"For contractors one virtue of slave hire was that masters were accustomed to getting paid quarterly or even at the end of the year. Nicholson’s next storekeeper reported that he had to pay 120 workers every week. Given Nicholson’s growing reputation for not paying up, many workers demanded a day’s wage in advance. Those men were probably not slaves."
Quote from Slave Labor in the Capitol, page 125
In the papers of James Greenleaf, Robert Morris and John Nicholson, the three speculators who went bankrupt as they tried to build houses in Washington from 1794 to 1796, we can get insights into building practices at the time. Letters written by their agents and contractors in the city rarely mention slaves. They were not adverse to slavery. Most of them had slave servants. They simply did not have the time or resources to set up a slave hire system which entailed feeding and housing slaves and maintaining the confidence of masters that they would be paid.
The July 4, 1796, letter below explained to John Nicholson that getting houses built to meet a contract with Daniel Carroll of Duddington required money in hand even to start building because "digging the foundation must be paid daily... as it is done by the lower order of people." They had a hard life and could not even wait for weekly wages.
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