The Film: Interview Transcripts: John Burt

John Burt, Esq., Pittsburgh historian on
the confluence of three rivers
Pittsburgh is clearly one of the major centers in Pennsylvania.  You have a cluster of activity in the east centered around Philadelphia.  On the western side of the state, the hub of activity is Pittsburgh. Geographically, it’s well located, it’s at the confluence of three rivers -- the Monongahela coming up from the south, the Allegheny coming from the North, meeting to form the Ohio, which flows west.  It’s a good way to go west and to go north, and people who are fleeing from slavery, those are the directions they want to go.

We tend to forget because of what happened during the Civil War that West Virginia was not a separate state, that was the western side of Virginia, a slave-holding state.  Wheeling, West Virginia had two slave markets.  So, 40 miles from here, people were being bought and sold.  You have this line that nobody can see.  On one side, a human being based on the color of his skin is property, and on the other side is a free person with all the claims to citizenship. 

The black community in Pittsburgh is one of the oldest in the state.  We know that was one of the reasons that George Washington came to ask the French to remove their garrison from Fort Duquesne, in addition to the fact that the British wanted the access to the beginning of the Ohio River.  The French were harboring fugitive slaves here.  Not necessarily because they had any deep religious or philosophic reason, but because it was a way to antagonize the British.  When in 1758, which marked the actual founding of Pittsburgh, the British forces under John Forbes, drove the French out, there were black men who served as Teamsters and laborers with the British force.  They were part of that first garrison, so the African-American community in Pittsburgh dates back, literally, to the founding of the city in November 1758. 

the second great awakening

Pittsburgh’s cast of characters

the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

government by the people