Glimpses of Revolutionary Camp Followers

In recent months Susan Holloway Scott at Two Nerdy History Girls shared a couple of artifacts that offer glimpses of the families who traveled with eighteenth-century armies.

In the collections of the Library of Congress is a panoramic view of the Hudson River in watercolor by Pierre L’Enfant. That includes a few vignettes of the American camp at West Point, New York, in 1782.

Scott notes:

A woman is shown holding a tin kettle for three soldiers to eat directly from it, while an interested (and likely hungry!) dog waits nearby. To their left are two girls climbing up the hillside. Again according to the exhibition’s notes, documents from 1782 list 150 women and children at West Point in addition to about 3,600 soldiers. Wives, daughters, and sweethearts, these women sewed, washed laundry, and supplied food for the men - important if often overlooked contributions to the military effort.

Go to Scott’s posting for close-ups of the relevant portions of the panorama.

Last year she shared an artifact owned by the New-York Historical Society, shown above: a ceramic lamb, a few inches long, that a child probably lost while camping with the British army near New York City.

Both these artifacts are on loan to Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, now offering an exhibit titled “Among His Troops: Washington’s War Tent in a Newly Discovered Watercolor.” L’Enfant is also credited with the long panorama at the center of that exhibit, which will be up until 19 February.

Washington’s “Dishy Letter” about L’Enfant

Last month the Washington Post reported that local real estate developer Albert H. Small had bought what it called “George Washington’s dishy letter about Pierre Charles L’Enfant” at a Christie’s auction. Small plans to donate his entire collection about the first President, including this letter, to George Washington University.

That’s appropriate since Washington and L’Enfant worked together on developing a new national capital. Today we remember L’Enfant as that city’s principal planner. But in fact Washington lost faith in the Frenchman early in the project, which for a long time was a mess. Unfortunately, when it comes to unabashed gossip this letter is more disappointing than “dishy.”

In January 1792 the President had written: “The conduct of Majr. L’Enfant and those employed under him, astonishes me beyond measure! and something more than even appears, must be meant by them!” Bob Arnebeck, author of Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800, suggests that part of Washington’s discomfort might have been due to L’Enfant being gay; more about that here.

The federal government fired L’Enfant in February 1792, and months passed without much progress. On 30 November the President wrote this recently purchased letter to David Stuart, one of the government’s three commissioners overseeing the new city:

You will consider what I am now about to say as a private communication; the object of which is only to express more freely than I did in my last letter to the Commissioners, the idea that is entertained of the necessity of appointing a Superintendant of the execution of the plans & measures which shall be resolved upon by the Commissioners of the Federal City—one who shall always reside there—and being a man of skill & judgment—of industry & integrity, would from having a view of the business constantly before his eyes be enabled to conduct it to greater advantage than the Commissioners can possibly do unless they were to devote their whole time to it. . . .

But where, you may ask, is the character to be found who possesses these qualifications? I frankly answer I know not! Major L’Enfant (who it is said is performing wonders at the new town of Patterson [New Jersey]) if he could have been restrained within proper bounds and his temper was less untoward, is the only person with whose turn to matters of this sort I am acquainted, that I think fit for it. There may, notwithstanding, be many others although they are unknown to me, equally so.

Mr. [Samuel] Blodget seems to be the person on whom many eyes are turned, & among others who look that way, are some of the Proprietors. He has travelled, I am told, a good deal in Europe, & has turned his attention (according to his account) to architecture & matters of this kind. He has staked much on the issue of the Law establishing the permanent residence; and is certainly a projecting genius, with a pretty general acquaintance. To which may be added, if he has any influence in this country, it must be in a quarter where it is most needed; and where, indeed, an antidote is necessary to the poison which Mr. F———s C——t is spreading, by insinuations, that the accomplishment of the Plan is no more to be expected than the fabric of a vision, & will vanish in like manner.

In addition, Washington wrote, Thomas Jefferson “has a high opinion of Mr [Étienne Sulpice] Hallet, but whether Mr Hallet has qualities, & is sufficiently known to fit him for a general Superintendency I cannot pretend even to give an opinion upon.” Both Blodget and Hallet ended up working on the federal capital, and both ran into trouble doing so. L’Enfant ended up suing for back pay.

As for “Mr. F———s C——t,” that was Francis Cabot, a merchant from Boston who had moved to Philadelphia in the 1790s. He was somehow involved in developing the federal city. In February and March 1792, Washington and Stuart wrote each other letters warning of rumors that Cabot had bribed his way into the business and was skimming off government contracts. A man named Samuel Davidson later testified that in 1793 Cabot had charge of L’Enfant’s trunks and “the first plan exhibited of the city of Washington, by Gen. Washington.” Was Cabot the man of that name born in Salem in 1757 and dying in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1832?

Enslaved Labor and Free Labor in the Capital City

Last month the Huffington Post ran an essay by author Fergus M. Bordewich titled “Full Circle: Inaugurating Our Country’s New President in The City Built by Slaves.” It described how enslaved laborers built the Capitol where President Barack Obama was inaugurated, with reference to specific workers.

Bob Arnebeck, author of Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800, shared comments about that essay with the H-Slavery email list. I asked Bob if I could rerun his remarks as a contribution from a guest blogger because they showed how complex slavery could be in practice, especially when bosses were also trying to work with skilled free laborers and to manage a very large project. So here’s Bob:

Certainly this is the time to draw a sharp contrast between the scene around the Capitol on January 20, 2009, and, say, June 20, 1795, when work on the buildings in Washington was in full swing. However, in his Huffington Post article Bordewich misses many of the nuances of slave hire in Washington in the 1790s.

Pierre L’Enfant was the first man in charge of the federal building project in the city. Though French by birth, he had a wide acquaintance with slavery, having served in the southern campaign during the Revolution. There is no evidence that he hired slaves to work in Washington. Indeed, he had a group of 75 free workers with high morale as evidenced by their continuing work even after the commissioners ordered them to stop. They took orders only from L’Enfant, which is why the commissioner wanted L’Enfant fired.

The Capitol and White House could have been built by free labor and likely would have been if George Washington had accommodated L’Enfant so that he didn’t leave the project in early 1792. The commissioners left in charge were obsessed with fixing their costs. Slave hire was part of their effort to fix the cost of unskilled labor.

White and free black laborers worked on the same terms as slaves. The commissioners never threatened to replace free skilled workers with slaves. They tried to control the cost of skilled labor by trying to hire on a piecework basis. Scottish masons refused. Then came a crew of Irish masons who were amenable. It was not so much free labor that the commissioners didn’t like—it was wage labor.

That said, the pieceworking Irish flattered the slaveholding commissioners by requiring the commissioners to provide enough hired slaves to assist them—i.e., move the stone into place. The commissioners had perfected their system: the wages of the men moving the stone were fixed as low as possible, and the skilled workers would only get paid for the work they did, not for the time wasted waiting for stone to be hauled up Capitol Hill by slaves with no incentive to work hard. The system didn’t last long: the Irish fussed about the slaves being too slow, but then the masons skimped on mortar and the walls they worked on soon fell down.

As for the working conditions of slaves, Bordewich paints too grim a picture. They lived in camps, but so did many white laborers—there was no city there, after all. The slaves got free medical care. Indeed, when there was a smallpox scare, some slaves requested inoculation, which they received, its cost deducted from the wages paid to their masters. There was a hospital with a visiting white doctor and a resident white nurse.

Slaves worked the same hours as everybody else, and white overseers ate the same food as the slaves, and complained about it. The slaves got paid a shilling for work on Sundays and holidays, and several slave sawyers got incentive wages of a shilling a day, making a pound and ten shillings in August 1795, for example—almost $4.

Ironically, the commissioners who thought slave hire would help control their cost were blindsided by inflation at the end of the decade. Feeding slaves became expensive. So while at one time there were may have been up to 120 slaves working for the government, toward the end of the project they hired fewer slaves.

Finally, in his article Bordewich mentioned a Jerry Holland, a free black who was refused a raise even though his supervisor promised one. Bordewich has Holland disappearing in the yellowing records, a victim of racism. From my research it appears that Holland did continue working in the city. He wound up as the commissioners’ messenger. He never got his raise, though—still paid the same wage as the hired slaves.

Bob Arnebeck has created a website with essays updating Through a Fiery Trial. He was one of the first historians I saw using the web this way, and I’ve been looking for a reason to point to his site.