Horses and hauling contractors

"One contractor supplied wagons drawn by four horses at four dollars a day, two horse carts for two dollars a day and a single horse cart for ten shillings a day."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capitol, pages 80, 81

That contractor was Joseph Dove and the source of that information about carts was a March 31, 1800, letter that he wrote to the commissioners which I scanned below. The reason for the letter was to ask for more money since the cost of food had doubled since those rates for hiring wagons were established in 1793.

The commissioners' records have many letters that invite a page or two of commentary which I couldn't expound in the book. I noted the information in this letter mainly because it is one of the few references to horses used in the city and I thought it important to establish that horses were there to do the hauling essential to getting building materials to the building sites. 

If Dove had complained that the higher cost of living made it more difficult to feed his slaves as well as his horses, I would have made much more of the letter, but he didn't. The simple reason for that may well be that he didn't use slaves. According to the 1800 census Dove owned 3 slaves, but his household had 5 white children 10 years old or younger so those slaves may have been house servants under his wife's orders and not on Joseph Dove's work crew.

It is easy to assume that as the city grew more whites began to rely on slaves, but Dove's letter reminds us of the inflation at the time that added to the burden of owning slaves doing non-agricultural work. The cost of feeding them rose while, as Dove points out, what they earned for their master remained the same. So assuming Dove struggled just to get by on the short term, he might have preferred hiring free laborers as needed rather than spend the capital, which he probably didn't have, to buy an able bodied slave that he would have to feed every day as long as he owned him.