The Black History of the White House Read online

  These churchgoing black men entered separately but left united. Allen’s response, with assistance from Jones, was to form the Free African Society and later to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Getting thrown out of Philadelphia’s St. George Church only served to make the men more defiant never to return. “They were no more plagued with us in the church,” said Allen.37

  The Free African Society was a broad-based network of African Americans that was formed “without regard to religious tenets, provided, the persons lived an orderly and sober life, in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children.”38 It sought to unite the black community—free and enslaved—to fight for justice and to take a stand against racism. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. referred to it as an “embryonic political cell.”39 Although the group was nondenominational, differences grew between Allen and Jones, and the former left the group in 1789 and established the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794.

  By the time President Washington arrived to stay at the president’s residence in Philadelphia, he was entering the one area in the new nation where the confluence of militant abolitionism and the struggle for black liberation was at its strongest. Because he did little to abate slavery, he became a target of antislavery campaigners. Pro-abolition Quakers, for example, had met with Washington after he was elected president, lobbying him to end slavery,40 and in 1797, black Philadelphians petitioned the federal government to prohibit slavery and repeal the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which Washington had signed into law in their city.41 Their efforts were unsuccessful.

  Embarrassed by his complicity in the business of human trafficking, Washington apparently made efforts to shield his slaves from public view as much as possible. He was rarely seen with them publicly (except for William Lee, until he was sent to Mount Vernon), and as Washington’s tenure went on, visitors noticed a decline in their presence at the president’s house. Hundreds of miles from the pro-slavery culture of the South, the first president of the United States must have experienced constant discomfort, possibly accounting for his frequent visits to his sprawling estate in Mount Vernon.

  Washington was not the only person shamed by the presence of the black people he kept enslaved in Philadelphia. Over the years, the city of Philadelphia itself quietly erased all historical traces of slavery from the president’s residence, or at least attempted to do so.

  The Movement to Honor Washington’s Enslaved

  While ignored by city and national officials, the story of Washington’s enslavement of men and women in Philadelphia did not die out in the black community. African Americans there have passed on the stories of that era from generation to generation. But it would take the city’s effort to honor another part of its history to trigger contemporary black Philadelphians to organize a movement demanding that the saga of the black people Washington enslaved be included in the city’s official history.

  In 2002, the National Park Service began its effort to move the Liberty Bell to a new $12.6 million pavilion.42 The move ignited a firestorm of protests when it was discovered by researcher Edward Lawler Jr., who was doing some digging of his own, that the proposed location for the new pavilion was the exact site where the president’s house once stood—the residence where the blacks whom President Washington held enslaved43 had also lived and toiled.44 Building on Lawler’s research, in 2007 archaeologists uncovered the precise location of the slave quarters. The planned entrance to the pavilion would be situated exactly there, atop the area where Washington’s slaves once lived.45

  The uproar began in January 2002 when Lawler broke the story about the “president’s house” in an extensive and detailed article in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. The article identified the location where Washington quartered the black men and women he enslaved—a part of the residence called the “smokehouse.” Dramatically, Lawler noted that the walkway entrance to the Liberty Bell Center was going to be built directly over the place where Washington kept his slaves46 and that people visiting site would have to walk over the precise spot where black people belonging to the first president of the United States once slept.

  Outrage was compounded by the fact that the Liberty Bell itself had been a symbol of the abolitionist movement since 1837, when it became the frontispiece of Liberty, a journal published by the New York Anti-Slavery Society.47 In fact, it was the abolitionists who first began to refer to it as the “Liberty Bell,” supplanting its previous title of “State House Bell,” and who adopted the militant words inscribed on it: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”48

  Response to Lawler’s article was swift. A number of groups formed to challenge the plans of the National Park Service, whose initial reaction to criticism over its omission of the slavery issue was stunningly underwhelming. The National Park Service sought first to minimize the concerns being raised and, when that did not work, to divert them. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, National Park Service officials implied that a focus on slavery would perhaps give undue significance and publicity to the issue, since Washington also had indentured servants and other workers at the house. Some National Park Service officials also suggested that any reference to the people Washington enslaved be displayed at the Deshler-Morris House, another much less prominent National Park Service facility that reportedly receives only around 2,000 visitors a year compared to an estimated 1.2 million annual visitors to the Liberty Bell.49

  By mid-May 2002, the National Park Service had a change of mind and began to move toward involving scholars, historians, elected officials, and community activists in an effort to determine how best to acknowledge the history of the people Washington enslaved. Park Service officials met with Lawler and another local historian, Charles Brockson, as well as with Representative Bob Brady (D-PA). It also sought input from nationally known historians and academics including the revered John Hope Franklin, the Smithsonian Institution’s Faith Ruffin, George Washington University’s James Horton, and Spencer Crew, director of Cincinnati’s Underground Railroad Museum.50

  The National Park Service’s new attitude was driven by activism on the part of the black community, including a letter-writing campaign led by “Radio Courtroom” host Michael Coard.51 A group called the Ad-Hoc Historians formed and called for “commemorating the lives of eight enslaved Africans, telling the full and complex history of American freedom.”52

  Events began to move quickly. Congress became involved, and on July 9, 2002, the House Appropriations Committee added an amendment to the $19.7 billion budget bill for the Interior Department (under which National Park Service operates) calling for the Park Service “to appropriately commemorate” those who had been enslaved by Washington in Philadelphia as well as the house itself.53 The amendment also demanded that the Park Service report on the progress it was making toward fulfilling that obligation by March 2003.54 By then, it was generally agreed by all the parties that at least a memorial should be constructed. In fall 2003, then-Philadelphia Mayor John Street committed $1.5 million in city funds to the memorial.55 And Independence National Historic Park, where the Liberty Bell Center is located, raised $4.5 million to pay for the conceptual plan for the memorial. Representatives Chaka Fattah (who played an early role in pushing for the memorial and supporting local initiatives) and Bob Brady announced that the congressional allocation to the project had grown to $3.5 million.56

  Significantly, the mayor’s office and the park formed a committee to oversee the development of the memorial dedicated to the black people President Washington enslaved. Members of the committee represented a broad array of scholars and activists, including:

  Romona Riscoe Benson, interim president and chief executive officer of the African American Museum in Philadelphia;

  Charles L. Blockson, curator of the Charles Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University, and a founding member of Generations Unlimited;

 
; Michael Coard, a founding member of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition;

  Tanya Hall, executive director of the Philadelphia Multicultural Affairs Congress;

  Edward Lawler Jr., a historian representing the Independence Hall Association;

  Charlene Mires, associate professor of history at Villanova University and editor of the Pennsylvania History Studies Series, representing the Ad-Hoc Historians;

  John Skief, chief administrative officer of the Harambee Institute of Science Technology Charter School;

  Karen Warrington, Representative Bob Brady’s director of communications;

  Joyce Wilkerson, Mayor John Street’s chief of staff.57

  Lawler’s research not only sparked challenges to the building of the new structure, but also inspired black historians, activists, and political leaders to mobilize numerous community-based groups, including the Ad-Hoc Historians and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition or ATAC (pronounced “attack”). The group was created to “compel the National Park Service (NPS) and Independence National Historical Park (INHP) to finally agree to the creation of a prominent Slavery Commemoration as a key component of the President’s House project.”58 Protests, education campaigns, and negotiations by ATAC were key to winning funds allocated specifically for that purpose from the city and the National Park Service.

  Carrying the struggle into the twenty-first century, ATAC also successfully lobbied to ensure that African Americans were employed in the construction of the project. In August 2009, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter announced that 67 percent of the construction jobs through subcontracts were being awarded to minority- and women-owned businesses. In fact, the design of the project itself went to a black-owned architecture firm, Kelly/Maiello Architects & Planners, whose owner made every effort to include other minority firms in the work.

  As of mid-2010, a number of issues remained unresolved as the effort to build a replica of the president’s house and a memorial to the enslaved people who lived there moved forward. A dispute arose in the committee when historian Edward Lawler criticized three important inaccuracies in the design of the house: “The design incorrectly sited the front of the house, distorted the shape of a much-noted bow window designed by Washington, and placed a commemoration of the house slave quarters in the wrong spot.”59 While not necessarily disagreeing with Lawler, the committee nevertheless went forward without revising the plan. For both legal and practical reasons, they argued that the agreed-upon design was still the best resolution.

  ATAC’s Michael Coard responded to Lawler and other critics: “There has also been criticism of the placement of the house’s slave quarters. But if the quarters were placed exactly where they stood more than 200 years ago, they would almost touch the new Liberty Bell Center, making the quarters impossible to enter and violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.”60 He cautioned that “hyper-technical replication must sometimes give way to practical-minded accessibility” and that “Philadelphia is about to make history with this project. And the designers already made history by envisioning a powerful, important attraction that everyone in America and the world should want to see. But they won’t see it if it’s not practical.”61

  While the campaign to honor the men and women that Washington enslaved in Philadelphia was successful, a similar campaign has yet to unfold in the nation’s capital, where dozens, if not hundreds, of slaves labored for U.S. presidents from James Madison to Zachary Taylor. These black people not only slaved in the White House but actually helped to build it. During the period that Washington and Adams were residing in Philadelphia, the difficult task of building a whole city, including the permanent home of the president, continued.

  CHAPTER 3

  A White House Built On and With Slavery

  Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

  “Their colour is a diabolic dye.”

  Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

  May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

  —Phillis Wheatley, the first black person to be published in the United States1

  Prelude: Peter’s White House Story

  Peter, or “Negro Peter” as he was sometimes listed on the payroll, must have been completely exhausted after working all day as a carpenter building the president’s house in Washington, D.C., the structure that would one day be called the White House. The winter months are often very cold in Washington, D.C., as wind racing off the Potomac and Anacostia rivers drives the temperature down into single digits, and major snowstorms are not uncommon. Although as a carpenter Peter primarily labored inside, during the icy days of January 1795 the site of the half-built president’s residence was certainly a frigid place to work. It was also likely that Peter did not get all the nutrition needed for such labor-intensive work. During the coldest days, he and the others forced to work there were likely underdressed for the weather, and those who contracted a cold or the flu continued to work nevertheless. Suffering the freezing weather, long hours of toil, and meager meals alongside Peter were four other black carpenters—Tom, Ben, Harry, and Daniel—who like Peter were also enslaved.2

  But these black men may have thought themselves more fortunate than others who were forced to slave in extreme conditions at the various stone quarries in and around Virginia. Those locations have been described as “snake-infested” and “swarmed with mosquitoes,” and the labor so arduous that each worker was given “a half-pint of whiskey per day to help them cope.”3 This was spirit-killing work if such there ever was. Enslaved black men were ordered into the quarries from “can’t see” to “can’t see” to carry out the back-breaking tasks of digging, cutting, lifting, and hauling stone. Tons of the stone from which the U.S. capital is built, and which can still be seen today, got there via the slave labor of black men.

  Although enslaved, Peter and the other black carpenters may have also thought themselves more lucky than the men, women, and children they saw each day being held in cages around the city or forced onto the auction block, many of whom were being sent to a life of misery on plantations in the dreaded Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Among those in cages or being sold, some were being punished for attempting to escape, learning to read, or being thought to be agitators for freedom. Some had been free but were illegally abducted by slave catchers who destroyed the papers documenting their freedom, and were now selling them off to the highest bidder. The manacles holding these people were heavy, perhaps even rusted from having been exposed to all manner of climates. From the construction site of the president’s residence, Peter and the others would have witnessed these events on a daily basis. As writer Walter C. Clephane soberly states, “The District of Columbia became a great slave market.”4

  While forced to work at the construction site, the men would see and hear horrors all around them. An endless parade of shame coursed through the streets as human traffickers transported blacks on horse-drawn carts or ordered shackled men, women, and children into long chain-linked lines on their way to or from the auction block. At Lafayette Square, directly across from where the White House was being built, slave pens stood for all to see. When the pens were full, the city jails were used to hold overflow. In Alexandria, a part of the District until 1846, the firm of Franklin & Armfield became one of the largest dealers of abducted and enslaved people, selling by the 1830s as many as 1,000 black people per year. 5 At Third Street and Pennsylvania, a dozen or so blocks from the White House construction site, the St. Charles Hotel held enslaved people in basement cells. At Seventh Street and Pennsylvania, the most robust and active slave market in the city flourished. At an abode owned by James Birch known as the “Yellow House,” hundreds of individuals were treated no better than farm animals. The three-story building was bustling with activity and was considered one of the major East Coast hubs for the buying and selling of black people.

  Describing his experience seeing a slave pen in Washington, D.C. in 1835, an English man wrote:
/>   It is surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height, with the posts outside to prevent escape, and separated from the building by a space too narrow to permit of a free circulation of air. At a small window above, which was unglazed and exposed alike to the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so trying to the constitution, two or three sable faces appeared looking out wistfully to while away the time and catch a refreshing breeze, the weather being extremely hot. In this wretched hovel all colors except white, both sexes, and all ages, are confined, exposed indiscriminately to the contamination which may be expected in such society and under such seclusion.6

  Slave pen, Alexandria, Virgina, circa 1863. In 1791, Alexandria was included in the area chosen by George Washington to become the District of Columbia.

  Part of the ambient noise in Washington, D.C.’s streets was the constant wails, screams, and cries of the enslaved, their anguish omnipresent. While nearly all whites and a few free blacks were enjoying liberty from British control and constructing a new city to represent and govern their newfound freedom and democracy, others were brutally forced to live, toil, and die in illiterate misery. So pervasive was the institution of slavery that most, if not all, of the hands that were building the White House were black hands. From their captive position trapped at the bottom of U.S. society, most of these people likely could not envision a time when they could enter the public buildings they were constructing as free and equal citizens, let alone as elected or appointed officials with authority over the inner workings of the nation. Was Peter one of those who believed that his destiny was to die enslaved, or did he imagine a future where he walked in the world as a free man?