The cornerstone of American democracy was laid by hands that history chose to forget. Between 1792 and 1800, more than four hundred enslaved Black men, women, and children built what would become the most famous residence in the United States, yet their names were deliberately erased from official records, their bodies buried in unmarked graves scattered across the District of Columbia. For two centuries, the government has maintained that this erasure was not accidental but a matter of policy, a systematic campaign to conceal the brutal truth behind the nation’s most powerful symbol.
The discovery that shattered this carefully constructed silence occurred in 1901, when a restoration team working beneath the foundations of the East Wing unearthed something that forced an immediate halt to all excavation. The supervisor on site issued a swift and absolute order: workers were to remain silent, and the discovery was to be covered up without delay. What they found suggested that the original construction involved far more than mere labor exploitation, pointing instead to a systematic concealment of deaths that occurred under circumstances the young republic could not afford to acknowledge.
The bones were reburied, the secret sealed, and the truth buried once more beneath the weight of institutional denial.
To understand why these discoveries were so dangerous, one must first understand how the project began and who was forced to build it. In 1790, Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital, but the Residence Act of July of that year mandated the creation of a new federal district along the Potomac River. President Washington himself selected the precise location in January 1791, a ten-mile square carved from land lying between Maryland and Virginia.
The site was not the magnificent landscape depicted in later paintings. It was a swampy, malaria-infested tract teeming with mosquitoes, oppressively humid in summer, and dotted with scattered tobacco plantations worked by enslaved people who had cultivated that land for generations.
The commissioners appointed to oversee construction faced an immediate and pressing problem: the federal government had no money. The entire project, including the President’s House, the Capitol building, the department buildings, and the roads, was estimated to cost four hundred thousand dollars, an astronomical sum for a nation still mired in Revolutionary War debt. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson proposed a solution that seemed elegant in its simplicity: hire enslaved workers.
Their masters would receive rent, typically five dollars per month per enslaved person, while the workers themselves would receive nothing beyond basic food and shelter. Jefferson argued in a letter dated March 1792 that this arrangement would keep costs under control while ensuring the work proceeded without delay or complaint.
The chief architect, James Hoban, an Irish immigrant who had designed several prominent buildings in Charleston, submitted plans for the President’s House in July 1792. His design drew heavily from Leinster House in Dublin, featuring Georgian symmetry and ambitious scale. When Washington reviewed the plans, he insisted the building be made fifteen times larger than Hoban’s original proposal.
This expansion required far more labor, materials, and time. The commissioners sent notices throughout Maryland and Virginia. Slaveholders could rent their enslaved workers to the federal construction project.
Compensation was guaranteed, and the government promised to return the workers safely. That promise proved worthless.
By November 1792, approximately one hundred and fifty enslaved workers had been assembled at the construction site. They came from plantations throughout the region, from Anne Arundel County, Charles County, Montgomery County, and Prince George’s County. The names of their masters appear in the commissioners’ payment records: Daniel Carroll, Notley Young, Samuel Davidson, William Brent.
But the names of the workers themselves were conspicuously absent. The records show only first names, sometimes not even that, merely notations such as “Negro man” or “Negro boy,” followed by an estimated age. Tom, age twenty-three.
Peter, age nineteen. A boy called Harry, perhaps fourteen. A man named Lenn, the records noted, was over fifty, too old for such demanding labor, but he was hired anyway because his master needed the monthly payment.
Work began immediately despite the approaching winter. The first task involved clearing the site, removing trees, draining the swampy ground, and digging the foundations. This meant working in waist-deep, freezing mud using only shovels, axes, and sheer physical strength.
The commissioners’ letters from that first winter briefly note the difficulties the Black workers faced due to weather, but they provide no details about the nature of those difficulties. A memorandum dated December 14, 1792, mentions the replacement of three workers who could no longer continue, without explaining why they could not or what became of them.
One worker who left a trace in the records was a man named Isaac, hired from a plantation owner named Samuel Hanson. Isaac was a skilled carpenter, one of several enslaved artisans brought to the project for their expertise. Commissioner correspondence shows Isaac worked on interior carpentry throughout 1793 and 1794, and that Hanson received payment for Isaac’s labor until November 1794.
After that, Isaac’s name disappears from the records. There is no indication he returned to Hanson’s plantation, no record of his sale or transfer, simply absent from the documents as if he had never existed. Another name that appears frequently in the early records is Peter Lennox, an enslaved quarry worker owned by Martha Custis Peter, George Washington’s adopted granddaughter.
Lennox was tasked with overseeing stone cutting at the government quarry in Acquia, Virginia, where the cream-colored sandstone for the President’s House was extracted. Quarry work was among the most dangerous occupations, requiring massive blocks of stone to be cut, lifted, and transported without modern equipment. A single mistake could crush a man in an instant.
Lennox’s name appears in payment records until 1796, noted as reliable and skilled. After 1796, he too vanishes from the documents.
The commissioners, Thomas Johnson, Daniel Carroll, and David Stuart, rotated through various positions, but their correspondence reveals a constant anxiety about the project timeline. President Washington wanted the house completed before his term ended in 1797. This pressure translated into punishing work schedules for the enslaved laborers.
Letters between the commissioners and Hoban reference working from dawn until dusk when weather permitted, and double shifts on foundation work to meet deadlines. These brief references hint at the reality. Workers labored sixteen hours a day, seven days a week even in good weather, with no compensation beyond minimal food.
Living conditions were equally harsh. The enslaved workers were housed in temporary wooden structures near the construction site, primitive barracks that offered little protection from the elements. An expense record from March 1793 indicates the purchase of straw for the Negro quarters, suggesting they slept on the ground with only straw as bedding.
Another record from August 1793 authorizes the purchase of salted fish and cornmeal to feed the Black workers. These were the cheapest provisions available, no meat, no vegetables, just enough to keep them working.
Disease was inevitable. The swampy environment was a breeding ground for malaria and typhoid. Commissioner letters occasionally reference illness among the workers, always framed as an impediment to the construction schedule.
A memorandum from June 1793 complains that dysentery had spread among the Black workers, reducing the available workforce by about a third. Dysentery could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 workers within days if severe. The letter says nothing about treatment or recovery, only the delay it caused.
Medical care for enslaved workers was minimal at best. The commissioners hired a physician named William Thornton to attend to the workers, but his compensation records show he was paid significantly less for treating enslaved workers than for treating free white workers. More tellingly, Thornton’s invoices show far fewer visits to enslaved workers despite their greater numbers.
When an enslaved person fell ill and could not work, the most common solution was to return them to their master and hire a replacement. This practice left no written record of what happened to those who were returned, whether they recovered, died, or were sold to compensate for lost rental income.
The Scottish builder Colin Williamson kept more detailed records than most. Williamson oversaw much of the stonework and maintained a diary that survived among his family papers until donated to the Library of Congress in 1968. His entries from 1794 and 1795 provide rare glimpses into daily reality.
In April 1794, he wrote that the Black men were working on the stone despite their hands bleeding. They were not provided gloves or proper tools, yet they were expected to produce the same quality as trained masons. Many suffered from infections requiring treatment.
He mentioned this to the commissioner’s representative, who said treatment would be provided as soon as time allowed, but time never seemed to allow. Williamson’s diary also recorded an incident in July 1794 that appeared in no official documents. A scaffold collapsed on the south wall, and three men fell, two of them Black.
The white man was taken to the doctor immediately. The two Black men were left in place for nearly an hour before anyone attended to them. One appeared to have a broken back.
Williamson doubted he would survive, and if he did, he would never walk again. This troubled him greatly, but he was told it was not his concern.
The man suspected of having a broken back was likely a worker named Ben, enslaved by William Brent. Ben’s name appears in payment records until June 1794, then stops. Brent continued to receive payment for Negro labor in July and August 1794, but the name changed to “Negro man Jim.”
This pattern, sudden name replacements in payment records without explanation, repeats throughout the construction period, indicating workers were replaced, but the circumstances of their departure were deliberately left unrecorded. By 1795, the exterior structure was largely complete, but interior finishing work would take several more years. The project expanded to include not only the President’s House but also the surrounding landscape, roads, and outbuildings.
This expansion meant the workforce actually increased during the second half of the decade. At its peak in 1798, between four and five hundred workers were employed at the site and in related operations such as quarries, brick kilns, and sawmills. The majority were enslaved.
The commissioners’ papers from this period become even more revealing about the status of enslaved workers. Earlier letters at least referenced Black workers by category: Black carpenters, Black laborers, Black quarrymen. After 1795, references became generic: workers hired from area plantations, indentured servants.
This linguistic shift was no accident. As the project became more prominent and public attention grew, the commissioners became more careful about documenting the composition of the workforce. They recognized even then that the public image of the project was problematic.
Here was the President’s House, symbol of the new republic, being built by people denied freedom in that very republic. George Washington himself visited the construction site several times during the 1790s. His diary entries about these visits focus on architectural progress and scheduling.
He never mentions the enslaved workers even once in these entries, despite their constituting at least seventy percent of the workforce. This omission demonstrates clearly how the founders chose to see or ignore the workers who built their institutions.
The white workers on site, mostly immigrants from Ireland and Scotland, received actual wages, typically one dollar per day for skilled craftsmen and fifty cents for common laborers. They could leave whenever they wished, and they could complain about working conditions. Their names were recorded in the records, including surnames, places of origin, and relatives.
When they were injured, they received medical care and compensation. When they died, they were buried in marked graves and their families were notified. None of this applied to enslaved workers.
They had no choice, no voice, no recourse. They built the house stone by stone, brick by brick, knowing they would never enter its doors except as servants. They knew their children would inherit their chains, and they knew their names would be forgotten while the names of architects, commissioners, and presidents would be carved into history books.
But some of them left their marks anyway, small deliberate acts of existence that would not be discovered for centuries. In the spring of 1796, James Hoban reported a problem to the commissioners. Several stone blocks being set into the north wall bore strange markings, superficial scratches that appeared deliberate rather than accidental damage during quarrying or transport.
Hoban described them in his letter of April 3, 1796, as primitive symbols or letters of unknown purpose. He wondered whether the blocks should be replaced or simply turned inward so the markings would not be visible. The commissioners’ response, dated April 10, directed Hoban to turn the stones inward and continue construction.
The markings were likely meaningless scratches resulting from handling. The letter concluded that there was no need to delay work for such trivial matters. The incident was considered closed, but the markings were not meaningless.
They were names. Enslaved stonecutters had carved their names, or sometimes just their initials, into the blocks they shaped. The inscriptions were subtle, easy to dismiss as incidental marks unless one knew what to look for.
They were acts of extraordinary courage because if discovered during carving, the punishment would have been severe. But they did it anyway. These men, whose names appeared in the records only as Tom or Peter or Negro man, carved full names, such as Isaac, into the stone, then sent those stones to become permanent parts of the President’s House.
It was their way of saying, we were here, we built this, remember us.
Hoban never reported finding additional marked stones, suggesting either he stopped noticing or stopped reporting. Given the commissioners’ dismissive response, the latter seems more likely. Why bother the commissioners with something they considered irrelevant?
The marked stones were not discovered again until 1902 during Theodore Roosevelt’s renovation of the building. Workers removing plaster from interior walls found the stones with their inscriptions turned inward exactly as Hoban had been ordered to place them. The renovation supervisor, a man named Charles McKim, noted the discovery in his private records.
Various stones were found with primitive markings on their inner faces. Some appear to be initials or names. Origin uncertain, possibly made by workers during original construction.
McKim’s note indicates he understood the significance, but no official report was ever filed. The stones remained in place, hidden behind a new layer of plaster.
But the marked stones were only a small part of what was deliberately concealed. The more significant concealment began in the summer of 1797 following an incident that nearly destroyed the project’s already fragile reputation. July 1797 witnessed one of the worst heat waves in recorded history.
Temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit for days on end. The combination of extreme heat, swamp humidity, and inadequate water supplies created catastrophic conditions for the workers. Within two weeks, dozens of enslaved workers fell ill with what commissioner correspondence vaguely referred to as “summer fever.”
The commissioners sent urgent letters to plantation owners: your workers are sick and cannot continue, send replacements. These letters are unusually numerous for late July and early August 1797. At least twenty-three of them survive in the archives.
Each requests replacement workers immediately, indicating the number of sick workers exceeded twenty-three, possibly by a wide margin.
What happened to those workers? The commissioners’ papers contain no subsequent correspondence explaining their fate. A plantation owner responds that he has received those who survived.
Replacements have been sent. There is no mention of the sick workers returning. No mention of their recovery or death.
Nothing. Colin Williamson’s diary from this period is harrowing. Disease spreads through the Negro quarters like wildfire.
He wrote on July 23, 1797, that he had seen at least a dozen men too weak to stand. Yet there was no doctor treating them. They lay in those miserable barracks burning with fever, and no one seemed concerned except to determine when replacement workers would arrive.
He asked the commissioner’s agent about arrangements for treatment. He was told the sick had been moved to an isolated area to prevent infection spreading to other workers. When he asked where this isolated area was, the agent became evasive and said it was not his concern.
What Williamson recorded on July 28 is even more disturbing. He had learned where the sick were being held. There was a hastily built hut near the old kiln site, about four miles from the main construction site.
He went there in the morning despite being told to stay in his designated area. What he saw troubled him deeply. At least twenty men lay in that hut with no care whatsoever.
One woman, a young girl, no more than sixteen years old, was tending to them as best she could with only water and rags. The heat inside the hut was unbearable. Several men were clearly dying.
He confronted the supervisor about this brutal treatment and was told quite plainly that the commissioners could not stop construction because of illness, that the sick would either recover or not, and that his job was stonework, not nursing. He felt ashamed to be part of this project. The young girl Williamson mentioned appears in no official records.
Enslaved women also worked on the project, primarily as cooks and laundresses, but their presence is rarely documented. Perhaps this particular girl was brought specifically to tend the sick. An enslaved woman with nursing experience, hired temporarily, then returned to her master when the crisis ended or did not end.
Williamson’s final entry on this subject, dated August 5, 1797, is terrifying in its brevity. The hut near the kiln is now empty, all of them. He asked what happened to the men who were there.
He was told they had recovered and returned to their plantations, but he saw no wagons arrive to transport them. He saw no men walking or being helped to leave. The hut is completely empty and no one will speak of it.
He suspected something terrible had happened, but he had no proof and no one to tell who cared what happened to those sick workers. If they had indeed recovered and returned, there would be documents, letters from plantation owners acknowledging their return, complaints about workers arriving in weak condition, anything. Instead, there is silence.
The records where answers should be are conspicuously blank.
One of the few surviving letters from plantation owners from that period offers a troubling hint. Samuel Hanson, the man who had rented the carpenter Isaac, wrote to the commissioners in September 1797 inquiring about three of his enslaved workers who had been sent to the project in June. Hanson wrote that he had received payment for their labor through July, but they had not returned as expected when he sent replacement workers in August.
He wanted to know their whereabouts and when they would return, as he needed them for harvest work. The commissioners’ response, dated September 18, 1797, is maddeningly vague. The workers you refer to were stricken with summer fever and could not continue.
Arrangements were made for their care. We will inquire into their current status and inform you. No follow-up letter exists showing whether the commissioners ever provided this information.
Hanson’s subsequent correspondence contains no further mention of these three workers, suggesting he either received a private verbal response or abandoned the claim.
But some plantation owners did not give up. In November 1797, William Brent sent a sharply worded letter to the commissioners demanding the return of five enslaved workers who had not come back to his plantation despite being replaced months earlier. The letter stated that he had lost five able workers for whom he was still receiving payment, yet the workers themselves had not returned.
This could not continue. He demanded either the return of these workers or an explanation for why they had not returned, plus compensation for their loss if they had died while in federal service. This letter provoked a strong reaction.
The commissioners’ response came within three days, an unusually short time, and was defensive. The workers you refer to encountered unfortunate circumstances during their service. They died despite every effort to treat them.
We regret this outcome, but we note that the work they were performing involved inherent risks that were known at the time of their hiring. Payment for Brent’s workers would cease as of November 1, 1797. No additional compensation would be provided.
And with that, at least five of Brent’s workers were confirmed dead. The commissioners acknowledged this under pressure, but no details were provided about how they died, where they were buried, or whether their families were notified. The letter treats their deaths as unfortunate but routine.
Workers died. Rent payments stopped. File closed.
How many other deaths occurred? The commissioners’ acknowledgment regarding Brent’s five workers indicates deaths did occur, but they were deliberately concealed in the records. If deaths were only mentioned when a plantation owner demanded specific answers, how many deaths were never reported at all because no one bothered to ask?
The architectural historian who later analyzed these documents, a man named Benjamin Latrobe Jr. , son of the famous architect, estimated in a private letter in 1882 that between thirty and fifty enslaved people likely died during the construction of the President’s House, although official records do not reflect this. Latrobe based his estimate on gaps in payment records, sudden name changes, and the unusually high number of replacement workers requested during certain periods, especially the summer of 1797.
But even Latrobe’s estimate may be conservative. If fifty people died during eight years of construction with hundreds of workers employed, that would actually be a remarkably low mortality rate given the conditions. Other large construction projects of that era, such as canals, fortifications, and harbor works, regularly saw mortality rates between ten and fifteen percent among enslaved workers.
If that rate applied to the President’s House with an estimated four to five hundred enslaved workers rotating through the project, the death toll could have ranged from forty to seventy-five people.
Where were they buried? This question leads to the discovery made by the supervisor in 1901, the discovery that caused an immediate halt to excavation and imposed strict secrecy among the workers. The restoration project that year involved reinforcing the foundations of the East Wing.
Workers dug to expose the original foundation stones laid in 1792, about six feet below the current ground level. They found bones, human bones, at least twelve skulls according to the supervisor’s private notes, along with numerous other bones that appeared to have been hastily and unceremoniously buried. No coffins, no markers, just bones in the dirt beneath the building’s foundations.
The supervisor, a man named Henry Reid, immediately recognized the gravity of the situation. If word spread that human remains had been found in unmarked graves beneath the White House, it would trigger investigations, questions, and possibly a massive public 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁. Reid made his decision that day.
He ordered the bones returned to their original position, told no one outside the work crew, and resumed restoration work in another area of the foundation.
Reid kept a personal diary, donated by his descendants to the National Archives in 1978. His entry for October 12, 1901, describes the discovery in detail. We found them about six feet down, just outside the original east foundation line.
The bones were jumbled together, with no evidence of proper burial. Some skulls showed damage consistent with trauma, though I am no medical expert. We counted at least twelve skulls, possibly more, as some were fragmented.
There was silence among the Black workers on our crew as we uncovered them. An older man, named Joseph, who had worked at the site for forty years, said he had heard stories from his grandfather about workers buried near the house during its original construction. He said his grandfather called them the forgotten ones.
We reburied everything before the end of the day. I instructed all workers that nothing had been found, and that anyone who spoke of this discovery would be immediately dismissed. I then moved the foundation work to the west side.
I could not risk this becoming public knowledge. I confess I felt nauseated all evening thinking about those poor souls buried like refuse beneath this great house.
Reid filed no official report about the discovery. He did not inform the president’s staff or the Department of the Interior. He simply ensured the bones remained hidden and took the secret to his grave in 1924.
It was only the discovery of his diary decades later that revealed what had been found and reburied. The bones raised terrible questions. If enslaved workers had been buried just outside the foundation, did they die during construction and were disposed of as quickly and quietly as possible?
Were these some of the workers who disappeared from the records in the summer of 1797? Were there other burial sites elsewhere on the grounds that had not been discovered? Reid’s diary notes that the bones showed damage consistent with trauma.
This could mean many things: injuries from construction accidents, the physical toll of hard labor, or even violence. The diary does not elaborate, and without forensic examination, which Reid refused to allow, the truth of how these people died would remain forever unknown. What is certain is that at least twelve people were buried in unmarked graves on the White House grounds, and that this fact was deliberately concealed not only in 1797 but also in 1901, when the evidence was available.
In both instances, someone decided it was better not to acknowledge these deaths.
The President’s House was not completed until November 1800, when John Adams became its first resident. By that time, most of the enslaved workers who built it had returned to their plantations scattered across Maryland and Virginia, and their role in the building’s construction was already being erased from the official narrative. The commissioners’ final report on the project, submitted in December 1800, is a masterpiece of omission.
It details every architectural feature, every cost, every challenge overcome. It praises James Hoban’s design and George Washington’s vision. It thanks the skilled craftsmen who accomplished the work.
But it never once mentions that the majority of those craftsmen were enslaved people who received no pay, no recognition, and in some cases no burial. Thomas Jefferson moved into the house in March 1801 after his inauguration. Jefferson brought his own enslaved workers from Monticello, cooks, servants, and gardeners.
For Jefferson, the presence of enslaved people in the building was not ironic or contradictory. It was simply the natural order of things. He wrote eloquently about liberty while surrounded by people denied it, and he never perceived the profound contradiction in this situation.
The building became known as the White House decades later, although the origin of the name is disputed. Some say the name derived from the white paint used to cover the sandstone walls after British troops burned the building in 1814. Others claim it was named for the natural color of the Aquia sandstone.
Regardless, the name stuck, and with it a myth about the building’s construction that was largely false. Official histories of the White House, written throughout the nineteenth century, rarely mentioned enslaved labor. When they did acknowledge it, they used euphemisms such as “servants” or “workers from local plantations” or “hired hands.”
The implication was always that they were ordinary employees doing ordinary work for ordinary wages. The reality that they were enslaved, had no choice, and received nothing was glossed over, distorted, and hidden. Even histories that acknowledged slavery’s role in the construction downplayed its significance.
A Washington guidebook published in 1831 described the building as erected by skilled craftsmen and laborers assembled through the diligent efforts of the federal commissioner. Technically true, but the phrasing suggests voluntary cooperation rather than forced labor. The guidebook’s author, Jonathan Elliot, knew the truth.
He had researched the commissioners’ documents, but he chose language that would not disturb readers’ national pride in the building.
This pattern of selective memory continued throughout the century as major renovations took place in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1860s. Newspapers covered these renovations extensively, but they never thought to investigate who had built the original structure or under what conditions. When presidents gave tours and speeches about the house’s history, they spoke of architectural influences from Irish and Scottish traditions, but they never mentioned the African hands that actually built the walls.
Yet some people knew the truth, even if they lacked platforms to share it. Among the enslaved community in Washington and the surrounding areas, the story of the building’s construction was passed down through generations. Elders who had worked on the project told their children and grandchildren what really happened there.
They described the brutal heat, the disease, the friends who disappeared and never returned. They spoke of bones buried in the ground, of carved stones hidden in the walls, of names that no one would remember.
One of these stories survived in a remarkable document discovered in 1978. Among papers donated by Howard University was a handwritten account by a woman named Celia Robertson, born into slavery in 1819. Robertson’s grandfather, Thomas, had worked on the construction of the President’s House in the 1790s.
Robertson recorded his stories as he told them to her in the 1840s, providing one of the rare direct accounts of what the work was actually like. Thomas’s stories, transmitted through his granddaughter’s memory and writing, paint a far darker picture than any official history. Grandfather Thomas said they worked until blood ran from their hands and their backs could no longer straighten.
He said the white overseers did not view them as human beings but as tools, like hammers and saws. If a tool broke, it was replaced. If a man fell, he was replaced.
He said they buried their friends at night when no one could see, and said prayers over them that no one recorded. He said his friend Peter carved his name into a stone and told Thomas that they would forget us, but the stone will remember us long after we are gone. Our names will remain carved in those walls even if no one ever sees them.
Grandfather wept when he told me this. He said Peter never returned from work one day. He fell ill one summer, and they took him away, and that was the last time anyone saw him.
Celia Robertson’s account continues with stories of her grandfather’s trauma from the experience. He suffered nightmares about the house for the rest of his life. She wrote that he would wake up trembling, saying he could still hear the voices of men dying in that shed where they put the sick.
He said he tried to help them, tried to bring them water, but the overseers prevented him from going near. He said he could hear them calling for their mothers and wives, asking for water and mercy. He said the sound stopped after a few days, and then the shed was empty, and no one ever told him what happened to those men.
Thomas also described the scaffold collapse that killed several workers, confirming what Colin Williamson’s diary recorded. Grandfather said he saw the scaffold collapse and three men fall, one white and two Black. The white man was taken for treatment immediately.
The two Black men lay on the ground badly injured for about an hour before anyone attended to them. One had a twisted leg and was screaming constantly, while the other was completely unconscious. Eventually they carried them to the shed.
He never saw either of them again.
The Robertson document remained unknown to the public until its discovery in the Howard University archives, with an article about it published in an obscure academic journal in 1982. Even then, it received little attention. The mainstream historical community largely ignored it, perhaps because it contradicted the more comfortable narrative about the building’s origins that had been entrenched for nearly two centuries.
But the document raised important questions. If Thomas’s memories were accurate, and there is no reason to believe his granddaughter fabricated them, then the official record had deliberately concealed numerous deaths and horrific working conditions. The shed where the sick were placed matched the location described by Colin Williamson in his diary.
The scaffold incident matched Williamson’s account almost exactly. Thomas’s stories and Williamson’s contemporary notes corroborated each other across decades. This convergence of evidence points to something historians had long suspected but could not definitively prove.
The construction of the President’s House involved a significant loss of enslaved lives, and this loss was systematically erased from the historical record.
Physical evidence also supported this conclusion. In 1978, the same year the Robertson account was discovered, a team of archaeologists conducted a survey of the White House grounds as part of a comprehensive historical documentation project. The survey included ground-penetrating radar analysis of areas that had not been significantly developed or disturbed since the 1790s.
The radar revealed anomalies consistent with unmarked graves in at least three locations on the grounds. One location was very close to where Henry Reid’s team had found bones in 1901. Another was near the old kiln site mentioned in Williamson’s diary.
The third was in an area that now forms part of the Rose Garden. The archaeologists noted these findings in their technical report but recommended against excavation. Given the political sensitivity of potentially discovering human remains on White House grounds, the report stated, and the fact that any such remains would likely be those of enslaved individuals buried without ceremony or documentation, we recommend leaving these sites undisturbed and marking them as potential sensitive areas for future reference.
In other words, we know bodies are likely buried here, but digging them up would be politically complicated, so let us simply note it and move on. This decision, like Henry Reid’s decision in 1901 and the commissioners’ decisions in the 1790s, prioritized institutional reputation over historical truth and human dignity. The people buried in those unmarked graves were forgotten after their deaths, just as they had been exploited during their lives.
Even when evidence of their existence surfaced, the response was to hide it, literally or figuratively.
The architectural historian Benjamin Latrobe Jr. , who estimated the death toll at thirty to fifty, became obsessed with uncovering the true number. After reviewing the surviving commissioner papers in the 1880s, Latrobe began contacting elderly African Americans in the Washington area, trying to collect their oral histories before that generation passed away.
He managed to record accounts from seventeen people whose grandparents or great-grandparents had worked on the President’s House. Their stories were remarkably consistent. All mentioned harsh working conditions, inadequate food and water, endemic disease, and people disappearing from the worksite never to be heard from again.
Several specifically identified the summer of 1797 as particularly deadly. One man told Latrobe that his grandmother said her uncle went to work on the President’s house and caught fever in that hot summer. She said they took him somewhere away from the others, and her mother went looking for him but could not find where he was.
Later they told her he had died and been buried, but they would not say where. She searched for his grave for years but never found it.
Latrobe compiled these accounts into a manuscript he hoped to publish as a correction to the sanitized history. He titled it The Hidden Cost: Forced Labor in the Construction of Federal Buildings. No publisher would accept it.
Latrobe tried for five years to find a publisher, but the rejections were unanimous. The manuscript was described as too controversial, unsuitable for contemporary readers, lacking sufficient documentation, and most importantly, damaging to the reputation of venerable institutions. Latrobe died in 1887, bitter and frustrated.
His unpublished manuscript remained in his papers until 1934, when a small academic press published it in a limited edition of only five hundred copies. The book did not sell well and quickly went out of print. It is now extremely rare, with most copies lost or destroyed over the years.
Only about twenty-four copies are known to exist today, scattered among university libraries and private collections. Even when the truth was documented and available, it could not change the dominant narrative. The myth of the White House as a symbol of democratic ideals and American values was too powerful, too central to national identity.
Acknowledging that it was built on the backs of enslaved people who died unknown and forgotten was too difficult. It required confronting uncomfortable truths about the nation’s founding that most Americans were not ready to face. And so the truth remained buried, literally in some cases, beneath decades and then centuries of silence.
The story of the enslaved workers who built the White House is not merely a historical footnote. It is a fundamental part of the building’s identity, a truth that has been suppressed, hidden, and denied for over two centuries. The workers who shaped those stones, who laid those foundations, who died in that summer of 1797, who were buried in unmarked graves beneath the most powerful building in the world, they deserve to be remembered.
Their names may have been erased from official records, but their labor endures in every wall, every column, every room of the White House. The stones they carved with their names, hidden behind plaster for over a century, remain as silent testimony to their existence. The bones buried beneath the East Wing remain as evidence of their sacrifice.
The stories passed down through generations of their descendants remain as proof that they were here, that they built this, that they mattered.
The question now is whether we will finally acknowledge them. Whether we will finally give them the recognition they were denied in life and in death. Whether we will finally tell the truth about how America’s most powerful symbol was built.
The evidence is there, scattered across archives and diaries and oral histories and archaeological surveys. It has been there all along, waiting for someone to piece it together, to insist on its importance, to ask the uncomfortable questions. The workers who built the White House were not anonymous laborers.
They were individuals with names, with families, with hopes and dreams. They were Tom and Peter and Harry and Lenn and Isaac and Ben and Jim and Peter Lennox. They were the grandfather of Celia Robertson, who wept when he remembered his friend Peter.
They were the men who died in that shed in the summer of 1797, calling for their mothers and wives, asking for water and mercy. They were the twelve or more people buried in unmarked graves beneath the East Wing. They were the thirty to fifty or more people who died building the President’s House.
They built the symbol of American democracy with their hands, their sweat, their blood, and their lives. And they were forgotten. But they should not be forgotten.
They must not be forgotten. Their story is America’s story, in all its complexity, all its pain, all its contradiction. It is a story that must be told, must be acknowledged, must be remembered.
Because the White House stands on their labor, on their sacrifice, on their bones. And until we honor them, until we acknowledge them, until we tell their story, the White House will always be built on a foundation of unacknowledged truth.