Image Caption: Courtesy The McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University

Note on this project: This essay makes use of images and material primarily drawn from the Northwestern University Special Collections and the Library of Congress. Throughout the text are links to other digital humanities projects and images that may be of interest. This research project was part of the Northwestern University Winter 2020 Art History Graduate Seminar “The Fugitive and Fugitivity.”

Found in the archive

This project looks at a fugitive in the archive. Her name is Eliza Coursy. She is between 18 to 20 years old, described as a Negro girl and she ran away on November 17, 1857. I first encountered Eliza after entering the words “fugitive slave” into the Northwestern University Library search engine. She is represented in the University’s Special Collections through a broadside fugitive slave notice that offers 100 dollars for her capture and return. 

In addition to her age, the notice comments that she is of “ordinary size” and has “chestnut or copper” colored skin. The notice directly refers to the scars on Eliza’s face, but it does not go into extensive detail. Additionally, the ad mentions that she has worked in Washington D.C. and knew people—perhaps friends—in the area of Georgetown, a historic neighborhood located along the Potomac River. The notice references the area near the Anacostia River as Eliza’s place of escape. Twenty or so years later, Frederick Douglass would take up residence in the Anacostia neighborhood along the river. 

Only a small portion of the full text from the broadside was included on the NU Library website. The functionality of the library database facilitated this presentation of information and shaped my initial perception of the paper object. The small amount of text made me believe that this broadside was undescriptive beyond Eliza’s name and the date and location. A second broadside notice in the University Library database also suggested a short, generic text only to reveal itself to contain clear, pointed details of the fugitives’ physical descriptions. This second broadside is from Mississippi County, Missouri and while it is outside my geographical area of study, I mention it briefly as it and the broadside for Eliza are, to my knowledge, the only fugitive slave notices in the Northwestern Special Collections. 

As it states below the main text of the announcement, Eliza’s broadside was printed at the H. Polkinhorn's Steam Job Printing Office on D Street, between 6th & 7th Streets. The shop printed a number of ephemera items including other broadsides, but also things like invoices and timetables. The Printing Office’s claim to fame was printing the 1865 playbill for the Ford’s Theatre’s production of Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. The assassination would lead to the printing of the conspirators’ own fugitive notice. It included photographs glued onto the paper and offered an astronomical amount of money for the assassin John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices.

The Nation’s Capital

Sandwiched between the two slaves states of Maryland and Virginia, the nation’s capital was an important economic site during the slave trade. Reportedly chosen for its proximity to both Washington and Jefferson’s plantations, the city would be a major site slave activity until Congress abolished slavery in the District in April 1862, five years after the fugitive ad for Eliza Cursory stated that she ran away. 

Eliza’s former master, John P. Waring, had this notice published ten days after her flight. Waring owned a farm in Montgomery Country, Maryland in the area now called Germantown which is about thirty miles outside of D.C. Waring is recorded in a local census as having around twenty slaves. With John Waring’s home in Maryland, Eliza’s labor had presumably been hired out. Following shifts in the agricultural economy of the area, slave owners increasingly began to “hire-out” their slaves, sending them to work in Washington or Baltimore. If this is indeed the case with Eliza and John Waring, then Waring would have received a portion of whatever wages she earned as a hired laborer. The broadside does not specify where in the city Eliza might have spent time. Regardless, Eliza’s time in the nation's capital meant a proximity to a developing urban landscape of national commemoration and memorialization. The capitol building, the Washington Monument (which remained half finished for 25 years), and The Smithsonian would be partially built during Eliza’s time in the city.  

The Smithsonian Institution for example was founded in 1846 and construction began on its first building, now called the Castle because of its architectural elements, in the late 1840s with construction completed in 1855. In this 1855 image of the area near National Mall, the red sandstone structure of the Smithsonian Institution seems to tower over the rest of the buildings. Perhaps Eliza encountered the rising red sandstone structure in her time in Washington. Or perhaps she knew or knew of the black construction workers that built the capitol building. The mid-19th century city—Eliza’s city—with its unpaved roads and ununiform urban landscape is quite unlike the city today, especially the National Mall with its polished monuments and museums commemorating the history and culture of the nation. 

Black Codes of the District

In the decades leading up to the Civil War when Eliza would have lived in the city, the government became increasingly concerned with the movements of free and enslaved black residents. This lead to the creation of The Slavery Code of the District of Columbia—also known as the Black Codes—which was a set of laws that dictated how and when they moved through the District. To mention three restrictions: There was a curfew of 10 p.m., gatherings required permits, and residents were required to carry papers certifying their freedom. 

In 1835, a fourteen year old girl named Nancy Jones was asked for her papers by a police officer. She, unfortunately, did not have them with her and was subsequently assumed to be a fugitive slave and was arrested. It mattered little that she was born free. This young girl’s story illustrates how the Black Codes operated via constant police surveillance and predetermined how the black population moved through the space of the city. 

Twenty years after Nancy was stopped on the streets of the city, Eliza Coursy became a fugitive. No cause is listed on the broadside for her flight and I found nothing to indicate why she may have left then. Interestingly she ran away in mid November. With Harriet Jacobs infamous concealment in the home of her grandmother in mind, I wonder how or where Eliza might have gone, if at all. Did she flee or did she stay in the city, able to hide in plain sight in one of the largest black populations in the country with around ten thousand black individuals recorded in the 1860 census? A population that only grew with the beginning of the Civil War just after her escape.

With the onset of the Civil War, slaves from plantations in Maryland and Virginia made their way first to Union army camps then to urban areas like the nation’s capital. Following the war, the population in Washington continued to grow resulting in one of the largest black populations in the U.S. by the end of the century.

Georgetown

Perhaps Eliza made contact with her “friends” in Georgetown, a part of the city at the time with a significant black population where she might be able to “hide in plain sight.” Perhaps she had heard rumors of the Underground Railroad site connected to Mount Zion United Methodist Church on 29th Street. Fugitive slaves hid in the burial vault of the church and it has been suggested that those who stopped there were hoping to eventually reach Canada. (Black Washington, 201) Again, thinking with Harriet Jacobs infamous concealment in the place of her enslavement—meaning the town where she lived—Eliza might have hid in the Georgetown area in one of the homes of the black population. Maybe she knew Abigail and Elsey Sides, two black sisters who lived in a small home on O Street in Georgetown. If Eliza did stay in the Washington area until slavery was abolished in April 1862, maybe she moved into what is now called Volta Place, then called Bell Court, a row of short brick townhouses. 

Beyond its black population and Underground Railroad site, the area of the city is connected by proximity to Georgetown University which in 1838 sold around 272 enslaved individuals to continue the operation of the institution. The individuals were sold for over three million of today’s dollars. Current students, faculty, and alumni of the University have recently sought and provided avenues of memorialization of this history and reconciliation with descendants—including the renaming of one campus building after Isaac Hawkins, one of the enslaved sold by the university. Beyond this newly christened building on the campus, walking around the rest of the neighborhood there is little indication that Georgetown had a significant free and enslaved population in the 19th century. Today the tightly packed townhouses have a reputation as some of the most expensive homes in the D.C. with many of the small buildings—including those on Volta Place—selling for millions of dollars. 

Instead of staying in D.C. Eliza could have attempted to flee North, stopping along the way in Baltimore. Like D.C., Baltimore had a sizable black population and perhaps being slightly geographically removed from the immediate area of capital would have allowed for some protection. But Baltimore was still in the slave state of Maryland and therefore could not promise the protection of freedom that the North would presumably offer. One of the most famous fugitive slaves in the U.S. was from Baltimore: Frederick Douglass. Following his escape in 1838, Douglass became an active abolitionist and famously harnessed the power of photography to resist racist representations of African Americans in the 19th century. The Northwestern Special Collection holds several documents and letters related to Douglass including letters sent back to Auld family that had previously enslaved him. 

Living in Maryland and Washington, perhaps Eliza had heard rumors of Harriet Tubman’s many trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to rescue friends and family. Or perhaps more likely she learned of the infamous attempted Washington D.C. escape on the ship named The Pearl. In April 1848, seventy-seven slaves from Washington, Georgetown, and the city of Alexandria boarded this ship that would take them down the Potomac to the Chesapeake Bay, and then north. The ship nearly made it to the Bay before being stopped and sent back to the capital. 

Among the seventy-seven enslaved who attempted to escape were the Edmonson Sisters. Born into slavery in Maryland, the young teenagers were hired out to households in Washington D.C. where they worked as domestic workers, just as Eliza likely had. Following their failed escape the two girls were sent to New Orleans to be sold. Eventually their family secured freedom and the two young women became active in the abolition movement. They attended the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Convention, in New York and were photographed together with Frederick Douglass who Emily became lifelong friends and neighbors with. In 2010, the two sisters were commemorated in a public sculpture in the city of Alexandria by the sculptor Erik Blome. 

Finding Eliza

In searching for information and images for this project I encountered a peculiar tendency of my research. That being that I wish to find Eliza Coursy. In searching for her, I found only a few mentions of her name in sources and found the same broadside in digital collections of two other museums—the George Washington University Museum and the Boston Athenaeum. I even found one of the broadsides being sold for 1500 dollars on a website called “Live Auctioneers.” 

In addition to looking for Eliza in general, I wished to find her in the photographic archives. I primarily searched the Library of Congress where I found many images of black women in the post Civil War era. But I did not find her. She remains out of sight and fugitive. Images of women from Hudson NY, Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, Lynchburg, Virginia, and women from unknown locations became stand-ins for her. She could be all of them. Or none of them.

Ultimately I do not know where she went, how she fled, or if she stayed in Washington. I can’t find her. The broadside while a small trace of her presence was produced by someone who enslaved her and therefore is and is not a trace of Eliza herself. The broadside archives only a mere fraction of material life.

I do not know where she went, how she fled, or if she stayed in Washington. I can only hypothesize about how she moved through the city and what she may have encountered. She remains an archival fugitive (to me at least.)

Coda: Myself in this project 

During the long humid summers of my teenage years I used to constantly wonder why the Founding Fathers selected such a hot, unpleasant former swamp for the nation’s capital. It was not until college in a different place that I fully learned and processed that part of their reasoning for selecting the site was to be near their slave plantations. This discovery radically changed how I viewed my hometown and my relationship to it. Of course as a child I had learned about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman the most famous Marylanders to escape slavery. But they had lived elsewhere in Maryland, slightly north in Baltimore and on the Eastern Shore. Their stories of enslavement felt distant and unreal from the reality of my suburban existence of Maryland. That my hometown was also the site of so much misery and violence did not fully register even as I began to understand my place within the anti-black structure of American society. Returning from college with what I had learned, the city was not the same and my relationship to it was not the same. Each time I complained about the endless summer heat, I stopped myself and tried to think about what it would have meant to work the farmland of rural Maryland under that looming summer sun with humidity that almost makes it hard to breathe. And all under the constant surveillance of an overseer or master. 

Part of the motivation for this project was to research and learn more about the history of the city and area that I have called home for so many years. It has been almost a year since I have been back to visit the city.* While it has been some time since I have first started to reevaluate my relationship to the city, this project has furthered how I think about the urban landscape of the city and those who traversed it two centuries before me. For me, Georgetown, the waterfront where the Pearl left, the Anacostia rive, and other sites are now haunted by Eliza’s memory.

*I intended to return to the city in late March 2020 but canceled my travel plans due to the coronavirus pandemic. As I am away from my home state of Maryland during this crisis, I have decided to make donations to the following D.C. area food bank organizations: Maryland Food Bank, Martha’s Table, Capital Area Food Bank, and Food for Others. Food insecurity is a problem beyond just emergency situations so regardless of when you might be reading this, I would encourage you to donate as well.

Further Reading: In addition to the sources and archives linked above here are some recommended resources.

Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth. First Freed: Washington, D.C. in the Emancipation Era, Howard University Press, 2002

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Goode, James M. The Evolution of Washington, DC: Historical Selections from the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at the George Washington University. Smithsonian Institution, 2015.

Harrison, Robert. Washington During Civil War and Reconcstruction: Race and Radicalism. Cambridge University Press, 2011

Harrold, Stanley. Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C. 1828-1865. Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 

Holland, Jesse J. Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C. The Globe Pequot Press, 2007.

Johnston, Allan. Surviving Freedom: The Black Community of Washington, D.C. 1860-1880. Garland Publishing, 1993.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic grounds: Black women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Savoy, Lauret. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. Counterpoin, 2015 

Randall Robinson, “Introduction,” The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000)

Reynolds, Virginia. "Slaves to Fashion, Not Society: Elizabeth Keckly and Washington, D.C.'s African American Dressmakers, 1860–1870." Washington History 26, no. 2 (2014): 4-17. Accessed February 7, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/23937711.

Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.