Architecture and Slavery
On 11 June 2020, the Museum of London finally took down an already-defaced monument to slave trader, owner, and sugar merchant Robert Milligan (figure 1). Erected in 1813, the statue at the West India Docks had been placed in storage in 1943, then reinstated in 1997 with a restored base and dedicatory plaque. The museum added contextualizing information from 2007 to 2011. Yet even without Milligan’s likeness, the docks remain as an artifact of urban infrastructure whose construction Milligan had spearheaded to maximize profits from colonial goods, grown and harvested by enslaved Black people who received none of that wealth.
Figure 1: Statue of Robert Milligan in front of the West India Docks, London, in 2017. Photograph by Jonah Rowen.
What differentiates buildings from statues? Why not, as human rights advocate Professor Sir Geoff Palmer recently suggested, sardonically, “Take down… all those buildings in London that are related to slavery”? After all, the same capital that financed the initial construction of the Milligan monument, whose restored pedestal less than 25 years ago re-declared his “genius,” also underlaid the “surrounding great work,” the West India Docks. Building demolition has not been a rallying cry, since labor and capital are ephemeral factors, perceived to be marginal and therefore invisible in the forms of completed buildings. Where statues invariably glorify their subjects, architecture plays an evidentiary role in histories of the people who designed, constructed, occupied, and serviced them. At some of these sites, we know some of the enslaved builders' names. But at others, only traces of their bodily existence persist, such as the handprint impressions in the bricks of St. Michael's Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Where statues invariably glorify their subjects, architecture plays an evidentiary role in histories of the people who designed, constructed, occupied, and serviced them.”
From the U.S., the historical power of British enslavers and the traces of their finances might appear inconsequential or historically distant compared to the inhumanities committed in the Americas through the nineteenth century, well after the British discontinued government-sanctioned slaving. The monetary capital white men like Milligan accumulated by capturing, selling, and owning Black people as property quickly transformed into other forms of wealth. Obscured by innumerable exchanges, those conversions of capital can be difficult to track, for example in profits acquired indirectly from uncompensated Black workers. Additionally, the U.S. clung to slave ownership decades after Britain outlawed it, and racist policies continued beyond formal emancipation.
Consider, however, the architect and slaveholder Robert Mills, who designed the Washington National Monument. Mills had apprenticed to James Hoban (architect of the White House), Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and Thomas Jefferson gave Mills access to his architectural library (he made drawings of Monticello for Jefferson). Condemning slavery as an “evil” in 1826, Mills nonetheless equivocated, “much good has emanated from it,” since Europeans were not acclimatized to labor in the U.S. South. He proposed gradual emancipation as a buyback program. Enslaved people purchased by the South Carolina government would dredge the Lowcountry. Rendered arable, an “industrious white population from Germany and Holland” could immigrate and work the land, thus bolstering the state’s federal political heft and the land’s economic yield.
Meanwhile, Mills wrote, even after manumission Black people would remain untrustworthy, vengeful, and indolent, so they would be duly exiled. Mills alludes to a colonizationist plan that would forcibly send freed Blacks to Africa to clear the newly productive land in South Carolina for white settlers, with politically, “morally,” and environmentally expedient effects. The U.S., to Mills, was “guiltless” of the “crime of slavery,” a vestige of British colonial domination. Atlantic slavery was a two-centuries-old institution by the 1820s, and Mills implies that, by then, slavery was so thoroughly ingrained that the fifty years since 1776 had not been sufficient to unravel it. Coupled with surveillance, Mills’s diffusionist plan designated particular places and geographies to Black people in order to alleviate whites’ anxieties about retaliation. Such initiatives predicated on racial forms of spatial governance demonstrate a preoccupation with fear and security. Designed skillfully, architecture could provide assurance.
From 1820 to 1830, Mills produced a number of buildings for the South Carolina state disciplinary apparatus (figure 2). He and the contractors for these courthouses, jails, workhouses, and other institutional buildings undoubtedly employed enslaved people for their construction. But when finished, they stood as dual symbols. To whites, they conveyed an ordered state. To Blacks, they were deterrents to resistance. For some time, Mills had been developing a system of brick-vaulted fireproof construction that, however apparently innocuous, carries deeper meaning when viewed through the lens of a slave society. In 1822, South Carolina authorities convicted a freed Black carpenter, Denmark Vesey, of plotting to muster Black people throughout Charleston and outlying areas to burn the city, slaughter all the whites, and escape to Haiti. Historians continue to debate whether the conspiracy was real, or anxious white authorities inflated it and compelled testimonies. (With U.S. federal aid, Charleston had welcomed white St. Dominguan refugees from the Haitian Revolution.) In either case, Mills’s implementation of fire-resistant construction techniques takes on a different cast in the light of “the circumstances which have recently occurred” (Mills’s euphemism for Vesey’s alleged conspiracy). Built by Black carpenters, masons, and other workers, but representing the apprehensions of white people who were outnumbered by and terrified of them, these buildings continue to embody that dual representation: fear and security. Mills’s buildings were preemptive counterparts to brutal judicial terror in response to Black resistance. Analogously, statues that celebrate enslavers assert authority.
Figure 2: Robert Mills, Kershaw County Courthouse, Camden, South Carolina, 1825-1828. Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.
In the New York Times, commentator Bret Stephens recently mused, “We need to find a way to balance present-day moral judgments with some appreciation that the past is another country.” Anxiety about removing so many physical artifacts that we relinquish public memory is not only unrealistic, it rests on a dubious notion of historiographic discontinuity under the guise of historical conscientiousness. Statues of people are not the past. Their purpose is to convey the values of their builders. Removing relics of racist oppression, people across the globe are asserting their own historical authority. They are redesigning their environments in the spirit of emancipation.
There is no question that we must take down monuments that venerate racial violence. For example, it is confounding that a statue to Admiral George Rodney, a supporter of and profiteer from the British trade in enslaved Black African people, remains standing in Spanish Town, Jamaica. As statues to white men have fallen in Britain and the U.S., relics of racial oppression in former colonies remain. Buildings built by coerced laborers, though, offer another perspective. Where records of the people who built them do not exist, buildings are de facto memorials—often the sole form—of a subjectivity denied to craftspeople and builders. They are the obverse of statues of identifiable figures that bear artists’ signatures. As we collectively recognize the physical environment’s role in discrimination, it is incumbent on architectural history to look past symbolic representations and toward materials, labor, and documentation to find traces of subjects whom we have otherwise erased from history. As a corollary to the necessary, historic work of dismantling, we also have the potential to restore.
