The Enslaved Builders of the Capitol and White House
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Before a single congressman took his seat, before a president had occupied a single room, the building you are looking at was quarried, bricked, and carved into shape by people who would never vote in it. The year was seventeen ninety-two, and the District of Columbia was under construction.
The hire-out system worked like this. An enslaver would contract his enslaved workers to the Capitol's commissioners. The wages, typically around five dollars per month for skilled labor, were paid directly to the enslaver. The worker who laid the stone received nothing but the fact of another day survived. Commissioner of Buildings records document the payments. The office of the Architect of the Capitol conducted a survey in two thousand five that found specific physical evidence of enslaved labor in the Capitol's foundations and stonework. The workers quarried sandstone from Aquia Creek in Virginia, fired the bricks for the President's House on the site itself, and performed much of the skilled masonry and carpentry that shaped both buildings.
The Capitol's original construction ran from seventeen ninety-two until approximately eighteen hundred. Decades later, the current dome, added between eighteen fifty-five and eighteen sixty-six, was also built under the hire-out system. That dome, the one visitors photograph today, was completed during the Civil War, at the explicit direction of Abraham Lincoln, who believed finishing it would signal that the republic would endure. Enslaved men had poured its ironwork foundations.
The White House Historical Association has documented the labor of enslaved workers at the President's House throughout the antebellum period, as domestic workers, groundskeepers, and construction laborers. Their enslavers collected wages. Their names were not recorded in the building's dedication.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture has led the scholarly effort to recover individual names and family histories from these construction records. Some names have been found. Most have not.
There is no monument on the Capitol grounds to any of them. The building stands as evidence of what they built. The silence around it is a different kind of record.
