A nation built together

First Lady Michelle Obama’s statement at the Democratic National Convention that enslaved people helped to construct the White House has shocked, and even offended, some Americans who see this as inconceivable, and even its mere mention as inappropriate or unpatriotic.  But the truth is that both enslaved and free built our nation together.  This is a critical fact to embrace, as we seek to transcend the racial tensions that have resurfaced in recent months.

Unfortunately, many Americans still don’t realize that early America was a world in which skilled, enslaved artisans helped construct many of our now iconic American buildings, whose beauty or symbolism we imagine as being entirely removed from the brutal ugliness of slavery. This is actually not in dispute.  Decades of research confirm the role slavery played in the making of the United States. 

{mosads}Today, we need to see ourselves as the inheritors of a nation built together, which at its inception relied upon the enslaved labor of one-fifth of its population.  Enslaved men and women acquired skills and talents that not only contributed substantially to the construction of buildings, the creation of landscapes and canals, but generated the wealth that fueled early American economic growth, settlement and, eventually, independence.

Michelle Obama’s explicit association of enslaved people with a national treasure like the White House challenges long-held notions that it is safe only to see and teach our history selectively, that slavery so tarnishes our values that to fully recognize its role in our founding would require the toppling of heroes and the questioning of our ideals.  

At historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg, where I work, we too recognize an important shift underway in the American imagination. In a city where the majority of the population was enslaved on the eve of the Revolution, tradespeople among them helped hammer the nails, hew the timber, and fashion the guns that earned our (but not their) freedom.  Today, we see new generations of visitors who seek a greater understanding of this shared world. 

Yes, enslaved individuals, working alongside free blacks, local white laborers and artisans, and even immigrants from Europe, helped to build the White House. But long before (and after), enslaved carpenters, joiners, and masons set foundations, laid the fabric, and raised the roofs of structures that embodied foundational ideas of early America—schools, churches and legislatures, including Congress—that remain important to our identity as a people today.  Are these buildings—like the White House—any less beautiful or impressive because their builders were considered less than the equals of their masters before the law?  Can a building that represents freedom, prosperity, and independence today still symbolize these ideas if we recognize its connection to coerced labor, family separation, and tragedy on a scale that was American slavery? 

And what are we to make of the lives and stories of those enslaved men and women who experienced the brutality of slavery and through their strength and resilience acquired the skills necessary to create beauty and elegant objects in an otherwise ugly, violent world?

These are questions for us and our time, and we’ll need to work through the answers, together.  They require us to reflect upon our physical environment and to reconnect places—some small or unknown and others iconic—with the people of the past who transformed and inhabited them.  They also challenge us to look courageously and honestly at whom we have been as a people, who we are, and most importantly, who we want to be.

No longer can we afford to view our past dependence on slavery and our quest for American freedom as being irreconcilable, and no longer can those of us in the education field assume that partial truths or selective historical memory is acceptable.  As colleagues at such institutions as Brown University, the College of William & Mary, and the University of Maryland have demonstrated through candid explorations of their schools’ involvement with slavery, uncovering and discussing a complicated and often painful past helps to chart the course for a future based on trust and mutual understanding.

The history of our longstanding reliance upon slavery is inseparable from the history of our founding and subsequent successes.  And new generations of visitors to historic sites are helping to lead the way, as well, urging a more complete retelling of this shared past.

Guests of all ages and backgrounds often demand that tours of our historic houses mention the coerced labor that funded their construction or the enslaved laborers who often helped build them.  And they’re telling us that they desire honest educational experiences that portray the people and perspectives of African Americans who helped build the town. 

As Michelle Obama suggested in her recent speech, if we are able to acknowledge that our past was built together, we can take one more step toward building a shared—and better—future together.

Ted Maris-Wolf is a vice president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and author of Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia (UNC Press, 2015)