Enslaved Black Georgians stuck to familiar routines while living at the national capital. Their presence in Washington DC was meant to serve a particular end: to care for their enslavers and to cater to the many needs and desires of America’s most powerful men. Keeping the fireplace warm and the dinner table full was only the beginning of daily chores. Masters expected captive men and women to maintain the tidiness of rented dwellings, to dispatch messages across town, and to provide support to any wives, children, or other family members in the city. When masters were sick, they expected the enslaved to nurse them to health; the likely assumed that those under their sway would listen to their own yearnings for the comforts of faraway homes.

Yet for all those familiar tasks expected of captives, marked differences existed between the experiences of Black Georgians in Washington City and in Deep South. Horizons of possibilities expanded in notable ways. At mid-century, a man named Allen became the first of a cluster of Black men who traveled hundreds of miles with Alexander Stephens for the annual Congressional session. The city Allen beheld in 1847 was one in which free people of color far outnumbered Black slaves. Public commentary circulated within the city was saturated by fierce denunciations of slaveholders’ outsized hold of national power. Some seventy-five miles north of the city lay “free soil” and the opportunity for the boldest among the enslaved to make life anew.

A man named Garland, held in bondage by Georgia Congressman Robert Toombs, appreciated how a Washington sojourn might clear the path to personal liberation. Garland convinced Allen to make a dash for freedom in 1850, but the pair was captured (along with a freedom-seeking woman named Louisa) before they even reached the city limits. Upon their arrest, Allen was taken in chains to Mississippi by a slave trader while Garland was kept on by Toombs and continued to be a valued personal attendant. Garland served Senator Toombs annually until 1860, when a successful flight to Canada helped clear the way for his entry to the ministry and service as a notable Black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. A new life involved the adoption of a new last name for the man known thereafter as the Rev. Garland White.

A shared Stephens / Toombs residence in 1853 cemented a life-long friendship between Garland and the Taliaferro-born teenager Pierce, whose remarkable saga is especially well-documented in the Stephens papers. By the time that Pierce adopted the last name of Lafayette in the late 1860s, he had begun a family, survived a war scare, witnessed emancipation, faced a murder prosecution, and nurtured an intimate relationship with a Black man named Felix, a fixture of the post-war Washington scene. Buying a house on K Street, Pierce Lafayette resumed ties with Stephens that reached back to his own early boyhood in the Bird dwelling. Lafayette and White left the Republican Party in these years and aligned themselves with a Democratic opposition that included some of America’s fiercest white supremacists. They reached out to Alexander Stephens, whose post-war stretch in Congress ran from 1873 to 1882, for assistance in securing patronage positions and other benefits.

A string of other Black Georgians attended to Stephens’ needs as he shaped the country’s destiny in official positions far from his home state. A man named Travis (legally the human property of Linton Stephens) attended Alexander in Confederate Richmond, being aided there by two enslaved brothers named Anthony and Henry. Stephens’ mounting infirmities required a higher level of medical care in the decade that followed his 1873 return to Congress. Two freed Black men providing the most essential support and in doing so largely avoided the roiling politics of the post-Reconstruction period. Harry Stephens took time away from Crawfordville’s Liberty Hall to support Stephens’ initial return to Washington; what he made of the city was not recorded. Aleck Kent stepped up as Stephens constant caregiver for the final stretch. “I hardly know what I should do without him,” Stephens commented about Kent, a Black Georgian who was featured in the national press and who struck a memorable presence in the photographic archive of the late 1870s and early 1880s.

IMAGE CREDIT: Aleck Kent appearing in “Alexander H. Stephens and servant,” Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection. James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.