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South Payne Street

L’Ouverture Hospital was established in February 1864 on a block bounded by Prince, Duke, South Payne, and South West streets. It was one of the first Union military hospitals in the country dedicated to the care of African American soldiers and contrabands ^[1] Source 1 NARA Civil War records Government record . The hospital’s several frame wards accommodated several hundred patients at its peak.

Harriet Jacobs Person Harriet Jacobs b. 1813 · d. 1897 Formerly enslaved author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) who, with her daughter Louisa, worked among formerly enslaved people living in and around Union-occupied … and her daughter Louisa were among the civilian volunteers who worked at and around the hospital, distributing clothing and operating schools for Black children in the adjacent neighborhood. Their reports from Alexandria to the northern abolitionist press are among the fullest contemporary accounts of life in the occupied city ^[2] Source 2 LOC Prints & Photographs Photograph . In December 1864 Black soldiers recovering at L’Ouverture signed and delivered a petition to Union military authorities protesting the planned burial of their comrades in the segregated Freedmen’s Cemetery rather than the new Alexandria National Cemetery; the petition succeeded and African American soldiers were reinterred in the national cemetery.

The hospital closed after the war and the buildings were dismantled. The site was built over in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; no above-ground remains survive. A historical marker at the corner of South Payne and Duke streets commemorates the hospital and the soldiers’ petition ^[3] Source 3 Alexandria Library Special Collections Manuscript .