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| They styling of this mixed chinoiserie and gothic revival door lintel shows a clear West African influence in it's technical execution. |
REDISCOVERING TWO SKILLED ARCHITECT- CARPENTERS ENSLAVED ON AN 18TH CENTURY VIRGINIA PLANTATION BY GEORGE MASON 260 YEARS AGO.
When I walked into the ornately carved rooms of Gunston Hall Plantation I saw there what stood out as the distinctly fluid style of West African craftsmanship. Anyone who has studied African art would be able to recognize these familiar hallmarks wherever they appear. That day I identified a patently West African mannerism in the execution of the architectural embellishments. It was an indelible sign left over 260 years ago by slaves interpreting mid-eighteenth century rococo motifs. Their enslaved creativity spoke across the ages. The story it told revealed the manufacture of a grandly conceived edifice with richly carven appointments. The owner of these brilliant men was non other than George Mason who refused to sign of the Constitution. Mason personally hired an inexperienced man to supervise the construction of Gunston Hall by his slaves who were far more experienced and skilled architects and carpenters by comparison. Gunston Hall was intended to impress the landed gentry of Colonial Fairfax County Virginia by upscaling the existing residences. It would establish Mason as a man of refinement and impeccable taste, signifying that he had socially arrived at the top of the social food chain of landed gentry such as it existed in the bucolic hinterlands of Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century. At that time no credit would ever have been lavished on a slave as having been an architect or a creative force behind the buildings he constructed from foundation to finial. Mason imported a carpenter from England to make it seem as if the edifice had been the total concept of a man his slave owning peers could respect, it would not have been considered chic for such a pretentious undertaking to have been the product of a slave. In America, especially during the colonial period when the cities we now know were dense forests slave labor was the invisible force behind the transformation of wilderness into civilization, slaves felled the forests to clear acreage for farming the large plantations and opened streets for the towns that grew up around plantation life; no one understood this better than men who owned slaves like George Mason.
The visual connection between the technical imprint of Africa and the thematic adaptation of European design was unmistakable. The struggle to realise a unique architectural footprint in the new world defining the hybrid iconography of its sociopolitical soul would evolve into the Federal Style so eloquently charactarized by the architectural stylists Jefferson and Latrobe. The development of this new architectonic vocabulary was pioneered by plantations such as Gunston Hall that rejected the opulence of European taste if not more by necessity than artifice establishing a simplified standard for the American home.
These early and middle colonial period buildings were conceived in a world that was was technically incapable of replicating the scale of contemporary European architecture because there were no resources available to devote to their painstaking execution. The new colonies were busied with the basic tasks of building the first footholds of development and in response the architecture of that period was functional. The urban and agricultural infrastructure was built upon the backs of slaves simply because it was the least desirable work and slavery rendered it virtually cost-free! European colonials supervised the clearing of forests, the draining of swamps, the building of roads and the construction of the simple structures of the times all accomplished by slave labor. In the thousands of history books written on North America not one has ever honestly told revealed this true story of how America was built.
In struggling colonial America, on the frontiers of European settlement during the eighteenth-century there was little time to lavish on capricious beauty. In the major east coast port towns we find architecture that is truly style conscious and sophisticated. Interestingly, the farther one is removed from cosmopolitan cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston and New Orleans the more clearly one recognizes the softening of architectural sensibility to a more improvised, homemade brand informed by the natural design instincts of slaves. One might say the architecture begins to become more fascinating there. Slaves ultimately interpreted culturally unfamiliar classical motifs for the ordinary buildings used by colonial peoples. The deeper we delve into the prolific construction boom that took place between the early 1600’s when the first slaves began to be imported to North America in significant numbers and the mid nineteenth-century preceding the American Civil War the more magnanimous a picture we get regarding just how much of this nation was actually built by slaves, the concept alone is simply mind-boggling.
I already knew that wealthy colonial plantation owners considered skilled African slaves especially architects and construction experts to be highly valuable personnel in rural environments where such professionals were absolutely otherwise unavailable. If you plan to visit this or any other plantation I recommend that you study period wood carvings, pottery and metal castings from mid-eighteenth century West Africa. Equipped with this practical knowledge it should be easy to connect the cultural dots… one, two, three, four….. a masterpiece!
We cannot continue to learn the story of the construction of Gunston Hall or any other structure built in America from the colonial period through the antebellum period without taking a candid look at the world that created it for they are intimately married. The people who ultimately realized the building of these edifices were typically slaves, they were the labor force of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A contemporary example might be the importation of laborers for the construction boom of the early twenty-first century but comparatively the importation of African slaves represented a much larger scale with billions of workers being enslaved over a duration of several centuries. When slavers stole entire families from their homes in Africa for sale in the slave markets of the Americas and the Caribbean they kept an eye out for highly skilled craftsmen, mathematicians, physicians, engineers, artisans, statesmen and other professionals already possessing skills that would fetch a high price in the marketplace. Had these captives actually been completely unskilled they would hardly have been considered worth the effort. The myth that these men and women were ignorant, unskilled savages equal in stature to farm animals was manufactured by European and American slavers as propaganda to justify the brutal rape, murder and dehumanization of billions of people over the course of over three violent centuries. The conceptual buy-in of those who participated in and accepted slavery including its premise of racial supremacy cannot be ignored today. We must reevaluate the character of those who saw fit to participate in the slave trade and not pretend they did not fully understand its implications. The men and women who owned slaves like George Mason, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew it was morally wrong but chose to justify it based on economics. We cannot idolize and celebrate such men and women any longer as icons of freedom and egalitarianism any more than Germans can place an olive Branch on the brow of Hitler. The practise of racial supremacy today is based on a technically bankrupt mythology originally manufactured then to bamboozle the poorer masses who, unaffected by the negative consequences of its inequities and too destitute to participate in its vast economic profits accepted the trend they were powerless to change. In truth European peasants who had been enslaved in feudal serfdom for over a thousand years were all to eager to trade-off their enslavement if only conceptually because it appeared to give them the hope and appearance of socioeconomic advancement. The moral and humanitarian obligation that the slave trade rejected and villainously turned it’s back on over 300 hundred years ago has never ceased to be a current social issue.
But something that had not occurred in all human history precipitated a universal abhorrence of slavery presaging it’s historical end in spite of its economic attraction. By the summer of July 4th 1776 most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence realized the awful mistake they had made by not clearly outlining a legally structured end to slavery. Although it is rumored that George Mason was sympathetic with the abolition of slavery but a slave owner himself, he made no effort to free his own slaves in life or even upon his death. It can be concluded that nay sense of abolition possessed by him was purely romantical since it was never evinced by a single action of his. It should therefore be assumed that he since he never left any tangible measurement of abolitionism he was in fact not the shining American figure we should hold in esteem, he was part of the problem.
Ironically, the only real good served, the only merit history can lay upon the brow of George Mason is that during his life he and his ancestors left us well documented evidence of the extraordinary skills many slaves possessed but we’re never credited for. We’re it not for their dutiful journal keeping which had every other intention but to preserve the legacy of their servants we might know nothing of the people who really made a plantation such as Gunston Hall successful.
On another front we must differentiate between whether we are allright considering a slave owner a hero, or a proper role model for the American way of life. Following to the social movement occurring in our culture whereby the lives and actions of public and popular figures are being held under a powerful ethical and moral microscope we must now not fail to revisit history for the purpose of separating good men from bad ones. If we can arrest and convict a man for dogfighting surely we can remove undue honors from men who contributed to the brutal murder enslavement of billions of innocent men women and children in the culturally malevolent slave trade.
In the past and present it has sufficed to mention that a slave owner treated his slaves well to assuage the inevitable onslaught of ethical and moral criticism. Those times have changed!
HISTORY CANNOT ESCAPE THE SCRUTINY UNDER THE HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARDS WE UPHOLD TODAY!
Today as then we realize the vast wealth of knowledge owned by slaves that was usurped literally for free. We also know these slaves were not given any credit for their contributions, no acknowledgement has ever been made to affirm their ingenuity without which the America we know today could have come to be… Nearly every historian that has published data on American history has been unpardonably ignorant or deliberately negligent of the contribution black peoples have made especially during the colonial era. These charlatans have failed us and cheated us of the richness and complexity of the American experience.
I was at first overtaken by the absence of Black American visitors at this historic site naked Gunston Hall; I alone had come to pay homage to the ingenuity of my ancestors on that day. Though the legacy of slavery is painful revisiting sites where it played out is a healing soulful pilgrimage.
I wanted to see if the tour guide had done his homework, if he knew that the planks which bore our weight were cut, dressed, polished and joined by black slaves so I asked him if he knew who the carpenters were. By his gesture I knew he didn’t. I surmised that he understood where I was going with my query. He responded that George Mason hired and imported Italian craftsmen a fabrication even he realised was embarrassingly unbelievable. For one thing the distinctly English brand of chinoiserie, and Gothic revival motifs were definitely not in vogue in aristocratic Italian homes of the time . A skilled and stylistically eloquent Italian craftsman of the 1750’s would have favored neoclassical motifs along the lines of Andrea Palladio. By 1750 French and Italian architecture was seriously neoclassical evoking eloquent interpretations of Roman, Etruscan, Greek and Egyptian temples. In mid-eighteenth century colonial America the landed aristocracy of the Potomac river valley and Chesapeake region were, for the most part, out of the loop with regard to mainstream architectural trends in Europe. Thomas Jefferson was a rare exception and it is quite clear that his fashionable instinct attracted him to the neoclassical styles trending in France and Italy when he built Montpellier in 1764. It might be a stretch to include Mount Vernon built by George Washington in 1758 as an early example of neoclassical expressionism adding a second to the list. Without a doubt Gunston Hall was intended to evoke the spirit of a small English country house that would have been in vogue in the early 1700’s. It was conceived as a romantic but visually effusive English cottage evoking the feel of Gothic abbeys and parishes of the English countryside.
I set out thereafter to prove that the intricate woodwork had been hand-crafted by African slaves. So I began to thoroughly research the matter proving or disproving my theory. As you have read my research proved my instinct in full.
In 1755 George Mason indentured a young Englishman named William Buckland importing him across the sea from England to America to oversee the construction and embellishment of his Potomac river plantation known as Gunston Hall. The original contract still exists but the concept of indenturement has changed over the past 261 years. There were two very different types of indenturement in the American colonies. The classic indentureship ivolved criminals and other incarcerated Persons including the poor being sold into temporary slavery as a way to repay their debts. However based on the paperwork it is clear that Buckland was a free man at the time he was hired so the term indenture in this instance would have had the same meaning in 1755 as the modern word, contractor. William Buckland was a contractor but it is also clear he was considered to be an indentured servant bound to a term of 4 years. At the time the carpentry and joining arts were a broadly defined trade and certainly could have included the particular design and construction skills expected of an architect.
According to contemporary diaries and inventories of Masons son two slaves were already owned by Mason working as skilled carpenters. These black men were named Tom and Liberty. Tom and Liberty lived on a section of the plantation known as “Log Town” an encampment of log cabins and other structures in what was called the Occoquan Quarter of the plantation grounds. Log Town had a black overseer named Nace and the entire Occoquan Quarter had relative autonomy it was populated by other skilled slave craftsmen such as blacksmiths and tanners and their families. This should not serve to suggest that slavery was anywhere close to an idyllic existence at Gunston Hall the reality is that it was brutal and dehumanizing consistent with slavery as a whole.
Masons son confidently praised the professional skills possessed by Liberty and Tom indicating that they were certainly more skilled and experienced at carpentry, and building construction than their indentured supervisor when he arrived on American soil. It can be safely assumed they were the architects and contractors for all the extant structures about the plantation. This leaves us to wonder why, given their superior skills, was a young contractor hired to supervise men with many times his skills and experience.
George Mason was a social climber. His residence at Gunston Hall was intended as a showplace to secure and affirm his status in colonial Virginia society. He avoided incurring the expense of hiring and importing an established, popular English architect, (I am certain it would have been an impossible task), and to be honest the bucolic farmers and plantation owners at the time would not have recognized the difference. It was a political keeping up of appearances at best implying that Mason had achieved a social status enabling him to “import” an English architect. To that end he was undoubtedly the “Hyacinth” of his sleepy agrarian community and a reminder that pretension is as old as time itself.
To add more realness to this diorama let’s examine the practical dynamics. Liberty and Tom were experienced contractor/builders and architects who certainly could have supervised and built Gunston Hall from the ground up by themselves. We do not know much about their education but the certainly had the ability to work from architectural plans and one must surmise they already possessed the skill to draw them. Based on written documents itvis quite clear that Liberty and Tom not only built the many domestic and agricultural structures on the plantation but that their skills were so high and demand so compelling in the region that they were given virtual autonomy in their own section of the plantation to oversee the daily maintenance of the entire plantation in addition to being contracted out to other plantations and work sites for maintenance and groundout architectural services. They were a complete design-build team. During the eighteenth century it was quite common for plantation owners to purchase architectural plans and treatises published in Europe and have their skilled slaves transform them into buildings. Because the design coordination was often supervised by a white carpenter or architect such as Buckland the slaves who certainly became adept at copying and manufacturing architectural details were never given due credit for their work. As we begin to delve deeper into the socioeconomic and political structures of slavery these deliberate exceptions of black men from the history of our country will be uncovered.
I uncovered the actual 1775 contract of indenturement for William Buckland and this rare document told me virtually everything I needed to know. The question was who actually executed the physical carpentry work at Gunston Hall and specifically the delicate wood carving of the crown mouldings and finestral details such as the fiery chinoiserie valences. The endorsement made by Jorge Mason at the completion of the work stated that Buckland and I quote that he,
“Had the entire direction of the carpenters and joiners work”.
Translated into 21st century English this means that he acted in the capacity of a supervisor but given the social realities of the time it is doubtful that Buckland actually, physically carved any of the fine interior and exterior embellishments because he already had a team of skilled carpenters at his disposal. It is more probable that he drew or provided exemplary plans from which the slaves worked and that he provided printed generic architectural patterns allowing them to extrapolate the execution. Even during his four-year indenture Buckland could not and would not have single handedly manufactured all of the marvelously intricate woodwork we marvel at today. It was carved by slaves… so who gets the credit for actually building Gunston Hall?
It’s is customary to attribute the building of a notable house to its owner because they were it’s financier, hence we say Gunston Hall was built by George Mason although he never contributed to its physical realization. Similarly, Buckland who went on to become a prominent architect in colonial Virginia was, like Thomas Jefferson a creative manager but one who left the messy, hard-core details of construction to the skilled expertise of slaves. This disparity in the transparency of the creative process has served to prevent skilled, enslaved artists from getting credit for their genius. This is one of the primary reasons why American history must be revised to reflect the contributions of black peoples.
Whilst reassigning due credit we must also revisit the “Hero-Srtucture” of this nation to reevaluate who should inherit the esteem of history moving forward from a platform of truth and fairness. When this has been judiciously managed black slaves will be resurrected from the abyss of ignorance and focused racism to assume their due status as builders of this nation…
FIN
Written by BIGDADDY BLUES
