Tracing the story of George Pointer and his descendants reveals a lot about not only the lives of enslaved and freed peoples in the Washington DC area but also about the sometimes surprising history of DC and the US.
Chapter 1: From Slavery to Freedom in Colonial Maryland
- Transporting cargo by river was much cheaper than by dirt roads.
- Tobacco was one of the most important crops and exports in colonial Maryland.
Chapter 2: The Risks of Freedom in a Slave State
- Some free Black people were captured by unscrupulous men and sold back into slavery.
- The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal used some of the channels of the defunct Potomac Canal in Maryland.
- The building of the Potomac Canal at Great Falls, Virginia was considered one of the most important infrastructure investments in the young United States.
Chapter 3: Nat Turner’s Long Shadow
- The successful Haitian revolution at the beginning of the 19th century was American slave owners’ “worst nightmare.”
- After Nat Turner’s armed rebellion in 1831 Maryland’s Colonization Society (to resettle free Black Americans to Africa) became the best funded colonization society in the United States.
- Francis Scott Key, who wrote the National Anthem, was one of the leaders of the colonization movement in the US.
Chapter 4: The Gathering Storm
- In the first half of the 19th century the largest and most rural part of the District of Columbia was named Washington County.
- Only 9 % of free Black people in DC owned property in the 1850s.
- Free Black people could not be a witness on legal documents before the Civil War.
Chapter 5: Civil War: DC’s First Regiment of US Colored Troops
- The enslaved people in Washington, DC were freed before those in southern states.
- The slave owners in Washington, DC were paid the market price for their slaves when they were freed as determined by a slave trader.
- In 1864 the Confederate cavalry invaded Washington, DC from the North but retreated a few days later.
- The 1st Regiment US Colored Troops trained on Mason Island, later renamed Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the Potomac River.
- Walt Whitman visited the troops training on Mason Island and praised them.
- A famous Confederate general praised the 1st Regiment US Colored Troops as “a foe worth their steel.”
Chapter 6: Reconstruction and Retreat
- Two years after the Civil War Black men in the District gained the right to vote and in 1868 several Black men were elected to serve in the local government.
- Washington D. C. became the headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau and therefore a model for many of the changes made by reconstruction.
- Schools for Black children were one of the most important changes the reconstruction made.
Chapter 7: Georgetown and a Black Middle Class
- Georgetown was a busy deep-water port until it began silting over in the 1890s.
- In 1870 almost one third of Georgetown’s population was Black.
- Development brought more white people into Georgetown and the building of the all-white Western High School forced the Black residents to move.
- District civil rights laws dating to the Reconstruction era were not observed in Georgetown but remained on the books until the turn of the century.
Chapter 8: The Lure of New York
- The Pullman Company hired more Black men than any other company of the time.
- The working conditions of a Pullman porter were difficult and railroad porters did not form a union until 1925.
- The Pullman porter job was highly respected in the Black community, even though it was demanding and underpaid.
Chapter 9: Dry Meadows and the Encroaching City
- Many communities in the 18th and 19th centuries had white, Black, and immigrant families living near each other.
- In the early 20th century some Black families in DC were forced to move so that white schools could be built on their land.
- In 2015 the 8th generation of George Pointer’s descendants had a reunion on the grounds of Lafayette School where their ancestors had lived for almost 80 years. Several years later the school’s park was renamed after their ancestor.
- October 11, 2023 will be George Pointer’s 250th birthday.