William Costin
   HOME
*



picture info

William Costin
William "Billy" Costin ( - May 31, 1842) was a free African-American activist and scholar who successfully challenged District of Columbia slave codes in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. Early life Little is known of Costin's upbringing. His enslaved mother was Ann Dandridge-Costin, and her father is reputed to have been Col. John Dandridge of Williamsburg, Virginia, making her the half-sister of Martha Washington. Ann Dandridge-Costin was said to be of African and Cherokee descent. Native American slavery had ended and she should have been free under Virginia law via her maternal ancestry, but the slave colony put priority on African ancestry. While Ann and several of her children lived at the Mount Vernon plantation owned by George Washington on the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia, there is no evidence her son William lived there. He may have lived nearby with other family. Costin's legal status as "free" or "enslaved" is debated by historians, as ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Brackets
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an "opening bracket" or "closing bracket", respectively, depending on the Writing system#Directionality, directionality of the context. Specific forms of the mark include parentheses (also called "rounded brackets"), square brackets, curly brackets (also called 'braces'), and angle brackets (also called 'chevrons'), as well as various less common pairs of symbols. As well as signifying the overall class of punctuation, the word "bracket" is commonly used to refer to a specific form of bracket, which varies from region to region. In most English-speaking countries, an unqualified word "bracket" refers to the parenthesis (round bracket); in the United States, the square bracket. Glossary of mathematical sym ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

National Republican
The National Republican Party, also known as the Anti-Jacksonian Party or simply Republicans, was a political party in the United States that evolved from a conservative-leaning faction of the Democratic-Republican Party that supported John Quincy Adams in the 1824 presidential election. Known initially as "Adams-Clay Republicans" in the wake of the 1824 campaign, Adams's political allies in Congress and at the state-level were referred to as "Adams's Men" during his presidency (1825–1829). When Andrew Jackson became president, following his victory over Adams in the 1828 election, this group became the opposition, and organized themselves as "Anti-Jackson". The use of the term "National Republican" dates from 1830. Henry Clay served as the party's nominee in the 1832 election, but he was defeated by Jackson. The party supported Clay's American System of nationally financed internal improvements and a protective tariff. After the 1832 election, opponents of Jackson coal ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Oney Judge
Ona "Oney" Judge Staines ( 1773 – February 25, 1848) was an enslaved woman of mixed races who was owned by the Washington family, first at the family's plantation at Mount Vernon and later, after George Washington became president, at the President's House in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital city. In her early twenties, she absconded, becoming a fugitive slave, after learning that Martha Washington had intended to transfer ownership of her to her granddaughter, known to have a horrible temper. She fled to New Hampshire, where she married, had children, and converted to Christianity. Though she was never freed, the Washington family did not want to risk public backlash in forcing her to return to Virginia and after years of failing to persuade her to return, the family stopped pressing her to go back. Early life Judge was born about 1773 at Mount Vernon, the estate of George Washington and his family. Her mother, Betty, was a slave, and her father, Andrew Judge, was ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Historical Society Of Washington, D
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the p ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the Supremacy Clause, supreme law of the United States, United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the national frame of government. Its first three articles embody the doctrine of the separation of powers, whereby the federal government of the United States, federal government is divided into three branches: the United States Congress, legislative, consisting of the bicameralism, bicameral United States Congress, Congress (Article One of the United States Constitution, Article I); the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive, consisting of the President of the United States, president and subordinate officers (Article Two of the United States Constitution, Article II); and the Federal judiciary of the United States, judicial, consisting of the Supreme Court of the United States, Supreme C ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Senators and representatives are chosen through direct election, though vacancies in the Senate may be filled by a governor's appointment. Congress has 535 voting members: 100 senators and 435 representatives. The U.S. vice president has a vote in the Senate only when senators are evenly divided. The House of Representatives has six non-voting members. The sitting of a Congress is for a two-year term, at present, beginning every other January. Elections are held every even-numbered year on Election Day. The members of the House of Representatives are elected for the two-year term of a Congress. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 establishes that there be 435 representatives and the Uniform Congressional Redistricting Act requires ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Adams
John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Before Presidency of John Adams, his presidency, he was a leader of the American Revolution that achieved independence from Kingdom of Great Britain, Great Britain, and during the war served as a diplomat in Europe. He was twice elected vice president of the United States, vice president, serving from 1789 to 1797 in a prestigious role with little power. Adams was a dedicated diarist and regularly corresponded with many important contemporaries, including his wife and adviser Abigail Adams as well as his friend and rival Thomas Jefferson. A lawyer and political activist prior to the Revolution, Adams was devoted to the right to counsel and presumption of innocence. He defied anti-British sentiment and successfully defended British soldiers agai ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




William Cranch
William Cranch (July 17, 1769 – September 1, 1855) was a United States federal judge, United States circuit judge and chief judge of the United States Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. A staunch Federalist Party, Federalist and nephew of President John Adams, Cranch moved his legal practice from Massachusetts to the new national capital, where he became one of three city land commissioners for Washington, D.C., and during his judicial service also was the 2nd Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and a Professor of law at Columbian College (which later became George Washington University). Early life and education Cranch was born on July 17, 1769, in Weymouth, Massachusetts to Mary (Smith), the sister of Abigail Adams and her husband Richard Cranch, who had emigrated from Devonshire when he was twenty years old. His father, although educated as a watchmaker, became the town's postmaster and an ardent patriot during the American Revolutionary ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Free Persons Of Color
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color (French: ''gens de couleur libres''; Spanish: ''gente de color libre'') were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America. A freed Afr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Samuel Nicholas Smallwood
Samuel Nicholas Smallwood (5 September 1772 – September 30, 1824) was the fifth and seventh mayor of Washington, D.C. and was the first popularly elected mayor of the city. Appointed to a one-year term in 1819, Smallwood was elected the following year to a two-year term, which he served from 1820–1822. He then was re-elected in 1824 but served only three months of his second term before dying at the age of 52. Biography Smallwood was born in Charles County, Maryland, in 1772. He was the son of Samuel Smallwood, from a prominent family that included members of the Maryland Assembly and Revolutionary War hero General William Smallwood. In 1794, Smallwood moved to the section of Prince George's County that would eventually become southeast Washington. He worked on both of the most important and prestigious construction projects in the new capital: he quarried rock for the foundation of the White House and was overseer of the slaves who built the U.S. Capitol in 1795. In 1801, he ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


William Cranch
William Cranch (July 17, 1769 – September 1, 1855) was a United States circuit judge and chief judge of the United States Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. A staunch Federalist and nephew of President John Adams, Cranch moved his legal practice from Massachusetts to the new national capital, where he became one of three city land commissioners for Washington, D.C., and during his judicial service also was the 2nd Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and a Professor of law at Columbian College (which later became George Washington University). Early life and education Cranch was born on July 17, 1769, in Weymouth, Massachusetts to Mary (Smith), the sister of Abigail Adams and her husband Richard Cranch, who had emigrated from Devonshire when he was twenty years old. His father, although educated as a watchmaker, became the town's postmaster and an ardent patriot during the American Revolutionary War. The elder Cranch then studied law and won ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]