Tunnicliff's diary.

The Englishman William Tunnicliff and his wife managed a hotel for the Philadelphia speculator John Nicholson. They hoped to make their establishment on 6th near Pennsylvania Ave SE the center of Capitol Hill life. Tunnicliff's ambitious plans were premised on a steady flow of cash and credit from Nicholson. Like Lewis Deblois, William Prentiss and William Lovering, Tunnicliff wrote frequently to Nicholson begging for money, usually in vain.

Tunnicliff had the brilliant idea to send Nicholson what he called portions of his diary that noted every instance of his lacking money to carry on his and Nicholson's business. In these diary entries that are in Nicholson's papers, I did not find the word "slave" or "black." That is not surprising. White people in the 1790s rarely wrote about slaves and blacks in general or as a part of the community.

In 1797 upwards of 90 hired slaves worked on the Capitol and White House. Most of them lived in a log hut camp on Capitol Hill. But they were not a part of Tunnicliff's world. Judging from his diary, he owned two slaves. The diary mentions "our boy Sandy" ordered about by his wife, and "my man Tom."

As the diary shows Tunnicliff was overseeing construction which entailed hiring laborers. Since he paid those men directly for their day's work, they were not slaves. There is no mention of their having masters. Only commissioners had the financial resources to hire a large number of slaves. Nicholson did not give Tunnicliff enough money to finance his operations let alone allow him to hire slaves. As the diary shows, providing bread to workers substituted for actually paying them.

The preferred way to always have someone around who would do the menial tasks that always popped up in a rather inconvenient city was to buy a slave who would do the work and who could be sold when, as I assumed happened in Tunnicliff's case, his Washington dreams ended and he moved north.

In time slave hire in the city would become more sophisticated. Some slaves would hired themselves out. But in 1797 whites like Tunnicliff, Deblois and Lovering who tried to establish themselves in the city bought slaves as servants and to do odd jobs.

(You can find larger images of the letters at the end of the post.)

How much plastering did the slaves do?

"Plastering began at the Capitol in the fall of 1798 as soon as the interior rooms were bricked and lathed. Work continued through the fall of 1800. The contractor, John Kearney started with 10 workers. The commissioners ordered him to hire more and gave him 3 more hired slaves to help. On average, 4 or 5 of them worked with the plasterers, amounting to 65 ½ months of work. Here too the commissioners charged the contractor $16 a month for the hands. We don’t know exactly what the hired slaves did save that in June 1799 the commissioners ordered a ½ pint of whiskey a day for the slaves boiling plaster of Paris."

Quote from Slave Labor in the Capital, page 148

We do not have the payrolls of the contractors so we don't know how many slaves they used, if any, unless, as in the case of Kearney, they hired slaves from the commissioners. We know that slaves worked as plasterers. Clotworthy Stephenson, an associate of James Hoban, who lived near the White House noted that his runaway slave Will was both a bricklayer and plasterer. 

While I found little information on Kearney, there was another contractor who came to the city in 1796 to do plastering, Hugh Densley. He contracted with Robert Morris and John Nicholson to plaster the houses the speculators were having built mostly in southwest Washington. The speculators arranged for Densley to rent 21 "temporary buildings". He would pay the rent with plasterers' work.

There were different rents for the "temporary buildings," varying from $12.16 to $60.76. How the rents for temporary structures likely made with wood could vary so much is puzzling, probably had to do with floor space. 

I share this document from Nicholson's papers for two reasons. It shows the scale of Morris's and Nicholson's operations and shows that skilled workers had to be housed some likely with their families. I think it more likely that Densley recruited free workers from Baltimore or other cities to come to work for him, rather than recruiting slaves from area masters. Both free and slave workers had to be housed but slaves could be forced to sleep in spaces that would have cost Densley far less money. I should add that the bankruptcies of Morris and Nicholson probably stymied the fulfillment of the bargain described in the letter. The whole story might be found in Nicholson's papers.

The Dazzling Greatness of James Greenleaf in 1794

"Morris was the most famous of the speculators, famed as the Financier of the American Revolution. But in 1794 Greenleaf had the most cash on hand and directed their operations in the city. Only 28 years old in 1793, he had dazzled Europe and America by making huge profits when speculating with Dutch banks on the American Revolutionary War debt."

To help run his Washington operations, James Greenleaf hired his brother-in-law William Cranch. Cranch was also the nephew of Vice President John Adams. In a letter to his father written shortly after arriving in Washington, Cranch described Greenleaf's coterie of French advisers and then extolled Greenleaf. Both Greenleaf and Cranch were from Massachusetts. Cranch replaced Nathaniel Appleton who was too sick to continue working for Greenleaf in Washington. Greenleaf met the Frenchmen during his travels from Europe to the US.