III. “Wanted at the City of Washington. A number of slaves to labor…”

This is the third of four lectures in America’s Architecture of Freedom and Unfreedom, the 74th A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Mabel O. Wilson of Columbia University.

Through an exploration of governmental, commercial, and residential buildings constructed along F Street in Capitol Hill, this talk reveals the history of how enslaved and free Black laborers became essential to Washington City’s transformation from a verdant patchwork of plantations to a monumental capital. The story of Peter (last name unknown), a carpenter enslaved by James Hoban, an immigrant Irish architect and builder who designed and supervised the construction of the President’s House (today’s White House), sheds light upon how Hoban and his peers’ hard-fought freedom and wealth depended upon confining Black craftsmen like Peter to conditions of unfreedom.

This lecture’s title is taken from an advertisement in the “Maryland Herald and Eastern Shore Intelligencer” (November 11, 1794).

Inaugurated in 1949, the Mellon Lectures is the longest-running lecture series at the National Gallery of Art. The series was founded “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” Learn more: https://www.nga.gov/research/center/p...

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