4 national monuments with cruelly ironic slave history
It isn’t just the White House, folks
“Was the White House built by slaves?” has been one of the most Googled phrases since Michelle Obama’s powerful DNC speech (yes, it’s true). Surprise, surprise, it’s hardly an outlier in American history. These four national historic symbols also have very dark beginnings — icons meant to represent freedom that are built on its very antithesis.
THE STATUE OF FREEDOM, U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING
It’s been known for quite some time that the second most prominent building in our nation’s capital — the U.S. Capitol Building — was also built largely on the backs of African slaves. At the time, in the District of Columbia, the slave labor force was disproportionately large, with approximately one white laborer for every three slave laborers. In Black Men Built the Capitol, Jesse Holland writes: “We now know that slaves baked the bricks used for the building’s foundation and walls, sawed lumber for the interior wall and floors, dug the trenches for the foundation, worked the Virginia quarries where the sandstone was cut, and laid the stones that hold up the Capitol to this day.”
Most ironic is that the Statue of Freedom that sits on top of the Capitol dome is believed to have been erected with the indispensable help of a slave named Philip Reid. Sculptor Thomas Crawford was commissioned to top the newly finished building. After several run ins with slave owner Jefferson Davis (future president of the Confederacy) over his desire to make the statue a freed slave (which was nixed), a 19-foot plaster mold of the statue was shipped from Rome. The Italian craftsman who was ordered to take the mold apart refused to do so without more pay, arguing that he was the only one who could do so without injuring it. Reid, an enslaved “skilled laborer” who had worked in a foundry his entire life, devised an ingenious pulley system to gently do so. “The black master-builder lifted the ponderous uncouth masses,” the New York Tribune reported, “and bolted them together, joint to joint, piece by piece, til they blended into the majestic ‘Freedom’ who today lifts her head in the blue clouds above Washington, invoking a benediction on this imperiled Republic!”
FANEUIL HALL
First called the “Cradle of Liberty” by James Otis, Jr. in an address dedicating the hall to the cause of liberty in 1763, Faneuil Hall — part of Boston’s “Freedom Trail” — was the site of many great orators’ passionate speeches about liberty in the days before and during the Revolution, including Samuel Adams. Colonialists met at Faneuil Hall to discuss and protest the catalytic Stamp Act, and in 1772, the first Committee of Correspondence was established at Faneuil Hall — sometimes considered the origin of the colonial rebellion. On November 29, 1773 the town of Boston voted there against the tea tax, resolving ‘as the town of Boston, in a full legal meeting, and “resolved to do the utmost in its power to prevent the landing of the tea.” Later the Hall became a site for Abolitionist protests. Frederick Douglass himself even made several speeches there.
That’s ironic, given Peter Faneuil’s history as one of Boston’s most powerful slave traders. Euphemistically called a “wealthy merchant” by many sources, he was in fact part of a slave trading family who owned a large warehouse and slave market on Merchant Row. Faneuil and his uncle Andrew were part of the notorious “Triangle Trade,” a merchant slave trade route from New England to Africa, Africa to the West Indies, and West Indies back to the American colonies. Faneuil put several slave ships to sea, including one infamously known as the “Jolly Bachelor.” It was the wealth earned from this trade that financed Faneuil Hall, built by Peter Faneuil as a marketplace for the city of Boston in 1742.
FORT SUMTER
The site of the first shots fired in the Civil War, Fort Sumter has become a national symbol of freedom in our cultural history.
One of a series of forts on the coast built with slave labor, construction on the fort had first begun in 1829 and was still ongoing in 1861 when the Confederates took the fort — in boats rowed by slaves — from its commander, Maj. Robert Anderson. A workforce of some 500 slaves were put to work reinforcing the fort, filling casements with sand, strengthening walls, and building new structures. A number of these slaves were killed during the work, though exactly how many is unknown. The fort was used by the military through World War II, then decommissioned and given to the National Parks Service. Today it remains a central symbol of the Civil War and America’s path towards abolishing slavery.
THE LIBERTY BELL
Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell is one of our country’s most powerful symbols of freedom, with ties to both the colonial Revolution as well as the Abolitionists, who adopted it as a symbol for their movement because of its inscription: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” But in 2002, during the construction of a $9m tourist pavilion for the Liberty Bell, the remnants of an unsavory past were discovered. During the planning for the pavilion, a local historian showed that in fact the new site was directly on top of the original President’s House — or more specifically, the Presidents’ slave quarters.
“In a year, when visitors enter the new $9 million pavilion to view the Liberty Bell, they will tread directly over ground where George Washington’s slaves toiled, slept, suffered and plotted escape during the eight years of his presidency,” reported an article at the time. After much outcry from historians and a heated debate, a compromise was reached, with the National Park Service erecting a federal exhibit around the President’s House and the experience of the slaves who were held there.
Maybe it’s appropriate the Liberty Bell is cracked.
