The Black History of the White House (13 page)

When faced with a labor shortage during the early phase of constructing the capital, the order to bring in slave labor was one of the most critical decisions implemented by the commissioners tasked to complete the project. White growers were more than eager to profit from subcontracting out the blacks they enslaved, when it was deemed they were not needed to toil in the fields. Being hired out, however, was not an opportunity for enslaved blacks to earn money for their labor. In nearly all instances, 100 percent of black wages went directly to their white enslavers. If in some rare cases slave workers received money for their work, it was due to the generosity or more likely the motivational intentions of their employer and went beyond what was owed the blacks' enslavers.

Although construction on the nation's capital had begun in 1790, Peter and other enslaved blacks were not ordered to begin work building the White House, the Capitol, and other federal structures until after 1792, because President Washington initially wanted to hire foreign labor to do the job. From the beginning, Washington hoped to bring in German and Scottish immigrants, whom he believed to possess the most talent and discipline for large-scale construction projects. Thomas Jefferson joined him in this belief and ordered the commissioners to investigate the viability of importing German workers.
However, outreach by the commissioners had little success in attracting foreign labor.
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The original three commissioners—Thomas Johnson, David Stuart, and Daniel Carroll—appointed by Washington on January 24, 1791, to oversee the work had difficulty getting foreign workers to sail to the United States, and at first had to settle for the labor of free and indentured white men.
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It is possible that free blacks were hired during the first two years of the project, but there is no clear record that that was the case. According to the payroll records of the time, Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the chief engineer hired by Washington in March 1791 to initially survey and design the city, had no blacks working for him. However, Washington had also hired Major Andrew Ellicott III to conduct a survey of the area. He in turn employed Benjamin Banneker, an African American writer, astronomer, publisher, and mathematician. Banneker helped to survey the land that became the District of Columbia in 1791. Working under Ellicott, he was instrumental in establishing true north.
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The hiring of the Frenchman L'Enfant and later the Irish surveyor James Hoban reflected another grand paradox in the founding of the nation. The aim of the American Revolution was first and foremost to break from England and forge a new nation independent of outside authority, political influence, or foreign culture. Yet it would be noncitizens, non-Americans who would design and build the nation's capital city. And they would bring with them their European ideas and sensibilities. L'Enfant's vision of the city was philosophically linked more to Versailles or Paris than Philadelphia or New York.

Europe's past would continue to shape the United States' future. And not only did the nation's new leaders and founders hire foreigners to plan the city, Washington and Jefferson eagerly
sought to bring in foreign, rather than American, workers. It should be remembered that, with few exceptions, that the nation's white founders were initially English by birth, citizenship, and culture. Despite the political break with England, cultural and social orientation and values were still very much framed by their British heritage.

Although they had trouble finding enough workers to begin the construction of the White House and other buildings, neither L'Enfant nor the commissioners used slave labor prior to 1792. The situation was becoming impossible. L'Enfant estimated that he would need more than 500 men to complete the work of building the city. This included carpenters, masons, stonecutters, bricklayers, supervisors, and hundreds of men who would do the challenging physical labor of cutting down trees, hauling lumber and stones, digging the foundation for the building, removing dead animals, and other undesirable tasks. The population of the area ceded by Maryland and Virginia was less than 1,000 people overall. The huge question that loomed before L'Enfant and the commissioners was from where these workers would come.

It was unclear how L'Enfant thought he would meet his labor quota without using slaves as there simply weren't enough free men available for hire. The shortage became a real obstacle to the project. Conflicts grew as L'Enfant resisted working under the commissioners who he considered, as Arnebeck writes, to hold “too narrow a view of the project.”
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The breaking point came in February 1792 when L'Enfant was fired. Although he had been close to President Washington, he had feuded with the commissioners nearly from the start of the project. The conflicts had already led to the dismissal of his workers in January 1792 because the commissioners felt that L'Enfant was spending too extravagantly on labor. It was only
after L'Enfant was gone that they turned to slave labor as a sustainable and cost-effective solution.

According to the commission records, the adjustment in labor policy was driven purely by economics. The commissioners would go back and forth in their assessment of how to get the work done at the cheapest cost, but clearly the use of slave labor was going to be financially beneficial. Those who worked under L'Enfant and Ellicott were paid wages, but after their workers were dismissed, the commissioners wanted to bring in new workers on a piecework basis. This issue would become more complicated once they decided to use enslaved people, because they had to deal with slaveholders as well as the enslaved themselves. In many cases, it would boil down to paying the white owners a yearly fee and paying some of the slaves an additional wage—about thirteen cents a day—as motivation for better quality work. The wages that would go directly to the slaveholders were between $60.00 and $70.00 a year, about $5.00 or so per month. On April 13, 1792, the commissioners met and made the following resolution:

[T]o hire good labouring negroes by the year, the masters cloathing them well and finding each a blanket, the Commissioners finding them provisions and paying twenty one pounds a year wages. The payment if desired to be made quarterly or half yearly. If the negroes absent themselves a week or more, such time to be deducted.
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Two years later, in July 1794, Commissioner Thornton also suggested that the commissioners purchase slaves rather than rent them, to avoid interference from slave owners, and that at the end of five to six years of work, they would be granted their freedom. This strategy would certainly have benefited those who
were enslaved and reflected at least a move toward the principles of equality and freedom that were claimed as the basis for the American Revolution. It is unknown if or how the commissioners debated this issue, or whether there was resistance to such a scheme from the area's slaveholders or from Washington and Jefferson, but in any case they decided not to purchase slaves and to continue to hire them from local owners.
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“Negroes”—meaning slaves in the vernacular of the times—would begin to work that summer by clearing trees. The land from Capitol Hill to the White House was a jungle of trees that had to be brought down, chopped up, and hauled away before any serious construction could begin. This was manual toil at its toughest and, from the commissioners' vantage, ideally suited to slave labor. The commissioners wanted the “best axe-men” to do the work.

Enslaved black men would also start to work on various dimensions of the president's house. It would take another couple of years before they would also be ordered to labor at the site of the Capitol. Their involvement began on February 11, 1795, and, according to payroll records, ended on May 17, 1801. Overall, for work on the Capitol, 385 payments were made for “Negro hire.”
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Although surviving records indicate how some of the enslaved workers were paid during the 1790–1801 period, it remains unclear who worked in the city and who was sent to the quarries. It's also quite possible that slave labor began on the Capitol earlier than 1795, as it is plausible that work was done without being documented in the commissioners' records.

So exactly what work did enslaved and free blacks do? In addition to cleaning up, black labor was employed in several categories, including cutting stone from the quarries; cutting and sawing trees to create streets; making and laying bricks; hauling materials; and roofing, plastering, painting, and carpentry at the
construction sites of the White House and Capitol. The work that white overseers ordered blacks to do evolved over time. The reason the commissioners initially wanted a monthly wage was because they thought they would have no further use for slaves after trees were cut and removed.
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It took time for them to witness and appreciate the wide variety of tasks that black workers could effectively perform. Seeing the quality of the slaves' work convinced the commissioners to expand use of their labor.

By 1793, it was clear that the commissioners wanted as many enslaved blacks as they could get. They began to place ads in newspapers around the country.
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In fact, Arnebeck makes the stunning assertion that “[t]he only workers the commissioners seemed comfortable with were slaves.”
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The commissioners provided the slaves with bedding, floor space in a barracks, and meals consisting of cornmeal and either pork or beef.
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Eventually, a hospital was built for sick slaves and other workers.
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As the work progressed, the hiring process became more complicated, with some laborers hired by the year, some by the month, and some by the job. In 1794, for instance, Williams “hired thirty-seven slaves by the year, twenty-six black and white laborers by the month, seven slaves to work with the surveyors, and six to work in the quarries.”
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The use of slave labor embodied a confluence of interests on the part of commissioners, slaveholders, and the enslaved people themselves. In the first place, use of enslaved blacks resolved the issue of labor supply that L'Enfant had been unable to manage. The commissioners had a workforce that was local, available, and except for the occasional few who successfully escaped, manageable. For the region's white growers who had large numbers of enslaved blacks to manage, the timing was nearly perfect. As tobacco farming begin to fade in favor of wheat and other less labor-intensive crops, for long periods of time there was less demand for slave labor than there had been in
previous decades. Although slavery was expanding in the deep South, the growth of the cotton industry, the 1808 ban on the foreign importation of slaves, and slavery's expansion westward created new demand for slave labor after the 1820s. At the same time, there was a surplus of slave labor at the end of the eighteenth century in the Maryland-Virginia area. The opportunity to hire out their slaves solved, at least temporarily, the cash flow crisis that many local white growers were experiencing.

Records from the commission detail which slaveholders in the area hired out their enslaved blacks and list the names of the enslaved themselves. For example, slaveholder William Beall hired out Davy, Frank and Newton. Slaveholder Ignatius Boone hired out Moses, Charles, and Jacob. Slaveholders Elizabeth, Eleanor, Jane, Mary, and Teresa Brent, all sisters, hired out Charles, Davy, Gabriel, Henry, and Nance. Slaveholder Joseph Queen hired out Clem, Moses, and Jess.
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Slaveholder Edmund Plowden hired out Gerald, Tony, and Jack.
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In all these instances, the money earned by the slaves went straight to the white owners and was not shared with their black workers.

The enormous task of building the capital city created an economic boom for people living in the area and beyond. It was not only attractive to whites who were looking for jobs and investments, but was also economically enticing to free blacks, enslaved blacks, and white indentured servants from around the country. Employment, investment, and business opportunities grew substantially as the city was being built. By 1795, the city and surrounding areas had grown so much and were populated with so many blacks that Georgetown, then independent of the city, passed regulations forbidding slaves and indentured servants from congregating in groups of more than five. Violators could be punished with thirty-nine lashes and a fine for the person's enslaver.
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Stone by Stone, Brick by Brick

While nearly all of the construction work was done by men, there is some evidence that black women were also ordered to labor in the construction process, especially for making bricks. Allen writes that because “it was considered semi-skilled labor, molding bricks was usually the work of female or adolescent slaves, who could mold as many as 5,000 bricks a day.”
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Given that in 1796 the commission placed an order for “[o]ne million of good place bricks,” there was no shortage of workers in brickmaking, which probably included a good number of women, and bricklaying, which was probably done by men. In spite of Allen's assertion, it's notable that no record was made in the commissioners' records regarding payments made to women, black or white. It is entirely possible that the black women slaved to make the bricks off-site, on plantations or farms, and that payment for their work was made directly to their white controllers. There is also a speculation that Mrs. Cloe LeClair, the nurse who ran the hospital for the workers for $10 a month, an outstanding salary at the time, was African American.
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Moving stone from the quarry to the city was a difficult task. It had to be hauled from the pits to boats, shipped to the city, unloaded—which could take six enslaved men up to two days—then dragged to the construction sites at the Capitol and the White House. To stay on schedule, the commissioners instructed the workers' supervisor, Elisha Williams, “to keep the yearly hirelings at work, from sunrise to sunset, particularly the negroes.”
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