Slaves were also used at Virginia quarries to chop stone out of the ground for the walls of the building, and elsewhere to dig clay for bricks and saw timber for as little as 13 cents a day-wages that were most likely pocketed by their masters. Jesse Holland writes in his book Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History that slaves helped to dig the building’s foundation. As the Association points out, the federal government as an entity did not actually own the slaves, but rather hired them out from their masters-but, as Ethel Lewis noted in her 1937 history of the building, during the work some of them lived in “mean huts” on the grounds of what would later become the White House gardens.
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When construction on the White House began in 1792, the site’s location between slave states Virginia and Maryland meant the labor force was made up of enslaved people and free blacks, in addition to white laborers from the area and immigrants from Ireland and Scotland, according to the White House Historical Association. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. That is the story of this country, 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.
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