And it is that slavery was a flourishing industry in Washington City. The location of the city, between the North and the South, and in a slave region, made it a natural center of business. Although the government itself did not have slaves, it saw no problem renting them for daily work. In the day to day ropes of slaves could be seen heading to the markets where they were chained to the walls of the establishments where the deals were settled. "Many of the politicians who inhabited the city on behalf of their states kept domestic slaves and their estates, and also saw no major objections to an industry still very lucrative," says Huguet. “The relationship of some presidents, Jefferson, without going any further, with their slaves was paternalistic: they considered slavery to be inevitable and they took care of the slaves, manifesting themselves proud of their behavior. Others, for example Jackson, did not see great moral problems in the fact of slavery ”. The truth is that —the chronicles of the time are witnesses— the foreigners who came to the city were surprised by the paradox of the politicians speaking on Capitol Hill of the great freedom that was in the country, and the sight of those same politicians walking accompanied by people of his property. In 1800, 25% of Washington's population were black slaves.

"The lives of all blacks were governed by the so-called Black Codes, which were very detailed summaries of the social interaction between black people, mainly slaves, and white people," adds Huguet. The slavery was inevitably associated with skin color, the blacks who circulated on the street always had to carry the ID card that certified them as free people. That changed in a few decades, and by 1840 Washington was one of the American cities with the most free blacks. Abolitionism grew until the dawn of the civil war. Still, Huguet clarifies that "in the years before the war, abolition won the game in the area not so much for ethical as practical reasons: the region's economy was undergoing transformation and slaves no longer represented such a beneficial resource."

To mud and slaves is added a third surprising area: prostitution. "Prostitution thus became a natural industry in the city, very beneficial for its promoters and which reached its highest levels in the 1950s and during the Civil War," Huguet explains. In the mid-19th century, the sex industry was the main source of wealth and the city's hallmark. The sex districts were perfectly visible from the White House, and what is now known as the Federal Triangle. "The houses of prostitutes moved a lot of money for their activity, but above all for the associated businesses: hotels, gambling, clothing and accessories stores, luxury items, tobacco, pornographic photos, laundries ...".

"The city that we know today as Washington DC has little or nothing to do with that Washington City of the first half of the 19th century," Huguet closes. For example, there is no longer the navigable canal that was the main axis of the city until the 1940s. Not to mention that from 2008 to 2016 Barack Obama sat in the Oval Office. "Today the city has removed many of the old stigmas related to poverty and race, but there is no doubt that it continues to exhibit high levels of social inequality." In things like that, the capital of the most powerful country in the world continues to resemble the nation that houses it.

Get 'Washington'

Author: Montserrat Huguet.
Publisher: Comares Historia.
Format: 264 pages. 25 euros.

Find it at your nearest bookstore