Washington, DC — National Mall & Federal Core
United States Capitol
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Start with the dome, because Washington likes to begin with scale. The Capitol’s first cornerstone was laid in 1793, when the permanent federal city was still more plan than place. The building you see is not one eighteenth-century object: it expanded repeatedly as the country, Congress and federal ambitions grew.
The polished symbolism hides a harder construction story. Enslaved African Americans were rented from their owners and worked at nearly every stage of the early Capitol project, including quarrying stone, sawing timber and hauling materials. The Architect of the Capitol now commemorates that labor with a marker made from sandstone once part of the original East Front.
Look up at the Statue of Freedom. Philip Reid, an enslaved craftsman working at Clark Mills’s foundry, played an important role in casting and assembling the bronze statue before it was raised in 1863. Reid gained his freedom during the process after emancipation took effect in the District of Columbia in 1862.
That is Washington in miniature: an architectural statement about liberty whose physical creation depended partly on unfree labor. The contradiction is not an footnote to the building. It is part of what the building means.