The spring of 1876 would find twenty-eight-year-old Jennie Dean in service in the ubiquitous domestic economy of urban Washington, DC, and, more particularly, the morning of April 15—Jennie Dean's birthday—would find her, in all likelihood, consumed by her morning chores: preparing the family breakfast and washing and ironing clothes from the previous day. Living as a domestic and working in the home of a prominent Washington, DC, family, Dean may have been awarded a little birthday holiday if her employer had made a rare exception and consented to it. However, festivities greater than her birthday were taking place nearby—a dedication ceremony at Lincoln Square (now Lincoln Park), one mile directly east of the U.S. Capitol building in the easternmost part of the city, was being held—and conceivably Dean could have used the pretext of her birthday to join the crowds there.

It was little more than a decade ago when Jennie Dean and countless other formerly enslaved African Americans heard the news that an assassin's bullet had killed President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in the District. Although African Americans in Washington, for all intents and purposes a Southern city, had been freed by the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, many feared that with Lincoln's death, some measure of their equality might soon be taken away. At the time, their growing fears and a continued sense of insecurity were only further heightened by the swearing in of Andrew Johnson as president—a man whose political leanings were as uncertain as was his commitment to Black progress. Congress had a sizable bloc of Radical Republicans who supported Black enfranchisement, but many felt that their future was still largely uncertain as congressional leaders continued to usurp control of the limited selfgovernment and Black agency the District had once enjoyed. Many African Americans who had lived in Washington had witnessed firsthand the collapse of the Freedmen's Bureau—another in a series of failed efforts by Northern whites to assist the race since the close of the Civil War.