This is a guest post by Maureen S. Thompson, PhD, who participated in the Fall 2023 Archives, History and Heritage Advanced Internship Program (AHHA) in the Manuscript Division.
How did one influential nineteenth-century family consider the end of slavery while simultaneously enslaving people? The relevance of the Blair Family Papers at the Library of Congress lies at the intersection of slavery and politics in the nation’s capital.
Francis Preston Blair and his wife, Eliza Gist Blair, had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood: Montgomery, Elizabeth (“Lizzie”), James, and Francis Preston Blair, Jr. (“Frank”). Additionally, their extended kin were located throughout numerous states. In 1830, the Blair family relocated from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., where they published the Washington Globe newspaper in support of President Andrew Jackson’s administration. In 1836, the Blairs established a household on Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the White House. There, family members interacted frequently with United States presidents, cabinet members, and congressional lawmakers. In 1845, the Blairs built a twenty-room residence they named “Silver Spring,” in Maryland, which was also a hub of political activity.
My task as an Archives, History and Heritage Advanced Internship Program (AHHA) intern working on the “Discovering African Americans in the Blair Family Papers” project was to search for examples of enslaved and free African Americans in the collection. My mentor, historian Michelle Krowl, explained this internship should be considered an “experiment” to see what I could discover, as well as what I couldn’t. To focus my search, Michelle and I speculated that women in that era handled domestic duties and would likely correspond about enslaved workers and servants. As expected, I discovered numerous examples in women’s correspondence, but also in wills and business transactions between men.