As some Americans fret about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to enable President Donald Trump to have a fantasy ballroom, complaints on the left abound that the ‘’People’s House” is being defaced. As litigation over the kerfuffle plays out, let us recall that shamefulness and disgrace attached to the White House from its inception.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama made known to the nation, in her address at the 2024 Democratic convention, that the “People’s House” was built largely by Black slaves. For a “republic” about to celebrate our semiquincentennial, that fact is not trivial. To coin a phrase, “Black lives matter”
Slaveholding President George Washington hoped to occupy the White House, and he exercised overall authority over its construction in the late 1790s. The initial idea was to employ Irish and Scotch immigrant workers for the building undertaking. Not enough White workers could be attracted. So enslaved Black craftsmen and laborers were hired out by nearby Virginia and Maryland slaveholders. Of course, the slaveholders—not the slaves—billed and were paid for the bondsmen’s sweat without equity to construct the executive mansion.
That slave sweat included clearing the land, stone quarrying, brick making and laying, and other 18th-century labor and building trades. Those slaves who inconveniently died while building were buried in unmarked graves.
Invoices maintained in the National Archives document billing by enslavers for the carpentry services of slaves Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel. Financial records in the Archives further reveal that some 400 other slaves helped build the White House. Despite his aspirations, George Washington never occupied the White House. Non-slaveholding President John Adams became the first White House occupant on November 1, 1800, when the building was near completion.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor had slaves working at the White House. Thomas Jefferson was the largest presidential slaveholder with 600 enslaved at his Monticello and Poplar Forest plantations. He brought slaves to work at the White House: Ursula Granger Hughes, Edith Hern Fossett, Frances Gillette Hearn and John Freeman. Thomas Jefferson enslaved mostly teenagers at the White House in the 19th century.
The East Wing of the White House was constructed in 1902 during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration renovated the space during his presidency in 1942. Jim Crow racial segregation of American life persisted during the chief executive leadership of both Roosevelts, decades after American chattel slavery ended.
Over the last 10 years or so, monuments and statues commemorating Ku Klux Klansmen, traitorous confederate officers, segregationists, and other symbols of White supremacy have been demolished/deconstructed/removed as a salute to beliefs that dishonor American racial hierarchy. But America being America, the pushback against dishonoring racist American totems is powerful.
The current administration has required the United States Military Academy at West Point to honor the deadliest traitor in American history. The Academy was ordered last year to display anew a 20-foot portrait of the 1829 alumnus, Robert E. Lee, that the President Joe Biden administration had removed. General Robert E. Lee accounted for more than 240,000 Union casualties of the Civil War.
In Florida, legislation has passed to render legally actionable teaching the uncomfortable truth of the nation’s history of racism.
As the age-old war continues to play out between the customary opposing combatants, a fresh reality is setting in. Some of us take issue with an edifice that was built by slaves being portrayed as the main edifice to recognize American democracy.
In fact, it is fine with me if the whole historic building—not just the already decimated 20th-century East Wing—is demolished and replaced with a White House built by a racially integrated unionized workforce. Under that construct, those doing the work of creating White House II would receive their share of the compensation—building under justice.
Of course, the big-budget destruction underway to build a new party space at the White House—now estimated to cost $400 million—is not anchored to such a lofty aspiration as justice. And the East Wing of the White House is not destroyed because of the shameful connection to the White House and slavery. But it should have been, and the rest of the White House and the slavery-built Capitol as well.
(Robert Hill is an award-winning Pittsburgh writer and communications consultant.)
