Smallwood
In Washington DC, power did not argue. It rode on schedule, working best when it became ordinary. 1 man learned to read that ordinariness—how it was enforced, and how movement was permitted or denied.
Image: Runaway slave broadside, May 9, 1860 (GilderLehrman Institute, GLC06377.01).
On a winter morning in Prince George’s County, a boy learned his letters. Not furtively, not by candlelight, but openly, under the supervision of a reverend and his wife. Thomas Smallwood was born enslaved on February 22, 1801, into a world that forbade what they were giving him. Maryland law had no place for a literate slave. Yet the alphabet came anyway—shapes, sounds, order—settling early into his memory alongside the knowledge that some things were not supposed to be seen.
The neighbors noticed. They came to see for themselves. A Black child was brought into their parlors and asked to perform. He recited the alphabet. He spelled words placed before him—baker, cider. Proof was required, and then repeated. Smallwood learned something then that stayed with him: power did not merely enforce ignorance. It inspected exceptions.
Freedom, when it arrived, did not undo that lesson. It came bound in numbers. A will promised emancipation in 1831. Money accelerated the date—five hundred dollars paid out by the reverend to unnamed parties. The debt passed downward. Smallwood worked to erase it. Even after the law recognized him as free, the payments continued. Sixty dollars a year bought the right to hire himself out. Freedom was something you serviced annually.
By the time he settled in Washington City, Smallwood had learned to read more than words. He read patterns. Bells rang at night. Streets emptied. Doors closed. Authority moved on schedule.
After dark, White men gathered at appointed places—taverns, courthouse steps, hotel entrances. Names were checked. Horses assigned. Districts divided. Lanterns lit. Patrol captains carried written authority to stop any Black person found abroad, to enter homes without warrant, to question, detain, whip, or jail on suspicion alone. Failure to ride brought fines. Failure to enforce brought contempt.
Smallwood saw where they waited. Near Black churches. Near meeting houses. At corners where curfew violations could be claimed without pursuit. He watched parishioners hurry, then slow, then stop. He watched papers demanded, fines assessed, bodies turned toward the workhouse. He noticed that the patrol never lingered long after violence. It did not need to. Fear traveled ahead of them.
He learned that the patrol was not improvisational. It was trained. Men learned to read bodies—who hesitated, who walked too quickly, who avoided eye contact. They learned routes through alleys and woods, which creeks could be crossed quietly, which homes tolerated visitors. They learned how much pain could be inflicted without killing, how unpredictability multiplied control. Violence was not supposed to be exact. It was supposed to be ambient.
Image; Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. U.S. Congress. An Act Respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons Escaping from the Service of Their Masters. 2nd Cong., 2nd sess. February 12, 1793. Source: The Library of Congress.
Image: Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. United States Congress. The Fugitive Slave Bill. Boston: Printed and for sale at 145 Hanover Street, 1854. Broadside. Source: National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.46.5.
Smallwood absorbed this knowledge without authority and without protection. He learned it because he had to. Literacy had trained him early to attend to systems. Freedom required it.
Maryland’s codes crossed the Potomac intact when Congress assumed jurisdiction over the District. The capital inherited habits along with statutes. Thirty-nine lashes marked restraint. Doors did not protect. Houses did not shelter. The law entered Black life most reliably at night.
Smallwood watched patrols form during moments of panic—after the British burned Washington, after rumors of insurrection, after mobs gathered. He saw them dissolve when the moment passed. He learned that enforcement was episodic until it became permanent.
By the 1830s, Washington was changing. The free Black population grew. Churches expanded. Businesses opened. Smallwood moved among them, listening, watching resentment harden. After Nat Turner, he noticed patrols riding longer, stopping more often. After the Snow Riot of 1835, he saw the curfew sharpen into an order, enforced not sporadically but deliberately.
Two years later, the law erased ambiguity. Meetings after ten were illegal everywhere. Constables were authorized to enter Black homes where gatherings were suspected. Smallwood understood what this meant in practice. Privacy was provisional. Worship was conditional. Home was searchable.
Poor whites noticed too. Men without property found themselves questioned, monitored, folded into patrol duty. Smallwood saw how enforcement disciplined them as well. To refuse to ride was to step outside the system. Participation became proof of belonging.
When disorder reached the White House itself in the early 1840s, Smallwood understood what would follow before Congress acted. Structure. Permanence. Men paid to do what volunteers had done irregularly.
The Auxiliary Guard arrived. Fifteen men. One captain. Headquarters between the Capitol and the White House. A lock-up. A whipping post. Hours from nine at night to four in the morning.
Smallwood studied the Guard carefully. He learned their routes. He learned which officers lingered and which rushed. He learned that after four in the morning, the city loosened its grip.
That knowledge became strategy.
With his wife Elizabeth, Smallwood timed movements around the curfew bell and the Guard’s withdrawal. Wagons of the enslaved rolled when patrols stood down. Doors opened in silence. Routes bent deliberately around authority. Between March 1842 and June 1843, they moved enslaved people—through Washington itself, out of the capital that claimed jurisdiction over them. On to freedom.
The Guard noticed. One night, Captain Goddard came himself. Smallwood was seated in his doorway when the watch arrived. The house was searched once. Then again. Then again. People inside were questioned. Status demanded proof. A runaway woman was hidden. Women moved her through a back door, into a garden, into corn. The house held. The watch left.
Smallwood fled soon after. Toronto received him. Washington did not forget him. He returned once more with Charles Torrey. The plan failed. Goddard captured the people they meant to free. Torrey went to prison and did not come out alive.
Smallwood survived because he had learned the system as well as those paid to enforce it. He had read it the way he had once read the alphabet—carefully, repeatedly, aloud.
Goddard stayed. He rose. He commanded the Guard for nearly two decades. When the Metropolitan Police replaced it in 1861, the uniforms changed. The men largely did not. One of the first scandals involved an officer paid to return a fugitive slave. Smallwood had already named that practice. He had already watched it.
Slavery ended in the District in 1862. The bells remained. The patrol routes remained. The habits remained.
Smallwood had known this long before the law caught up. The system did not rely on ignorance. It relied on routine. And he had learned, early, how to see routine clearly enough to break it.
Intellectual Map
Primary Sources
District of Columbia. Acts of the Corporation of the City of Washington. Washington, DC, various years, 1820s–1840s.
Duley, E. M. Two Hundred Dollars Reward. Broadside announcing the pursuit of Manuel. Livingston County, KY, May 9, 1860.
Smallwood, Thomas. Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, (Coloured Man): Giving an Account of His Birth—the Period He Was Held in Slavery—His Release—and Removal to Canada, Etc. Toronto: Press of the Beacon Office, 1851.
Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872. https://archive.org/details/DKC0088
Torrey, Charles Turner. Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey who died in the penitentiary of Maryland, where he was confined for showing mercy to the poor. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1847. https://archive.org/details/memoirofrevcharl00love2
United States Congress. An Act Respecting Fugitives from Justice, and Persons Escaping from the Service of Their Masters. 2nd Cong., 2nd sess. February 12, 1793.
United States Congress. The Fugitive Slave Bill. Boston: Printed and for sale at 145 Hanover Street, 1854. Broadside. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.46.5.
Secondary Sources
Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Masur, Kate. Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021.
Shane, Scott. Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland. New York: Celadon Books, 2023.
Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. London: Verso, 2017.
Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Brooklyn, NY: AK Press, 2004.