Where did the slaves' masters live?

The letters of the commissioners are mum when it comes to slave hire. This all happened well before the era when governments constantly studied themselves to make the bureaucracy more efficient. There was hardly any bureaucracy: three commissioners told one man to hire slaves. So in their records, there is not even a hint at why almost a third of the slaves hired came from such a distance.
Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 28

While the commissioners didn't write letters discussing slaves they hired, there are receipts in the records and also a few letters from masters authorizing others to collect the wages of their slaves. When I did my research, I didn't copy those letters since generally payrolls had that information. Of course now I wish I had copied everything.

Fortunately, others have shared copies. The images below were taken from the US Capitol Historical Society website: http://www.uschs.org/exhibit/exhibit-freedoms-shadow/dchc_00.htm

Valuable as it is, the website, in my opinion, doesn't quite milk the documents for all their significance. The documents suggest how far away the masters lived. The first receipt below is signed by Middleton Belt for his own slave, Peter, hired out to the commissioners.



Belt was a contractor who did hauling for the commissioners, and lived, I am pretty sure, in Georgetown. Another master Joseph Forrest signed for his slaves.

 

His brother Uriah was a prominent Georgetown landowner. Henry Turner collected the money for his father Joseph's slaves.


Was Turner another Georgetown resident who just sent his son over to collect the money?

Other receipts show that some masters lived far away. Valentine Reintzell wrote from Chaptico, Maryland, about 50 miles down river on the border of Charles and St. Mary's counties authorizing Zephaniah King to collect the money.



King in turn wrote authorizing Matthew Kennedy.

The next receipt for James Hollingshead who hired out Abram and Charles shows that James H. Blake collected the money that the two slaves earned for Hollingshead. Blake also collected the money for slaves hired out by Susannah Johnson and Francis Wolf. Hollingshead later became an overseer of the laborers at the Capitol. So he was not rich master. But James Blake was a man of some repute.

James Blake became the mayor of Washington, appointed by President James Madison. Blake had strong Virginia connections and lived there before moving back to Washington to become mayor, or so my spotty research suggests. Most of the slaves hired to work on the public buildings came from Maryland. There was a common law tradition restricting hiring out slaves in another state for over a year, but I wonder if Blake might have been a middleman who eased Virginia masters' fears and brought their slaves to Washington.

Another receipt shows Thomas Baden collecting the money for James Stone

And here is an interesting letter I missed, from Stone to the commissioner's clerk, Thomas Johnson, Jr., authorizing Baden to collect the money (though Stone seems to misspell Baden's name.) I'm kicking myself for missing this letter, which was available on-line well before I wrote my book, because of this phrase Stone used, asking for the money for "my Peoples labor in the Public Service."

In my research, I have found "people" used to refer to both a gentleman's staff of servants and to a contractor's employees. It did not necessarily have racial overtones as in the spiritual "Let my People Go." In this case, it clearly refers to black slaves. Yet, of course, when the Founders wrote "We the People of the United States..." in the Constitution, they were not thinking of their slaves.