How Slaves Built the Capital and the White House

A few years ago, I read Randall Robinson’s book, “The Debt,” and was stunned as I read his account of how slave labor built the White House and the Capitol.

Robinson said he stood in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building, and noticed how the frescoes, the walls, the other art work, didn’t say anything, didn’t show anything to the millions of people who visit annually about the work slaves did to make those two buildings a reality. According to Robinson and according to historical fact, had not slave labor been used, our two most treasured national buildings might not have been.

Apparently, when construction was begun on the buildings, there was a relatively large number of Free Blacks living in Washington, D.C., but there were also other Blacks, still enslaved in neighboring southern states, who had little work to do on plantations because the need for slave labor to work the tobacco fields decreased. Slave owners began to “hire out” their slaves for other work, and were paid for the work the slaves did.

Enter Pierre L’Enfant, the man credited with planning the city of Washington, D.C. After he drew up the plans for the city, and unable to find workers from Europe and America to build his vision, he and the commissioners of Washington, D.C. turned to slave labor. It would be the slaves who would do the bulk of the work for the massive project. A list of people who worked the project included 122 names labeled “Negro hire.” Actually, as the need for labor became apparent, the United States government sent out a request for 100 slaves. Owners of the slaves, not the slaves themselves, were paid $5 a month for the work the slaves did.

What, exactly, did the slaves do? This is where Robinson’s words haunted me. On their backs, he wrote, they had ropes and pulleys that moved huge stones used for the dome of the Capitol into place. Something called “arkose sandstone blocks” were taken by slaves and oxen from the Aquia Quarry in Virginia, to Washington, D.C. It was the slaves who mined and loaded those huge stones onto boats in Virginia and slaves who took the stones off the boats once they reached Washington, D.C. They had to be hauled from the docks to the construction site; those which couldn’t be safely hauled on wagons with oxen were taken by slaves using pulleys.

Slaves fired and stacked the bricks, Robinson writes. They mixed the mortar. They sawed timber and hauled it to the site. Up the hill, on their backs, they hauled timber and stone.

Atop the dome of the Capitol there is a statue called, ironically, the “Statue of Freedom.” It was designed by an Italian and was cast in bronze in Maryland. A slave named Phillip Reed was given the responsibility, writes Robinson, for loading the five sections of this statue into reinforced wagons, each weighing more than a ton, and getting those wagons up the hill to the Capitol. Once all the parts were at the construction site, Reed and other slaves reassembled the statue to make sure all the pieces still fit together. This part of the project alone took 31 days. Once they did that, they took the statue apart again, hoisted it atop the dome and reassembled it there. They got pittance for pay, if that. Their slave owners benefited from their work.

I visited Washington D.C. shortly after reading Robinson’s book, and was hit with a sense of sadness that America cannot admit, proudly, the role African Americans have had in building this nation. I walked through the Capitol like it was hallowed ground; I stared at the White House with new eyes. I shook my head that America lives in a dream world where the only “right” or “smart” or “talented” people can be white; slaves are not honored for their brilliance, tenacity, skill and strength. That makes me sad. But this is what I know: Every African American parent ought to know who built the Capitol and White House, and share it with their children, “writing it as frontlets between their eyes,” as the Israelites were instructed to do in talking about the Exodus.