A Tea Set, A Bell, and A Wall:
Spatial Distribution of Power and Control at the Octagon
Yael Horowitz
Citation: Horowitz, Yael. “A Tea Set, A Bell, and A Wall: Spatial Distribution of Power and Control at the Octagon.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, March 19, 2021.
Abstract: The Octagon, an architecturally unique Federalist house right across the street from the White House, was home to the Tayloes, one of Virginia’s wealthiest plantation enslaving families. After 1814, the Tayloe’s lived in the Octagon permanently. This paper focuses specifically on the time frame around 1828 after John Tayloe had died, leaving Anne Tayloe widowed in D.C. during tumultuous times. “A Tea Set and A Bell: Spatial Distribution of Power and Control at the Octagon” explores the way that three objects, a tea set, wall-mounted bells, and the outer wall of the Octagon House in Washington, D.C., can help weave a narrative about white womanhood, enslavement, and power. The narrative centers on the matron of the house, Anne Tayloe, and the ways that the material qualities of these objects expose stratification and reliance. The objects are interpreted in order to illustrate the way that the very notion of white womanhood relied upon the labor of enslaved people and, specifically, enslaved Black women. The paper uses the study of objects, the Octagon’s archive, and theories such as the Cult of White Womanhood as evidence for these dynamics. The paper touches on the themes of leisure, safety and labor, and the ways that they are each distributed along stratified societal and racial lines.
Keywords: Gender, Race, Power, Labor, the Landscape of Slavery, The Cult of White Womanhood, 19th century American History
Anna Maria Thornton and Anne Tayloe both lost their extremely prominent husbands within 5 days of each other in the Spring of 1828.[1] Anne Ogle Tayloe was married to John Tayloe III, one of the richest plantation owners in Virginia, a breeder and trader of enslaved people, and the owner of the Mount Airy plantation and of the Octagon house, located blocks away from the White House on 18th Street and New York Avenue in Washington, DC. Anna Maria Thornton was married to William Thornton, the architect of said Octagon (and the first Capitol building), and a member of the American Colonization Society- a deeply racist organization whose mission was to send free African Americans to Africa as an alternative to emancipation.[2] The men’s death left two white women alone and widowed to live in the upper echelons of D.C. society during an increasingly tumultuous time of racial tension and violence leading up to the 1835 Snow Riots, which happened right on the Thornton’s doorstep. Imagine these two women mourning together, drinking tea, relying on the physical and emotional labor of the people they enslaved, and attempting to protect themselves from the righteously riotous world outside the walls of The Octagon. They were a picturesque vision of the Cult of True Womanhood, women who were “suffering without sin” and all the holier because of that.[3] The violence and the white supremacy inherent in the Cult of True Womanhood resides in the ability for ‘fragile white women’ to adhere to the Cult of True Womanhood was directly reliant on the subjugation of their Black enslaved servants. These women held immense amounts of power over their households and the enslaved people who labored in and around them. Their womanhood, their whiteness, and their power was constructed in opposition to the people they oppressed.
The act of drinking tea was an acceptable social activity for white women at the time. It did not disturb their True Womanhood, which was made up of four cardinal values: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”[4] The Cult of True Womanhood was established to create a vision and, to some lesser extent, a reality of women who were meek and weak, and who needed to be protected from the outside world. This was established in direct opposition to Black women who were seen as “sexually promiscuous and because of her hard work as a laborer, physically powerful.”[5] Anna Maria Thornton and Anne Tayloe are perfect examples of the hypocrisy of the Cult of True Womanhood. They are both socialites, who are well respected by their peers and held up as a vision of what a wealthy white woman should be. Margaret Bayard Smith’s writing and letters captured in the anthology entitled The First Forty Years of Washington Society mentions both Mrs. Thornton and Mrs. Tayloe by name, singing both of their praises.[6] In her letters to friends and family, Bayard Smith calls Anna Maria Thornton a “social and agreeable companion” and Anne Tayloe “most fashionable and exclusive.” [7] They were able to be social and fashionable while also respectable, seemingly able to “uphold the pillars of the temple with their frail white hand.”[8] Upholding a household while not exerting oneself is far easier when someone else is doing all the work . For Anne Tayloe and Anna Maria Thornton, their households and their fragility were built upon the labor and subjugation of enslaved people. Even in a tea service, this distinction – the servers and the served, the subjugated and those in control – was clear.
An example of this dichotomy, of control and labor, can be seen in Bayard Smith’s account of coming home to an already prepared tea set up. Bayard Smith contently recounts:
My good Betsy, continues to do well; always on coming home of an evening I find the tea table set, the candles lighted and a good fire…Poor Bibby not withstanding her stupidity makes a good biscuit, she is always delighted when I ask her to make them.[9]
In this example, the dynamics of labor and control are apparent. Betsy and Bibby are the ones who are handling all of the preparations and objects to set up the tea service. Bayard Smith is able to simply arrive to a set up service, but she is also the one who mandates how it happens and what is served, as demonstrated by her asking for the biscuits. The women who control the tea service are not the same ones who labor to set it up, in this way the Cult of True Womanhood and domesticity is able to be seamlessly maintained by the dual and inverse racialization of white and Black femininities. This relationship, between Anna Maria Thornton and Anne Tayloe and the people they enslaved, likely changed after the death of their husbands; it situated them in a more precarious position during mounting racial violence and perhaps made them even more dependent on being reclusive and being able to trust and control the people who served them.
Figure 1: Smithsonian Institution, “Tea Pot,” Smithsonian Institution,
http://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:nmah_300746?date.slider=1780s%2C1850s&q=tea&fq=place%3A%22United+States%22&record=32&hlterm=tea&inline=true; “William Duncan McKim Photograph Collection.” Accessed November 24, 2019.
It is August of 1835, Anna Maria Thornton and Anne Tayloe are sitting in wooden chairs over a state-of-the-art tea table, and over a silver tea set. Earlier in the month, Anna Maria’s life was threatened by a man she enslaved, named Arthur Bowen, and saved by his own enslaved mother, who was sleeping on the floor of her bed chambers.[10] This one incident reinforced the perception of white women as “too pure and good for this world but too weak and passive to resist its evil forces. The best refuge for such a delicate creature was the warmth and safety of her home” where she could be served tea and taken care of.[11] They pour themselves tea out of a glimmering and steaming tea pot, perhaps while discussing their fears about being widowed during the racial unrest in D.C. In the Tayloe’s inventory, there is record of a comprehensive silver tea set that includes “silver polished Coal bright engraved large sized tea pot, 1 ditto teapot stand, 1 ditto sugar bason gilt inside, 1 ditto cream ewer…18 ditto tea spoons.”[12]
The silver teapot could have looked much like one in figure 1, which belonged to the McKim family of Baltimore, who were of a similarly elite class as the Tayloe family, and members of the American Colonization Society just like William Thornton. Every piece of the McKim tea pot has a decorative component, ranging from the flared pedestal with flower overlays, to the lid with a flying and active swan, to the handle with a wing. The McKim family crest is engraved on the lid of the teapot, pointing to the importance of ownership and recognition. It was not uncommon for a coat of arms to be engraved on a teapot.[13] The symbology of a coat of arms is a powerful reminder about who gets to claim belonging to the family and who is in service of the family, personal belonging and property ownership go hand in hand. The teapot at the Octagon was the Tayloe’s because it belonged to them, and because it was inscribed as theirs, even if they were the ones who handled and cared for the silver the least. This can be seen as a tiny microcosm of the kind of dispossession experienced by enslaved people and of the dual nature of ownership versus responsibility and labor.
The teapot is as important for its social function as it is for its visual elements and expression of status. If the Tayloe family had a similar teapot, the combining of aesthetic and functional value echoes the very architecture of the Octagon. The building sits on a uniquely shaped triangular plot of land, the congruent shape of the building demonstrates architectural prowess and status. The building was so unique, that it was taken over by the American Institute of Architects as their headquarters from 1898 to when they converted it into a museum in 1970.[14] The decorative elements on the teapot are gendered. The use of floral motifs and a swan, as opposed to an eagle, seem more feminine. The teapot is relegated to the feminine and domestic realm the same way the women who use it would be. Even if the drink was enjoyed by all genders in different settings, “the domestic, aesthetically pleasing, expensive, and graceful nature of the drink and its customs defined it as part of the domain of women.”[15] The relegation of this kind of tea service to the domain of white women is directly juxtaposed with the labor of Black women in making it possible. The construction of these two racialized femininities is done directly in contrast with one another. The labor that goes into maintaining the silver sheen of the teapot would never have been done by the Tayloes themselves. It would have only been in front of the Tayloes when it was in use, or when it was stored in a visible place, acting as an artifact. When Anna Maria Thornton and Anne Tayloe sit down for tea, they would be encountering a tea set that was prepared through hours of labor by the people they enslaved, who likely would be coming in and out of the room maintaining the tea service, the fire, or providing anything the women needed. There is an added layer of all the labor that went into getting the individual elements into that room. The import of tea, the process of drying it, the harvesting of sugarcane (definitely done by enslaved people), drawing water from the well, and creating a fire to heat the water over are all instances of the labor that went into every single tea service and would not have been done by the people sitting down to tea.
There are questions of control here as well. The people who are doing the work are not necessarily the ones with agency to say when or how the work happens, that power would be given to Anne Tayloe. This dynamic points to the dual and hypocritical nature of the Cult of True Womanhood, the ability to be in control and weak at the same time. On a small scale, Anne is able to be in control of a tea service without having to do the labor for it. On a much larger scale, Anna Maria is at the center of a series of riots in 1835 that started as a result of a threat to the fragility of her white womanhood – which was then used as an excuse for collective punishment and extreme violence. The violence and collective punishment that was enacted in 1835 is also known as the Snow Riots. The riots started when white laborers attacked the Epicurean Eating House, a restaurant owned by a free Black man, Beverly Snow. This violence erupted after a confluence of racial and class conditions and events, such as Bowen’s threat on Anna Maria’s life and rumor spreading and fear mongering about Snow.[16] While white men were the perpetrators of this violence they were presumably acting on behalf of white womanhood. In a letter to her husband who was away at the time about the riots, Mary Elizabeth Fendall (who was of a similar social standing as the Thorntons and the Tayloes) writes “you never left me so well defended” reassuring him that she was safe.[17] She also writes “hear if these boys find they can create such a sensation in the city and go unpunished we shall have nothing but mobs.”[18] As history has demonstrated with the riots of 1919, with the murder of Emmett Till, and with the 2021 insurgency at the Capitol, mobs of white men often act with impunity . Frequently in these moments, the mythology surrounding white feminine fragility led directly to racialized violence. The same forces of racial distinction and subjugation are at play in both of these scenarios, constantly shaping the role that white women play in society.
Figure 2: Boucher, Jack E., “Kitchen Servant Signal Bells,” 1972, Historic American Building Surveys Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/pa1164.photos.136755p/
As they realize they are running out of hot water, or sugar, or tea cakes, they pull the wire string that is embedded throughout every level of the house to ring a servant’s bell in the cold, stone basement. “There is solid evidence that the Octagon had a bell system…fragments of the bell system have been found over the years” in various locations including the drawing room, parlor, and the Tayloe’s bedrooms.[19] While the curvature of the tea pot might echo the shape of the servant’s bell in the cellar, the material it is made of, its function, and the role it plays in the lives of those who primarily interact with it are directly oppositional. The teapot is a gleaming silver, the bell is made of lesser metals like brass, iron, and copper, perhaps it is even allowed to rust where the teapot is consistently shined (see figure 2). The objects have different functions for the distinct kinds of people who interact with them. For Anne and Anna Maria, the teapot is a social item of leisure and pleasure, and perhaps, of social duty. For the people they enslaved, the teapot is another object in a long list of things they are responsible for maintaining and preparing but do not have access to enjoy. The bells would have been rung primarily by the Tayloes, increasing their ability to project “an image of ease and leisure” but heard primarily by the people they enslaved when they were in the basement.[20] The bells meant that the enslaved people did not need to be in the same room as the women the entire time that the tea service was going on, “bell-pulls increased privacy…but they also increased the master’s powers of nonverbal control.”[21] Anne Tayloe would not even need to call out in order to beckon for one of the enslaved people. The bell system was hidden within the walls of the Octagon, hiding the exact mechanisms of servitude and enslavement while still allowing the residents to reap the benefits. In a letter discussing life at the Octagon in the lead up to the Civil War, John Tayloe III’s granddaughter said “the bells rang for a long time after my Grandfather Tayloe’s death, and everyone said that the house was haunted.”[22] But perhaps, the bells were actually still ringing because, regardless of the death of the family’s patriarch, chattel slavery remained and servitude continued all throughout the house. This kind of servitude and privacy went hand in hand and was an essential part of maintaining a sense of civility, which was a core tenet of the Cult of True Womanhood.
Figure 3: Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator, William Thornton, George Washington, James Madison, John Tayloe, American Institute Of Architects, J E Fauber, et al., Brostrup, John O, photographer. Octagon House,1741 New York Avenue, Northwest, Washington, District of Columbia, DC. Washington D.C. Washington, 1933. translated by Lindstrom, F Jmitter Documentation Compiled After. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/dc0195
Increased privacy was also a primary function of the outer wall of the Octagon. The brick wall extends from the two side elevations of the house, towards the backyard (Figure 3). The bricks are laid using the English Garden wall bond, and as William Tayloe, one of the family’s sons, said the stretches of brick wall are interrupted by “pillars caped with stone.”[23] This formation of wall and pillars gives the exterior of the Octagon an added layer of stateliness. It is no longer just a house but an enclosed compound and reinforces how much property the Tayloes have and exactly what the boundaries of that property are. Similar to the family crest on the teapot, the outside wall is a clear indicator of ownership – both of the physical property and of the people who labor, and the products of their labor, in the rear yard. The power of separation and distinction is clear with the rear yard, it defines what is internal and external, within the purview of the Tayloes and outside of that, what is outside labor and what is acceptable domesticity. Anne and Anna Maria perhaps found some solace knowing that there was a containing wall, a symbol of controlling the flow of traffic in and out of the house, and of separating themselves from the labor, and perhaps a false reminder that they were safe from the outside world. The outside wall of the Octagon creates a sense of multiple domesticities, there is the domestic realm of what is happening inside the house (and on the various floors of the house), and there is the labor and work happening in the rear yard that support the domestic realm inside. The wall also divides the property of the Octagon from the rest of D.C. and the streets, creating a barrier between insiders and outsiders. The wall’s multiple functions included “enclosing the lot…shielding its support structures…[and] permitting controlled access to the yard.”[24] Much of the work to maintain the house would have been done in the rear yard, the well that contained the water “for cooking, cleaning and drinking” was in the center of the yard; the smoke and meat house, the cow shed, and the laundry room all existed in outbuildings in the rear yard contained within the outer wall.[25] The labor that is necessary to maintain the house is separated from and controlled by those who live in the house. The rear yard wall does not necessarily serve to protect the family from the riotous city. It does not cover the front of the house or any of the windows. It functions primarily to control the flow of people and to shield the outside world from seeing all of the intense labor that goes into maintaining the mirage of an easy domesticity. “The work that went on outside was kept at a distinct distance from life inside the house,” intentionally so.[26] To see the back-breaking labor that went into creating the social sphere of the Octagon could have changed the perception of who was responsible for the work of homemaking. As women, Anne Tayloe and Anna Maria would have been seen as responsible for their households, for entertaining with tea and cakes and social gatherings, but they needed to be able to do so without breaking a sweat, maintaining their images of fragility and portraying a sense of ease and the rear yard wall enabled that.
The rear yard wall allowed them to control who saw what parts of the functioning of the household, but it also created a more direct physical control of movement. According to the early sketches and the pattern of the bricks, there were likely only two entrances through the outer wall of the Octagon, one on either side of the house. This limits the ways that people would be able to access the Octagon if they were not coming directly to the front door. If there are always people working in the rear yard, then people cannot come into the Octagon compound unnoticed or unannounced. This controlled flow of movement could have provided Anne and Anna Maria some solace after the events of August 1835. However, it likely was more complicated than that. Anna Maria Thornton was attacked by a man that she enslaved, someone who would have been within the inner circles of her home, within the domestic realm that was supposed to be safe for women. As they are drinking tea from a shimmering tea pot, calling on their servants using the bell system, perhaps they are wondering about how safe they really are even within the Octagon compound.
Safety was a core component of the Cult of True Womanhood, for a True Woman was someone who needed to be protected. When that idea also becomes racialized, white women become the justification for collective punishment when they are threatened. Their delicacy, like the floral details on the teapot, their leisure, as protected by the bell system, and their safety, marginally protected by the outer wall, all contribute to the vision and contradictions of white women who had the “best of both worlds – power and virtue.”[27] She is able to control her surroundings without lifting a finger, maintain her domestic realm without doing any of the labor, and exert power over the people she enslaved at every moment of the day even during a simple tea service.
Difficult and violent histories can be told through material culture studies if the right critical analysis is used. Looking at both the ownership and the use and pathways of the object and using a process of critical and contextual imagination helps unearth narratives of violence that are often silenced. Stories of enslavement do not need to be relegated to the slave’s quarters, instead understanding how anti-Blackness and chattel slavery was present in every aspect of society is paramount. This type of material culture study can be useful in integrating important and difficult histories into interpretation in museums and historic houses in order to facilitate larger narrative shifts towards just storytelling.
Endnotes
[1] Stella Pickett Hardy, Colonial Families in the Southern States of America (New York: Tobias A. Wright Printer and Publisher, 1911), 502.
[2] “Dr. William Thornton,” Architect of the Capitol, accessed December 2, 2019, https://www.aoc.gov/architect-of-the-capitol/dr-william-thornton.
[3] Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151-74, doi:10.2307/2711179, 162.
[4] Welter 1966, 152.
[5] Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 42.
[6] Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society (Washington, D.C.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906).
[7] Smith 1906, 1; Smith 1906, 356.
[8] Welter 1966, 152.
[9] Smith 1906, 11.
[10] John DeFerrari, “An Attempted Murder Kindled DC’s First Race Riot in 1835,” Greater Greater Washington, June 29, 2012, https://ggwash.org/view/28168/an-attempted-murder-kindled-dcs-first-race-riot-in-1835.
[11] Welter 1966, 162.
[12] “Fragment of 1805 Ledger/Journal,”1805, Uncatalogued Tayloe Material/Food, Beverage Files, The Octagon Museum Archives, Washington, DC..
[13] “Services for Tea,” n.d Food, Sugar file, The Octagon Museum Archives, Washington, D.C.
[14] “History,” Architects Foundation, accessed January 16, 2020, https://architectsfoundation.org/octagon-museum/history/.
[15] Lisa Lynn Petrovich, “More Than the Boston Tea Party: Tea in American, 1760s-1840s,” Master’s Thesis, (University of Colorado, Boulder, 2013), 69.
[16] DeFerrari, “An Attempted Murder Kindled DC’s First Race Riot in 1835.”
[17] Correspondence from Mary Elizabeth Fendall, Eyewitness account of the Snow Riot,August 1835, C0291, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University Libraries, Fairfax, VA, 2.
[18] Fendall 1835, 3.
[19] Orlando Ridout, Building the Octagon, (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Press, 1989), 116.
[20] “Servant Bells at Poplar Forest,” Poplar Forest, accessed December 4, 2019, https://www.poplarforest.org/servant-bells-at-poplar-forest/.
[21] Wendy Danielle Maddill, “Noiseless, Automatic Service: The History of Domestic Servant Call Bell Systems in Charleston, South Carolina, 1740-1900,.” Master’s Thesis, (Clemson University, 2013), ii
[22] Virginia Tayloe Lewis, “Washington Society Before the War,” circa 1870, Octagon, Bells. The Octagon Museum Archive, Washington, DC.
[23] Ridout 1989, 116.
[24] “Octagon Walking Tour,” Octagon, Perimeter wall,, The Octagon Museum Archives, Washington, DC.
[25] “Octagon Walking Tour.”
[26] “Stable Yard Pamphlet,” Octagon, Rear Yard, The Octagon Museum Archives, Washington, DC.
[27] Welter 1966, 175.
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