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 means of the African-American sculptor John Wilson was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda. It was commissioned by means of 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 solitary 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 centurys of African Americans who worked upon the Capitol during its early history is incomplete 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, on the other hand their individual biographies are unknown. Their day-to-day lives are understood in sole the most general terms; reconstructing them is challenging work for the historian.

A list of somebodys 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 of that kind chores as pit-sawing lumber or hauling stone from the Commissioner's Wharf. They were housed in ill-formed 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 hold fast their earnings if they worked upon Sundays or at night. A slave named Peter for instance, earned 1[pound] by dint of making a coffin for individual of the nameless "public negroes" on the other hand their more usual work center around clearing the "streets" of fieldstone and stubs digging foundation trenches, unloading stone, sharpening tools and laying brick.

Despite their exertions, President Washington was disappointed by means of the slow pace of raising the fresh capital city. In an effort to spe progres Washington in September 1794 appointed Dr William Thornton as a commissioner for the Federal district. A physician through 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 unrestrained People of Color.

Thornton used his position as commissioner to advance sum of two units favorite projects: completion of the Capitol and manumission. Shortages of workmen and labor-related disturbs such as strikes, particularly among the stonecutters, gave him the opportunity to combine these causes. In 1795 he made sum of two units 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 next to the first idea, which Thornton thought the better single was that slaves be purchased outright, trained to make an incision in stone and then freed after six years of service.

Both proposals would accomplish humanitarian extremitys 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 render certain the completion of the building." However, there is no record that the other members of the board answered to these suggestions; and it is uncertain if an enslaved African American at any time earned freedom by working upon the public buildings in the Federal city.

What is certain is that Thornton's efforts to reduce the problem of slavery failed--that issue would be decided upon the field of battle. ironically, as the land was torn apart in the 1860 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 upon the wage rolls of the day, admitting little else documents their efforts.

One black man, however, left a mark beyond his name and category. A fresh cast-iron dome now rose above the elderly Rotunda walls and atop that dome, in 1863 was placed the alloy of copper Statue of Freedom now thus familiar to Americans. Philip Reid, a slave, helped cast that statue--indeed, Reid is credited with the mechanical skill that allowed the plaster archetype 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 event now looks out over a capital that, like the nation, has drawn out owed much to its African Americans.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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