"His approach to city building was akin to colonization. He set up a company store and negotiated contracts with workers so that a good part of their wages amounted to goods they got at the store as well as in building lots and materials to build houses. Nicholson counted on his workers becoming a part of the city."
Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 124
Because of his spectacular bankruptcy and death soon after, John Nicholson's papers were picked through by lawyers for years and then wound up in the state historical museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Nicholson did most of his wheeling and dealing from his home in Philadelphia. The museum microfilmed his incoming correspondence and letters from several correspondents who Nicholson sent to forward his Washington investments give a feel for life in the city between 1795 and 1798.
When I first realized how detailed the letters from those men he hired as store keepers and building contractors were, I was sure I would get some explicit descriptions of how slave laborers served the city, not to mention what free blacks were doing. I was soon amazed that I couldn't find any descriptions. Nicholson was known as a friend of African Americans. His contribution allowed Richard Allen to finish building the first AME church in Philadelphia. So we can't say that Nicholson and his correspondents ignored blacks because Nicholson didn't care about them. However, Nicholson was banking on making money off his Washington lots and houses to allow him to stave off bankruptcy. So he wasn't interested in reading about the talents of slaves who would never buy his lots or houses, nor of free blacks who were very unlikely to buy lots or houses.
However, his correspondents wrote to Nicholson to get money from the supposed millionaire. They did write about how they saved money for Nicholson. So I have to conclude that employing slaves did not help them do that. Ironically, the masters of slaves were more insistent on being paid for their slaves' labor than free workers were for theirs. Free workers, especially skilled workers, could be fed promises. The only slaves mentioned in the letters were house servants and messengers.
So I will share several examples of what these letter show about the city. In this post there are four scans, three of a letter to Nicholson from the store keeper William Tunnicliff and one a page of the diary Tunnicliff sent to Nicholson.
I think the men referred to only by their first name were servants. Sam may have been the free mulatto servant Nicholson hired when he was briefly in Washington. In giving him a great coat, Tunnicliff probably thought he was doing Nicholson a singular service.
Lewis Deblois' Harry, who ran away, was likely a slave. (Deblois, by the way, came from Massachusetts and like so many northerners accommodated himself to slavery.) But Morris, his storekeeper, who looked for Harry was likely white. After discussing that, Tunniciff writes about Deblois having a ditch dug but in this case as in all others like it, no mention is made of who did the digging.
William Prentiss was a contractor. Tunnicliff describes his return from St. Mary's county with cord wood. Possibly Prentiss hired slaves to do that, but there is no mention of it.
The diary shows how Tunnicliff was in constant negotiations with free skilled workers desperate to get paid for work they had done for Nicholson. I found no mention of payments to slave masters let alone letters from them.
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