dcaap:
Thanks to collaborations with DCAAP and the GW library’s digital services unit, the GW university archives is bringing to light a previously obscure cache of documents that confirms the presence of enslaved laborers at the college prior to the civil war, and describes the college’s rationale for expelling a student who attempted to assist those enslaved men gain their freedom.
The year was 1847, the student’s name was Henry J. Arnold, and his crime was providing Abram, an enslaved man owned by an employee of the college, with $14 and a letter for an attorney with the intention that Abram would file a lawsuit to win his freedom. While the Arnold Case, as it was called, was not completely unknown in the history of George Washington University, it has been largely forgotten in both scholarly and common memory, and has never received the thorough historical examination it deserves.
The documentation, which has been reprocessed by DCAAP staff as a stand-alone collection, consists of drafts and copies of letters written by Columbian College’s then-president, Joel S. Bacon, to Arnold, his family and others who inquired or appealed to him about the matter. Without this critical documentation, the story of enslaved people at Columbian College may have been lost to history entirely or deemed apocryphal.
All of the letters in the collection have been scanned and are now freely available for study to anyone in the world. Additionally, since the handwriting in the letters may be difficult for some modern readers to decipher, we have scanned a partial transcript of the letters prepared as an academic article by Alex Dienst, the man who first uncovered them. Documentation accompanying the letters indicate that Dienst attempted to have the manuscript published in the early 20th century by a journal of southern history based in Washington, D.C., only to have it turned down “as it touched upon a local institution here and hence might arouse some feeling.” We are pleased to finally share it here for the first time.