Slavery, Nostalgia, and the White House

At the Aiken-Rhett House Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, visitors do not view the beautiful interiors of the slaveholders’ residence until they have become fully acquainted with the slaves’ living quarters and work spaces. Tours begin in the basement and back yard of the house. The site interrupts the nostalgic gaze of the tourist, insisting that guests confront the way that black people held in bondage created, day in and day out, white slaveholders’ grandeur. The southern plantation—and the white supremacist mythology surrounding it—is turned upside down.

Last week, First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, did something very much like this for the entire country. In her speech before the Democratic National Convention, Obama described the arc of African-American history that she sees reflected in her family’s service to the country. That story, she explained,

brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn.

Obama exploded a central conceit of American mythology—the idea that in order to honor the founders’ ideas, or their artifacts, we must remember them as essentially pure, free from the taint of avarice, racism, or cruelty. She instead asserted a new way to revere the American project, as something flexible enough to contain, and endorse, the great sea change in American life represented by her husband’s election to the presidency.

Though many listeners responded positively to Obama’s linkage of the present to the nation’s troubled past, other Americans were angered. Some took to Twitter to accuse Obama of lying, prompting multiple media outlets to fact check the speech. Others bemoaned the fact that anyone should point out these facts, even if they were true—this was “bad news” that depressed pride in the country. Others charged that the instinct to share the news was rooted in racial animus. The most talked-about response came from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. While O’Reilly explained to his viewers that Obama hadn’t lied, he described the slaves who worked on the White House as “well fed” and housed in “decent lodgings.” O’Reilly was roundly chastised by citizens, journalists, and scholars who pointed out that, no matter what one ate, a slave was a slave, and bondage, no matter its circumstances, was not liberty. Though D.C.’s slaves labored alongside free workers, they had no control over their labor contracts, and they could be brutalized or sold at will. Moreover, whatever meager capital some were able to accumulate paled in comparison to that earned by their white counterparts.

Let’s be clear—the problem here isn’t about the historical record, or access to facts. In 2009, on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, the same arguments were debated, and the same fact-checking was done. Historians have long acknowledged that slaves helped build the White House. Indeed, though the city’s planners initially tried to recruit only European immigrant laborers to build the city of DC, slaves worked on virtually all aspects of the construction of Washington, D.C. and its various federal buildings, alongside free laborers, both black and white, immigrant and native born.^[1]

This slave hiring scheme was established in April 1792, when the three commissioners in charge—appointed by President George Washington, and slaveholders, all—ordered their manager to “hire good laboring Negroes by the year, the masters clothing them well and finding each a blanket, the Commissioners finding them provisions and paying twenty one pounds a year wages.”^[2] The twenty-one pounds wages (about five dollars per month) went, of course, to the slaveholders, not to the enslaved laborers.

Slave hiring thus became one of the capital’s first business enterprises. Commissioners embraced the system because hired slave labor was plentiful and less expensive than free labor. For slaveholders experiencing declines in the tobacco economy, slave hiring was an attractive way to profit from the labor of men not otherwise profitably employed.^[3] And the more closely connected one was to the commissioners (both the original three and others who succeeded them over the years), the more one stood to profit. As historian Bob Arnebeck explains,

The commissioners hired a slave worth about one hundred pounds for twenty-one pounds a year. The slave’s master would not have to feed the slave, and the value of the slave, as long as he didn’t get injured or run away, would not decrease. The master was making roughly a 20 percent return on his or her ‘investment,’ and that was in an era when some thought making over 6 percent was sinful.^[4]

Not surprisingly, middlemen eager to exploit opportunities appeared on the scene, subcontracting with the commissioners to locate and hire slaves, both their own and those of area owners. Among them were Samuel Smallwood and Dr. James Blake, both future mayors of the District of Columbia.^[5] Such slave-hiring arrangements were typical of the slave economy in the early republic and would grow increasingly important in the Upper South in the antebellum period.^[6]

We certainly need to know these facts. But it is equally important to understand that negative reactions to Michelle Obama’s speech did not really arise from a failure of expertise, or knowledge. They arose from an anxiety–-not about the slaves who labored and suffered under this system—but about the fate of the reputation of the slaveholders, men whose words and deeds have lived beyond them in ways they could scarcely have imagined.

Many Americans view the White House as an iconic, untroubled repository of patriotism and American identity. This is a conceit as enduring as the plantation myths that the Aiken-Rhett House tour seeks to up-end. The White House was not a plantation per se, but it was nonetheless built for plantation owners, by plantation slaves, hired from other slaveholders, who got richer because of it. Moreover, it was a slaveholders’ home for fifty of the first sixty years of the republic.^[7] The institution would not be abolished in the District of Columbia until 1862, during the Civil War, when few slaveholding Congressmen were present to resist, as they had when abolitionists had previously attempted to end slavery in the District.

The building of D.C. is inextricably tied to these historical realities. And for some Americans, placing black slaves at the heart of the national project is simply an unwelcome reminder of the centrality of racism to the financial and political successes of its leading lights, and to the country as a whole.

For those whose nostalgia for the White House is a proxy for an edifying, even purifying, personal connection to the nation, the implications are unsettling, at best. Indeed, they demand a reckoning that many wish to avoid altogether. But the reckoning is necessary. Just as the Aiken-Rhett House asks its visitors to begin by contemplating the morally-corrupt source of its grandeur, Michelle Obama simply asked Americans to consider the sorrowful continuities, and amazing disjunctures, in the nation’s history of racial oppression, all of them inscribed in the building of the White House.

 

^[1] Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2011), 115-117.

^[2] Bob Arnebeck, Slave Labor in the Capital: Building Washington’s Iconic Federal Landmarks (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014), 42. The architect of the White House, James Hoban, was an Irish immigrant living in Charleston when he travelled to DC with his enslaved carpenters, Peter, Tom, Ben, and Harry, as well as his assistant’s slave, Daniel. Hoban also owned indentures for three white laborers. See Lusane, 106.

^[3] Lusane, 115-117.

^[4] Arenbeck, 29.

^[5] Arnebeck, 29-30. The architect of the White House itself, James Hoban, was an Irish immigrant living in Charleston when he travelled to DC with his enslaved carpenters, Peter, Tom, Ben, and Harry, as well as his assistant’s slave, Daniel. Hoban also owned indentures for three white laborers. See Lusane, 106.

^[6] Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2-4, and passim.

^[7] In all, twelve United States presidents would own slaves, eight of them while holding office (http://hauensteincenter.org/slaveholding/). George Washington and his wife, Martha, held some three hundred slaves at Mount Vernon and the various presidential residences while he was president, including in Philadelphia, where they exploited a loophole in Pennsylvania’s antislavery statutes. The law in Pennsylvania stated that any slave who lived with their owner in Pennsylvania longer than six months was eligible to petition for his or her freedom. Jesse Holland describes the Washington family’s subterfuge to avoid losing any of their slaves during his tenure in the President’s House. “[B]etween March 1791 and October 1796, the Washingtons made fourteen trips from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon, rotating their slaves in and out of Pennsylvania to keep them under their control.” One of those slaves, Oney Judge, the personal maid to Martha Washington since she was a child, attempted to flee in 1796, hatching her plan with black friends in Philadelphia who aided her in getting away to New Hampshire. The Washingtons continued to attempt to recapture Judge and another slave, Hercules, the Washington’s cook who absconded a year later, until George Washington died. See Jesse J. Holland, The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2016), 45-62, quote on 49. See also Michael Coard, “The ‘Black’ Eye on George Washington’s ‘“White” House,’” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 129, no. 4 (October 2005), 468; and “Ten Facts about Washington and Slavery,” at http://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/ten-facts-about-washington-slavery/.