The House the Prison Built
A house history that fails to properly engage with the past demands revisiting. Here’s an example in Raleigh, North Carolina: the Executive Mansion, the “people’s house.” The mansion’s official history does not sufficiently acknowledge the significance of prison labor, which played a crucial role in its construction (Figure 1). Instead, it is the significant admiration bestowed on the building during its nearly 130 years that is celebrated.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who visited the Executive Mansion while he was governor of New York, noted that it had the most beautiful interior of any governor’s residence in America.[1] In addition to such presidential praise, the brick and sandstone building, with its steeply pitched roof and gingerbread ornamentation, serves as an excellent example of Queen Anne style architecture in the United States. Designed by architects Samuel Sloan and Adolphus Gustavus Bauer, the Executive Mansion replaced the former Governor’s Palace (1814-1816), which had ceased functioning as a governor’s residence when it was surrendered to Union forces, in 1865. After several years when North Carolina’s governors had to seek out their own domestic accommodations, the new Executive Mansion, completed in 1891, established a permanent gubernatorial residence that could function as an exemplary “symbol of late-nineteenth century progress and the spirt of the ‘New South’.”[2] This building has remained in use as the governor’s residence up to the present moment, providing a home for thirty governors.
Figure 1. View of the west façade of the North Carolina Executive Mansion from North Blount Street, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2019. Photograph by Mira Rai Waits.
The Executive Mansion is managed by a committee consisting of governor-appointed members, the Executive Mansion Fine Arts Committee, which raises private funds to support the “preservation, improvement, and renovation” of the mansion. Through the work of this committee, the public image of the Executive Mansion has been constructed as one of domesticity, civic community, and history. While walking by the mansion along North Blount Street, a visitor can read key pieces of that history on a silver and black historical marker (Figure 2). The marker identifies the mansion’s architects and the date of completion, and its use of prison labor in construction.
Figure 2. North Carolina historical marker for the North Carolina Executive Mansion on North Blount Street, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2019. Photograph by Mira Rai Waits.
Hardly a secret, this turn to prison labor at the state level was part of a widespread move to harness the labor power of prisoners in the New South during and after Reconstruction (1865-77). Beginning with the convict lease system and followed by the introduction of chain gang labor, Southern states used prison labor to consciously exploit a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” A horrifically violent practice that disproportionally affected newly freed Black Americans, prisoners in the New South, as Michelle Alexander and Ava DuVernay have made plain, became “slaves of the state” within a system that set out to control the labor of Black people.
The aforementioned committee has documented the carceral construction history of the mansion in official publications. Prisoners who worked on the Executive Mansion were incarcerated at the North Carolina Central Prison (State Penitentiary) and supervised by Colonel William J. Hicks, a state official with a background in private contracting. His official title at the prison was Warden and Architect. During his tenure at the prison as architect/overseer, Hicks oversaw the contracting of prisoners for lease on various projects including the construction of roads and railroads, as well as an ambitious fabrication program at the prison. It supplied the bricks for construction on major state buildings in and around Raleigh.[3] The bricks at the Executive Mansion, particularly the handmade bricks that comprise the sidewalk that surrounds the mansion, have been afforded a small but noticeable place within recorded history because of the unique marks of their makers that linger on the sidewalk’s surface.
“Consequently, the lesson to be learned from the history of the Executive Mansion is missing from the interpretive literature: while prisoners may have built the governor’s home, they continue to be prevented from voting on who gets to live there. ”
Scattered signatures can be observed while walking around the mansion (Figure 3). The narrative surrounding their meaning has changed over the years. In the 1970s, the committee reported that these signatures were evidence of the prisoners’ desire to leave “their mark in history.” The supposition, a misreading of the historical record, was that prisoners had taken “pleasure” in making bricks for the mansion as opposed to the hard labor demanded in building railroads across the state.[4] North Carolina’s history with prison labor and the Western North Carolina Railroad is brutal. Prisoners in the New South were expendable to the state under the convict lease and chain gang labor systems. These systems were in certain respects worse than slavery, as prisoners could be worked to death and then easily replaced with no impact on production and profit. Any alignment of “pleasure” with forced labor, even if it manifested in the construction of elegant Victorian mansion, is a gross misrepresentation. By the 1990s such erroneous speculation about the prisoners’ relationship to their labor and their rationale for signing the bricks had been removed from the committee’s report, but the signatures still feature as part of the mansion’s history. The bricks were originally signed because crew leaders needed a way of marking the stacks of bricks that their crews of masons had completed. They function today as a reminder of the prisoners who were forced to labor for the state, contributing to the very material foundation of North Carolina’s capital city.[5]
Figure 3. Bricks signed with the names “Ballard” and “Horton” on the North Carolina Executive Mansion sidewalk, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2019. Photograph by Mira Rai Waits.
The problem with the history of prison labor at the Executive Mansion as it is currently represented through the historical marker, the reports of the committee, and even in the physical marks of nineteenth-century laborers, is that it is divorced from contemporary civic imagination. Nineteenth-century prisoners contributed to the built landscape of state governance, and North Carolina’s prisoners continue to labor for the state “producing goods and services for the Department of Public Safety and other tax-supported entities,” but voting, the most significant means for a citizen to leave their mark on history, is vastly restricted for the state’s former prisoners. North Carolina, along with twenty other U.S. states, disenfranchises its former prisoners, preventing them from voting until their probation periods are completed. Or as Article VI, Section 2 of North Carolina’s 1971 Constitution decrees, prisoners will have the right to vote only after having first been “restored to the rights of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law,” which has thus far been interpreted as referring to the completion of parole. The history of voter disenfranchisement in North Carolina is tainted with racism. Originating with slavery and codified in the Jim Crow era, the state’s denial of voting rights due to racial discrimination has persisted into the present. Consequently, the lesson to be learned from the history of the Executive Mansion is missing from the interpretive literature: while prisoners may have built the governor’s home, they continue to be prevented from voting on who gets to live there.
“While this effort is important in presenting history in an accessible medium and promoting future research, it does nothing to compensate the descendants of slavery whose labor was essential to the construction of one of the most well-known architectural symbols of modern democracy.”
The Executive Mansion is not the only elected official’s home in the United States that is emblematic of a deeply troubling disconnect between a building’s construction history and the voting rights of those tied to its architectural legacy. Only recently, during the Obama administration, did the history of the White House, another “people’s house,” receive widespread public attention for the use of slave labor during construction and in the management of the house itself. The White House Historical Society acknowledges this history with an online exhibition, Slavery in the President’s Neighborhood, that documents the White House’s entanglement with slavery, and the broader significance of slavery in the U.S. capital. While this effort is important in presenting history in an accessible medium and promoting future research, it does nothing to compensate the descendants of slavery whose labor was essential to the construction of one of the most well-known architectural symbols of modern democracy.
This presentation of the history of the Executive Mansion—a home that owes its presidentially praised existence in part to prisoners—presses elected officials in North Carolina to reflect on the state’s longstanding relation with prison labor and to take action now to protect the voting rights of former prisoners. Ultimately, the house’s history is not a static history that should be admired from a temporal distance. Instead, it should inform state law and policy because it is an important reminder of how prisoners, far from being removed from civil society, have been made to play a central role in shaping that society’s architectural contours and thereby deserve a place within. The introduction of modern prison labor schemes like North Carolina’s have always been framed by proponents as rehabilitative; criminals who have “failed” to be responsible citizens are supposedly transformed within prisons through labor whereby they gain skills to reenter and contribute to society. If the proponents of the schemes are to be believed—as opposed to seeing the history of prison labor in the United States as the exploitive evolution of slavery that it has been to date—then prisoners upon release should be free to leave their marks on history through unrestricted voting rights. They are owed more than just signatures on bricks.
NOTES
[1] William Bushong, North Carolina’s Executive Mansion: The First Hundred Years (Raleigh, N.C.: Executive Mansion Fine Arts Committee and the Executive Mansion Fund, Inc., 1991), 131.
[2] Bushong, North Carolina’s Executive Mansion, 2.
[3] “Penitentiary brick” was used for the following buildings in Raleigh: the Central Prison (1869-84), the North Carolina Executive Mansion (1883-91), the Supreme Court Building (1885), the Labor Building (1887), and Holladay Hall (1889-91) at North Carolina State University. In Chapel Hill Memorial Hall (1883-1885), which was razed in 1930, was also built with “penitentiary brick.” Bushong, North Carolina’s Executive Mansion, 21.
[4] The Executive Mansion; Raleigh North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Executive Mansion Fine Arts Committee, 1976), 10.
[5] The Executive Mansion; Raleigh North Carolina, 10.
