The White House that slaves helped build
Planners tried to import European workers, but ‘turned to African-Americans’
WASHINGTON— When Michelle Obama said in her prime-time televised address to the Democratic convention Monday night that the White House was built by slaves, she was citing a little-discussed fact that dramatized her own African-American family’s place in history.
But the first lady’s assertion was met with derision and disbelief by some, who questioned whether it was true and said her choice to mention it amounted to an attempt to divide the country on racial lines.
There is little dispute among historians that slaves had a role in the building of the White House. According to information posted on the White House Historical Association’s website, planners had initially intended to import workers from Europe but had trouble recruiting any, so they “turned to AfricanAmerican — enslaved and free — to provide the bulk of labour that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings.”
The association said slaves worked at the government’s quarry in Aquia, Virginia, to cut the stone for the walls of the White House. The construction team included white labourers from Maryland and Virginia and immigrants from Ireland, Scotland and other parts of Europe, the association said.
Jesse Holland, a Washington-based journalist who wrote The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House, says most people have never thought about how the president’s house and other important government buildings were constructed, but historians have long acknowledged their role.
“If you think about it, it would be pretty obvious: the White House is a neoclassical mansion that was built in the South during slavery, and a majority of the mansions that were built in the South during slavery used slaves,” Holland said in an interview.
“We as Americans build up a myth of our country, and a lot of times, we don’t want to look behind that myth,” he added. “For me, finding out the truth and acknowledging the participation of everyone in the construction of this country just makes our country richer.”
Obama was reaching for a similar point Monday, emphasizing as her husband often does that the strengths of the United States spring in part from its ugly and painful past.
She said America’s story is “the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters — two beautiful, intelligent, black young women — playing with their dogs on the White House lawn,” Obama said.
It was not the first time the she has used the line — it also appeared in a commencement address she delivered in June at the City College of New York. It got more attention Monday night, when Obama delivered a speech viewed by many more Americans amid an ever-more-intense presidential campaign.