Who gets paid when there is no money?

"In November 1797, they had not paid their workers since September. With funds so scarce, Hoban's padding his salary thanks to his slaves' work may have angered free workers."

 Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 109

A major frustration of  my research was not finding any explicit statements of policy in regards to paying for hired slaves. In September 1797 the commissioners could not pay their workers. In the following letter they alerted Hoban at the White House and Hadfield at the Capitol and told them to tell the workers and then prioritized who would get paid first once money became available.

Obviously slave masters had the least need of the money. They had no current expenses for the upkeep of the slaves they hired out. The commissioners paid workers by the month. In the letter they give paying them priority over quarterly "salaries." At this time the master's of many hired slaves were paid every quarter. But "salaries" may have referred only to what supervisors, like Hoban and Hadfield, and the commissioners got paid. The letter also mentions "small debts to laborers and people residing at a distance." Did that refer to the shilling a day paid to slave sawyers and money owed to masters, many of whom lived outside of the city?

I am afraid that the root of my problem is that the commissioners, in this case William Thorton and Gustavus Scott simply did not have that firm a grasp of the work force and they were careful to only make generalizations. They rarely got down to specifics in their letters. But in November they did ban the hiring of slave carpenters. Since all who had been hired belonged to Hoban and his friends, I raise the possibility that the lack of money contributed to the commissioners banning the slave carpenters. Or put it this way in the context of this letter: despite being paid a quarterly salary, Hoban still was among those first in line to get paid because he received the money paid to the slaves he hired as carpenters. All speculation, of course, but I think looking at the issue from many angles helps us get a feel for what was going on.

In making the photocopy I cut off the bottom line of the first page below