Payroll for night guards

"After there was a theft of building materials on the President's Square, the commissioners placed a night guard made up of white laborers. A criminal was caught and jailed on the President's Square. There is no record of the upshot of the arrest. It is unlikely the man they caught was a hired slave. No guard was ever placed around the laborers' camps."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, p 137

The payroll below is not easy to read but I think it is important. It lists the laborers who were paid to guard building materials at the President's square and explicitly states why they were hired. It also shows that the guards were paid at the same rate laborers were getting, 45 Maryland shillings a month. Four of the guards were on duty all 28 nights of February which mean that instead getting 45 shillings they made 48 1/2 since a month was considered 26 working days. Judging from the payrolls I have, there were no laborers hired to work during the day in late January and February 1795 except some working for the surveyors.

I think the guards were posted in the middle of January since the payroll for them shows that the most nights any man stood guard was 14. The overseer Bennett Mudd was paid for 4 nights of guard duty suggesting that the crisis of setting guards soon eased and became a more humdrum duty.

The time of the year when there were fewest hired slaves on the scene was the middle of January so I use these documents to absolve them of any suspicion of committing the thefts. Since these guards were put on a payroll, I also assume that if guards had ever been placed in or around the laborers' camp, there would be a payroll for them. Finally, since the overseer Mudd was paid for 4 nights of guard duty, I assume that if guarding the hired slave laborers at night had been one his duties, he would have gotten extra pay for that. So it seems to me, even though there were in 1797 and 1798 at least 90 hired slaves in the laborers' camp, they were never guarded or policed.

The White House was built in two stages, 1793 to 1796 or so and then 1798 to 1800. After the first stage it was essentially an unfinished shell and most of the workers moved to Capitol Hill to work there. As both buildings were finished guards were needed. In 1800 as the federal government began to relocate to the city, the commissioners asked for Marines to guard the public buildings at night. They even thought "regular soldiers" would be better "than such men that we can get here." The reputation of army soldiers was not very high then which suggests how little confidence the commissioners had in their workers.