Snow Riot

Did You Know?

• The riot was preceded by the nation's first labor strike by federal employees, which began at the Washington Navy Yard on July 29, 1835, involving 175 white mechanics.
• President Andrew Jackson ordered a company of U.S. Marines to restore order after days of rioting.
• After the riot, the District Council passed a new ordinance forbidding black people from assembling after sundown—targeting the victims, not the attackers.

History

By 1835, Washington, D.C., was a powder keg. Four years earlier, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion had terrified slaveholders across the South, and a revolt in Jamaica had pushed Britain to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833. Fear and panic were widespread. Abolitionists were deluging Congress with petitions to end slavery in the capital, so many that the House passed gag rules to automatically set them aside.

Many white residents, however, were just waiting for a chance to retaliate for Turner’s uprising. Several incidents made things worse. First, an enslaved man named Arthur Bowen, drunk and carrying an axe, walked into the bedroom of his enslaver, Anna Thornton. He didn’t strike her or try to.

But proslavery advocates were furious that Bowen had dared to protest his enslavement. He was arrested without harm, and they turned their anger on Reuben Crandall, whom they accused of distributing abolitionist material in Washington. District Attorney Francis Scott Key—the man who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”—pushed for Crandall’s arrest and prosecution. Crandall was found innocent, which publicly humiliated Key and ended his political career.

Next came the first labor strike by federal employees in U.S. history. On July 29, 1835, workers at the Washington Navy Yard walked off the job after Commodore Isaac Hull, responding to thefts, cut their lunch privileges. The strikers wanted a ten-hour workday and for Hull to cancel his order. The strike grew to 175 white mechanics and workers, and it immediately exposed deep racial tensions at the Yard.

In an undated diary entry from August 1835, African-American diarist Michael Shiner wrote that white workers intimidated black caulkers and demanded they stop working. He recorded: “Commodore Hull ishsared and evry one of them struck and said they wouldnt work anny moore and at the same time they were collered man from Baltimore by the name of Israel Jones a caulker by Trade he was the forman Caulker of those Colerded Caulkers and they were fifteen or twenty of them here at that time Caulkin on the Columbia and the Carpenters made all of them knock oft two.”

Many scholars see a direct link between the Navy Yard strike and the riot that followed. National and local events in 1835 pushed workers to strike, but long-standing racial fears and anxieties led the Yard’s white workers to take the lead in what became known as the Snow Riot. White mechanics and carpenters on strike heard a vicious rumor that made them even angrier. They believed that a free black restaurateur named Beverly Snow had said something insulting about their wives and daughters.

Snow’s Epicurean Eating House was famous for its fancy, high-end food. On August 11, 1835, a mob broke into Snow’s restaurant, smashed it up, and drank his stock of whiskey and champagne. Snow fled, and the rioters couldn’t find him. Shiner wrote of “a Rumor flying around about a colered man by the name of Snow about an expression he had made about the Mechanics wifes god kowes wether he said those things or not and at that time snow kept a Restaurant on the Corner of six street and pennsilvanian west in the cellar and at the time all the Mechanics of classes gathered into snows Restaurant and broke him up Root and Branch and they were after snow but he flew for his life and that night after they had broke snow up they threatened to come to the navy yard after commodore Hull.”

But they didn’t come that night. The next day, Commodore Hull got orders from Navy Secretary Levi Woodbury to fortify the yard. The strike quickly turned into a race riot. White striking mechanics and laborers took out their resentment on the black population.

Mobs attacked establishments run by free blacks: schools, churches, and businesses. The proslavery newspaper United States Telegraph justified the violence as economic, saying, “The reason of all these attacks on the blacks is, they enter into competition for work at a lower rate.” Another target was a man named Augustus, who worked at the White House. According to Nicholas P. Trist, Augustus was “a remarkably fine looking mulatto.”

When rioters went to the White House and demanded that President Andrew Jackson remove Augustus from his job, Jackson refused, saying his servants were “amenable to me alone, and to no one else.” Trist also noted that rioters burned buildings in the Kalorama neighborhood. Josephine Seaton, daughter of National Intelligencer publisher William Seaton, wrote in a letter about the strike and riot: “Snow will certainly be torn to pieces by the mechanics if he be caught, and they are in full pursuit of him. Unfortunately, several hundred mechanics of the navy yard are out of employment, who, aided and abetted by their sympathizers, create the mob, — the first I have ever seen, not recollecting those of Sheffield, and it is truly alarming.”

Seaton was one of the few observers who saw that the strike revealed the corrosive effects of racial competition. The violence only stopped when President Andrew Jackson intervened.