In June 1837, the still-enslaved Arthur Bowen wrote to his mother from Pensacola, Florida, to complain about how his new owner, William Stockton, was treating him. The letters, Anna observed, left his Maria “very gloomy and dissatisfied.” So Anna decided to arrange for Stockton to sell Arthur to a kinder master, an older man who worked in the Pensacola Navy Yard. Within a year, Arthur wrote to “say he was doing well and [was] liked on board the steamboat at Pensacola.” Anna Thornton never mentioned Arthur Bowen again in her diary. What happened to the young man who detonated Washington City in August 1835 is not recorded in American history.
Reuben Crandall had contracted tuberculosis during his stay at the Washington City Jail. After winning his freedom, he booked passage to Kingston, Jamaica, thinking the tropical climate might help. He died there on January 18, 1838. Most people soon forgot his sacrifice for the antislavery cause, but not poet John Greenleaf Whittier. After the Civil War, Whittier wrote a poem called “Astraea at the Capital,” in which the Greek goddess of justice visits Washington during the time of slavery. She stops at the City Jail.
Beside me gloomed the prison-cell
Where wasted one in slow decline
For uttering simple words of mine,
And loving freedom all too well
That was Reuben Crandall.
. . .
Francis Scott Key seemed to lose his ambition after his setbacks in 1835 and 1836. He continued to serve as district attorney for Washington City after the election of Martin Van Buren in the 1836 election, but he was no longer a presidential confidant. In May 1837 he suffered the painful loss of another son, John Ross, who succumbed to a quick-acting disease. Key resigned from the district attorney’s job in 1840 and spent the rest of his years in private law practice, still a keen advocate of African colonization and sharp opponent of the antislavery movement. Key died of complications from pneumonia in his daughter’s home in Baltimore on January 11, 1843.
The news of his death, said the Intelligencer, created “a very general painful sensation” in Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court suspended its proceedings for a day. At City Hall, Judge Cranch presided over a brief ceremony that was attended by the entire district bar, including Richard Coxe, Joseph Bradley, and Walter Jones. Cranch praised Key as one of the bar’s “oldest and most respected members, and one of its brightest ornaments” who was always animated “by an overbearing sense of duty.” In his eulogy Cranch did not mention “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Key’s song was not formally adopted as the national anthem of the United States of America for another century. The designation came about after newly elected left-wing members of the Erie City Council in Pennsylvania opened a meeting in 1929 by singing the “The Internationale,” a socialist anthem. A member of the American Legion took exception and organized a campaign to designate “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem so such a disgrace could never happen again. Congressman John Linthicum, a Democrat from Baltimore, introduced a bill to do just that. More than 150 organizations supported the move, and a petition attracted more than 5 million signatures. President Herbert Hoover signed the bill into law on March 3, 1931.
Roger Taney served as chief justice of the United States from 1836 to 1864. In 1856 his Supreme Court heard the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott was a middle-aged bondsman who had worked for the Sandford family in Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, where slavery was outlawed. Scott sued for his freedom, saying he lived in free territory. By a seven-to-two majority, the court dismissed Scott’s argument and affirmed the plaintiff’s right to coerce his labor. Taney took the lead in rejecting Scott’s bid for freedom. In a passage that would become notorious, he declared that people of African descent
had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
The court’s ruling effectively legalized slavery nationwide, even in states that had outlawed it for decades. Taney’s ruling alienated public opinion across the North and hastened the coming of the Civil War in 1861.
The war was still raging when Taney died on October 12, 1864, but the North was winning. Three weeks later, slavery was officially abolished in his home state of Maryland. “His death at this moment,” said one biographer, “seemed to mark the transition from the era of slavery to that of Universal Freedom.” While his wisdom would be questioned, his influence would not. Roger Taney had shaped American law as surely as his brother-in-law Francis Scott Key had shaped American patriotic feeling.
John F. Cook returned to Washington in the fall of 1836 after spending one year teaching at a school in Columbia, Pennsylvania. In the words of one historian, “He resumed his work with broad and elevated ideas of his business.” He would teach in the schoolhouse at Fourteenth and H streets for the next seventeen years, educating a generation of Negro children all by himself. Along the way, he founded the Union Bethel AME Church and the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, located at Fifteenth and R streets, both of which still exist 175 years later. His two sons grew up to become professors and would play a leading role after the Civil War in the founding of Howard University, the first African American institution of higher learning. Cook died in March 1855. His funeral, said one account, was attended by “clergymen of no less than five denominations, many of the oldest and most respectable citizens, and a vast concourse of all classes, white and colored.”
Benjamin Lundy published the Genius of Universal Emancipation from Philadelphia until 1838, when supporters of slavery destroyed his printing press and other possessions. Lundy moved to Lowell, Illinois, where he died on August 22, 1839.
Richard Mentor Johnson was elected vice president of the United States of America in 1836 under President Martin Van Buren. According to one historian, he “served without distinction and continued to scandalize his party by more dalliances with slave women.”
Andrew Jackson retired from the presidency in March 1837. He died at his Tennessee estate, the Hermitage, on June 8, 1845. He bequeathed his property in scores of enslaved persons to his heirs.
John Sherburne was haunted by his slaying of Daniel Key. He took to drink, made lieutenant, and died in an asylum in Boston on November 2, 1849.
Maria Bowen and her mother, Nelly, were given their freedom in 1844 by Anna Thornton. Maria Bowen died in Washington City in March 1864. She was sixty years old.
Julia Snow, Beverly’s widow, died on February 7, 1865. She was buried next to her husband in the Toronto Necropolis.
Beverly’s friend Isaac Carey returned to Washington after the Civil War and became a deputy marshal and a member of the school board.
Anna Maria Thornton lived another thirty years after the Snow-Storm as her fortune slowly declined. She died in a rented room in Washington City on August 16, 1865. She was ninety years old. Mrs. Thornton was “remarkable for her beauty and accomplishments,” said the Intelligencer and “one of the most distinguished ornaments of society.” Her marriage was childless, the paper noted, “and she leaves no inheritor of her name and her virtue.”