November 1797 order banning slave carpenters

"Hoban did not protest the order, nor had he ever presented reasons to the commissioners for hiring slave carpenters."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 109

At a November 17, 1797, meeting, the commissioners ordered that carpenters chips, scrap wood, be given to laborers for firewood, that no slave carpenters be hired anymore, and that an inventory be taken of public stores by James Hoban and Capt. Williams.

Of course, ending the hire of slave carpenters is the most interesting to us, but the only context we have for that order is the commissioners' proceedings, which I scanned below. (The notations on the scan are notes I made on my photocopy of the page.)

There is no evidence that these three orders are related, that banning slave carpenters had anything to do with thefts or carpenters' chips. However, the only slave carpenters hired belonged to James Hoban and the head carpenter Peirce Purcell. So a good case can be made that the commissioners were more interested in restraining Hoban, Purcell and other free carpenter who might be profiting on carpenter's chips, than they were scorning slave carpenters.

However, in the fall of 1797 the commissioners were unable to pay any workers. Their October 3, 1797, letter to Hoban and George Hadfield shows how that embarrassed them and how they had to rely on men to work without pay. The scans of the letter below are not quite complete. In making the photocopy I cut off the bottom line of the first page below

The commissioners wanted priority in payment of arrears to be given to payroll workers and did so because those men depended on wages to survive. Slaves didn't. They didn't get wages. So it can be argued that the commissioners were loath to offend white workers who needed money by paying for slaves who didn't.

Since the commissioners eventually fired Purcell and tried to fire Hoban, I think the order banning slave carpenters had more to do with their masters than the slave carpenters. But I wish we had more evidence so that we could be sure that white carpenters didn't raise the issue thus foreshadowing the white only craft unions of the future.

Judging from the payrolls, the slave carpenters played an important roll. There are payrolls showing that around 7 slave carpenters worked from December 1794 to the end of 1797. But there is no evidence that they were missed. As the roofs and interiors of the Capitol and White House were finished the payrolls for carpenters swelled. There seemed to be no trouble hiring free carpenters as the February 1798 payroll below shows.