For over four decades, the District of Columbia, the seat of national government and a major slave-trading depot, stood as a key symbol and site of the US government’s support of slavery. This chapter focuses on abolitionist depictions of the slave trade in the District and the moral liability thrust on northern citizens because of its many kinds of publicness. Abolitionists repeatedly circulated the image of chained slaves driven past the US Capitol. Reprised by sightseers and abolitionists, the iconic image conjured not only democratic complicity but also democratic shame. William Wells Brown searingly critiqued the District slave trade in Original Panoramic Views of the Life of an American Slave (1849), the focus of the chapter’s final section.