There was a previous discussion on whether there were any slaves in the US that were owned by corporations
Were any slaves owned by government agencies (e.g. Federal, State, or local), or contracted by government agencies from a local slaveowner to perform on a government contract?
E.g. might any of the public roads in Virginia be built by slaves owned by or contracted to the Virginia Department of Transportation, or did people in Tennessee ever receive their mail from enslaved mail carriers owned by the USPS?
Please, no wage-slave jokes here. I’m talking about real-life chattel slavery as practiced in the United States (including the Confederate states during the conflict).
As far as I know, no. The government never owned any, and the thought never seems to have come up. Companies hired skilled labor mostly, so it wasn’t really relevant to them. Now, you might count the issue where, during the Civil War itself, the Federal Forces wound up in effective possession of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of slaves. But as a practrical matter they stopped being slaves.
Over the course of the war, they went from slaves, to people whose status was unclear but who worked for the federals for food and shalter, to people who worked for the government on plantation land conquered by the feds in exchange for a low wage to a share of the production, to outright free men able to join the armed forces.
The HBO series John Adams depicted slaves being used in the construction of the Executive Mansion when President Adams arrived in Washington, DC. I don’t know if that’s historically accurate, but I’d be very surprised if no slave labor was used in constructing the nation’s capital.
That’s accurate. Slave labor was used in most construction projects in slave-era Washington.
It would be assumed that slaves would be used by contractors in any time and place that slave labor existed.
However, it’s much less likely that the federal government itself directly owned slaves, although that’s probably a matter of splitting hairs since slaves were staff at many Washington government buildings.
When I stayed in a bed and breakfast in Lexington, Virginia, a house that advertised its date as 1868, I gave thanks that I was sleeping in a place that wasn’t built by slave labor.
The staff work of the White House (butler, cooks, maids, gardeners*, etc.) was mostly done by slaves, until about the time of President Lincoln. But these seem to have been the personal property of the current President, owned by him, not by the White House or the government.
*The famous story about Dolly Madison rescuing the painting of George Washington as British soldiers were about to burn the White House is not quite true – it was the slave gardeners that did that; she hersef made off with the White House silver.
When someone dies intestate and heirless, doesn’t their estate pass to the state? If so, it’s conceivable that the state or federal governments may have occasionally inherited slaves.
Why must this be so? The south needed to rebuild everything after the war and three years seems enough time to start over. If your point is that everything that remained from the antebellum South was tainted by slave labor, that doesn’t seem to have been the way anybody saw anything after the war. It was a bright line through history.
And you’re probably living on land that was stolen or scammed from Indians.
An estate would go to the state. I don’t know if any would go to the federal government even if the person was living in Washington, D.C. because it would have depended on specific laws of Congress. In any case, lawyers would sell off the non-cash holdings of the estate as soon as possible.
In the US, there was a definite group of skilled-trades slaves. As noted, slaves were used in the construction trades, so there were slave masons, carpenters, etc.
In the slavery era there were a much larger number of federal territories. Given that these were usually on the relatively dangerous frontiers of the country where lone settlers and prospectors were liable to die without any obvious next of kin, it would surprise me if the federal government (or, on its behalf, the territorial government) did not make provisions for disposing of their wealth.
This was my thought as well. The same would probably apply to people who defaulted on debts to the government (for example, through nonpayment of fines and taxes) after the abolition of debtors’ prisons in 1833. Their property, probably including slaves, could have been seized and sold off.