"Every now and then, a fact goes viral.
Current case in point: that slaves helped construct the U.S. Capitol, where the son of an African man is set to be sworn in as the nation's 44th president.
Pundits and politicians have mentioned this dozens of times in the past few days, wielding it as potent shorthand for all the historical import of the moment.
..."The Capitol was built by slaves," Pelosi said. "
...It turns out there's far less in the historical record on the subject than one might expect.
Early historians of the Capitol's construction were largely indifferent to the work of common laborers, both paid and slave.
Only in the past 15 years or so has attention been trained on the role slaves played in constructing perhaps the nation's most important building — and the work has been led not by professional historians, but by individuals who developed a personal interest in the subject, such as retired Washington television reporter Ed Hotaling and freelance writer Bob Arnebeck.
In 2005, Congress appointed a task force to research the subject, which issued a report in conjunction with the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, finally bringing a measure of scholarly rigor to bear on the topic.
The task force acknowledged it was not able to tell the full story. "No one will ever know how many slaves helped to build the United States Capitol Building — or the White House," says the 2005 task force report, entitled History of Slave Laborers in the Construction of the United States Capitol.
...The commissioners' use of slave labor was unremarkable for the time.
When the Capitol was constructed, from 1793 to 1826, the building trades in almost every colony augmented the work force with slave labor.
...Pelosi might have specified that slaves were only part of the work force, but they were involved with almost every aspect of construction for at least the first several years.
We find her statement True."
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