Chris Cruz for Visit Alexandria
John Chapman
John T. Chapman is walking toward Old Town Alexandria’s Ramsey Alley on a Sunday afternoon, with about 20 people following along on a tour about the Underground Railroad.
While there aren’t many records about ties between Alexandria and the Underground Railroad, the secret network of people who helped free enslaved people, there is still a lot to be discovered when it comes to Alexandria’s Black history.
“This is still a working alleyway,” Chapman said as he gathered everyone around him on a cobblestoned alley near Old Town’s waterfront.
Chapman, who is a fourth-generation Alexandrian and also a city council member, gives these walking tours about Black history in Alexandria as the owner of Manumission Tour Company. (Manumission is the act of freeing slaves.) He said he has discovered a lot about Alexandria’s Black history as he’s delved into it over the past few years.
Chapman founded Manumission Tour Co. in 2016 to fill a gap in Alexandria’s many history tours: African Americans made up 20 to 25 percent of Alexandria’s population as far back as the 1700s, and they were essential to the early development of the city.
Chapman has gotten a lot of his information from records kept by William Still, a Black abolitionist and conductor on the Underground Railroad who lived in Philadelphia and wrote down the stories of slaves who made their way to freedom — including at least one slave who escaped from Alexandria.
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Slave Housing
“When I was putting together this tour, I came across the Encyclopedia of Virginia and they actually had a look into slave housing in Virginia and I saw Alexandria was on the map for slave housing,” he told visitors on the tour. “And I said, ‘Hold on! I know we have Old Town and I know we have a lot of historic homes, but I’d never heard of any kind of slave housing.’”
Stopping next to a brick home in the alley, Chapman said the building dates back to the 1790s and was home to a family that owned slaves, who also lived at the property. “So, you have examples like this, of homes that are brick and mortar and still around.”
Slaves lived either in a brick house, if a family was very wealthy or sometimes in wooden outbuildings built adjacent to a home, Chapman noted.
Other examples include the homes of Lord Thomas Fairfax at 607 Cameron St., a house Fairfax built in 1816. Another is the home of John Carlyle, a wealthy merchant and a founder of the city who lived at 121 N. Fairfax St., which is now part of NOVA Parks. Fairfax freed his slaves, including the great-great-great grandfather of Justin Fairfax, who is running for governor.
A Taste of Freedom
In the runup to the Civil War, in 1850 Alexandria, “you’re going to have enslaved people and free people walking the streets” of Alexandria, Chapman noted, setting the scene. “African Americans made up about 23 percent of the population in Alexandria in 1850. Of that 23 percent, it’s going to be almost a 50-50 split between enslaved and free.”
It wasn’t always that way, Chapman explained. In 1790, when the first census happened in the United States, the population of the Alexandria area was about 22 percent African American, but then it was about 90 percent enslaved and 10 percent free.
“So, there’s great change over the course of several decades in an urban city like Alexandria,” Chapman said. “The enslaved who are here and the subject of these stories are going to understand and have a little bit of knowledge about what it’s like to be free, because they’re going to see them in the city streets. It’s not going to be something that’s going to be foreign to them like if they were on a plantation and they don’t see free people.”
“And so they’re going to be much more desirous of that freedom because somebody they can see and touch and know has that,” he said. “That’s going to set some of the activity levels that we have around people running away here in Alexandria.”
Chapman leads the group up Cameron Street. Before the Civil War, Mary Dade lived at a home on the street, and was the owner of a man named Oscar Payne, an enslaved man, who she decided to rent out to another person.
“Renting of slaves is not an uncommon thing here in the city of Alexandria,” Chapman noted. In this case, Dade rented out Payne to J.P. McGuire, the headmaster of Episcopal High School.
The rental contracts for slaves could be for days, months or even years. “We don’t know when [Payne] picks up the idea to run away,” Chapman said. “But we do know that he runs away in 1857. And he makes it all the way to Philadelphia, where he is interviewed by [the abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor] Still.”
“One of the things we do know — the Underground Railroad does a little reconnaissance on their own,” Chapman noted. “There is a slave ad put out by J.P. McGuire for the capture of Oscar Payne. What I want to point out is the reward amount (which is $200) is a lot of money. Why is it so high?”
The reward notice reads:
“$200 Reward.—Ran away from the service of the Rev. J. P. McGuire, Episcopal High School, Fairfax county. Va., on Saturday, 10th inst. Negro Man, Oscar Payne, aged 30 years, 5 feet 4 inches in height, square built, mulatto color, thick, bushy suit of hair, round, full face, and when spoken to has a pleasant manner—clothes not recollected.”
“This [Oscar Payne] is not his property, he is someone else’s,” Chapman noted. “So, for him to lose somebody else’s property, it’s worth the extra money to put in a reward versus the knowledge that you’re going to have to pay all of the money for her lost property, which he does end up having to do because Oscar is not caught.”
Most of the rewards for runaway slaves at the time are $100 to $150. At that time in the 1850s, a slave would cost about $1,100 — or $30,000 in today’s dollars, Chapman said.
The newspapers at the time, the Alexandria Intelligencer and the Alexandria Gazette Packet would publish such ads, he said.
Slave Traders
Alexandria was not a place where many slaves looking for freedom might hide, said Jenny Masur, author of Heroes of the Underground Railroad Around Washington, D.C.
“Quakers who helped them had to be very careful about their records,” she said. “There were definitely people involved in the anti-slavery effort but they left nothing in writing. Quakers were in a difficult situation, they had to get along with their pro-slavery neighbors. I don’t think Alexandria would have been a good place to hide. It was full of slave traders.”
Those included Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, better known as the slave traders Franklin & Armfield at 1350 Duke St., who were in the wholesale slave business. Their firm, which started in the early 1800s, handled hundreds of slaves and sold them
to plantations in the South. They eventually sold the business to Price, Birch and Co., which continued in the business until 1861, when, at the outset of the Civil War, federal troops arrived to occupy Alexandria.
A Railroad Through Alexandria
During the Civil War, one of the biggest names of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, who worked for the Union Army as a cook and nurse, becoming an armed scout and spy.
“Do we know if Harriet Tubman ever came to Alexandria?” asks Chapman. “We know much of her work was done in Dorchester County, Maryland.”
Researchers in Dorchester County in April of this year discovered the foundation of Harriet Tubman’s childhood home in what is now the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge there.
But there is one significant Alexandria connection: An enslaved man from Alexandria, Joe Vinny, has a wife and four kids who live on a plantation in Dorchester County, Chapman said.
When he traveled there to visit them, he found out from his wife that a group of slaves were getting ready to run away.
Joe returned to Alexandria to make his plan to escape and meet them back in Dorchester County. He was successful and met up with the group of about 36 people, which then broke up into small groups and make their way to Philadelphia.
“This is one of the bigger runaways recorded in William Still’s book,” Chapman noted. “And so you have this group, he records all of their stories.”
But the slave owner — Samuel Pattison — is on the hunt for them and places an ad.
“What the conductors in the Underground Railroad do is keep track of the owners,” Chapman explained.
“They find the slave advertisements. Most provide a description of each individual who runs away. Pattison runs five ads listing their names and what they’re wearing, so they can be tracked down.”
Pattison did receive a message, from a man named J.W. Thompson who wants to know more information so he can help to track down these individuals,” Chapman said. “We find out later that Thompson is one of the conductors. He is acting like he is interested so he can find more information so he can help those who have run away.”
“Conductors don’t just free people but they do reconnaissance work — you have people changing their names and changing their appearance. It’s not just about saving people but about keeping them free as well.”
Notable Places in Alexandria's Black History
Episcopal High School, 1200 N. Quaker Lane
Location where Oscar Payne was working (for Rev. John Peyton McGuire, principal of the school) when Payne ran away.
1701 Duke St.
Statue of Edmonson Sisters, who were part of a group of 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, D.C. by boat. That failed, but they were freed from slavery later and became prominent in campaigns against slavery.
1707 Duke St.
Once home to Bruin & Hill slave traders.
Freedom House Museum, 1315 Duke St.
The Musuem was once home to Franklin & Armfield slave traders.
Lloyd House, 220 N. Washington St.
The house was once home to Quaker educator Benjamin Hallowell, who helped form the Benevolent Society of Alexandria in 1827. His son was thought to be a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
Dade Residence, 505 Cameron St.
The Dade Residence is now a private home, but was once the residence of Mary Dade and two slaves, Oscar and Joseph Ball, stepbrothers of Oscar Payne. Oscar and Joseph escaped.
Market Square, 300 King St.
This area was once a slave market.
