Tuesday Topics: Differing Perspectives on Slavery in Maryland and the District of Columbia

Slavery in the Washington area was different than that in the Deep South just before the Civil War. While it began much the same way, it soon changed. After tobacco wore out the land, slavery made less sense, and it was hard to enforce with an increasingly diverse and large free African American population in Washington, D.C. By the time of the Civil War, the enslaved residents of Washington, many of them Maryland slaves, lived along among the free communities. Author James H. Johnston discusses the differing perspectives on slavery that emerge from his two books, The Recollections of Margaret Loughborough, about a daughter of the Old Dominion of Virginia, and From Slave Ship to Harvard, which follows six generations of an African American family in Maryland.