Capitol construction - United States Capitol Building; African American construction labor; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

In 1986, a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. by the African-American sculptor John Wilson was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda. It was commissioned by Congress as a tribute to the slain civil rights leader and was accepted as a permanent addition to the Capitol's art collection. Although the bust is only a few years old, its documented history fills thick files that trace its commissioning, its artist, its placement and other facts.

By contrast, our knowledge of the hundreds of African Americans who worked on the Capitol during its early history is sketchy at best. Names such as james, Will, Davy, Nathan, Pompey and Prince appear in the early records as "Negro hire," a euphemism for slave labor, but their individual biographies are unknown. Their day-to-day lives are understood in only the most general terms; reconstructing them is challenging work for the historian.

A list of persons employed by the commissioners to build the Capitol and White House during a sample five-year period (1795-1800) contains 122 names of "Negro hire." Many were assigned to the 74 identified stonecutters or to the 84 carpenters also named, and they labored at such chores as pit-sawing lumber or hauling stone from the Commissioner's Wharf. They were housed in rude huts clustered around the sites of the President's House and the Capitol, alongside the shacks where white laborers lived. Occasionally these slaves were allowed to keep their earnings if they worked on Sundays or at night. A slave named Peter, for instance, earned 1[pound] by making a coffin for one of the nameless "public negroes." But their more usual work centered around clearing the "streets" of fieldstone and stumps, digging foundation trenches, unloading stone, sharpening tools and laying brick.

Despite their exertions, President Washington was disappointed by the slow pace of raising the new capital city. In an effort to speed progress, Washington in September 1794 appointed Dr. William Thornton as a commissioner for the Federal district. A physician by training, Thornton was better known as the amateur architect who had won the design competition for the Capitol. He was also a slave-owning Quaker who helped establish the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color.

Thornton used his position as commissioner to advance two favorite projects: completion of the Capitol and manumission. Shortages of workmen and labor-related troubles such as strikes, particularly among the stonecutters, gave him the opportunity to combine these causes. In 1795 he made two proposals to his fellow commissioners. The first was that 50 "intelligent negroes" be hired for six years and paid wages from which they could earn their freedom. The second idea, which Thornton thought the better one, was that slaves be purchased outright, trained to cut stone and then freed after six years of service.

Both proposals would accomplish humanitarian ends by pragmatic means; the chief advantage of the latter scheme, Thornton explained, was that "no change of men and prices could affect the work at the Capitol and it would ensure the completion of the building." However, there is no record that the other members of the board responded to these suggestions; and it is uncertain if an enslaved African American ever earned freedom by working on the public buildings in the Federal city.

What is certain is that Thornton's efforts to resolve the problem of slavery failed--that issue would be decided on the field of battle. ironically, as the country was torn apart in the 1860s, the Capitol itself was being enlarged. And as with the original construction, black labor would play a crucial--and largely unrecorded--role. The names of African-American workmen--categorized as "freemen.," "fugitives," or "contraband"--appear on the wage rolls of the day, though little else documents their efforts.

One black man, however, left a mark beyond his name and category. A new cast-iron dome now rose above the old Rotunda walls and atop that dome, in 1863, was placed the bronze Statue of Freedom now so familiar to Americans. Philip Reid, a slave, helped cast that statue--indeed, Reid is credited with the mechanical skill that allowed the plaster model of the statue to be disassembled for its removal to the foundry. It is fitting that his work, raised in the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, now looks out over a capital that, like the nation, has long owed much to its African Americans.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group