Patronage and Protest in Kate Brown’sWashington

Kate Masur

As the summer of 1880 came to a close and the nation focused on yet another extremelycompetitive presidential election, the job security of the women’s bathroom attendant inthe U.S. Senate suddenly gained national attention. Kate Dodson, who was African Ameri-can, had looked after the Senate “ladies’ retiring room” and the comfort of its patronsfor nearly twenty years of Republican rule. But Democrats, newly in control of the Senate,were replacing long-standing Republican appointees with their own favorites. Dodson wassupposed to be an exception. The year before, Republicans had won a promise that herjob would be safe. Then, on a quiet August Saturday “when her Republican friends [were]absent,” the Senate sergeant at arms fired her.1

Republican newspaper editors leapt to Dodson’s defense, making her dismissal a par-tisan cause célèbre. Reminding readers that congressional Democrats had already begunfavoring ex-Confederates with patronage appointments, often firing Union veterans in theprocess, they urged compassion for yet another victim of Democratic perfidy. “Poor KateDodson” lamented the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune; “A Victim of BourbonRule,” charged the New York Times; “Not Sparing the Women,” added the Chicago DailyInter Ocean. In fact, as the papers reminded their readers, this was the second timeDodson had been attacked by Democrats. A dozen years earlier, in an episode thatprompted a Senate investigation, a white security guard at the Alexandria, Virginia, rail-road depot had forcibly pulled her from a train when she insisted that she was entitled toride the ladies’ car into Washington. Dodson was “a cripple,” the Chicago Daily Tribunewrote, “because the brutal violence of ex-slaveholders had sought to destroy her on accountof her color.”2

Kate Masur is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University.For insightful readings of this article at different points in its long trajectory, I thank Geraldo Cadava, Libby

Garland, Darlene Clark Hine, Martha Jones, Stephen Kantrowitz, Khalil Muhammad, Dylan Penningroth, JamesD. Schmidt, Peter Slevin, Lisa Tetrault, and the members of the Newberry Library’s Labor History Seminar. I amgrateful to Don Ritchie for crucial research advice and to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, especially Felicia Belland Don Kennon, for the opportunity to present this work; to the readers for the Journal of American History,including Cindy Aron, Spencer Crew, Richard Valelly, and several others who remained anonymous; to Ed Linen-thal and the JAH staff for their careful editorial work; and to the ACLS-Ryskamp Fellowship for financial supportduring the final stages of this research. Above all, my gratitude goes to Elsa Barkley Brown for her interest in thisproject and for her commitment to teaching and writing the history of African American women.

Readers may contact Masur at kmasur@northwestern.edu.

1 “AVictim of Bourbon Rule,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 1880, p. 1.2 “Poor Kate Dodson,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 17, 1880, p. 5; “Victim of Bourbon Rule”; “Not Sparing

the Women,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, Aug. 23, 1880. Quotation from “Kate Dodson,” Chicago Daily Tribune,

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas650© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

March 2013 The Journal of American History 1047

Kate Dodson emerged in these stories not just as a respectable woman trying to makean honorable living but also as a civil rights heroine whose history was aligned with theRepublican cause of racial equality. Despite her prominence at the time, however, herstory and the history of African American federal employment in her era have beenalmost entirely forgotten. A small number of studies have examined black federal employeesaround the turn of the twentieth century, and a somewhat larger group has examined thesegregationist policies of the Woodrow Wilson administration. The origins of large-scalefederal employment for African Americans, however, lie in Kate Dodson’s period: the eraof the Civil War and Reconstruction. The 1866 Civil Rights Act and three new constitu-tional amendments dramatically altered African Americans’ relationship to the nationalstate. So too did the possibility—and the reality—that African Americans could find workin the growing apparatus of the U.S. government.3

During Reconstruction, federal employees such as Kate Dodson played increasinglyimportant roles in black Washington. As the federal government’s civilian agenciesexpanded during the Civil War, so did their need for messengers, watchmen, char-women, janitors, and other laborers. African Americans demanded patronage appoint-ments from the ascendant Republican party. Recognizing government work as a sourceof livelihood, they pushed the party they supported to understand them as constituentsentitled to a share of the spoils. African American federal employees used their connec-tions to prominent whites to improve their own prospects and those of their friends andfamilies. In this way, networks of patronage and obligation developed within black fami-lies and in the broader community of African American federal employees. At the sametime, government work became a foundation for a vibrant and politically active blackcommunity in the nation’s capital. African American federal employees were institutionbuilders, political leaders, and civil rights activists, and the connections they forgedhelped make Washington the center of the nation’s black elite by the 1880s.4

Aug. 20, 1880. See also “Another Head in the Dust,” Washington National Republican, Aug. 17, 1880; “Dis-charged Kate,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, Aug. 20, 1880; and “National Notes,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Aug.26, 1880.

3 Laurence J. W. Hayes, The Negro Federal Government Worker: A Study of His Classification Status in the Dis-trict of Columbia, 1883–1938 (Washington, 1941); Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: African Americans andthe U.S. Federal Government (New York, 2007); Samuel Krislov, The Negro in Federal Employment: The Quest forEqual Opportunity (Minneapolis, 1967); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “The Rise of Segregation in theFederal Bureaucracy,” Phylon, 28 (no. 2, 1967), 178–84; Nicholas Patler, Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration:Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century (Boulder, 2007); Kathleen Long Wolgemuth,“Woodrow Wilson’s Appointment Policy and the Negro,” Journal of Southern History, 24 (Nov. 1958), 457–71;Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America(Chapel Hill, forthcoming 2013). Few historians have given attention to low-level federal employees of any kind inthis period. On clerical workers, see Cindy Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers inVictorian America (New York, 1987). For a rare look at white government laborers in the Civil War era, see DavidMontgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967), 311–23. Gov-ernment laborers were not even enumerated in nineteenth-century efforts to record the size and scope of the federalgovernment. See Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, 1958), 57–58.

4 Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883 (Urbana,1961); Steven Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities,1877–1920 (New York, 1982), 47–84; Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service; Leonard D. White,The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History (New York, 1958). Willard B. Gatewood, Aris-tocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington, 1990), esp. 39–68; Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading theRace: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital, 1880–1920 (Charlottesville, 1999), 152–59;Eric S. Yellin, “‘It Was Still No South to Us’: African American Civil Servants at the Fin de Siècle,” Washing-ton History, 21 (2009), 23–47. For the argument that “patronal” relationships were the defining feature of

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Kate Dodson stands out amid this accomplished cohort. She worked for the Senatefor nearly twenty years, beginning in 1861, when her husband, Jacob Dodson, usheredher into the federal work force. She divorced him in 1867, resuming her maiden name,Kate Brown, but she kept her job. After she was assaulted in Alexandria for seeking pas-sage on the ladies’ car, Radical Republican senators who knew her from the Capitol de-manded an investigation. She, in turn, sued the railroad company for damages and thenproposed legislation forbidding racial discrimination on the line. Between her work forthe government and the proceeds from her legal victory, she managed to accumulatepersonal property of considerable value. When she died in 1883, she was well known inofficial Washington. She was also a benefactor of two local churches and an integralmember of a community of black federal employees whose public activism helped makeWashington a hub for black politics during Reconstruction and whose inroads into gov-ernment work created a foundation for future generations.

In offering a detailed portrait of a relatively unknown person’s life, this article shiftsour focus from breadth to depth. Rather than analyze black federal employees in theaggregate, it examines the diverse forces that shaped an individual’s story and exploreshow, in turn, that story reveals something larger. This approach draws both on a tradi-tion of African American biography and on recent impulses in social history. Nine-teenth-century African American scholars compiled biographies of “men of mark” and“homespun heroines,” seeking to tout racial leadership and inspire new generations.Twentieth-century African Americanists continued to write biographical studies, oftenusing individuals’ stories to explain the nuances of lives shaped not only by oppressionbut also by agency and aspiration. Of late, this tradition seems to have converged withthe social-historical impulse to understand the lives of common people. Earlier socialhistorians pioneered the use of census data, tax and probate records, and other sources todocument large-scale patterns in, for example, population, mortality, literacy, or employ-ment among groups whose histories had not previously been written. Historians havecontinued to use such sources but now apply them to different purposes. Instead ofbeing satisfied with mapping big-picture changes, they aim to track the life stories oflittle-known individuals or families and to use small-scale stories to shed light on agency,identity, and contingency in history.5

Reconstruction politics, see Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of PopularPolitics in the South (Chapel Hill, 2011).

5 William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York, 1863);Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Xenia, 1926). In addition to myriad biogra-phies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and, more recently, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, andHarriet Tubman, see, for example, R. J. M. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge, 1986); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie LenaWalker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” Signs, 14 (Spring 1989), 610–33; John Hope Franklin, GeorgeWashington Williams: A Biography (Chicago, 1985); Leon Litwack and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of theNineteenth Century (Urbana, 1988); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925(Hamden, 1978); and Howard N. Rabinowitz, Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (Urbana, 1982). Ihave been particularly inspired by biographies that reveal complexity and contradictions in the lives of women civilrights activists. See, for example, Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana,1999); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996); and Xiomara Santamarina, Bela-bored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill, 2005). Social historians’growing interest in individual life stories is probably the result of the convergence of several factors, includinghistorians’ concern with assessing how non-elite people have exercised agency within worlds of constrained possibil-ity; explicit engagement with questions of scale; the desire to write histories that are compelling and accessible for

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The two basic registers—the typical and the exceptional; large-scale historical develop-ments and the idiosyncrasies of individual lives—merge in the story of Kate Brown.Brown’s history offers a human-scale perspective on African Americans and Republicanpatronage in the Civil War era and shows how access to government work shaped blacklife in Washington at a pivotal moment. It reveals something of the mechanics of patron-age, of how African Americans mobilized their connections to prominent whites, and toone another, to create opportunities for advancement. It provides a glimpse into how oneparticularly resourceful woman managed to use her connections and access to the courtsto further her claims to dignity and citizenship. And finally, it allows us to see how publicprotest was woven into a life preoccupied, as well, with making a living, sustaining (andbreaking) kinship ties, and creating a safe and satisfying personal existence.

Although much more can be known about Kate Brown’s life than about the lives of mostnineteenth-century African American women, her early existence remains fairly obscure.Born in Virginia in the 1830s, Catharine Brown grew up in Alexandria, the daughter ofSarah Ann Piper Brown, a free woman of color. By 1850, Catharine’s older siblings, Mar-garet, John, and Cornelius, were living on their own, the two young men working as plas-terers. Judging from her confident handwriting as an adult, we may surmise that Brownattended school in Alexandria. Her educational opportunities would have diminished dra-matically after 1846, however, when the city, which had been part of the District ofColumbia since 1791, was returned to the state of Virginia. Following this “retrocession,”white leaders shuttered the city’s black schools, enforcing the state’s law prohibiting theteaching of reading and writing to free people of color. Given her approximate age andliteracy as an adult, Kate Brown may have continued her formal education across thePotomac River, in Washington. She may also have been a member of Alexandria’s indepen-dent black Baptist church, First Colored Baptist, to which she later bequeathed $100.6

readers; and access to digitized primary sources, which makes research on obscure individuals less arduous than everbefore. For early acknowledgements of and reflections on this trend, see Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, andFredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill,1997); and Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal ofAmerican History, 88 (June 2001), 1294–44. In the field of nineteenth-century African American history, forexample, community studies have given way not just to an acknowledgement of difference and conflict amongAfrican Americans but also to an effort to understand how relatively unheralded individuals conducted their lives inan era of slavery, emancipation, and changing conceptions of race. In this newer vein, see, for example, MaryFrances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-slave Reparations (New York, 2005);Scott E. Casper, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine (New York, 2008);Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through theCivil War (New York, 2004); Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A TransnationalFamily Story,” American Historical Review, 108 (Feb. 2003), 84–118; Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdic-tion in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and HistoryReview, 29 (Nov. 2011), 1031–60; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery andFreedom (Berkeley, 2005); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age ofEmancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and theSecret Journey from Black to White (New York, 2011); and Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’sFrontier (New York, 2009).

6 On Kate Brown’s siblings, see 1850 U.S. Census, town of Alexandria, Virginia, family 1287, available atAncestry.com. Dorothy S. Provine, ed., Alexandria County, Virginia, Free Negro Registers, 1797–1861 (Bowie,1990), 18, 90, 114, 133, 268; Moses B. Goodwin, “History of Schools for the Colored Population in the Districtof Columbia,” part I, U.S. Department of Education, Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Condi-tion and Improvement of Public Schools in the District of Columbia, 41 Cong., 2 sess., 1871, H. Exec. Doc. 315,

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Although in separate jurisdictions after 1846, Alexandria and Washington shared muchin common. Both cities were part of the broader Chesapeake region, where the ante-bellum transition from tobacco-based agriculture tomore diversified farming led to the dim-inution of the enslaved population and a concomitant growth in the number of freeAfrican Americans. Like Kate Brown’s family, many free blacks lived in the region’s cities,where they typically worked as domestics, common laborers, or tradesmen. By 1850, freeblacks outnumbered the enslaved in bothWashington and Alexandria, thoughWashingtonwas a much bigger city and free African Americans composed a far greater proportion of thetotal black population. City life offered free blacks opportunities not found in the coun-tryside, but the social and legal regime of slavery nonetheless defined their lives. In bothcities, local law demanded that free blacks register and carry free papers, proscribed themfrom many occupations, and barred them from assembling without a permit. Yet Congresshad ultimate jurisdiction in the District of Columbia, and racial repression there couldgo no further than the nation’s legislators would allow. Black schools, churches, and civicorganizations were never free from harassment, but by the 1850s such institutions werethriving in the capital city, enriching and supporting the lives of both free and enslavedAfrican Americans.7

Kate Brown left Alexandria sometime after 1853 for a new life in Washington. Her firstdefinitive appearance in the U.S. census is in 1860, when she was in her twenties and work-ing as a live-in servant in theWashington home of Edmund French, a wealthy civil engineer.French, who was from Connecticut, had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy atWest Point and designed railroads and bridges in the Northeast before coming to thecapital to work on an ambitious extension of the Treasury Department building. In theFrench household, Brown was one of two free “mulatto” house servants who, along witha white cook, a white laborer, and two white farm hands, made up the staff. EdmundFrench died in 1860, and the next year Brown moved out of his household and into thehome of her new husband, Jacob Dodson.8

Jacob Dodson was firmly entrenched in a world of African American federal govern-ment employees that had its beginnings before the Civil War. A native of Maryland andformer servant in the household of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Dodson had tra-veled to the West and back three times on government-sponsored expeditions led by Benton’sson-in-law, John C. Frémont. Dodson was a valued and trusted member of Frémont’s teams.

pp. 284–85, 307–8; A. Glenn Crothers, “The 1846 Retrocession of Alexandria: Protecting Slavery and the SlaveTrade in the District of Columbia,” in In the Shadow of Freedom: The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital, ed.Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio, 2011), 141–68.

7 J. D. B. DeBow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, 1853), 234, 256; Ira Berlin,Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974); Mary Elizabeth Corrigan, “TheTies That Bind: The Pursuit of Community and Freedom among Slaves and Free Blacks in the District of Colum-bia, 1800–1860,” in Southern City, National Ambition: The Growth of Early Washington, D.C., ed. Howard Gillette(Washington, 1995), 69–90; Constance M. Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton,1962), 173–76, 179–87; Henry S. Robinson, “Some Aspects of the Free Negro Population in Washington, D.C.,1800–1862,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 64 (Spring 1969), 43–64; Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor,Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family overFreedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore, 2011); Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners inthe South, 1790–1915 (Urbana, 1990), esp. 61–79; Goodwin, “History of Schools for the Colored Population inthe District of Columbia,” 273, 284–85, 311–17; Crothers, “1846 Retrocession of Alexandria.”

8 On the French household, see 1860 U.S. Census, Washington County, District of Columbia, first division,family 114, available at Ancestry.com. Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, 23 (1897), 170–71.Brown registered as a “free negro” in Alexandria in 1853. See Provine, ed., Alexandria County, 268.

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Yet when he returned to Washington from his final trip, probably in late 1847 or 1848, hefaced a job market that offered black men few opportunities for stable or interesting work.Local laws forbade African Americans from engaging in many trades, and white laborers oftenperceived free black workers as a threat to their livelihoods. Rather than return to personalservice, Dodson took a position as a “water closet” attendant in the U.S. Senate. Hard-pressedin a discriminatory labor market, African Americans who, like Dodson, knew or had workedfor white officeholders could obtain crucial recommendations for government work. In fact,some of antebellum Washington’s best-known black ministers and teachers were similarlywell connected and also had stints as government employees.9

If Jacob Dodson’s ties to a powerful political family were good for securing a job inthe government, they were also useful in his fight for pay for his military service in theMexican War in California. His name did not appear on the muster rolls, Dodsonargued in an 1854 petition to Congress, because, “being a colored man, he could nothave been lawfully enrolled as a volunteer in the service of the United States.” His strug-gle for back pay extended over two Congresses, during which time one of his patrons,Senator Benton, lost his bid for reelection. Dodson finally got his pay with the help ofSenator John B. Weller of California, a Mexican War veteran who had succeededFrémont as the state’s governor. Weller was a proslavery Democrat, but he was linkedby marriage to the Benton family, and he evidently thought highly enough of JacobDodson to make the case for him on the grounds of racial equality. Congress must “givehim what he would have received if he had been of a different color—in other words, ifhe had been a white man,” Weller argued. Congress finally approved Dodson’s petitionfor wages, a victory made possible by Dodson’s tenacity and his connections to well-placed patrons.10

At the same time as Jacob Dodson was working in the Senate and seeking compensa-tion for earlier military service, he was also cultivating a private life. He may have been awashroom attendant, but years of decently paid work for the Frémont expeditions and inthe Senate had enabled him to reach a level of wealth that placed him among Washing-ton’s most prosperous African Americans. In 1850 he owned land worth $1,500 and wasliving with his wife, Mary; an infant daughter, Verleta; Elizabeth Dodson (probably his

9 Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont (Urbana, 1993), 155; DonaldJackson and Mary Lee Spence, eds., The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont, vol. I: Travels from 1838 to 1844(Urbana, 1984), xxxiv; William Loren Katz, The Black West (Garden City, 1973), 4. U.S. Congress, Senate, Reportof the Secretary of the Senate, 31 Cong., 1 sess., 1849, Sen. Mis. Doc., pp. 33, 3, 16, 30, 44, 50, 55, 57. BobArnebeck, Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington,1790–1900 (New York, 1991); Corrigan, “Ties That Bind,”85–86; G. Franklin Edwards and Michael R. Winston, “Commentary: The Washington of Paul Jennings—WhiteHouse Slave, Free Man, and Conspirator for Freedom,” Journal of White House History, 1 (1983), 52–63; KateMasur, “The African American Delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A Reappraisal,” Civil War History, 56 (June2010), 132–33; E. Delorus Preston Jr., “William Syphax, a Pioneer in Negro Education in the District of Colum-bia,” Journal of Negro History, 20 (Oct. 1935), 457; Dorothy Provine, “The Economic Position of the Free Blacksin the District of Columbia, 1800–1860,” ibid., 58 (Jan. 1873), 61–72, esp. 67–68; John E. Washington, TheyKnew Lincoln (New York, 1942), 135–41.

10 For Jacob Dodson’s petition, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Report of the Com-mittee on Military Affairs, 33 Cong., 2 sess., 1855, Sen. Com. Rep. 403. Thomas Hart Benton was chair of theSenate Committee on Military Affairs, which handled the petition. For John B. Weller’s argument, see Congressio-nal Globe, 34 Cong., 1 sess., Feb. 21, 1856, p. 482. For Jacob Dodson’s case in Congress and the press, see ibid.,33 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 9, 1855, p. 210; ibid., Jan. 31, 1855, p. 493; ibid., 34 Cong., 1 sess., April 17, 1856,p. 938; and “Case of Jacob Dodson,” Liberator, May 9, 1856, p. 75. On Benton, see Biographical Dictionary of theU.S. Congress, 1774–Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=B000398. On the relation ofBenton and John B. Weller by marriage, see Anna Mary Moon, comp., Sketches of the Shelby, McDowell, Deaderick,Anderson Families (Chattanooga, 1933), 75.

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mother); and an eleven-year-old boy boarder. Jacob’s household would be transformedin the next ten years. The 1860 census enumerator found Jacob still living with Eliza-beth, but neither Mary nor Verleta was part of the household. Meanwhile, his home nowincluded ten-year-old Francis B. Dodson and eight-year-old Emily A. Dodson, probablychildren born to him and Mary since the previous enumeration. Although it is impossi-ble to know with certainty, it seems likely that Mary and Verleta died between the twoenumerations. In 1860, then, Jacob was about forty years old, gainfully employed, andunmarried.11

Historical sources do not reveal how Kate and Jacob met or what drew them to oneanother. He was more than ten years her senior and had two children at home. But healso had what appeared to be a stable job at the Capitol, a house of his own, worldlyexperience, and a well-developed ability to navigate between the deference required inwork for powerful white people and the assertiveness necessary to improve his lot in life.Jacob was evidently Catholic, for in the fall of 1861, the pair said their vows in the city’snewest Catholic church, St. Aloysius, which had been completed just two years earlier.The church was widely admired for its classical architecture and gorgeous artwork byConstantino Brumidi, the artist who, a few years later, would paint murals to adorn thenewly finished Capitol dome. St. Aloysius also had a reputation for a measure of racialegalitarianism. As one writer noted in the late 1860s, “Colored people have always heldpews there on the same floor with the whites, and there is a large free female coloredschool in the parochial school building connected with this church.”12

Marriage to Jacob opened new employment opportunities for Kate. In the early1860s, Jacob did odd jobs around the Senate, sometimes providing gallons of paste tothe room where congressional documents were folded and other times cleaning carpets.The sergeant at arms was in charge of hiring and paying the common laborers whoworked in the Senate, and Jacob was evidently able to persuade him to hire on his newwife and, occasionally, his son. Kate began her work at the Capitol as a laundress, andby the end of 1861 she had landed a job as attendant to the ladies’ retiring room on thethird floor. The Senate’s quarters for “lady” visitors—which also included a “ladies’reception room” and a “ladies’ gallery”—had opened in 1859 and reflected the contem-porary impulse to shelter respectable women visitors to the Capitol from the ostensiblydegrading influences of masculine political culture. The retiring room, a bathroom, was“handsomely ornamented and tiled” and required constant oversight by an employee tokeep it clean and attend to the needs of its patrons.13

11 1850 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., Ward 2, family 857, available at Ancestry.com; 1860 U.S. Census,Washington, D.C., Ward 2, family 517, ibid.

12 Goodwin, “History of Schools for the Colored Population in the District of Columbia,” 218; DiamondJubilee of St. Aloysius’ Church, Washington, D.C., 1859–1934 (Washington, [1934]), 12–24. For their marriage, see“Married,” Washington Evening Star, Oct. 9, 1861; Petition for divorce, Case 961, Equity Docket 8, Equity Cases,case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court, 21 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).

13 On Jacob Dodson’s duties, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 37 Cong., 2 sess.,1861, Sen. Mis. Doc. 66, pp. 41, 78; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 38 Cong., 1sess., 1863, Sen. Mis. Doc. 128, p. 64. On the sergeant at arms, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretaryof the Senate, 37 Cong., 3 sess., 1862, Sen. Mis. Doc. 11, p. 99; and Senate, Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 38Cong., 1 sess., 1863, Sen. Mis. Doc. 128, pp. 18, 53. John B. Ellis, The Sights and Secrets of the National Capital:A Work Descriptive of Washington City in All Its Various Phases (New York, 1869), 92. On sex segregation in theSenate, see Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.(Chapel Hill, 2010), 93, 95.

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Kate commenced that work at a wage of $1 per day. She worked in the retiring roomthirty days each month, but she also continued to wash the Senate’s towels and, occasion-ally, curtains too. The Senate’s “bath-rooms, engineers’ department, and folding-room”generated dozens of towels each month, allowing her to supplement the approximately$30 she made for her work in the ladies’ room with another $20 to $30 for laundry.Although Jacob Dodson’s real estate holdings were considerable, the waged employmentof his son and wife—as well as the presence in their house of boarders—suggest that thehousehold required more than Jacob’s salary to get by.14

If the nature of Kate Brown Dodson’s work was similar to that of many urban blackwomen throughout the South, the conditions under which she did it were quite differ-ent. The year she married Jacob and began working in the Capitol was also the yearRepublicans swept into Washington, their political power heightened by the secession ofthe eleven southern states that joined the Confederacy. As Kate and Jacob married andpursued their livelihoods in the capital city, Union forces occupied nearby areas of Vir-ginia and Maryland. Slaves began to take leave of their owners, many fleeing into Wash-ington in search of protection, employment, and ultimately freedom. Fugitives arrived ingrowing numbers during the war, contributing to a 300-fold increase in the city’s blackpopulation by 1870. Black migrants to Washington faced a housing shortage, steepprices for rent and food, and a local white population that largely disdained them.15

The war-related growth of the federal government did, however, create thousands ofnew jobs in Washington, and Republican control opened new opportunities for AfricanAmericans in particular. In 1863 Kate Dodson went to work as attendant to the “ladiesdepartment” in the fast-growing Treasury Department, which had begun to employwomen (most of them white) in the printing of greenbacks. Besides being on the Trea-sury payroll, Dodson ran a “candy and cake stand” inside the building. That September,a Northern black visitor to Washington was amazed to observe the number of AfricanAmericans working for the U.S. government: “What think you of finding responsible col-ored men by scores, employed here, in the Capitol, in the Treasury, in the State Depart-ment; in fine, in all the Departments of government”? Employment by the government,he wrote, was “an acknowledgement of a capacity, but more, an evidence of political re-cognition.” The correspondent was perhaps overly optimistic, since African Americanshad long labored for the U.S. government without being recognized as voters or citizens.Yet his exuberant report is not difficult to fathom. In the fall of 1863, the EmancipationProclamation had been issued, black men were serving in the Union army, and the dawnof “political recognition” seemed at hand.16

14 Quotation from Senate, Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 38 Cong., 1 sess., 1863, Sen. Mis. Doc. 128,p. 65. U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 37 Cong., 3 sess., 1862, Sen. Mis. Doc. 11,p. 13. For the composition of the Dodson/Brown household between 1861 and 1866, see Case 961 file, EquityDocket 8, Equity Cases, case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court.

15 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, ColonialTimes to 1970 (2 vols., Washington, 1975), I, 26; Robert Harrison, Washington during Civil War and Reconstruc-tion: Race and Radicalism (New York, 2011), 27–56; Lois E. Horton and James O. Horton, “Race, Occupation,and Literacy in Reconstruction Washington, D.C.,” in Toward a New South? Studies in Post–Civil War SouthernCommunities, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Robert C. McMath Jr. (Westport, 1982); Allan Johnston, SurvivingFreedom: The Black Community of Washington, D.C., 1860–1880 (New York, 1993), 101–46; Masur, Example forAll the Land, 27–28, 31–34.

16 On Kate Dodson’s employment at Treasury, see U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Report of theSelect Committee to Investigate Charges against the Treasury Department, 38 Cong., 1 sess., 1864, House Rpt. 140,pp. 220, 364. My thanks to Jessica Ziparo for this reference. On women in federal employment during the Civil

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Still, it was by no means easy for black Washingtonians to obtain jobs in the federaldepartments. Access to even the lowliest positions—laundresses and laborers—requiredconnections to prominent whites or to African Americans with ties to the government.In early 1861, for instance, Henry Piper informed Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase thathe was “a poor, uneducated colored man” seeking “a situation in your Department.”How-ever poor and uneducated, Piper belonged to Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, aprominent and active black congregation. To bolster his case, Piper told Chase that hewas “very well aquanted” withWilliam Slade, the lead servant in the Lincoln White House,a member of Piper’s church, and, like Chase, an Ohioan. It took Piper three years andmultiple letters of reference, but in spring 1864 he was hired as a laborer in the TreasuryDepartment.17

The Treasury Department also hired a black man named Lewis Simpson, who got hisjob by mobilizing his connections to the Union army. Simpson was born at the U.S.Military Academy at West Point, New York, where his father worked as a bootblack andbathroom attendant. In early adulthood, Lewis worked for Gen. John Sedgwick, a WestPoint graduate, and traveled with him to the western frontier and then to the Civil War.Sedgwick was killed in battle at Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, in May 1864. Soonafter, Simpson moved to Washington and looked for work. Bolstered by letters of recom-mendation from officers on Sedgwick’s staff, Simpson was hired as a Treasury Depart-ment laborer. At roughly the same time, he married Margaret Brown, Kate Brown’ssister.18

The black men and women who obtained government jobs in this world of patronageand personal connection worked hard to pry open similar opportunities for their friendsand, especially, their relatives. One family acquainted with Kate and Jacob Dodson wasparticularly successful. John L. Hickman and his son, Thomas, were among the Senate’sbest-paid common laborers, typically earning slightly more than Kate did. Age twenty-one in 1870, Thomas worked as a messenger at the Capitol. So did his brother-in-lawWilliam Lucas, who until recently had been a servant in a Washington hotel. Like KateBrown, Lucas married into a family that could help him get government work and thusgive him a leg up in a circumscribed job market. Members of another branch of theHickman family also worked for the U.S. government. Anthony Hickman, possibly JohnL. Hickman’s brother, was a Senate laborer, and his wife, Priscilla, occasionally took in

War, see Jessica Ziparo, “‘This Grand Experiment’: Women Enter the Federal Workforce in Civil War Era Wash-ington” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2012). “A Letter from ‘Ethiop,’” New York Anglo-African, Sept. 5,1863. On the employment of African Americans in military labor, see Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documen-tary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. II: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South(New York, 1993), 243–364.

17 Henry Piper to Salmon Chase, March 14, 1861, Henry Piper Employment File, box 461, Applications andRecommendations for Positions in Washington, General Records of the Treasury Department, 56 (NationalArchives); W. B. Evans to Mr. Secretary, Aug. 8, 1863, ibid. On William Slade, see Masur, “African AmericanDelegation to Abraham Lincoln,” 125.

18 Lewis Simpson Employment File, box 530, Applications and Recommendations for Positions in Washing-ton, General Records of the Treasury Department. On John Sedgwick, see Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Livesof the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge, 1964), 430–31. On Lewis Simpson’s father, see “Proceedings of theCourt of Inquiry in the Case of Cadet Whittaker,” p. 1580, Selected Documents Related to Blacks Nominated forAppointment to the U.S. Military Academy during the 19th Century, 1870–1887, National Archives MicrofilmPublication M1002, reel 6; “Proceedings of the General Court-Martial of Cadet Whittaker,” p. 4347, ibid., reel14. “Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry in the Case of Cadet Whittaker,” pp. 1506–7, reel 5.

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Senate laundry. By the late 1860s, Anthony and Priscilla’s second child, William, was alsoemployed in the Senate.19

If the Civil War and the Republican ascendancy had dramatically improved AfricanAmericans’ chances of being hired by the government, the inauguration of PresidentUlysses S. Grant in spring 1869 opened new avenues for upward mobility. To anunprecedented degree, Grant and the heads of his executive departments saw AfricanAmericans as constituents entitled to consideration for patronage. Black men could nowvote in the former Confederacy, and the Fifteenth Amendment was on its way to ratifica-tion, making it clear that African Americans would become a permanent part of theelectorate. With good reason, then, African Americans seeking federal positions began toset their sights higher. The experience of Eleanor Ketchum, for example, showed thedifference a year could make. Ketchum had worked as a copyist for Rep. BenjaminButler during Andrew Johnson’s 1868 impeachment trial, and Butler had endorsed aletter recommending her to the Department of Internal Revenue. At first, Ketchum didnot apply, believing “the times were such as not to encourage a Colored woman to hopefor advancement.” But shortly after Grant’s inauguration the moment was “more pro-spective of hope.” Ketchum asked Butler to help her find work in the Treasury or PostOffice Department, and with his recommendation, she was soon appointed a Treasuryclerk. Higher-status appointments tended to go to men, however. Kate Brown’s brother-in-law, Lewis Simpson, who began his Treasury Department career as a common laborer,was promoted to the more prestigious and lucrative position of messenger and soon roseto become head messenger in the Third Auditor’s Bureau. Anthony Bowen, a literate for-mer slave who was a minister, founder of the nation’s first black Young Men’s ChristianAssociation, and longtime messenger in the Patent Office, finally obtained a clerkship aswell.20

By the end of the century, white-collar appointments such as Anthony Bowen’s werea source of racial pride and an indicator that the U.S. government had acknowledged the

19 On Thomas Hickman and John L. Hickman, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate,39 Cong., 1 sess., 1865, Sen. Mis. Doc. 125, pp. 12, 31; U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary ofthe Senate, 39 Cong., 2 sess., 1866, Sen. Mis. Doc. 54, p. 9; U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of theSenate, 40 Cong., 2 sess., 1867, Sen. Mis. Doc. 12, pp. 44, 85; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Letter of the Secretary ofthe Senate, 40 Cong., 3 sess., 1868, Sen. Mis. Doc. 18, pp. 9, 12, 34, 138. For the household headed by JohnHickman, which included William Lucas, see 1870 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., Ward 4, family 800, availableat Ancestry.com. For the 1860 occupation of a William Lucas who is probably the man who married ElizabethHickman, see 1860 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., Ward 4, family 364, ibid. Sluby and Wormley, eds., Blacksin the Marriage Records of the District of Columbia, II, 32. On Anthony Hickman, see U.S. Congress, Senate,Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 38 Cong., 1 sess., 1863, Sen. Mis. Doc. 128, pp. 18, 53; U.S. Congress,Senate, Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 38 Cong., 2 sess., 1864, Sen. Mis. Doc. 48, p. 50; and U.S.Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 39 Cong., 1 sess., 1865, Sen. Mis. Doc. 125, p. 8. OnPriscilla Hickman, see U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 38 Cong., 2 sess., 1865, Sen.Mis. Doc. 48, p. 27; U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 40 Cong., 2 sess., 1867, Sen.Mis. Doc. 12, p. 62; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Letter of the Secretary of the Senate, 40 Cong., 3 sess., 1868,Sen. Mis. Doc. 18, p. 3. On William Hickman, see ibid., 10.

20 Masur, Example for All the Land, 160, 163; James A. Padgett, “Ministers to Liberia and Their Diplomacy,”Journal of Negro History, 22 (Jan. 1937), 57–58; James A. Padgett, “Diplomats to Haiti and Their Diplomacy,”ibid., 25 (July 1940), 276. Eleanor J. Ketchum to Benjamin Butler, March 16, 1869, box 50, Benjamin ButlerPapers (Library of Congress, Washington); Julia Wilbur Diary, “large” diary set, April 21, 1869, Julia WilburPapers (Haverford College Library Special Collections, Haverford, Pa.); Agnes L. Ketchum Employment File, box322, Applications and Recommendations for Positions in Washington, General Records of the Treasury Depart-ment. Kate Dodson to Hon. Sec. of Treasury, March 28, 1877, Simpson Employment File, box 530, ibid. OnAnthony Bowen, see Masur, Example for All the Land, 150, 160. See also New York World, May 22, 1869; andWilliam J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (Cleveland, 1887), 269–71.

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intellectual capacities of people of African descent, not just their ability to performmanual labor. Indeed, amid growing frustration with government segregation and discri-mination, a new generation took pride in the few African Americans who had managed,during Reconstruction, to enter into clerical work for the government. An older author,however, reminded aspiring youngsters that the more menial government jobs theirfathers (and mothers) had done were nothing to be ashamed of. In the old days, hewrote, “The highest position a colored man could expect to get was that of a servant or amessenger under the Government. It was brawn and not brain that was expected of ourrace.” Another confirmed that in the Civil War era, employment as a government laborerwas “a ‘big’ job for a colored man.”21

It is no wonder that in the 1860s and 1870s many African Americans regarded gov-ernment work, however menial, as a path of opportunity and an indicator of status. Aspeace returned, the city remained swollen with migrants from the countryside, and manyblack residents struggled simply to survive. Racial discrimination among white laborersand employers was rampant. The government favored white employees too, but when itdid hire African Americans, the wages it paid could be better and certainly more consis-tent than in the private sector. Hickman family members, for example, were able topurchase real estate during the 1860s. Their success, and its grounding in governmentwork, fits larger patterns charted by the economic historian Loren Schweninger, whofound that in Washington in 1870, “to a greater degree than in any other city, the neweconomic elite was comprised of ex-free Negroes of modest means who substantiallyexpanded their wealth holdings during the 1860s.”22

Nor was it just the pay that made government jobs desirable for African Americans.One mid-twentieth-century researcher found that most black government laborers andmessengers did extra work for their powerful patrons “before Government time, andoften into the night at dinners and receptions.” Yet government work freed many blackWashingtonians from the drudgery and constraints of live-in domestic work. Govern-ment offices were less isolated than work in employers’ homes. And black workers wholived in their own homes had more time for family and friends, church, voluntary associ-ations, and other paid employment. Government work thus became prestigious amongAfrican Americans in part because government employees could parlay patronage rela-tionships with powerful whites into tangible benefits for their families, friends, andinstitutions.23

21 William H. Severson, History of Felix Lodge no. 3, F.A.A.M. (Washington, 1908), 11; Washington, TheyKnew Lincoln, 137. See also Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washing-ton, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, 1994), 128. On pride in early clerks and other high-level appointees, seeletter of J. A. Johnson, Washington Post, June 1, 1893, p. 7; Andrew F. Hilyer, The Twentieth Century UnionLeague Directory (Washington, 1901), 111; and Washington, They Knew Lincoln, 137–40.

22 1860 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., Ward 4, family 1144, available at Ancestry.com; 1870 U.S. Census,Washington, D.C., Ward 4, families 799 and 800, ibid. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Commu-nity, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana, 1980), 26–56; Johnston, Surviving Freedom, esp. 3–74; and Masur, Example for All the Land, esp. 54–58, 146–56, 163. Schweninger, Black Property Owners in theSouth, 203.

23 Washington, They Knew Lincoln, 141. On a later period, see Sharon Harley, “Black Women in a SouthernCity: Washington, D.C., 1890–1920,” in Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South, ed. Joanne V. Hawks andSheila L. Skemp (Jackson, 1983), 67. On the advantages of living out, see Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out,123–30; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Divisionof Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs, 18 (Autumn 1992), 1–43. For African Americans creating opportunities assubordinates in patronage relationships, see also Peggy G. Hargis, “For the Love of Place: Paternalism and

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In fact, African American government employees featured prominently in the inter-related projects of civil rights activism and institution building in black Washington. JacobDodson himself not only waged a struggle for pay from the Mexican War but alsoattempted to mobilize an African American home guard during the Civil War. Less thantwo weeks after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Dodson informed Secretary ofWar Simon Cameron that he knew “of some 300 reliable colored free citizens of this citywho desire to enter the service for the defense of the city.” He mentioned his servicewith the Frémont expeditions and concluded, “I can be found about the Senate Chamber,as I have been employed about the premises for some years.” Dodson’s military ex-perience and connections to powerful whites, however, could not trump the government’sdetermination to prohibit black men from joining the Union effort on an equal footingwith whites. Cameron delivered a flat refusal. Dodson nonetheless continued to demandthe perquisites of citizenship for himself and other African Americans. In 1865 he signeda petition seeking voting rights for black men in the capital.24

Dodson was only one of many black government employees who helped make Wash-ington a hub of African American activism by claiming new rights and contributing toblack organizations. After Congress outlawed slavery in the capital and nullified the ante-bellum black codes in spring 1862, black Washingtonians demanded a halt to the enforce-ment of the Fugitive Slave Law; sought access as equal citizens to the galleries of the Houseand the Senate; asserted a right to ride the city’s streetcars; and demanded the vote. Federalemployees in Brown and Dodson’s circle played prominent roles in such endeavors.Dodson’s close friend David Fisher was a watchman in the army paymaster general’s office,an elder in Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and a leader in local politics and theblack public schools.25 John L. Hickman helped organize the local “colored” UnionLeague; Anthony Hickman became a trustee of the Colored Union Benevolent Associationand worked for voting rights for black men. Lewis Simpson, Kate Brown’s brother-in-law,and at least four other government employees were delegates to a December 1869 blackmen’s labor convention in Washington.26

Patronage in the Georgia Lowcountry, 1865–1896,” Journal of Southern History, 70 (Nov. 2004), 825–64; andSantamarina, Belabored Professions, 104–5, 154, 158–59.

24 Jacob Dodson to Simon Cameron, April 23, 1861, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the OfficialRecords of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, 1880), ser. 3, vol. I, 107. For Simon Cameron’s rejec-tion of Jacob Dodson’s offer, see ibid., 133. Petition of Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia, [Dec. 1865],39A-H4, Records of the United States Senate, 46 (National Archives). This petition is also available as Docu-ment E-2 in Freedmen and Southern Society Project (College Park, Md.).

25 Masur, Example for All the Land, 22–173. Deposition of David Fisher, July 30, 1867, Case 961, EquityDocket 8, Equity Cases, case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court; “Records ofSession and the Church Records, Vol. 1, 1841–1868,” box 34-1, Papers of Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church,Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University, Washington); “A Call for a National Convention ofColored Citizens of the United States,” New York Anglo-African, July 2, 1864; “Colored Men’s Equal Rights Con-vention,” Washington Chronicle, Feb. 3, 1866; “Consolidation of the District,” Washington Evening Star, Feb. 2,1870; “Second Ward Politics,” ibid.

26 On John L. Hickman, see resolutions by District of Columbia Colored Union League, [April 1866], 39A-H4, Records of the United States Senate. These resolutions are also available as Document E-58 in Freedmen andSouthern Society Project. On Anthony Hickman, see petition of Gurden Snowden et al., Jan. 6, 1875, “District ofColumbia,” Accompanying Papers File, 43rd Congress, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 233(National Archives); C. A. Stewart et al. to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, [April 1864], 38A-J4,Records of the United States Senate. This document is also available as Document E-80 in Freedmen and SouthernSociety Project. On Simpson, see Proceedings of the Colored National Labor Convention: Held in Washington, D.C.,on December 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1869 (Washington, 1870), 38.

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Government employees also stood out among Washington’s earliest black elected offi-cials. Four of the seven black men elected to the common council in 1869 worked forthe U.S. government: a cloakroom attendant in the House of Representatives; a NavyYard laborer; a U.S. Coast Survey employee; and Henry Piper, who was by then a Trea-sury Department messenger and became one of the council’s most outspoken advocatesof racial equality in schools and public accommodations. The need to maintain goodrelations with white patrons surely shaped black federal employees’ activism, but it didnot stunt their commitment to black institutions and black advancement.27

With formal politics and political leadership largely a male domain, many prominentblack women of Kate Brown’s era found their public voices in church-based women’sorganizations. White House seamstress Elizabeth Keckly, for example, drew on churchnetworks to organize and promote a women’s organization that aided the city’s AfricanAmerican migrant population. Kate Brown’s specific church-related activities remainobscure, but her loyalties are clear. At the end of her life she bequeathed $100 to FirstColored Baptist Church in Alexandria and $100 to Nineteenth Street Baptist Church,one of the most prominent and active black churches in Washington. Its pastor, DukeW. Anderson—who also held positions of civic authority—reached out to newly freedmigrants, dramatically expanding church membership. His wife, Eliza Shadd Anderson,founded a women’s auxiliary, and by the late 1880s the church was a wellspring ofwomen’s activism. Whether Brown participated in the auxiliary or similar organizationsis unknown, but her bequests to these two prominent Baptist churches suggest her com-mitment to church affairs.28 At work, at home, and probably at church, then, KateBrown lived among people who valued civic life and sought to contribute.

For Kate and Jacob Dodson, however, economic and social advantages did not preventpersonal crisis. After a stint at Treasury, during which she continued to do laundry forthe Senate, Kate Brown returned to the regular Senate payroll as the ladies’ retiring roomattendant at the end of 1865. Her marriage was foundering. Jacob had developed a seriousdrinking problem and lost his Senate job. “For one whole year he was perfectly stupidfrom drink. He did not draw a sober breath for this time,” Kate testified at her divorcehearing in the summer of 1867. As Jacob’s earning abilities declined, she took financialresponsibility for the household. During the year before the divorce, she had been“obliged to take care of myself[,] him and his two children by a former wife.” Then Jacobmoved her possessions out of their house, sold her furniture at auction, and kept the

27 Another black councilman, George Hatton, was a Union army veteran. “The Councils Elect,” WashingtonEvening Star, June 8, 1869; “The Municipal Campaign,” ibid., June 2, 1869. The next year, longtime PatentOffice employee Bowen was elected to the common council. See Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the NationalCapital: From Its Foundation through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act (2 vols., New York, 1916), II,560. On Henry Piper, see “The Rights of Our Colored Citizens,” Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, Jan. 4,1870; and “Second Ward Republicans,” Washington Evening Star, April 7, 1870.

28 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868;New York, 1988), 113–16; C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. V: The United States,1859–1865 (Chapel Hill, 1992), 248–52. In 1896, Nineteenth Street Baptist Church was the site of the firstmeeting of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race inAmerica, from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (New York, 1882), 497–503; “TheLadies’ Christian Mite Society,” in One Hundredth Anniversary of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, Washington,D.C., 1839–1939 (Washington, 1939), unpaginated; John W. Cromwell, “The First Negro Churches in the Dis-trict of Columbia,” Journal of Negro History, 7 (Jan. 1922), 78–80; Tameka L. Dunlap, “Washington’s Sweetheart:Nannie Helen Burroughs” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 2008), 61–66; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righ-teous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993),esp. 182.

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proceeds. They had gotten along well until then, she testified, but at that time, “hetreated me very cruelly & turned me out of the house and locked and bolted and nailedme out of the house. He threatened to shoot me and I was afraid that he would do it.”29

The documents Kate Brown and others filed in the divorce case take us well beyondBrown’s life as a laborer or a civil rights protester, into the realm of the personal and thedeeply painful. During the proceedings, Anthony Hickman testified that he saw Jacob“drunk frequently” and that “before [Jacob] was discharged he drank pretty hard, andneglected his business.” Even David Fisher, who had once lived with Jacob and had beenthe best man at his wedding, conceded that Jacob’s “habits” had “been pretty bad, that isfor intemperance.” Several witnesses testified to Jacob’s philandering. A grocery delivery-man affirmed that he had seen Dodson at a neighborhood brothel many times. LucyHarris, one of Jacob’s paramours and a friend of Kate’s sister Ann, had boarded with theDodsons. She testified to having sex with Jacob in “the Petitioner’s house, and in herroom and in her bed.” Harris also described Jacob’s unkindness to Kate: “He cursed herand abused her and called her everything. I saw the defendant threaten to strike thePetitioner one day.”30

By suing for divorce, Kate Brown ensured that her family’s domestic struggles wouldbe brought into the public eye. This was not a decision to be taken lightly, for Brownand her allies lived within a broader culture in which reputation was immensely impor-tant and African Americans’ sexual and moral propriety was always subject to question.Brown surely knew, as she sought a divorce, that publicly airing her husband’s drinkingand infidelity could damage not only his reputation but also her own. In fact, she alreadyknew what it was to be demeaned in public. During a congressional investigation ofcorruption in the Treasury Department in 1864, she had been charged with serving as a“procuress” for her supervisor as he sought inappropriate relationships with white femaleemployees. Although both she and the supervisor denied the charge, it had no doubtbeen humiliating to have her morality publicly questioned.31

In 1867 the Washington Evening Star published the sordid details of the divorce case,noting that Kate and Jacob were “well known colored people.” But Kate evidently had astrong case and an unimpeachable reputation. In court, witnesses testified to her goodcharacter and confirmed and elaborated her charges against Jacob. David Fisher averredthat she had “always been an industrious woman, and so far as I had an opportunity toobserve . . . conducted herself properly.” The judge ruled in her favor, granting her a di-vorce, the right to any property she brought into the marriage, and the right to “resumeher maiden name of Catherine Brown.”32

29 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of the Senate, 39 Cong., 2 sess., 1866, Sen. Mis. Doc. 54, p. 5.Deposition of Catharine Dodson, July 29, 1867, Case 961, Equity Docket 8, Equity Cases, case files 946–75,Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court.

30 Deposition of Anthony Hickman, July 30, 1867, Case 961, Equity Docket 8, Equity Cases, case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court; deposition of David Fisher, July 30, 1867, ibid.; deposi-tion of George W. Topping, July 30, 1867, ibid.; deposition of Lucy Harris, July 29, 1867, ibid.; and depositionof Catharine Dodson, July 29, 1867, ibid. Kate stated that Jacob sold all her furniture except “a bed and bedstead”that belonged to her sister.

31 Report of the Select Committee to Investigate Charges against the Treasury Department, 38 Cong., 1 sess., 1864,House Rpt. 140, pp. 15, 22, 154–55, 364.

32 “Decree of Divorce,” Washington Evening Star, Oct. 7, 1867; deposition of Fisher, July 30, 1867, Case 961,Equity Docket 8, Equity Cases, case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court. On genderand respectability in African American divorce cases, see Dylan C. Penningroth, “African American Divorce inVirginia and Washington, D.C., 1865–1930,” Journal of Family History, 33 (Jan. 2008), 25, 26–27. For the

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It was just a few months later, on February 8, 1868, that Kate Brown grabbed hold ofthe railroad car in the Alexandria depot and refused to let go. She was working thatwinter Saturday, but she decided to take two hours off to visit a sick relative in Alexan-dria. At the Washington depot, she purchased a round-trip ticket on the “ladies’ car” andtraveled in that car across the Potomac River to her hometown. Like the ladies’ accom-modations in the Senate where Brown worked, ladies’ railroad cars were intended toshelter virtuous women from an ostensibly corrupting public culture dominated by men.Train conductors often excluded black women from ladies’ cars, implying that they didnot qualify as “ladies” and turning gender segregation into a form of racial segregation.33

Her visit finished, Kate Brown planned to return to Washington in the ladies’ car.But as she boarded the train at the Alexandria depot, a private policeman—employed bythe railroad company to maintain order on the platform and racial segregation on thetrain—insisted that she ride in the car reserved for African Americans. Brown objectedforcefully. As she later explained to James Harlan, the chairman of the Senate’s Commit-tee on the District of Columbia, “I told him I came down in [the ladies’] car, and inthat car I intended to return; that I had my ticket, a return ticket, which I had bought inWashington, and I was going back in the same car; [the policeman] said I could not go;I asked him why, as I had paid my fare and had come down in the same car; he said thatcar was for ladies; I told him then that was the very car I wanted to go in.” The police-man, not interested in debating, grabbed Brown and tried to pull her from the train. Sheheld on to the door with one hand and a bar with the other, bracing her foot against theseat. She announced that she would “never” come out of the car and that “before I leavethis car I will suffer death.” When the policeman threatened to beat her, she told him to goahead: “I had made up my mind not to leave the car, unless they brought me off dead.”34

During the confrontation, the policeman pounded Brown’s knuckles, twisted her arms,and grabbed her collar. A man who called himself a “sheriff” joined in. He held Brown bythe neck, and the two men finally dragged her onto the platform. Brown estimated that thestruggle lasted about eleven minutes and that several bystanders had looked on. “I declarethey could not have treated a dog worse than they tried to treat me,” she told SenatorHarlan, “It was nothing but ‘damned nigger,’ and cursing and swearing all the time.”35

Brown had been seriously injured. Benjamin H. Hinds, a white clerk at the Capitol,found her crying on the train platform and, recognizing her from work, offered to help.

judgment, see “In the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia,” Oct. 7, 1867, Case 961, Equity Docket 8,Equity Cases, case files 946–75, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court. Jacob Dodson’s whereaboutswere unknown at the time of the hearing.

33 “A Dastardly Outrage,” editorial, Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, Feb. 10, 1868; U.S. Congress,Senate, Committee on the District of Columbia, Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 40 Cong.,2 sess., 1868, S. Com. Rep. 131, p. 12. On ladies’ cars and segregation, see, for example, Barbara Y. Welke, “WhenAll the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914,” Law and History Review, 13 (Fall 1995), 261–316; Willi Coleman, “Black Women and Segregated PublicTransportation: Ninety Years of Resistance,” in Black Women in United States History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine(Brooklyn, 1990), 295–302; Patricia Hagler Minter, “The Failure of Freedom: Class, Gender, and the Evolution ofSegregated Transit Law in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Chicago-Kent Law Review, 70 (1995), 993–1009; andKenneth W. Mack, “Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation onTennessee Railroads, 1875–1905,” Law and Social Inquiry, 24 (1999), 377–409.

34 Committee on the District of Columbia, Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 12. On therole of the special policeman, see ibid., 5, 11, 12, 17–20.

35 Ibid., 13.

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“Judging from her manner,” he later testified, “she was injured considerably, either infeelings or person.” Brown herself explained that as she held fast to the railings of thecar, she became “so exhausted I could scarcely talk.” She was seriously injured and criedmost of the way back to Washington. Her physician, Alexander T. Augusta, diagnosedher with internal hemorrhaging and recommended that she remain in bed. She was bed-ridden at home when George T. Downing, a prominent northern black activist, and hisdaughter paid a visit. She was still in bed when she testified to Senator Harlan. InMarch, about five weeks after the attack, a sympathetic white visitor noted in her diarythat she was “much shocked to see [Brown’s] condition” and that “her recovery is doubt-ful.” In June, she recorded that Kate “is some better, but will never get well.”36

What was Kate Brown thinking when she risked injury rather than leave the ladies’ car?This question is well worth asking. African American men and women were routinelyforced to submit to insults and undignified treatment; they knew that resistance could beexhausting, futile, and dangerous. Why, then, did Brown decide to resist? It is possible thatthe recent breakup of her marriage was a factor. Maybe she emerged from the divorcefeeling newly empowered and more confident that she get a fair hearing in the courts.Perhaps her personal frustration and anguish made her less willing to tolerate disrespect.Maybe the failure of her marriage made her feel that she had little to lose.

Sources permit little more than speculation on the internal factors that contributed toher decision to take a stand. Turning to the broader context in which she lived, however,we can see events that likely shaped her choice. In the preceding several years, Brown hadwitnessed a great transformation in national and local life. She had watched as a trickle ofblack spectators in the Senate became, by the end of the war, a stream of people demand-ing access to the halls of American power. She had come to know Radical Republicanleaders, including Charles Sumner, an outspoken member of the Senate’s District ofColumbia Committee, who believed the nation’s capital should be a laboratory for progres-sive policy on racial equality. She had almost certainly talked politics with members of herimmediate circle—friends and relatives such as Jacob Dodson, Lewis Simpson, and JohnL. Hickman—who were active in the struggle for racial equality and uplift.37

Along the way, Brown had also become personally acquainted, perhaps through herwork at the Capitol, with Augusta and Downing, the two prominent black men who vis-ited her during her convalescence. Augusta, a former Union army surgeon then workingat the government-run Freedman’s Hospital, was himself an outspoken advocate of racialequality on railroads and streetcars. In 1864, after being ejected from a Washington street-car while traveling on official army business, Augusta penned a letter of protest to Sumner,who read it on the Senate floor. Downing, a wealthy caterer originally from New York, hadfought racial discrimination in Rhode Island’s public schools. Shortly before Brown’s protestin Alexandria, he had become manager of the restaurant in the U.S. House of Representa-tives, a position from which he pressed congressmen for legislation favorable to AfricanAmericans and racial equality. In fact, just days before Brown was attacked, Downing hadcomplained to Sumner that he and his family had been ill-treated on the Baltimore andOhio Railroad. Both men’s careers exemplified how African Americans could use ties withprominent Republicans to obtain work in the government and how such employment

36 Ibid., 7, 8. Wilbur Diary, “large” diary set, March 16, June 27, 1868.37 Masur, Example for All the Land, 91–97.

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could position them to lobby for changes that would benefit not only themselves but alsothe cause of black equality.38

Despite her personal and political connections and the ferment in Washington, how-ever, it seems unlikely that Brown had set out to create a confrontation on the train. She testi-fied that she had been anxious to return to Washington without incident because she hadwork to do at the Capitol, and a witness explained that she had been wearing a veil, sug-gesting that she did not wish people to look too closely at her skin color. Still, perhaps heracquaintance with influential men made Brown more confident in opposing segregationon the railroad. She felt the injustice of discrimination keenly; she also had good reason tobelieve that powerful people would come to her defense.39

Radical Republicans in Congress and in the local media—spurred by Senator Sumnerand Senator Lot Morrill of Maine—rallied vociferously to her side, defending Brown as aninnocent woman victimized by arrogant and unrepentant representatives of the slave power.The city’s Radical Republican newspaper condemned the assault as “a dastardly outrage,”and members of the District of Columbia Committee demanded an investigation into theattack on the woman they knew as the very respectable ladies’ bathroom attendant. Theyaimed to discover, in the words of Sumner’s resolution, whether additional legislation wasneeded “to secure the rights of colored persons” on the Alexandria and Washington Rail-road. The company’s most recent charter, granted by Congress in 1863, stated that “noperson shall be excluded from the cars on account of color.” Perhaps, Radical Republicanssuggested, the company’s charter should be revoked or more stringent legislation enacted.40

The District of Columbia Committee, however, demurred, noting that Brown hadfiled a civil suit against the railroad. After interviewing Brown, railroad officials, and wit-nesses, the committee recommended that Congress do nothing until the case worked itsway through the courts. It would be too draconian to revoke the company’s charter, thecommittee concluded, since the railroad “contributes very largely to the public conve-nience.” If the resolution of Brown’s lawsuit were not “satisfactory” or if the companycontinued its discriminatory policies, the committee said, it might reopen the issue.41

As Washington’s Radical Republican newspaper noted days after the assault, KateBrown’s “friends” were “determined not to let the matter drop.” Aided by prominentRepublican lawyers, Brown sued the railroad for $20,000 in damages. Injuries she hadsuffered, Brown and her lawyers argued, left her “confined and unable to attend to herordinary business” and “obliged” her to “pay large sums of money for doctoring andattendance.” The trial, delayed two years by the railroad company’s legal machinations, at-tracted less public attention than the original struggle at the Alexandria station. But Brown’s

38 On Augusta, see Ripley et al., eds., Black Abolitionist Papers, V, 205–6, 211n8; “A Dastardly Attack on Dr.Augusta,” New York Anglo-African, May 9, 1863; Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds.,Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 2: The Black Military Experience (New York,1982), 354–58; Congressional Globe, 38 Cong., 1 sess., 1864, pp. 553–54. On George Downing, see ibid., 40Cong. 2 sess., Feb. 12, 1868, p. 1121; “A New Caterer,” Washington Daily National Intelligencer, Jan. 8, 1868;“Letter from Washington,” Milwaukee Sentinel, April 4, 1868; Simmons, Men of Mark, 1005; Frederick Douglass,The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1881; New York, 1993), 394; Leslie H. Fishel,“Downing, George Thomas,” Feb. 2000, available at American National Biography Online; S. A. M. Washington,George Thomas Downing: Sketch of His Life and Times (Newport, 1910).

39 Committee on the District of Columbia, Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 12, 22.40 Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 10, 1868, p. 1071; “Dastardly Outrage.” An Act to Extend the

Charter of the Alexandria and Washington Railroad Company, and for Other Purposes, 12 Stat. 805 (1863). Seealso Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (4 vols., Boston, 1877–1893), IV, 179.

41 Committee on the District of Columbia, Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 2–3.

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case did not go unnoticed in political circles. One high-level white federal employeewho attended portions of the trial recorded in his diary, “From what I heard . . . I wouldnot have given a verdict for over $100—because it seemed to me to be a purposely got upcase for the sake of a judicial row between the colors.” The jury, composed of twelvewhite men with considerable property and significant Republican connections, was a bitmore sympathetic. Finding that agents of the railroad were responsible for Brown’s inju-ries, it awarded Brown $1,500 in damages.42

Yet the matter was not settled, either for Brown or for the railroad company. Brownrefused to rest her case knowing that the railroad company continued its discriminatorypolicies. Four days after the verdict, she submitted to the Senate District of ColumbiaCommittee a bill “to protect the rights of citizens on the Alexandria, Georgetown, andWashington R.R” and requested that the committee use its 1868 report on her assault inAlexandria as supporting evidence. She hoped new legislation would force the company’smanagers “in the future [to] be more energetic in performing their duties and protectingthe rights of citizens.” Senator Sumner, Brown’s steadfast ally in the workplace, evidentlydisagreed with the strategy she proposed and instead waited for a fresher incident. Onemonth later, after an African American state legislator from Georgia was refused first-classpassage from Washington into Virginia, Sumner suggested that the committee again con-sider action to ensure “equal rights” on railroads operating in the capital.43

Meanwhile, the railroad organized an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which served asthe appellate court for the District of Columbia district court. The Supreme Court’s decision,rendered in its October 1873 term, upheld the lower court but rested its opinion on narrowgrounds. It did not consider Brown’s claim in light of the 1866 Civil Rights Act or the Four-teenth Amendment. Rather, the Court considered what Congress had intended when itforbade the railroad, in the company’s 1863 charter, from excluding passengers on account ofcolor. The railroad company insisted that it was enough to have “provided accommodations”for African Americans, even if they were separate from those for whites. The Court acknowl-edged that “the words” of the charter “taken literally might bear [that] interpretation,” but itconcluded that the company was making “an ingenious attempt to evade a compliance withthe obvious meaning of the requirement.” “It was the discrimination in the use of the cars onaccount of color, where slavery obtained, which was the subject of discussion,” the courtstated, “and not the fact that the colored race could not ride in the cars at all.”44

It was through this case, which merited a brief mention in the 1896 Plessy v. Fergusondecision, that Kate Brown entered the annals of legal history. Brownwas, in fact, one ofmanyblack women of this era who took to the courts to protest discrimination on railroads,

42 “Dastardly Outrage”; Case 4582, 1867, Law Case Files, 1863–1934, Records of the District of ColumbiaSupreme Court. On Brown’s lawyers, see William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and theMaking of Modern America (New Haven, 2011), 193, 271n43. “Local Courts,” Washington Daily Morning Chroni-cle, March 22, 1870; Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, March 24, March 26, 1870; “The Courts,” WashingtonEvening Star, March 21, 1870; “Civil Rights,” ibid., March 24, 1870. Benjamin Brown French, Witness to theYoung Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, 1989),613. On the finding and award, see Case 4582, Law Case Files, 1863–1934, Records of the District of ColumbiaSupreme Court. On the jurors, see Thomas, Iron Way, 193.

43 Kate Brown to Committee on the District of Columbia, March 29, 1870, Sen. 41A-E5, Records of theUnited States Senate. Brown’s proposed bill was not in the file. Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 2 sess., April 18,1870, p. 2740. The verdict was delivered on March 25, 1870. Case 4582, Law Docket Book, vol. 5, Records ofthe District of Columbia Supreme Court.

44 Alexandria and Washington Railroad Co. v. Brown, 84 U.S. 445, 452 (1873). Emphasis added.

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streetcars, and steamboats. As the research of Barbara Welke and others has shown, blackwomen used the law and conventions of gender and respectability to claim rights mostwhite women enjoyed as a matter of course. Yet we still know little about how womenplaintiffs incorporated civil rights activism into lives concerned also with labor, family,and community.45

Indeed, Kate Brown’s protest in Alexandria and the ensuing court battle represent only a fewaspects of a multifaceted existence. Work and the need to make a living were always criticalfor her, and after her divorce she was more reliant than ever on her own abilities. Lying inbed days after her protest, she worried about paying her rent. “I shall have to get up and go tomy work as soon as possible if I have to go on crutches,” she told Senator Harlan.46

Fortunately, Kate Brown’s allies in the Senate wielded sufficient power to keep her employ-ed during and after her recovery. In fact, Brown attained more job security than most un-skilled government employees of any sex or race could ever hope for. When a new Congressconvened in 1869, a recently appointed Senate sergeant at arms removed her from her posi-tion. Sumner intervened immediately, and she was restored to the job. Then in spring 1874,Congress took the unusual step of creating a separate line in the federal appropriations bill forher. For the next five years, each annual appropriation included funds to pay “Kate Dodson”an annual salary of $720 “for attending the ladies’ retiring room of the Senate.” Republicannewspapers later reported that it was Sumner who had suggested placing her in the appropri-ations bill “to make it certain that in the future she would not be dropped from the roll.”47

Sumner and his allies likely wanted to secure Brown’s position because they knew thepolitical tides were turning and they wanted to protect a woman whom they had cometo know well and value as an employee. The Massachusetts senator died in March 1874and thus did not live to see that fall’s congressional canvass, an epic rout of the Republi-cans in the House of Representatives and a signal of a nationwide reaction against federalReconstruction policies. Soon after the Democratic takeover, Kate Brown’s counterpartin the House was fired from her job, revealing the wisdom of the senators’ effort toprotect Brown’s job and the vulnerability of black federal employees when Republicanpower diminished. Brown benefitted from having cultivated the respect of powerful menwhom she had come to know in the relatively intimate quarters of the Senate. The RadicalRepublican senators who worked hardest to secure her position likely admired her bravestand against segregation on the railroad. They also believed she was a good worker and acredit to the institution. She impressed politicians and visitors alike, Senator Charles Drakeof Missouri explained, “with her truly lady-like character” and was “an educated, intelligent,respectable, and to all appearance refined woman.”48

45 In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court cited Brown’s case when it noted that it had previously held that“where the laws of a particular locality or the charter of a particular railway corporation has provided that no personshall be excluded from the cars on account of color, we have held that this meant that persons of color shouldtravel in the same car as white ones.” See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 545–46 (1896). Welke, “When All theWomen Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men,” 278.

46 Committee on the District of Columbia, Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 14.47 Washington National Intelligencer, May 8, 1869; “Great Men of the Past,” Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1891.

Employment reports from the Senate sergeant at arms show no break in Brown’s tenure on the payroll. Congressio-nal Record, 43 Cong., 1 sess., May 18, 1874, p. 3983; ibid., 43 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 18, 1875, p. 540; “Poor KateDodson,” 5. See also “Victim of Bourbon Rule,” 1.

48 “Our Washington Letter,” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, Dec. 20, 1875. Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 2sess., Feb. 12, 1868, pp. 1122–23. For senators’ appreciation of Brown’s job performance, see also ibid., 46 Cong.,2 sess., May 21, 1880, p. 3612.

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Kate Brown’s brother-in-law, Lewis Simpson, was not so fortunate in the volatile mid-1870s. Lewis and Margaret had allowed Kate to move in with them after her divorce,and they had been called to testify in her lawsuit against the railroad. Now she tried tohelp them in return. Simpson began to have trouble at work in the summer of 1874,when President Grant appointed a new Treasury secretary charged with reforming theagency. To Simpson’s dismay and to the surprise of his immediate supervisors, the newadministration demoted him from chief messenger to laborer, with a concomitant reduc-tion in pay. Despite the demotion, Simpson “was ordered to still perform the duties ascheif messenger to the Bureau which he did for over 14 months” while another mancollected the chief messenger’s salary, Kate Brown wrote in a letter preserved in Lewis’spersonnel file. Finding the situation untenable, Simpson left the department in 1876.49

The timing was awful. The country was entering a period of economic hardship, andemployment opportunities for black men in Washington, always limited, were contract-ing. In March 1877, John Sherman, a longtime Republican senator from Ohio, becameTreasury secretary. Kate Brown, who probably knew Sherman from his Senate days,immediately sought his help for her suffering brother-in-law. In a lengthy letter she sum-marized Lewis’s career in the Treasury Department and insisted that he was a goodworker who had been “removed for no cause.” “The times are so dull that there is nowork to be had,” she stated, and “haveing a sick family all winter he is very anxious toget something to do if it is only for 3 or 4 months.” She closed by emphasizing familyties. Lewis was her brother-in-law, the husband of her “afflicted” sister. She wrote againtwo weeks later, reminding Sherman of Lewis’s “reduced circumstance.” She signed bothletters “Kate Dodson,” the name she evidently continued to use at work.50

Kate’s plea to John Sherman echoed requests made by the many other black federalemployees who had also sought to use credibility and connections to help their kin.Jacob Dodson had undoubtedly once made such entreaties on Kate’s behalf, and judgingfrom how many Hickmans worked for the government, members of that family werealso adept at converting personal reputation into jobs for family members. Patronagerelations operated not just between black employees and white politicians but also withinnetworks of care and obligation among African Americans. Yet the close-knit and per-sonalistic world of elite black and white Washington remained a profoundly unequalone. African Americans might occasionally serve as brokers, as when William Syphax, amember of a prominent black family, determined which job seekers would be permittedto interview in the Patent Office. But the system rested on hierarchical relations of race.It was powerful whites who had favors to dispense and blacks who were forced to do theasking.51

49 1870 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., Ward 2, family 1080, available at Ancestry.com; Summons of March16, 1870, Case 4582, Law Case Files, 1863–1934, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court. KateDodson to Hon. Sec. of Treasury, March 28, 1877, Simpson Employment File, box 530, Applications and Rec-ommendations for Positions in Washington, General Records of the Treasury Department. When asked whetherthe department should rehire Simpson, Frederick Douglass replied that he had “no special interest in Simpson andif I had, I should say at once: Advance and do your duty. The Government has a right to the best service it canobtain without regard to the wishes of the friends of particular individuals.” See Frederick Douglass to Sir, Sept.18, 1876, ibid.

50 Kate Dodson to Hon. Sec. of Treasury, March 28, 1877, Simpson Employment File, box 530, Applicationsand Recommendations for Positions in Washington, General Records of the Treasury Department; Kate Dodsonto Sec. Sherman, April 14, 1877, ibid.

51 Wilbur Diary, “small” diary set, May 1, 1869.

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Kate’s efforts on her brother-in-law’s behalf yielded nothing. In 1878 Simpson gaveup on finding work in Washington and returned to West Point, where he eked out anexistence as a menial laborer under his father’s supervision, lived in a barracks basement,and corresponded with his wife about job opportunities in Washington. He had “two orthree irons in the fire” when he became embroiled in a race-related scandal at the militaryacademy. Johnson Whittaker, one of the first black men to attend West Point, was bru-tally assaulted and then charged with staging the attack in hope of garnering administra-tors’ sympathy and improving his academic standing. Some people suspected that LewisSimpson had been Whittaker’s accomplice in the supposed charade.52

Simpson’s testimony in the Whittaker hearings revealed a man in straitened circum-stances who was nonetheless willing to speak frankly about racial injustice. He challengedauthorities at West Point, stating that he “didn’t think [Whittaker] would get justice”there “because the prejudice was so strong against him.” Simpson complained that thedetectives who brought him from Washington to New York had “arrested” him ratherthan assume he would come voluntarily, and he voiced his suspicion that academy offi-cials “would put this thing on me and railroad me to the penitentiary.”53 Like JacobDodson, Kate Brown, and many other black federal workers, Lewis Simpson refused toaccept the racial status quo. Like them, he also bore his share of personal difficulty.Coming amid a period of financial crisis and family separation, the Whittaker trial—andthe shadow it cast on Simpson’s character—was surely an unwelcome detour.

Back in Washington, Kate Brown’s patrons were losing sway and her job security wasthreatened. In the 1878 election, the Democrats retook the Senate after seventeen years inthe minority. The shift meant an overhaul of clerical and labor positions, and Brown’s jobwas no exception. The following spring, during the Forty-Sixth Congress’s first debate onappropriations, Democratic leaders proposed to substitute the words “female attendant” forKate’s name in the annual appropriation bill. When Brown’s Republican supporters pro-tested, Democrats promised that she would keep her job despite the change in wording. Ayear later, however, Appropriations Committee chair Henry G. Davis of West Virginia clar-ified that the provision for a “female attendant” did not guarantee a position for KateDodson (as they called her). That August, in advance of the Congress’s third session, thenewly appointed Senate sergeant at arms told Kate she was fired.54

The flurry of publicity that followed revealed much about the parties’ divergent atti-tudes toward black women as government workers and citizens. The Democratic BostonDaily Globe drew on racist stereotypes about black women’s sexual immorality to repre-sent Kate Dodson as an accessory to white Republican lasciviousness. The paper beganwith a description of Dodson’s “exceptionally fine form” and “very clean, nice chocolatebrown” skin. Then, echoing the Treasury Department investigation proceedings of 1864,it insisted that her relationship to the Republicans was characterized by sexual, not political

52 “Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry in the Case of Cadet Whittaker,” pp. 1442–43, 1499, reel 5. See alsoJohn F. Marszalek, Assault at West Point: The Court-Martial of Johnson Whittaker: An Account of the Ordeal of aBlack Cadet (New York, 1972).

53 “Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry in the Case of Cadet Whittaker,” pp. 1469, 1471, 1474, 1481, 1492,reel 5.

54 Congressional Record, 46 Cong. 1 sess., May 10, 1879, p. 1206; ibid., June 13, 1879, p. 1975; “WashingtonSociety,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1879; “Pick Out Your Places,” Washington Post, March 8, 1879; “Political,”New York Sun, June 13, 1879. Congressional Record, 46 Cong., 2 sess., May 21, 1880, p. 3612.

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patronage. Republican senators wanted to keep her employed because she was a conduitin their flirtations with white women spectators at the Capitol. With a wink, it describedan inverted patronage relationship: Kate Dodson was “the dispenser of just such favors asRepublican senators desired.”55

By contrast, Republican editors rushed to use her firing as an opportunity to toutRepublican principles of Union and equal citizenship. With a presidential election loom-ing, they portrayed Dodson as the widow of a Union soldier who died of exposure after thewar and claimed that she had been “crippled” by Democratic partisans on the Alexandriaplatform. Now, Republicans lamented, this innocent black woman was victimized again,this time by Democratic politicians determined to favor Confederate sympathizers withpatronage. One paper predicted that “the daughter of an ex-Rebel soldier” would be in-stalled in her position. Another hoped the scandal would push black northerners flirtingwith the Democrats back into the Republican fold.56

Of course, such paeans oversimplified the real Kate Brown Dodson’s life story and were,in some places, plainly inaccurate. She relied on herself economically not because her hus-band had died but because she had sought a divorce. Nor had she been a helpless victim ofwhite-supremacist violence. To the contrary, she was a person of considerable determinationwho had gone to great lengths to change discriminatory policies on the Alexandria andWashington Railroad. Kate Brown had long been a recipient of Republican patronage, butshe had become an agent of that patronage as well. At first a protégé of her husband, shehad forged a place of her own in the Senate work force and cultivated the support of powerfulRepublicans. Indeed, her Republican connections ran deep. Immediately after being dismis-sed from the Senate, she drew on them once again, and it was soon announced that she hadfound a position in the Treasury Department, where John Sherman was still secretary.57

Nor was Kate Brown quite the “humble” figure Republican newspapers portrayed in theirsympathetic accounts. She never owned a home, but probate records show that herrented quarters were furnished with the trappings of a genteel life. Years of steady gov-ernment work and the $1,500 in damages from the railroad company enabled Dodsonto accumulate considerable assets. She owned an eight-piece set of parlor furniture, up-holstered in silk plush, and her walls were adorned with chromolithographs and otherpictures. She had several sets of bedroom furniture and linens to match, as well as a modestcollection of clothes and jewelry. She stayed out of debt, purchased savings bonds and a$2,000 life insurance policy, and even loaned an acquaintance $1,000. When she died in1883, probably in her late forties, a New York African American newspaper described “Mrs.Kate Dodson” as “a well-to-do lady” who had “willed her large estate and money interests torelatives and friends.” Her assets, which totaled more than $4,000, did indeed make her

55 “Kate Dodson,” Boston Daily Globe, Aug. 22, 1880. For the ubiquity of such imagery in this period, see, forexample, Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2007), esp. 17–22; and Santamarina, Belabored Professions, esp. 13–17.

56 “Poor Kate Dodson”; “National Notes.” Jacob Dodson seems to have registered for the draft in 1863, butno evidence has emerged that he served in the Union army. He evidently died of pneumonia in 1869 or 1870.The federal mortality schedule indicates that he was a laborer in the Treasury Department and a widower at thetime of his death. Entry for Jacob Dodson, July 25, 1863, p. 235, vol. 1, District of Columbia, Consolidated Listsof Civil War Draft Registration Records, Provost Marshal General’s Bureau, Consolidated Enrollment Lists, 1863–1865, 110 (National Archives), available at Ancestry.com; Jacob Dodson, U.S. Federal Census Mortality Sched-ules, Washington, D.C., Ward 2, 1870, ibid.

57 “National Notes”; “People and Events,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, Aug. 28, 1880.

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wealthy in comparison to the vast majority of African Americans, both in Washington andthroughout the country.58

In fact, Kate Brown’s substantial estate became the subject of a controversy within herfamily. In the will filed with the probate court, Brown gave her seventeen-year-old nephew,Abraham Lincoln Brown, $400; she bequeathed $200 to four-year-old Alexzine Montague,the daughter of a messenger in the war department. Another $200 went to JamesC. Wright, the twelve-year-old son of a government clerk. She gave the remaining $1,200of her insurance policy to one James Gray Jr., “to be invested in U.S. government bonds”for “his sole use and benefit during his minority.” The rest of her estate, including all herpersonal property, went to Annie Gray, who the Washington Evening Star reported was herniece. Brown’s decision to favor young people in her will appears consistent with her cam-paign against discrimination on the railroad and her frugal habits. She was a person whothought ahead and sought to bolster the life chances of future generations.59

And yet any reckoning with her bequests must include not only who benefitted butalso who was excluded. After she died, three of her siblings—Margaret Simpson, JohnH. Brown, and Cornelius Brown—attempted to stop the will’s execution, arguing thatAnnie Gray had exerted undue influence on their sister toward the end of her life. Ajudge agreed to allow the siblings’ complaints to be aired before a jury. The siblings,however, neither engaged a lawyer nor called witnesses. They were therefore easily out-matched in court by Brown’s executor, an African American Treasury Department mes-senger who hired an attorney and called numerous witnesses, including the two Treasurymessengers who had witnessed the will. When all was said and done, the jury agreed thatthe will was valid; “Catharine Brown” had been “of sound mind and memory” when shesigned it, and no fraud was involved.60

What happened to prompt the conflict over Brown’s will is difficult to sort out.Perhaps Annie Gray did pressure an ailing Kate Brown to make large bequests to her andJames Gray. It is also possible that Brown was alienated from her siblings and fully in-tended to write them out of her will. Two things are certain, however. First, Kate Brown’scareer as a government employee plus the settlement of her lawsuit had allowed her tobecome far more prosperous than her siblings. John H. Brown worked as a plasterer allhis life, Margaret Simpson as a hairdresser, and Cornelius Brown as a farm laborer. Johndeposited his modest savings in the Freedman’s Savings Bank in 1871 and thus may havebeen one of the many African Americans who lost everything when the bank went under

58 “Washington Letter,” New York Globe, March 17, 1883. For her household possessions and her virtual lackof debt, see “Estate of Catharine Brown,” June 21, 1883, Inventories and Sales, H.J.R., vol. 12, pp. 144–48, 151,Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court; “A Will with Five Codicils,” Washington Post, March 14,1883. Loren Schweninger has designated as “prosperous” those African Americans who, in 1870, held $2,000 ormore worth of real estate. See Schweninger, Black Property Holders in the South, esp. 197–207.

59 Will of Catharine Brown, Oct. 4, 1882, box 1181, 625, Probated Wills: Deceased Residents of theDistrict of Columbia, accession no. 90-013 (District of Columbia Archives, Washington); “Condensed Locals,”Washington Evening Star, March 14, 1883. On Abraham Lincoln Brown, see 1870 U.S. Census, Washington,D.C., Ward 2, family 775, available at Ancestry.com. On Alexzine Montague, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington,D.C., enumeration district 17, family 122, ibid. On James C. Wright, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C.,enumeration district 37, family 391, ibid.

60 “Estate of Catharine Brown,” June 21, 1883, Proceedings of Probate Court, H.J.R., vol. 15, pp. 465, 478,525–26, Records of the District of Columbia Supreme Court; ibid., vol. 17, p. 79, ibid.; Case 24414, Law CaseFiles, 1863–1934, ibid.; Case 24414, June 21, 1883, Law Docket, vol. 28, ibid. On the executor, JohnW. Hunter, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 19, family 357, available at Ancestry.com; Official Register of the United States (Washington, 1883), 89.

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a few years later. In any event, census records do not suggest that any of them accumula-ted significant wealth. Like so many African Americans struggling to make a living inWash-ington, the siblings evidently remained outside the networks of patronage that made thelives of their sister and other government workers a bit more comfortable. For economicreasons, they had reason to want a piece of Kate’s estate. Beyond their own self-interest,they may also have believed that the will violated relations of patronage within families—that is, that family members had obligations, in death as in life, to the well-being of theirimmediate kin.61

Second, the will reveals that Kate Brown continued to live in a social world dominatedby other African American government workers, a world in which a measure of upwardmobility was possible and people helped one another get ahead. She bequeathed portionsof her insurance policy to the children of two such workers who were apparently notrelated to her, and she chose Treasury employees to serve as executor and witnesses toher will. Brown may also have helped a niece and nephew obtain government work inplaces where she had strong ties. As adults, two of her brother John’s children, BlancheBrown and Abraham Lincoln Brown, worked for the government, the former as a Trea-sury clerk and the latter as a messenger at the Capitol.62

Kate Brown’s career as a laborer, an activist, and a member of a family and a commu-nity reveals how African American government employees could turn Republican patron-age to their advantage. But it also shows how the ebbs and flows of partisan power couldleave government employees economically vulnerable, subject to summary firing. Civilservice reform was designed, in part, to change that. Many hoped that more neutral,anonymous procedures would enable skilled, educated African Americans to breakthrough the “color line” that continued to prevent most African Americans from beingpromoted out of laborer and messenger jobs. As it happened, most of the positions inwhich African Americans were employed, both in Washington and elsewhere, fell outsidethe provisions of the 1883 Pendleton Act, the first major civil service reform legislation.Civil service examinations did make more jobs in Washington available to well-educatedblack workers, a development that enhanced the city’s status as the capital of the nation’sblack elite. Yet the sense of hope that accompanied civil service reform soon waned. TheRepublican administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft evincedlittle interest in cultivating a racially egalitarian federal work force, and the trend wascemented when the Wilson administration, which took office in 1913, dismissed AfricanAmericans from prestigious offices, demanded that photographs be attached to applica-tions, and intensified segregation in large agencies such as the Post Office and Treasury.63

61 Unfortunately, the ubiquity of the names Brown and Gray make it difficult to know whether AnnieGray was related to Kate Brown or how Annie and James Gray were related to one another. For JohnH. Brown as a plasterer, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 17, family 373, availableat Ancestry.com. For Cornelius Brown, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 2, family109, ibid.; and 1900 U.S. Census, Washington Asylum, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 144, ibid. ForMargaret Simpson, see, for example, W. H. Boyd, Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia, 1878 (Washington,[1878]). Freedman’s Savings Bank register for John H. Brown, Jan. 19, 1871, Washington, D.C., branch, availableat Ancestry.com.

62 For Blanche Brown, see 1880 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 17, family 373, avail-able at Ancestry.com; and 1900 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 17, family 393, ibid. ForAbraham Lincoln Brown, see 1910 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., enumeration district 152, house 1202, ibid.

63 Frederick Douglass spoke of a “color line” in government employment. Quoted in Hayes, Negro FederalGovernment Worker, 20. Meier and Rudwick, “Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy”; Van Riper, History

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If the Wilson administration’s Jim Crow employment policies represent the intentionsof the federal government at the nadir of American race relations, the opening of federalemployment to African Americans during and after the Civil War reflect that era’s morehopeful reconfiguration of race. The expansion of the federal government, the rise of theRepublican party, and the beginning of black citizenship opened new possibilities for KateBrown’s generation of black Washingtonians. White-collar government jobs remained outof reach for most of them. Yet the African American government laborers of the Civil Warera laid the groundwork for the group of African Americans that Eric Yellin has called “thecity’s middle strivers, the white-collar clerks,” the men and women who, at the turn of thetwentieth century, “best indicated the promise of the capital city.”64

Large-scale changes are part of Kate Brown’s story, but so are individual traits and inti-mate gestures. Patronage was defined by personal relationships, networks of influence, rela-tions of trust, and face-to-face conversations. Black workers operating in the world ofgovernment patronage knew that a casual conversation or a job well done might helpsecure a favor down the road: a position for a family member, a donation to a black organi-zation, or a powerful backer in a conflict. Kate Brown understood this system well, and sheused her connections—along with intelligence and gumption—to fight racial discrimina-tion where she could and to help people she cared about. In this respect she differed littlefrom other black federal employees of her era, who used what clout they had to help theirfamilies and lead their communities. Looking biographically, we can begin to see the net-works of patronage that permeated both public and private life. We also see a woman whowas, at once, an activist and a wage earner; an individual, a family member, and a memberof an African American community enlivened by the possibilities of emancipation andcitizenship in the post–Civil War period. Kate Brown’s story shows us that the political worldof protest, parties, and power was inseparable from the personal terrain of family, commu-nity, and face-to-face connection.

of the United States Civil Service, 105, 161–62; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service; Harley, “Black Women in aSouthern City,” 63–67.

64 Yellin, “‘It Was Still No South to Us,’” 23–24.

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