I have this mental picture of free guys and slave guys working side by side, along with these Irish guys who are shoveling sand and lugging lumber up to the fourth floor - and everybody sitting down having coffee. It just is almost unbelievable for us to picture, but that's the kind of inference you get from these records.
You could go either way with it - maybe it was her 12-year-old kid who was just carrying water upstairs for the guys to drink.
It was a hodgepodge of retro fits and so they completely gutted it and rebuilt it.
(University Hall) is the same size and shape, and the exterior has not been substantially altered, but it was always being changed over the years.
Brown University did not own any slaves.
You've got black guys and white guys and slaves and freed men and an Indian sitting around on the job drinking rum together. It doesn't mean that all day it was peace and love and harmony on the job site, but it's not what we picture when we say people were enslaved to work on University Hall. So there are nuances to this. History is messy.
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