Carroll ad

The retired commissioner Daniel Carroll died May 7, 1796. His wife Eleanor had died in 1763 but he was survived by his mother Eleanor Carroll then 92 years old who continued to live on Carroll's Rock Creek plantation with her daughter Elizabeth. Eleanor died on a few months after Daniel. A few months after her death the executors of her estate sold 30 slaves. I've not seen Daniel Carroll's will so I don't know if these were his plantation slaves that had been bequeathed to his mother. I am not sure if Joseph Park, the Carroll plantation in Forest Glen, remained in operation but the executors did hurry to sell these slaves and other farm stock and tools.

Evidently Commissioner Carroll's experience with hired slave working on the public buildings did not change his view of slaves as property to be sold along with everything else on the plantation from horses and oxen to potatoes and turnips.

The ad for the Carroll slave sale was accidentally juxtaposed in the newspaper with a portion of the "Essay on the City of Washington." This was also published elsewhere in French. Pamela Scott attributes it to Stephen Hallet, the French architect shafted in his efforts to contribute to the design of the Capitol. Perhaps. The essay does seemed to be geared to refugees from the excesses of the French Revolution but not to the royalists who formed the first wave a refugees, but rather republicans and liberals fleeing later. So right next to the slave sale ad is a whiff of reform if not revolution. The author thinks a great virtue of the City of Washington built to an ambitious plan "will be the multiplication of useful accommodations which may tend to the comfort to the indigent and laborious class of people."