The Carceral Capital: Race and Incarceration in Antebellum Washington, DC

Washington D.C.’s antebellum landscape was pockmarked with prisons. Many of the city’s taverns possessed cells, highly capitalized slave traders owned their own private prisons, the city jail held the enslaved and free alike, and some constables had cells in their private homes. In addition to these, the city also possessed police lockups in each ward, a workhouse, and a penitentiary, all of which disproportionately incarcerated Black residents and visitors–particularly women. Despite experiences of imprisonment appearing in many of the autobiographies of the formerly enslaved, prisons receive scant attention in the studies of African Americans in this period. Incarceration not only maintained and expanded enslavement, but alongside racial legislation and police, prisons existed as vital nodes in the matrix of attempted racial control. The District’s jails were both a place of “safe keeping” at the service of slave traders who wanted to warehouse their human commodities and simultaneously a place of punishment where officers were paid to whip and brand enslaved people who ran afoul of the regulations set by their owners or city statutes. Hundreds of suspects were jailed as runaways until they could prove their freedom and pay their jail fees. The line that separates kidnapping and arrest blurs when carried out by city and federal officers who operated government-owned prisons. Those who could do neither were sold by the federal marshal to the highest bidder—some into lifelong enslavement. In this presentation we will look beyond the widely-known kidnapping of Solomon Northup in the nation’s capital, and examine the many forms of Black incarceration carried out in government run facilities. The use of racial legislation, selling prisoners into servitude, and sentencing free Blacks to hard labor reveals that many tenets of the carceral system assigned to Jim Crow were actually fully operational decades before the Civil War.