Thomas Johnson, the commissioner who pushed for hiring slaves

"Knowing that Johnson had hired slaves to work for the Potomac Company, Washington and Jefferson must have suspected he would persuade his fellow commissioners to hire them too and that it was pointless to comment."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, pages 48-49

In 1792 and 1793, President Washington and Secretary of State Jefferson periodically urged the commissioners to hire workers from Europe or New England. Yet they never wrote about the workers the commissioners did hire. There are no mentions of the hired slaves working on the Capitol and White House in their letters to the commissioners or between themselves. I don't think we can simply say that it goes without saying that they knew slaves would be used. The commissioners resolved to hire slaves over a year after development of the city began. They fired white workers before hiring slaves.

I am certain that Washington or Jefferson did not instruct them to do that. Both men, who had been frequently away from their plantations, thought slavery was a problem, both for the nation and personally for themselves as they managed their personal affairs. But the commissioners they appointed thought of slavery as a solution to the problems they faced. Certainly Washington and Jefferson knew that Commissioner Thomas Johnson felt that way. They also knew that with his forceful personality he would dominate the other two commissioners.

In this blog I am trying to share documents that help describe work in Washington in the 1790s highlighting the work of slaves when I can. Thanks to Commissioner Johnson being the only man in the office one day in 1794, three orders of the commissioners were written out by him in his difficult to read scrawl and authorized with his initials.

By using "Negro" rather than "slave" whenever they wrote about the slaves they hired, the commissioners put a better light on their policy. It was better form not use the word slave in the land of the free. As the third order in the scan below shows, Commissioners Johnson was matter-of-fact. He dashed off an ad for Baltimore and Easton, Maryland, newspapers soliciting "slaves." (I've never had time to search for copies this ad in newspapers so I don't know if "slaves" made it into print.)

With publication of Slave Labor in the Capital, I took my five part essay on the use of slaves on the public buildings off the web. Below the two scans of Johnson's orders, I've copied my considered opinion of Johnson as a commissioner that is in that web essay.

To be sure, Johnson thought the policy of hiring slaves was bowing to necessity. Due to slow sales of city lots and the inability to get a loan on city lots, the commissioners did not have money to spare and needed to get laborers as cheaply as possible. But for Johnson personally there may have been more involved. As we reconstruct the lives of the men in the Founders' generation we tend to see them as men of native talent confronting the novel challenges of creating a new nation. The c.v. of Thomas Johnson seems to show just this, as he combined high political office, and brief military service, during years of revolution. Then in a period of nation building he was a lawyer, administrator, entrepreneur, and while serving as commissioner, at the time a non paying job, Washington appointed him a justice of the Supreme Court, and wanted to make him Secretary of State.

In the flux of the life of someone so evidently prized as a problem solver, it is easy to overlook his own overriding sense of entitlement. As became clear shortly before he left the commission, Johnson intended to profit from the development of the federal city. While still a commissioner he advertised the sale of almost all his property in and around Frederick, Maryland, including "several good negro foremen." He explained to the President that he wanted "to avail myself of the moment which I saw and has almost past away to benefit myself by the rise of the city to which a long friendship for Potomack and every exertion in my power in its favor fairly intitle me." (Johnson to Washington, 23 Dec 1793) In a March 13, 1795 letter, his successor as commissioner, Gustavus Scott, hoped that a favorable opinion from Attorney General against Johnson's quest to buy water lots in the city would "have the happy effect of quieting the appetite of the little man." (Thornton Papers) This suggests a motive for his antipathy to L'Enfant who not only had the original proprietors in the city worked up in a white heat of expectation, but was amassing a work force with earth moving morale even in the dead of winter. The dismissal of L'Enfant cooled the proprietors who recognized that losing someone tied so closely to the venture lessened, for the moment at least, the value of their land. Hiring slaves chilled the expectations of workers. In this cool environment, the city would progress slowly, which allowed Johnson to bide his time until he sensed the time was right to buy city property.  

The right moment for Johnson came in late 1793 after he negotiated an extensive sale of 6,000 city lots to the Boston speculator James Greenleaf. Johnson was persuaded to sell lots so cheaply because Greenleaf also offered to raise a loan for the commissioners, pay for the lots in seven equal annual installments which would pay for work on the Capitol and President's house, build 140 brick houses in the city and, in private negotiations, to buy the private lands Johnson had offered for sale. (See my Tracking the Speculators: http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/speculators.html)

In tracing the genesis of the use of slaves in the city, it is clear to me that their employment was not a matter of policy initiated or even explicitly approved at the highest level, that is, by Washington and Jefferson. Our current conception of the nation's founders is one of men of grace, genius and gravitas hemmed in by the rude conditions of the times. We chaff at the idea that they could be manipulated by underlings. While Washington supported the commissioners and thought so much of Johnson that he asked him to take complete charge of the city, he never explicitly commented on the use of slaves. One might argue that their use of slaves was reassuring to a slave owner like the president, and, because of that, Johnson remained in Washington's good graces as others not interested in slaves, like L'Enfant and Ellicott, fell from favor. However, in his will Washington tried to free his slaves, which suggests that he harbored some doubts about the institution. In their book George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America, (Oxford U Press 1998) Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell note Washington's disgust at his own slaves. On February 16, 1794, he wrote from Philadelphia to his overseer William Pearce about them: "It appears to me, that to make even a chicken coop, would employ them all week; buildings that are run up here in two or three days (with not more hands) employ them a month or more." Combine that attitude with his constantly urging the commissioners to get emigrant workers, and one has to think that a propensity to employ slaves did not endear a man to Washington.