Abstract

"Part, Whole, and Plus: The Design of Federal Construction Contracts from the Late Antebellum to the Reconstruction Era"

Ultan Byrne, University of Toronto (ultan.byrne@gmail.com)

Years before the Norcross Brothers’ canonical collaboration with H.H. Richardson and the subsequent rise to ubiquity of the general contractor at construction sites in the United States, the Treasury Department’s construction office had already developed a preference for lump sum whole-building contracts in the late antebellum period. While this system neither depended on nor precipitated the wide-scale capitalization and consolidation of the construction world in the United States, the Treasury’s building contracts did offer a set of early, very public, and geographically widespread examples in which the work of construction was reorganized along the lines that would later become the industry norm. And yet, just as this norm began to emerge during the Reconstruction Era and early in the Gilded Age, the Treasury shifted to relying on a combination of day work and cost-plus contracts for executing its construction projects instead. How should we understand the fact that the federal government—the largest and most geographically extensive contributor to architecture in the U.S. 19th century—diverged so sharply from the general pattern of development in the construction industry?
In this paper, I offer an answer to this question by examining the evolving relationship between labor organization, the consolidation of the construction industry, and congressional intervention in the Treasury’s contracting. Shifts in the design of these contracts involved subtle reconfigurations of the boundary of the federal state, transforming the way in which the Treasury engaged with manufacturers, contractors, and individual laborers, while also opening up new opportunities for patronage and spoils. While the state is frequently relegated to a supporting or background role in histories of contracting—as stabilizing the monetary instruments for contract fulfilment and the juridical apparatus for enforcement, this paper combines evidence from the Treasury’s correspondences with an analysis of its contracts to reveal how these roles were inflected in cases of the government’s own buildings.