Black Hands, White House

Slave Labor and the Making of America

Renee K. Harrison

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506474670
• eBook ISBN: 9781506474687
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African American History

Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities--namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, among others--enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era. Critical to this study are also examples of enslaved laborers' role in building Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon. Subsequently, their labor also constructed the nation's capital city, Federal City (later renamed Washington, DC), its seats of governance--the White House and US Capitol--and other federal sites and memorials.

Given the enslaved community's contribution to the US, this work questions the absence of memorials on the National Mall that honor enslaved, Black-bodied people. Harrison argues that such monuments are necessary to redress the nation's historical disregard of Black people and America's role in their forced migration, violent subjugation, and free labor. The erection of monuments commissioned by the US government would publicly demonstrate the government's admission of the US's historical role in slavery and human-harm, and acknowledgment of the karmic debt owed to these first Black-bodied builders of America.

Black Hands, White House appeals to those interested in exploring how nation-building and selective memory, American patriotism and hypocrisy, racial superiority and mythmaking are embedded in US origins and monuments, as well as in other memorials throughout the transatlantic European world. Such a study is necessary, as it adds significantly to the burgeoning and in-depth conversation on racial disparity, race relations, history-making, reparations, and monument erection and removal.

Part I

Captured and Caged

And Still They Built New Worlds

Chapter One

Black Bodies

White Minds, and the Irony of Liberty

The Enslaved Community’s Contribution to the American Economy

When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

—The Declaration of Independence

This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

—Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

When Thomas Jefferson, the youngest member of the Second Continental Congress, penned the iconic words “WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal,” slavery was well underway in the mainland North American colonies. The first draft of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was written during the second meeting after members of the First Continental Congress, the governing body of the thirteen colonies, convened to discuss their rights as white men and their quest for independence from the tyrannies of Britain. Delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies were present to take a stand against a British monarchy whose financial backing and signed decrees they once sought to bolster their acquisition of lands, ships, commodities, and humans. Georgia officials chose not to send delegates because of their reliance on Great Britain’s militia to help them overtake the Muscogee Creek peoples.

The Muscogee Creek peoples were commonly referred to as the Creeks, a term created by Europeans to signify those Indigenous peoples (Native Americans) living at the time in river valleys throughout Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.1 In the Georgia region, over 675,000 acres along the Ocmulgee River in Macon were at stake, and Georgians, in a battle against the Muscogee peoples, turned to Great Britain for support. Georgia’s absence at the First Continental Congress did not impede the gathering of the delegates from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia. The men representing these twelve colonies were resolute in freeing the colonies from Great Britain’s control and forming an independent government.

During the Second Continental Congress meeting, five delegates—Thomas Jefferson (Virginia), John Adams (Massachusetts), Robert R. Livingston (New York), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), and Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania)—were selected to form a committee tasked with crafting a written response to King George’s tyrannical behavior, especially that relating to the 1774 Coercive Acts (also called Intolerable Acts). These acts, imposed by Great Britain on the colonies, were designed to punish the colonists for capital offenses, such as the 1773 confrontation at Boston Harbor, often referred to as the Boston Tea Party.

On December 16, 1773, Samuel Adams and other colonists, known as the Sons of Liberty, disguised themselves as Native Americans (offensively described by Europeans as Mohawk Indians) and boarded three ships docked in Boston Harbor. Their mission was to conceal their identities while staging a protest against the British Parliament’s levying of taxes against the colonies for commodities exported from Europe to the thirteen colonies. The colonists saw the taxation system as Britain’s attempt to exert power and control over them, as was evident in Great Britain’s passage of the 1773 Tea Act, which permitted Parliament to tax imported tea and also required colonists to purchase tea solely from British companies. Adams and the other protesters demanded that the ships and their cargo of tea return to Britain. The British refused, and in response, the Sons of Liberty threw overboard and destroyed 342 chests of tea owned by the East India Company, a powerful British trading corporation founded under Queen Elizabeth I by royal charter in 1600. As a result of these actions, the British Parliament closed the Boston port to trade and in 1744 imposed the Coercive Acts. The acts included the Boston Port Act (which outlawed trade in Boston Harbor), the Quartering Act (which mandated housing for British soldiers stationed in the colonies), the Administration of Justice Act (which sanctioned extradition to Europe of British officials charged in the colonies with capital crimes), and the Massachusetts Government Act (which repealed the 1691 Massachusetts Charter and granted a royally appointed governor power over the Province of Massachusetts Bay). The colonists’ discontent with these and other punitive actions became the impetus for the Continental Congress’s efforts to free themselves from Great Britain’s tyrannical rule and the resultant Declaration of Independence. The European immigrants were essentially at war with their own government.

Jefferson, the most gifted writer among the five delegates, crafted a response with nearly twenty indictments against the British Crown, including charging King George with attempting “to establish ‘a detestable & insupportable tyranny.’”2 The king’s actions, they declared, gave way to “the cause of America’s separation from Britain.”3 The Declaration of Independence could be seen as a freedom-by-war-if-necessary manifesto. Yet the irony of the colonists’ declaration was its patriotic tenor and legitimation of freedom from oppression for themselves without acknowledging their complicity in the oppression of others. The majority of the delegates were white Christian men who, despite their language of freedom, were actively engaged in massacring the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and dispossessing them of their occupied lands. They were also actively engaged in owning and selling Black-bodied people for the purpose of building and buttressing a New World infrastructure and economy in both the North and the South. At the time Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, slavery had been flourishing in the American colonies for nearly 155 years. Though omitted from historical narratives about America’s greatness, Black people were foundational to European progress in the American colonies and throughout the New World.

In his speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Frederick Douglass highlights another paradox inherent in the Declaration of Independence, a document that espouses ideas of freedom for white colonists with capital and voting power. Douglass implies that the declaration’s “one People” and “WE” clauses were inclusive only of its fifty-six white male signers and those Christian European immigrants, now self-made citizens, residing within the mainland North American colonies. At the time of its conception, the framers had the freedoms and privileges of themselves and their descendants in mind. Douglass makes this “WE” (“one People”) onus clear when he writes, “The Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. . . . Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold . . . we are called upon to prove that we are men!”4 Douglass is clear the declaration was not written for those enslaved men, women, and children laboring against their will throughout the American colonies. The framers sought independence from British oppression while simultaneously “nationalizing slavery in its most horrible and re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Black Voices Calling
• Part I. Captured and Caged: And Still They Built New Worlds
• Part II. Blessing the Wings: A Call for a National Memorial
• Notes
• Index