Free laborers and slaves hired by the month

The laborers hired by the year, principally slaves, were evidently not kept on payrolls. Their wage did not vary unless they were absent for over a week. As these 1796 payrolls for overseers and laborers show, overseers and free laborers were on payrolls and during the building season monthly hires, usually more free laborers than slaves, were added to the payrolls.

The March 1796 payroll lists three overseers, including John S. Slye, who was hired by the commissioners as a reward for bringing 30 hired slaves to the city. Obviously those slaves, paid by the year, are not on this monthly payroll. One of the two laborers on the payroll, Jeremiah Holland, was, I think, the laborer referred to in a 1795 note as "Jerry the black man." 

The April payroll is as spare as the one in March and Slye is not on it. My guess is that he left or was fired.

I copied the July and August 1796 payrolls for overseers and laborers which shows how the number of laborers swelled. Also two new overseers are listed: William White and Samuel Smallwood. The July payroll shows that laborers got a raise in the middle of the month from 60 Maryland shillings a month to 75. However in the spring of 1797 they would again make 60 shillings a month so the raise was probably an inducement to continue working during the hot months.

These payrolls do not segregate the free laborers paid by the month from the slaves. Although members of the same family did work together, usually men with the same second name listed together were slaves and that the last name they shared is the last name of the master. Unfortuntely,  many of the payrolls were bigger than the photocopy machine at the Archives so I did not always include the signature of the person who received the monthly wages.

In my book I list hired slaves, masters, black laborers and white laborers so there you can find my ideas on the status of all the men on these payrolls. Below the 1796 payrolls, I show a scanned photocopy of a May 1797 payroll showing how a master or his agent signed for the receipt of his slaves' wages. The two men listed with Burnes as the last name were slaves of James Burnes.

1800 receipt for hauling laborers' camps

"In December 1794 a contractor was paid to haul five logs to the 'laborers' camp on Capitol Hill.' In 1800, when slave hire ended, a man was paid to haul the 'camps' off Capitol Hill and it took his crew and wagon two days to do it."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 26

In doing my research I couldn't afford to photocopy everything so I can't show the commissioners' order sending five logs to the laborers' camp. I did photocopy a letter the commissioners sent showing the logs were used to make huts. They asked Captain Williams, the man who hired and supplied laborers, to sell the logs of a roofless hut.

 

No one ever described the camps or huts the laborers lived in but there is a receipt for what was paid to a hauler to remove them from Capitol Square:

 

It strikes me as interesting that these were called the laborers camps, and not associate particularly with "Negroes", the word almost always use to denote a slave in the commissioners' records. I think that these camps housed both white and black, free and slave laborers. In 1796 the commissioners' surveyor made a map of Notley Young's plantation along the Potomac and noted that "Houses occupied by Negro's" were colored black on the map. 

One would like better evidence but I think we obliged to use what we have. As I mention in the book, in the 1790s the powers that be did not feel compelled to enforce segregation in the lower classes.

The other items in this short receipt are interesting too. The first and fifth help us mark when the commissioners and superintendent decided work on the Capitol and progressed enough so that carpenters could concentrate on finishing the interior of the White House. Also note that while the benches and old carpenters' shop were taken to the President's House Square, no destination is noted for the camps. It took 1 1/4 days to haul the work benches, 2 days to haul the old camps, and 3 3/4 days to haul the carpenters' shop. Can that help up us estimate the size of the camps? The carpenters shop was where teams of up to six pairs of sawyers cut lumber as well as where carpenters built what ever could be pre-assembled before installation in the building. Much of the winter work was done there so it could accommodate upwards of 30 men as they worked. In 1798 the commissioners hired upwards of 120 laborers. Judging from how quickly they were hauled away my guess is that the camps the laborers slept in were not extensive. If they had been someone might have described or at least noticed them.

Items three and four, hauling Spanish whiting and lime, show how calcium carbonate and calcium hydroxide were brought together for the men doing the plastering to use. That the lime came from Dr. May is intriguing. He had been the doctor hired by the commissioners to visit sick laborers in the hospital. Since doctors in the that era often dabbled in other things to make money maybe Dr. May had access to lime that he could sell to the commissioners. But the lime he had may have been given to him when the hospital was in operation so he could make casts for laborers with broken bones.

The final item is most interesting of all. Gerry Holland or Jerry Holland was a free black hired at least by 1794 who worked as a laborer with the surveyors and then the masons and finally as the commissioners' servant. I don't think the "materials" hauled for his house were building materials but rather furniture and personal belongings that would make a small stone house vacated by stone workers habitable by Holland and perhaps his family.

Finally the man who did the hauling, Zepheniah Prater earned the commissioners' ire when he took back the slave he hired out to them. More on that, maybe, in another post. That Prater hired out a slave suggests that other slaves he owned helped him as he hauled materials.