Track 3: CONTRACTS + LABOR / Presentation 1
Economics of Construction in Antebellum America’s Slaveholding South
Clifton C. Ellis, PhD
Elizabeth Sasser Professor of Architectural History
Texas Tech University, College of Architecture
This paper seeks to reveal the causal links between intention and architecture in the American South during the antebellum period, and the implications and legacies of an environment built with unfree labor. Currently, there are no studies of the actual construction costs of antebellum building campaigns, and thus no studies that can consider both the monetary and human cost of construction of enslaved labor.
The focus of this study is the mansion house that James C. Bruce completed at his Berry Hill plantation in 1845. This paper draws upon the original source material of the Bruce Family Papers, which are held at the University Virginia Library. Over the course of a calendar year, these documents were mined for evidence of James Bruce’s architectural legacy.
James Bruce enslaved more than 400 African Americans on his four Virginia plantations. Both the manuscript documentation and the surviving buildings of his home plantation, Berry Hill, are evidence of the human cost of agrarian capitalism; such building campaigns exacted not only a monetary cost, but also a human cost. The cost of one enslaved worker’s labor is fully documented in original sources, as is the cost of housing that enslaved worker. The cost of an enslaved worker can readily be compared to the cost that Bruce incurred of employing a tutor, an overseer, a clerk, or to the cost of a marble fireplace mantle, a silver-plated doorknob, a dining room sideboard.
The mansion house that James C. Bruce completed at his Berry Hill plantation in 1845, had a final cost of $35,432.00. At 9,000 square feet, the house was two-and-a-half times larger than the county courthouse that the same builder, Josiah Dabbs, had finished in 1838. Berry Hill stood in the landscape of Virginia as the largest and finest example of Greek Revival architecture of the period, and more importantly to this discussion, as a testament to the profitability of an agrarian system of capitalism based in slavery.
Few building campaigns of the antebellum period are as well documented as Berry Hill plantation. The Bruce family papers at the University of Virginia include contracts, decorating instructions, bills, and receipts not only for the mansion house itself, but also for barns, stables, icehouse, smoke house, and slave houses. The mansion house is still intact, and although its ancillary structures are in various stages of decay, enough remains for a thorough physical documentation of the plantation.
Dr. Clifton Ellis is the Elizabeth Sasser Professor of architectural history at Texas Tech University College of Architecture. He is a cultural historian whose research focuses on the architecture and material culture of the antebellum South.
