The Williams Slave Pen

In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free Black man and professional musician, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave while visiting Washington, DC to attend the funeral of President William Henry Harrison. He was imprisoned in the Williams Slave Pen, later recounting in Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853) a brick-walled yard behind a house that appeared to be a quiet private residence, with an ironed door opening into a narrow covered passage to the street, a roofed area, and a loft where enslaved people might sleep or seek shelter, all constructed so the outside world could not see those held there, even though the Capitol stood in plain sight above it. The infamous pen, owned by W.H. Williams, once stood near the corner of 7th Street and Independence Avenue, formerly B Street, Southwest, where a seemingly innocuous yellow house set back in a grove of trees concealed a yard in which enslaved persons were held awaiting transport to southern markets. It was one of the most lucrative slave pens operating in Washington, DC in the years before the Civil War, and Williams had purchased an existing slave pen there because its location on 7th Street gave direct access to the District's waterfront shipping piers on the Potomac River.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States