At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley

Abstract

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley Joseph P. Reidy (bio) At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) Tamika Nunley’s At the Threshold of Liberty examines African American women’s struggles to achieve freedom and equality in the District of Columbia during the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, slavery framed these efforts; then, in very short order, everything changed. Nunley offers a character-rich account of ordinary women who persistently sought to escape oppressive circumstances. She views their actions as evidence of “self-making,” in which “enslaved women plotted, dreamed, imagined, and created ideas about themselves, as well as the people they knew, and the places in which they lived” (2). Present in the capital city from the beginning, enslaved women persistently sought to rise above the status of property and assert their [End Page 269] personhood, and in the process they made the district “a contested site of liberty” (39). Women’s overt demonstrations of self-making often challenged slavery directly. As early as 1815, the enslaved woman Ann Williams leaped from a second-floor window to avoid removal to Georgia. Three decades later, the sisters Mary and Emily Edmonson joined seventy-five other enslaved people in an ill-fated attempt to escape the city in the schooner Pearl, a case that won international notoriety. Freedom-seeking women also took to the courts, and Nunley’s account of their exploits reinforces the findings of such recent studies as Kelly Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017) and William Thomas III’s A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (2020). When successful, such actions dramatically changed the lives of plaintiffs and their families. The failures could have far-reaching implications, as the case of the sisters Priscilla and Mina Queen demonstrated. Claiming that the free status of their ancestor Mary Queen entitled them to freedom, they retained the services of Francis Scott Key, a veteran of such pleadings, including those of other descendants of Mary. The matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1813, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled inadmissible the “hearsay evidence” upon which the Queens asserted the free status of their progenitor (74). In one fell swoop, Marshall crushed the sisters’ dreams and those of countless other enslaved persons similarly situated. Between 1830 and 1850, as the district’s total Black population steadily grew from roughly nine thousand to almost fourteen thousand, the free portion soared from under five thousand to more than ten thousand. The free Black community’s growth resulted less from procreation than from self-purchase; once having scrimped and saved to achieve liberty, recipients guarded the prize carefully by creating tight networks of personal relationships and social institutions to protect their status. Nunley notes the importance of education in this effort, led by the pioneering work of Ann Marie Becraft, Sophia Browning, and Alethia Browning Tanner in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These women instilled in the daughters of families “with aspirations for social mobility” the necessary qualities of character, deportment, and responsibility (104). Students’ letters to the pioneering white educator Myrtilla Miner, whose Normal School for Colored Girls opened in 1851, reveal their commitments to “thrift, frugality, and hard work” and to “reform and uplift” in the public sphere (113). This quest for self-making, Nunley argues, encompassed enslaved as well as free Black women, as the example of Elizabeth Keckly illustrates. Having learned custom needlework while enslaved, she eventually [End Page 270] purchased her freedom and settled in Washington, where she became a sought-after dressmaker whose elite clientele included Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The Civil War ushered in dramatic and lasting change. Virtually overnight, Washington became an armed camp, and the metaphorical “threshold of liberty” became an actual one. Nunley explores this transformation from two vantage points...