Commissioners' Proceedings: first order to hire slaves

"At their April 13 meeting the commissioners handed this to Williams: The Commissioners resolve to hire good laboring Negroes...."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 42

Below are scans of my photocopy of the commissioners' proceedings that record their order to hire slaves. Unfortunately the order didn't say how many they wanted to hire. My guess is that they hired about 40 laborers, because that's how many they asked Elisha Williams to hire for 1793.

I think we have to use the numbers of projected hires with care, whether in the commissioners' proceedings or as expressed in newspaper ads. Payrolls and receipts of payments to masters are the best sources for the number of slaves hired. Not that that is easy to arrive it. I think especially at the peak of slave hire that some of the slaves hired for the year were kept off payrolls.

Another possible misconception one might get from just reading the proceedings is that the commissioners only hired slave laborers. The commissioners who were rarely at the work sites did assume their laborers were slaves but when Elisha Williams placed ads in the newspapers he didn't designate the race of the laborers, at least in the ones I've seen. Below the scans of the 1792 order, I scan a January 1798 ad for laborers from a Washington newspaper.

Newspapers often juxtapose interesting items. Two columns to the left of the ad for laborers is another installment of "Further extracts from an old Manuscript" which was a way some anonymous writer vented his spleen at the commissioners. That writer never alluded to the commissioners slave hire policy. Despite the focus we are putting on that policy today, at the time, even as many criticized the commissioners, no one wrote anything good or bad about their policy of hiring slave laborers.