The Invisible Line (26 page)

Wall arrived in Washington with a captain's commission and a reputation for abolitionist heroics, due to his role in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. He was part of an instant elite. He had friends and family nearby and in positions of power. A short walk up Seventh Street from his home stood the newly created university for Negroes. Although Wall had never sought higher education, he felt a strong connection to Howard. Not only had its namesake, General Howard, appointed Wall to the Freedmen's Bureau, but the general had also asked him to find some “capable young men” in Oberlin to enroll at Howard. Wall recruited all three members of the first graduating class, including James Monroe Gregory, the valedictorian who was then hired to teach Latin and mathematics.
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Saddled atop a horse named Splint, Wall trotted down city streets eye to eye with the District's wealthiest denizens. On Sundays he prayed at the First Congregational Church, the moral heart of Reconstruction, alongside Chief Justice Salmon Chase, Senator Samuel Pomeroy, and General Howard. Before Divine Worship, Wall attended the church's Sabbath School, thoroughly integrated thanks to his efforts to attract numerous “esteemed young colored ladies” and men, where teachers were known to “tell a negro that the chair at the White House was not too good for him to sit in.” When the minister balked at Wall's application for membership, General Howard and much of the congregation sided with Wall, and the minister resigned.
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Despite his elite connections, black and white, Wall spent most of his time among Washington's poorest people. In vast army barracks given over to former slaves, he heard complaints about their living conditions and treatment and passed them along to his boss, the assistant commissioner for the Washington field office. He opened his home to the freedpeople. His wife, Amanda, taught a class of twenty freedpeople there several days a week.
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Initially, though, Wall spent his time offering them a way out. He spoke generally of the advantages of moving north and west. He also tried to fill specific openings that people sent him in response to reports that he was seeking “good employment” and “fair contracts” for former slaves. From Oberlin, Sandusky, and elsewhere in Ohio, people were asking Wall to provide “a woman of good moral character,” “two men & two women that are
married
&
steady
,” “a
reliable
man that will work diligently when I am not with him,” “a good washer and ironer,” “a good intelligent mulatto boy,” “a good strong & willing farm laborer.” “I want
honest steady reliable
men & women, and I will do well by them,” wrote a probate judge in Toledo seeking help for his farm and orchard. “They shall have the same wages I pay other hands.” Wall negotiated pay, recruited people for the jobs, and organized their transportation north and west. A new nation would spring not from the words of the Constitution but from the terms of a contract.
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THE SURGEONS WERE CONFERRING, shadows in the dim light of Wall's bedroom. One had the trace of a Scottish accent, the other Irish. Both had moved to the United States as boys before the war. Immediately they had become Americans and, over time, men of consequence. Both had worked with Wall in the Freedmen's Bureau, and they continued to serve the cause of liberty at the Freedmen's Hospital nearby.
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The days since Wall was shot had been all fits and starts, black sleep and burning consciousness, whispered prayers, and blood-soaked gauze. The lead ball remained unyielding inside him, posing a grave threat of infection. Newspapers as far away as San Francisco were reporting Justice Wall's condition—small solace for a suffering man.

His doctors stopped talking, approached, and told Wall that he would die. It was a quick pronouncement, barely enough for one sentence in the newspaper: “The physicians have notified the colored justice, shot the other day by Davenport, that he is not likely to recover.” A death sentence. Wall was forty-six years old. He had a grieving wife. Their two sons, Edward and Stephen, were schoolboys, just beginning to see the world as men. The girls, Sallie and Bel, were still so young. He had traveled vast distances, from Rockingham to Oberlin to the national capital. He had moved from slavery to freedom, helped others do the same, and then recruited an army to liberate those left behind. He returned to the South a leader of men. He was still fighting the great struggle. There was so much more to do.
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TWO YEARS EARLIER, on a Friday afternoon in September 1869, half a dozen boys stood scuffed and silent before O.S.B. Wall. In his makeshift hearing room, the police magistrate listened as the arresting officers cataloged the boys' crimes. Their afternoon had started innocently enough: a baseball game in a field off Boundary Street, shadows long and lean in the low autumn sun. In an instant the game dissolved when a wild fox ran across the field. They chased the animal “helter-skelter, pell-mell” along the northern limit of Washington City, once just farm and wilderness but increasingly the heart of colored life in the District. The Freedmen's Hospital was straight ahead. Howard University's main building was up the hill a few blocks away.
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The fox had a head start, but it was sure to be cornered and trapped—something else for the boys' bat to hit. Almost within reach, it ducked inside an open door. Without breaking stride, the boys piled in after it. Through a restaurant and out to the alley. Into another open door, through another building, back to the street. The boys' laughter phased into gruff shouts, as home and business owners tried to end the chase. Gleeful, out of breath, the boys could barely understand what the adults were saying. But the grip of rough hands and a few words hissed with hate stopped the boys cold, saving the fox from an untimely end. The adults were angry. They were white.
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The two groups faced each other, the line between them buckling with every shove. “The whites and the blacks bandied epithets which are not for our columns,” reported one newspaper, “and at one time it was thought a serious riot would take place.” Within minutes, though, shrill whistles and the dull rap of nightsticks cut through the shouts. Metropolitan police officers broke up the scrum, sent people running with a slap and a glare, and made some arrests for good measure. The precinct house was just around the corner, on Seventh beyond the Boundary. For Wall, their arrival broke the relative calm before the nightly tide of drunks, prostitutes, and confidence men, toughs, knife artists, and desperadoes. After a quick hearing, O.S.B. Wall fined the boys one dollar each.
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As police magistrate, Wall was no longer trying to convince the District's freedpeople to move north and west and embrace lives as agricultural laborers. Instead, he was trying to build something right where he lived. In his years with the Freedmen's Bureau, he had never helped more than a few dozen people abandon Washington. Even Hell's Bottom—the teeming slum just steps from Wall's house—seemed preferable to Elyria, Ohio. The freedom to move was not just about getting away from slavery and masters. It was about being able to choose a community.

Perhaps Wall's mission to resettle the freedpeople was doomed from the start. Just days before he joined the Bureau, Congress had passed a law over President Johnson's veto conferring the “elective franchise . . . without distinction of race or color.” With full voting rights, colored men could cast ballots in municipal elections in Washington and Georgetown, which were two separately chartered cities in the District. While most of the South was wracked by racial violence and governed by onerous Black Codes, Washington was becoming “an experimental garden for radical plants.” If there was any place where blacks could make a better world for themselves, it was Washington.
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When the Freedmen's Bureau all but folded in 1869, Wall cast his lot with his adopted city and the new world of politics. Voting in the District had been on his mind long before he moved there. Along with John Mercer and Charles Langston, he had been part of a group that petitioned Congress to make the change. Even in his darkest moment in South Carolina in January 1866, he contemplated the prospect of political power in a city that was being remade by former slaves. At the end of a letter detailing his arrest ordered by Charleston's Union army commander, Wall inserted “Think President Johnson will veto the District colored suffrage bill? I hope not.” His wife, Amanda, also believed strongly in the ballot, maintaining, as Susan B. Anthony and others did, that the Constitution guaranteed women full equality as citizens. In 1869 and 1871 Amanda marched with a group of woman suffragists, black and white, who attempted to register to vote in the District of Columbia.
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Exercising the right to vote meant making a boisterous and public assertion of power. It would be two decades before the secret ballot was adopted in the United States. Voters cast ballots outdoors in full view of one another, with preprinted tickets and separate boxes for each candidate. On Election Day they marched in parades, shouted their candidates' names to the sky, and bare-knuckled their way through opposing mobs. Even Republican ward meetings were shouting, scuffling affairs, held in otherwise decorous churches and schools. Although blacks made up only a third of Washington's population, they voted in numbers nearly equal to whites. In 1868 blacks had succeeded in electing mayor Sayles Jenks Bowen, a Republican so radical that the Democrat he replaced refused to give him the keys to the office. When his predecessor refused to use local taxes to fund colored schools, Bowen had paid the expenses out of his private fortune.
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Once asked what his politics were, Wall responded, “I suppose I am a republican, to the best of my knowledge.” It was an understatement. He was a committed Republican and, thanks to his brother-in-law, a connected one. Upon his election, Mayor Bowen appointed him police magistrate for the second precinct.
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With a world of patronage opening up to capable colored men, Wall had his pick of jobs. But he sought out legal positions, committed to the idea that the law would provide a pathway to equality. In 1870 he started attending night classes at the newly formed Howard University Law Department. John Mercer Langston was the dean. His professor, the aptly named Albert Gallatin Riddle, proclaimed to the class, “I shall not attempt to give you a definition of law . . . [T]he law does not claim to be an actual science, and you will be at liberty to discover or invent a definition of your own.” While Riddle described the law as “at once a despot and an embodied democracy,” an institution that “does not know that there can be advantage on the side of wealth, or that high position can exist,” Wall knew better. In Ohio before the war, he had seen how legislatures that were corrupted by slavery made unjust rules. In Charleston he had learned that even when well-intentioned people had the law on their side, they could accomplish little without the brute strength of a like-minded army, police force, or electorate. The law required skill within the courtroom; Riddle urged Howard's law students to “surpass” their “white competitors” because “the world has already decided that a colored man who is no better than a white man is nobody at all.” But the law would be a useful tool for colored Americans only when accompanied by political activism, organizing, and ultimately power.
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Inside the station house, a short walk from home, Wall embodied Negro equality. He also saw firsthand, every day, how fragile it was. The prisoners were young and old, male and female, charged with all manner of misdeed: rape and attempted rape, disorderly conduct, carrying a concealed weapon, assault with intent to kill, death threats, theft of a child's bank, stealing a pair of boots, running an unlicensed pushcart, and punching a man named Bean in the head. Colored Washington was desperately poor and plagued by crime—facts used constantly to justify disenfranchising blacks. Although Washington was spared the Klan terror and the race rioting that were erupting with troubling frequency across the South, nearly every moment of contact between blacks and whites—no matter how trivial—was fraught with the possibility of racial confrontation.
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At the dawn of freedom—when no one quite knew whether freedom would mean equality—the vote sustained the District's blacks. The freedpeople were poor, but their power on Election Day meant a good number would get city jobs. The all-white police force often treated them as contraband, criminals, even savages in need of “rudimentary civilization.” But colored votes meant that the police superintendent, A. C. Richards, was an ally. When some whites asked for separate lines at polling places, Richards refused.
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Equality ruled the day in Washington. The city council banned racial discrimination in restaurants, theaters, and other places of public accommodation. Directories for Washington and Georgetown stopped marking black residents with asterisks or the letter
c
. Congressional bills establishing integrated schools came tantalizingly close to becoming law.
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Still, the major order of business for Washington's new government was turning the city into a modern capital. Nearly every street had to be graded and paved, with cobblestones, wood blocks, bituminous coal tar—anything that would cover up the putrid and stinking “mudholes and mantraps” that, in the words of one newspaper, “swarm[ed] in all directions as thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa.” The task was almost as massive as building a whole new city. Costs far outstripped any amount of taxes the city could raise. Mayor Bowen's government borrowed heavily and, after two years of shrill accusations of corrupt contracting, was voted out of office.
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