The Black History of the White House Read online

  As is the case for virtually all the black people who slaved to build the White House, not much is known about Peter’s life and family. According to researcher Bob Arnebeck, Peter was likely sent to the District of Columbia by way of South Carolina with his owner, the Irish immigrant James Hoban, about whom a great deal is known.7

  Born in Desart, Ireland in 1762, James Hoban was living in Charleston, South Carolina, by his early twenties. After meeting President Washington in Charleston during the president’s Southern tour in summer 1791, Hoban listened with interest when Washington mentioned the need for builders to help construct the nation’s new capital. In 1792, he entered a design contest held to select the best architectural plan for building what would become the permanent residence and official office of all future U.S. presidents. Drawing from his Irish roots, Hoban rendered a plan inspired by Dublin’s Leinster House and won the coveted $500 prize.

  President Washington then tentatively hired Hoban to oversee the planning and construction of the building, and Hoban attended the groundbreaking ceremony. Washington liked Hoban and later wrote the commission in July 1792 to confirm his hire, stating, “He has been engaged in some of the first buildings in Dublin, appears a master workman, and has a great many hands of his own.” By “hands,” Washington was likely referring to individuals Hoban was enslaving. Hoban’s contributions to the city would go beyond his work on the White House and the Capitol. He would later become the first Superintendent Architect of the Capitol and be elected to the D.C. City Council. Unlike Peter’s work, Hoban’s has been remembered and honored in both Ireland and the United States.

  Hoban and his assistant, Pierce Purcell, traveled to Washington, D.C. and began their work that year. They brought with them a number of the people they kept enslaved, including the carpenters Peter, Tom, Ben, and Harry, who were owned by Hoban, while the carpenter Daniel belonged to Purcell. According to the 1795 payroll records of the commission that oversaw the building of the new city, Peter and Tom were earning wages as much as those paid to the white indentured servants with whom they worked. This included the McCorkill brothers and Peter Smith, all of whom were white and whose contracts were owned by Hoban and Purcell.

  In February 1795, Peter worked twenty-one days and earned “six pounds, sixteen shillings, & six pence” at a per diem rate of 6 shillings/6 pence—the same rate being paid Peter Smith, a white servant who was indentured to Purcell. But the money Peter earned he did not get to keep. It went to James Hoban—the man who enslaved him. Hoban and Purcell’s enslaved black men appear to be the only ones ever hired as carpenters. George Washington’s nephew, William Augustine Washington, had proposed to the commissioners to hire “twelve good Negro carpenters,” but they did not take him up on that offer.

  From 1793 to 1797—after which they and all other black carpenters were banned from working on the White House—Peter and the others were among the seventeen carpenters that worked at the site and completed a significant amount of the interior carpentry work. Once finished, the White House was projected to be the largest residence in the country.

  The black carpenters were banned by the commissioners as a consequence of a conflict between Hoban and another contractor. By late 1797, a rival Scottish contractor, Collen Williamson, submitted complaints to the commissioners regarding Hoban’s use of black carpenters. Among the allegations were that black and Irish carpenters were getting paid too much relative to other carpenters, that Hoban was unfairly profiting from their labor, and that Hoban and Purcell were stealing building materials. Although there was little basis for the charges and it was clear that Williamson was driven by competitive revenge, the commission responded by ordering that “no Negro Carpenters or apprentices be hired at either of the public Buildings and that no Wages be allowed after that day to any white Apprentices without an especial order of the Board,” the public buildings meaning the White House and the Capitol.8

  As the new nation was presenting itself as being guided by the egalitarian principles of democracy, freedom, and justice, the home and office of the nation’s president and commander in chief was being built, in part, with the slave labor of black people who were stripped of all rights. As far as the record shows, President Washington, who was in charge of making sure the project was completed, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was responsible for the project’s implementation, never spoke of or acknowledged this contradiction about the construction of the White House or the work that the black carpenters (and others) were doing.

  If Not Slaves, Then Who? Enslaved and Free Labor Builds the Nation’s Capital

  The Federal City is increasing fast in buildings and rising in consequence; and will, no doubt, from the advantages given to it by Nature and its proximity to a rich interior country and the Western Territory, become the emporium of the United States.9—George Washington, December 12, 1793

  Enslaved labor built much of early America, particularly in the South. Indeed, almost every major building in every major city constructed in the pre-nineteenth-century era used slave labor in some capacity or was owned by a slaveholder. The list includes Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were drafted, debated, and signed, and Boston’s Faneuil Hall, given to the city by Peter Faneuil, who made his fortune in the triangular slave trade.10 The list also includes the labor involved in the building and maintenance of the palatial plantation homes of George Washington at Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, and James Madison at Montpelier. The bodies, bones and muscles of enslaved blacks were used to construct nearly every major structure built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, but their labor has gone uncelebrated and largely undocumented. That this primary aspect of American labor history has been lost or forgotten does not mitigate the significance of recognizing the role black labor played in constructing the country’s original state architecture, buildings and landscapes.

  By the latter part of the eighteenth century, in Virginia and Maryland—the two states in which white people enslaved the most blacks—it had become customary for slave owners to hire out some of their blacks when it was profitable for them to do so. In Virginia, the state with the largest number of enslaved by a wide margin, the population of enslaved people had grown from a few hundred at the beginning of the eighteenth century to nearly 300,000 by the end of it. As historian Roger Wilkins notes, “By the time of the Revolution, 40 percent of all Virginians were black,” and 96 percent of that population was enslaved.11 Maryland had more than 100,000 black people enslaved to whites.

  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.12

  The original three commission
ers—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.13 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.14

  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.”15

  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.16

  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.17

  “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.”18 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.19 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.20 In fact, Arnebeck makes the stunning assertion that “[t]he only workers the commissioners seemed comfortable with were slaves.”21 The commissioners provided the slaves with bedding, floor space in a barracks, and meals consisting of cornmeal and either pork or beef.22 Eventually, a hospital was built for sick slaves and other workers.23

  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.”24 The use of slave lab
or 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.25 Slaveholder Edmund Plowden hired out Gerald, Tony, and Jack.26 In all these instances, the money earned by the slaves went straight to the white owners and was not shared with their black workers.