The Town That Was Built by Hands That Owned Nothing

Alexandria's wharves were built and worked largely by enslaved labor. The hogsheads of tobacco that made the town's fortunes were rolled to ships by men and women who received nothing from the trade they sustained. The Carlyle House, the merchant townhouses along King Street, the Christ Church that Washington attended — all of it was constructed and maintained by enslaved workers whose legal status made their labor legally invisible as a contribution to the community.

When the Revolution came, Alexandria's enslaved residents found themselves in an impossible position that historians are only beginning to examine carefully. The Patriot cause demanded that white Alexandrians declare their opposition to tyranny and their commitment to natural rights. It made no parallel demand on those same Alexandrians to extend those rights to the people they owned.

Some enslaved Alexandrians sought to use the chaos of wartime for their own liberation. Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation offering freedom to enslaved men who joined British forces was heard along the Potomac as clearly as anywhere in Virginia. How many Alexandria-area enslaved people responded is not precisely known; the Patriot record has little reason to document escapes that embarrassed the cause.

Others remained in place, carrying the daily burden of sustaining households and commercial operations while the men of those households went to war. The women, children, and elderly who could not fight continued doing exactly what they had always done: feeding, cleaning, maintaining, building.

After the war, Alexandria became one of the most active slave-trading markets in the eastern United States, a development that sits in severe tension with the town's Revolutionary heritage. The same wharves that loaded Continental Army supplies in 1777 were loading coffles of enslaved people for sale further south by the 1790s. Franklin and Armfield, the largest domestic slave-trading firm in American history, operated from a building on Duke Street a few blocks from Carlyle House. The proximity is not coincidental — it is the logical outcome of an economy that had never questioned its foundation.