Beverly Snow opened his basement refectory on the busy corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in the winter of 1832. Snow’s elegant tables and excellent menu were soon popular with the high society of the American capital. (illustration credit bm.1)
Beverly Snow’s restaurant stood next to Jesse Brown’s mammoth Indian Queen Hotel. Home to politicians, lobbyists, and slave traders, Brown’s establishment was a social and political hub of the burgeoning capital city. (illustration credit bm.2)
An itinerant editor from West Virginia, Benjamin Lundy started publishing in Washington City in 1831. With the help of friends among the free blacks, his antislavery publication provoked hope, arguments, and a grand jury indictment. (illustration credit bm.3)
As Lundy’s assistant in Washington, William Lloyd Garrison learned the art of waging journalistic war on the American slave system. Lundy would die in obscurity while Garrison would go on to become one of the most influential journalists of the nineteenth century. (illustration credit bm.4)
Lundy’s newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, not only catalogued the crimes of the slave traders, but also needled District Attorney Francis Scott Key for overlooking them. Key responded with criminal charges. (illustration credit bm.5)
A shoemaker by trade, John Francis Cook took over a school for colored children on H Street in 1834 and named it the Union Seminary. He organized a secret talking society for young African American men seeking to escape slavery. (illustration credit bm.6)
While the ranks of the free people were swelling in Washington City, the trafficking in humans was also booming, as slave traders sold black families “down the river” to work on the burgeoning cotton plantations in the South and West. Buying and selling people was a respectable business in Jacksonian America. (illustration credit bm.7)
As the architect of the U.S. Capitol, William Thornton was a close friend of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A cranky genius, he was also an inventor, a horseman, and a bon vivant. After he died in 1828, his widow, Anna Maria, struggled to pay off his debts. (illustration credit bm.8)
The Thorntons lived on F Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, one of the finest blocks in the capital. Arthur Bowen, nineteen years old and enslaved, lived in a garret on the top floor in 1835. (illustration credit bm.9)
After Arthur Bowen’s drunken intrusion and escape, Anna Thornton advertised a reward for his capture in the National Intelligencer. (illustration credit bm.10)
A headline in the Lynchburg Daily Virginian announced the news that the flamboyant colored restaurateur had been arrested. The sensational story spread quickly. (illustration credit bm.11)
The editors of the National Intelligencer blamed the antislavery men for provoking Arthur Bowen with their “incendiary” publications. (illustration credit bm.12)
Famous for writing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814, Francis Scott Key went on to a hectic and lucrative career in law and politics, including eight years as the district attorney for the unruly and amoral city of Washington. (illustration credit bm.13)
Key helped his brother-in-law and close friend Roger Taney achieve one of the most remarkable careers in American politics. In the Jackson administration, Taney served as attorney general, secretary of the treasury, and the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where his 1857 Dred Scott decision hastened the coming of civil war. (illustration credit bm.14)
Nearing the end of his second term in 1835, President Andrew Jackson relied on Key to advance his administration’s agenda. Jackson was frail, conspiratorial, and determined to protect the slave system. (illustration credit bm.15)
In the case of accused slave Arthur Bowen, the passionate intervention of Anna Thornton persuaded the president to pardon a young African American sentenced to be hanged. (illustration credit bm.16)
Escaping the contradictions of Washington, Beverly Snow moved to Toronto, a mecca for Africans in America, and opened a succession of saloons and restaurants along King Street in the 1840s and ’50s. (illustration credit bm.17)
Washington’s expatriate restaurateur, Beverly Randolph Snow, died free and prosperous at age fifty-seven. He is buried at left in the Toronto Necropolis. (illustration credit bm.18)