Neoclassicism, Race, and Statecraft across the Atlantic World

On the night of 11 August 2017, photographer Andrew Shurtleff snapped a photo of a mob of young torchbearers in front of the white columns of the Rotunda, the central building of Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (Figure 1).¹ Chants of “Blood and soil!” made explicit these men’s familiarity with Nazism. The photo shows them standing soldierlike, several hundred men who traveled to Charlottesville to confirm their presumed role as “real” Americans and to defend the myths of white supremacy and white nationalism that sustain that position. By 2017, the growing emphasis on the nation’s histories of exploitation by those teaching the violence of slavery and its legacies promised to overwhelm the fragile mythos constructed and embraced by white nationalists. And their choice of stage was no accident. The Rotunda’s monumental columns and cresting dome had for generations communicated to young white men the stability of their privileged place in the American story. Those participating in 2017 were not unaware of their own history. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate—another neoclassical monument—was a favorite stage for Adolf Hitler; the night he was appointed chancellor, thousands of torchbearing Nazis marched through the gate, a moment immortalized in numerous photographs (Figure 2). These two architectural moments might be coincidental. Or they might not be. This essay argues that the use of classical buildings to reify white supremacy has a centuries-old architectural history.

In 1818, as he was developing a new university in his home state of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson articulated its purpose: “To form statesmen, legislators, and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend; . . . to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order.”² In an important move, the cultivation of virtue and order at this institution was to depend on the fundamentals of Enlightenment learning, principally reason, radically disentangling moral formation from its traditional grounding in religion and the church. Designing both buildings and curriculum, Jefferson began by dividing all useful knowledge into ten domains, each to be taught by a master tutor from within his own pavilion. Refusing to hire faculty from American universities, Jefferson sent agents across Europe to hire tutors who were Enlightenment masters of their subjects. The pavilions he designed, together with the tutors they housed, formed Jefferson’s “academical village,” likely inspired by the model of such a village described by the ancient Greek philosophers in the Encyclopédie méthodique.³

Breaking from classical commitments to bilateral symmetry, Jefferson designed ten formally distinct buildings so that through their variety the façades would exhibit “models in Architecture of the purest forms of antiquity, furnishing to the student examples of the precepts he will be taught in that art.”⁴ This village, of course, would become the University of Virginia, a complex of late neoclassical pavilions flanking a central library in a rotunda modeled on the ancient Roman Pantheon (Figure 3). As Jefferson imagined a new university dedicated to educating citizen leaders for the democratic republic he helped to found, the ancient worlds that birthed both democracy and republicanism were for him the ideal architectural incubators.⁵ But scholars who examine Jefferson’s design intentions for the university often overlook an important point: Jefferson never imagined that the institution would educate people of color.⁶ His belief, grounded in his own “empirical” observations of Black people’s vacant imaginations and weak artistic sensibilities, was that they were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”⁷ Jefferson’s views on this mutuality of endowment similarly drew from an ancient classical tradition. Socrates, among others, assumed the interdependence of an elevated mind and a healthy body.⁸ Jefferson’s assumptions about the inferiority of African Americans implicated not only the Black body and mind but also, by extension, Black moral character. Given his Enlightenment convictions that sensibility and reason were the foundations of virtue and character, which were themselves necessary for democratic citizenship, he argued that whites and Blacks in America were necessarily “separate nations.”⁹ Jefferson believed that classical architecture, grounded in ancient precedent and rightly disposed, could educate students toward virtue and elevate their innate sense of taste, and he also believed that Black people lacked the capacity for such personal moral development. Thus, his new classical university, like the nation it was intended to undergird, was for whites only.¹⁰ In his designs for the University of Virginia, Jefferson assumed an interdependence among neoclassical architecture, the elevation of taste, and the making of citizens, a status that for him excluded all those he identified as Black. He understood classicism to be the highest form of architectural expression, the white race to be the highest expression of humanity, and a democratic republic to be the most virtuous expression of government. But Jefferson’s ideas were not new. In this essay, I will show that this triangulation has a history, as I seek to reassemble some of the fragments that can bring that history into clearer view.

In making this argument, I am building directly on Mabel Wilson’s excellent work on Jefferson’s Capitol Building in Richmond. By situating the design of the Virginia Capitol Building in its social, economic, cultural, and political context through a deep analysis of Jefferson’s writings and those of others, and by expanding the scope of archival sources from architectural drawings to scientific treatises, Wilson effectively analyzes the relationship between the democratic ideals presumably manifest in the building and the discourse around racial difference that directly implicated that democracy. In her words: “I explore how the ontological and epistemological ground for the racialized citizen/noncitizen dynamic is one structured conceptually, physically, and spatially by [the Capitol].”¹¹ Building on Wilson’s foundation, in this essay I address the racialization that is interwoven with other post-Renaissance classical architecture and, like Wilson, seek to examine classical architecture’s role in nation making through the eighteenth century. Peter Minosh continues Wilson’s arguments; in an essay appearing in the same volume as Wilson’s on the Virginia Capitol, he extends the analysis to William Thornton’s designs for the U.S. Capitol building. “Against . . . the multiple ideologies of freedom, liberty, and equality that have been projected onto the neoclassical architecture of the Capitol,” Minosh surfaces a dialogue between the architecture and the realities of “racism, slavery and notions of American enlightenment.” He argues that slavery “construed [the Capitol] by being foundational to the political imaginary within which it was formed.”¹² Both Wilson and Minosh have laid essential foundations for this article by offering models for implicating early American neoclassical buildings in the emerging scientific, social, and political discourses around race.¹³

If, as David Karmon recently implied in this journal, the dialogue between race and racism and the history of early modern architecture are underexamined, the connections between race and the aesthetics of that era have been examined by scholars in other fields for decades.¹⁴ Additional foundations for this article have been laid by art historian David Bindman, whose scholarship has explored the ways that neoclassicism in painting and sculpture is in conversation with early race science, and social historian Simon Gikandi, who has examined in depth the ways that slavery shaped the intellectual and aesthetic currents of elite British culture.¹⁵ And because, as these scholars acknowledge, the construction of race and the unfolding of eighteenth-century empires are contingent historical forces, the arguments of this article also depend on work engaging the intersection of architecture, nation, and empire. Just as Alex Bremner’s magisterial Imperial Gothic demonstrates Gothic architecture’s role in the project of empire making in the Victorian age, the same can be said of the classical tradition for preceding generations.¹⁶ Think only of the innumerable echoes of Gibbs’s churches, “Palladian” plantation houses, and temple-fronted courthouses across early America, the West Indies, India, and elsewhere. In these places, eighteenth-century neoclassical architecture—especially public buildings—could easily function as a synecdoche of an emerging British Empire, one founded on mercantile and industrial capitalism.¹⁷ In fact, the financial capital made available through trade and industry was essential to the remarkable building programs that realized the empire both at home and abroad.¹⁸ Put simply, many other scholars have already shown how empire, racism, and neoclassicism were in conversation throughout the eighteenth century. In this article I seek to bring those arguments to bear on eighteenth-century architecture and the project of nation making.

Let me be clear about what I am, and am not, arguing. This article should not leave readers with the conclusion that all architects, builders, and patrons who erected neoclassical buildings were racist because of that construction. The manifestation of racialized hierarchies is rarely that explicit. I am arguing for something more nuanced, and often unconscious: that neoclassicism and the construction of race were Enlightenment siblings, distinct yet mutually implicating worlds of knowledge.¹⁹ In the pages that follow, I offer a series of fragments in the form of vignettes charting the rise of the classical architectural tradition through eighteenth-century Britain, Germany, and the Caribbean, before returning briefly to Virginia. In so doing, I suggest ways in which classical architecture and the construction of race are mutually implicating cultural expressions. For historical actors, however, those implications were so normative—or “natural,” in Enlightenment parlance—as to be barely legible. In an effort to show the stakes of the case, I have selected for these vignettes buildings that were involved in the project of empire and state making; by implicating a body politic, these buildings asserted a power that reached beyond their immediate contexts. Neoclassical architecture has been too long divorced from the social, economic, and racialized infrastructures of empire; it has been seen as a natural by-product of rarified patrons and an emerging architectural theoretical culture somehow separate from the commercial and financial capital necessary to fund such projects. But the fact that these discourses are difficult to perceive, camouflaged by the textures of the everyday, does not render them impotent in their moment or unknowable in ours. The difficulty of the project does not render it unworthy. We historians assemble fragments of the past. Willie James Jennings reminds us that in assembling a past, “everything is in slices and slivers.”²⁰ In the case of Jefferson and the University of Virginia, those fragments are large and clear; the whole is comparatively legible. The fragments for the predecessors discussed in this essay are thinner, but we can still see through the slices into past worlds of meaning.

Through the three vignettes that follow, and the story of Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia that bookends them, I seek to render subtle meanings more visible by exposing simultaneous and occasionally cross-referential worlds of knowledge that have been allowed to occupy distinct historical categories. That neoclassicism and race theory are contemporaneous with nation making and imperial expansion is self-evident. The development of the European nation-state was well under way before the eighteenth century, with the seventeenth century seeing the emergence and dramatic growth of robust administrative infrastructure and military complexes. These national burdens were funded by taxation of rapidly growing mercantile capitalism, which over the seventeenth century outpaced the older practice of generating revenues through land taxation. As a result, the professional class consisting of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and lawyers displaced the hereditary aristocracy as the powerful financial center of the national stage.²¹ As European nation-states cemented, classicism as an architectural expression enjoyed predominance in Western European circles. In this article, I step back from formal distinctions among aesthetic categories coined by various architectural historians, such as Georgian, Palladian, neoclassical, and Greek revival, preferring to see them all as drawing from a shared concern with the resurgence of ancient classical forms for contemporary life. Across elite circles of Europe and the Atlantic world, the eighteenth century, especially through its second half, was fixated on the neoclassical.

And if it is true that classical churches and courthouses manifested empire through public architecture, the economies of empire also helped to realize neoclassicism. The extraordinary wealth generated by the exploitation of Africans and other people of color made possible white Britons’ opportunities to explore ancient places, granting them the privilege of education that allowed for curiosity and the leisure time and available resources to document and reconstruct these ancient worlds for modern purposes. Jamaican planter James Dawkins, for example, was the largest benefactor supporting early expeditions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the eventual publication of Robert Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra and Ruins of Balbeck, and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.²² Dawkins’s wealth depended entirely on the brutal slave regime of sugar production in his birth colony of Jamaica. Many hundreds of enslaved Africans perished on sugar plantations named Aleppo, Palmyra, and Parnassus so that Dawkins could support the launch of the publications that eventually had a profound impact on academic neoclassicism through the later eighteenth century. The white columns of Athens rendered on the pages of the Antiquities depended on a seemingly endless stream of discarded Black lives.

The eighteenth century also saw the birth of racial taxonomies. While earlier centuries were certainly shaped by racial prejudices, natural philosophers organized humanity into discrete varieties by the 1730s and solidified taxonomic categories labeled “races” by the 1770s.²³ The systematic documentation that undergirded the archaeological rigor of classical architecture in the second half of the century shares an epistemology with the writings of those concerned with documenting and understanding human variation in the same decades. The more important question to ask is, How are these bodies of knowledge and practice related?

The first two vignettes below demonstrate that emerging ideas about race shaped neoclassical architecture in at least two ways: first, Africans and their buildings became convenient signs of the primitive against which the sophistication of neoclassical culture might be measured; and second, neoclassicism was enlisted in the project of nation making, and therefore in citizen making, which was itself contingent on constructions of race.²⁴ The third vignette shows how a Haitian contest of this tradition reveals the force of its power, the exception that proves the rule. Over the course of the eighteenth century, each of these forces—exploitation, the indexing of culture, and nation making—marked neoclassical buildings in Europe and across the Atlantic, so that by the time Jefferson was designing his new university, neoclassicism, racism, and the politics of nationhood were mutually implicating.²⁵ In deploying an episodic frame rather than following a single linear argument, this article is suggestive, not definitive. While the interdependence of neoclassicism and empire is better understood, architectural historians have the responsibility to close the distance between our own field and the work of historians of science who have recognized for much longer the importance of the constructions of race. And as architectural historians, we must examine critically the ways in which the worlds of ideas enlist architecture to shape social structures and experiences.

In the late 1750s, teams of stonemasons in Bath were beginning to build the façades of what would soon be celebrated as a triumph of classical architecture: the King’s Circus (Figure 4). Comprising thirty planned town houses laid out in a circle, the three unequal arcs of the Circus were unified as a single urban campaign by an unrelenting march of triple-stacked paired pilasters, Doric below Ionic below Corinthian. Designed by John Wood the Elder but completed by his son Wood the Younger, the Circus was under construction by 1754. Widely recognized as a landmark of urban residential architecture, the Circus inverted the exterior of the ancient Roman Colosseum as an interior façade to create a perfectly unified elevation masking individually designed town houses. The design’s inversion of such a monumental classical form as an urban housing scheme was simultaneously highly original and directly informed by ancient classical precedent.

The format of the leasing structure for the town houses of the Circus meant that while the façades were unified, each town house was built for a particular lessee, a fact visible in the ornament on the individual façades.²⁶ The individual nature of these town houses, of course, highlighted the owners’ participation in various capital-making enterprises and provided evidence of their status as enlightened participants in liberal society, while the houses’ uniformity clearly communicated the coherence of this class of people, capitalists central to the making of both nation and empire. Those distinctions were expressed on the elevations only in the carved metopes of the Doric order fronting the various houses. Tim Mowl and Brian Earnshaw have rightly identified George Wither’s 1635 Emblemes as the visual source for many of the metopes, and a close reading of that work makes clear that these figures were burdened with meaning, often religious.²⁷ The caiman’s scales, for example, reminded readers that virtue was like a coat of armor against which no weapon would prevail; the palm tree evoked the righteous, who were like trees planted by streams of water. And while these seventeenth-century emblematic functions might very well have survived into the next century, the meanings of these images should also be read contextually.

Consider that the caiman and the palm tree—both decidedly tropical subjects—are in triad with what is likely a royal African umbrella (Figure 5). The first two appear in Wither’s Emblemes but the last does not. These three are joined by other metopes that depict sugarcane and either an overshot waterwheel or a windmill, technologies commonly found in Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. Taken together, these metopes may well be references to Caribbean plantation holdings. But even more interesting are metopes illustrating clusters of small round huts, capped with thatched conical roofs and resting on elevated platforms (Figure 6). One has geometric patterns inscribed in its presumably mud-skimmed walls. Previously unidentified, these huts might well be African. If so, they would have been seen in their moment through a complicated historical, social theoretical, and architectural theoretical lens, one focused on the Atlantic world. Historian Ronald Neale notes that Bath’s first phase of geographic and economic growth, in the early second quarter of the eighteenth century, was directly connected to Bristol’s expansion as an African and West Indian port. Bath, he observes, was a convenient locale for investment of newly won West Indian fortunes.²⁸ In fact, visual references to both Africa and the Caribbean would have made sense for Bath’s elite. Rowland Blackman, owner of plantations in both Barbados and Antigua, and James Plunkett, who owned a plantation in Jamaica, both owned houses in the Circus in the decades right after construction was completed.²⁹

While not a port city, Bath had deep eighteenth-century connections to the ports of Bristol and Liverpool. And it is in that larger, regional, context that these metopes begin to make more sense. Rather than being unique examples of architectural references to West Africa and the Caribbean, these metopes are simply participating in an architectural language of empire already in evidence in both Bristol and Liverpool, here extended to Bath, on buildings designed by the very same architect.

Prior to his work on the King’s Circus, John Wood had a long history of working for major transatlantic merchants in both port cities. In early 1741, a group of leading merchants in Bristol approached Wood to design and construct an exchange building in their city, the first such building to be erected outside the capital city of London. British exchanges were public buildings that facilitated the regular transactions of merchants but also symbolized the increasing authority of the merchant class. In the case of Bristol, Wood engaged those who traded with—but were not native to—Africa and the West Indies.³⁰ The plan of the building included an open courtyard flanked on four sides by structures housing a wide variety of functions, from counting rooms to a coffeehouse to taverns. And while the plans and elevations are features that have captured the attention of architectural historians, it is the ornamental program that concerns us here. Working to Wood’s designs, sculptor Thomas Paty filled the tympana of the four pediments facing the interior courtyard with representations of the canonical four continents (Figures 7 and 8). In Wood’s own words, “The spaces between the Capitals of the Columns and the Pilasters of this Front, are filled with Festoons which represent Great Britain and the Four Quarters of the World, with the chief products and manufactures of every country.”³¹ Each tympanum was embellished with animals and products that symbolized the three foreign realms: camels and dragons for Asia, seals and penguins for America, and crocodiles, elephants, and lions for Africa. Significantly, while the personification of America sits above corn cobs and barrels of tobacco and Asia sits above fine jewels, the panel supporting the personification of Africa is filled only with swirling vegetation, devoid of reference.³² Unreferenced but understood by those familiar with the Atlantic trade, Africa’s products were Africans.

Significantly, each of Wood’s continents was dominated by a figure whose facial features capitalized on familiar stereotypes of human difference, likely including color, although the original paints are long obscured. By depending on this framework for organizing the continents, their peoples, and their products, John Wood’s Bristol Exchange created a public commercial space that rendered knowable the three foreign quadrants of the world, creating an imaginary whereby those quadrants were accessible through the courtyard’s doors. Even more, the courtyard’s ornamental scheme centered Bristol as the gateway to that world.

Soon after completion of the Exchange, Bristol’s command of the Atlantic market began to lag behind that of Liverpool, which soon became the major center for trade with Africa and the West Indies.³³ As early as the 1750s, the African and Caribbean trade constituted a third of Liverpool’s revenues.³⁴ In the 1730s, Liverpool sent out only fifteen ships on slaving voyages, but by the early 1770s that number had crested at one hundred per year, and by the final decades of the century three-quarters of all ships involved in the English slave trade departed from Liverpool.³⁵ One of the reasons for this dramatic escalation was the capacity of the city’s merchants to outfit those ships with necessary supplies, shaping a regional economy—from fishing to textiles—that depended on the slave trade.³⁶

By the middle of the century, Liverpool’s merchants had begun to outpace their rivals in Bristol, and in doing so they too built an exchange, again designed by Wood with ornament by Paty. The Liverpool Exchange, begun in 1749, was largely completed by 1754. Although later changes have transformed the building, the east elevation survives intact, and a drawing and description of the pediment scheme of the southern elevation illuminate the original design (Figure 9). A close analysis of Paty’s ornamental schemes on these façades reveals the merchants’ global vision. The south front included a pediment over the portico and carved relief panels along the entablature. An 1810 description of the Exchange indicates that the sculpture of the pediment—no longer extant but visible in Wood’s elevation—was framed around a central figure, the Genius of Liverpool. To Liverpool’s right stood the Genius of Commerce, the Genius of Liberty, and a liver (Liverpool’s emblematic bird); to her left rose Neptune, his trident, and an aqueous urn.³⁷ The program here depends on earlier examples of such pediments. The 1650s program in the pediment of the Amsterdam Town Hall exhibits the four continents, including Africa, framed by a lion and elephant, paying homage to the city of Amsterdam represented as a standing female figure crowned by a mast and crow’s nest. Much as in the Liverpool example, Neptune lies at Amsterdam’s feet. Closer in time and space to the Liverpool Exchange, London’s Mansion House pediment similarly shows a female personification of London triumphant through trade and commerce, complete with a personification of Old Father Thames.³⁸

But if the pediment generically asserts Liverpool’s mercantile dominance, the east entablature makes clearer reference to the source of the city’s wealth. The entablature comprises nine panels organized into three sets of three, each arranged with a female allegorical figure in the central panel and supporting attributes to either side. The set on the left represents Africa (Figure 10). Its center panel features an African woman’s head—racially stereotyped with flattened nose—surmounted with feathers and placed amid ivory tusks, gourds, and an umbrella, another emblem of Africa since at least the 1663 publication of Claes Visscher’s map Orbis terrarum tabula recens emendata et in lucem edita. The right panel in this set presents a huge elephant head with raised tusks and trunk. The left panel depicts a beast of burden surrounded by crates, hogshead barrels, and sacks, all connected by interweaving ropes, the stuff of wharves. The set of panels on the right of the entablature represents America, with a female head amid bows, slingshots, and a quiver full of arrows in the center (Figure 11). The panel to the right includes a boar surrounded by blossoms, but it is the panel on the left that is of greater import. This panel includes a camel’s head and a caiman, with a sea monster in the background. The camel, represented on an early map of Barbados, and the caiman, which surmounted the great seal of Jamaica, indicate that America here is the Caribbean. Connecting Africa and America, the middle three panels represent the Atlantic Ocean, with a central female head surrounded by seashells. That she connects Africa and America is made clear by the gourds nearer to Africa and the sunflower nearer to America.

These buildings are the precursors to Wood’s King’s Circus. Seen through the lens of his earlier work, the caimans, umbrellas, and African houses on the Bath metopes seem drawn from prints, maps, and other sources, and oriented toward a clientele deeply enmeshed with the Atlantic trade. To the residents of the Circus and to visitors in the popular spa town, the caimans and palm trees were direct referents to West Africa and the West Indies. But an allegorical representation of Africa as seen in Bristol and Liverpool and a representation of an African hut are two different things, the first depending on a long visual tradition, the second an entirely new visual enterprise in the mid-eighteenth century. In attempting to represent African architecture with a round hut, Paty (or Wood) was drawing from a very different, and much more recent, visual tradition. By the middle of the eighteenth century, printmakers and mapmakers increasingly deployed images of small, round, clay-walled and thatch-roofed houses to represent traditional huts of Africa. In what appears to be an early example of a widely circulated image of African architecture, François Froger included in his Relation d’un voyage fait en 1695, 1696, & 1697, published in 1698, an illustration of a European trader bargaining with an African supplier for two enslaved people (Figure 12). An overhanging palm tree shades two round, earthen-walled and thatch-roofed houses. But if the African hut was incidental in Froger, it was the subject of an engraving published in the travel account of Jean Barbot. In his 1732 A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, Barbot included a three-panel illustration titled “The High Lands of Sierra Liona,” which offers one of the earliest detailed views of “African” architecture (Figure 13). Both round and square buildings appear in the engraving, all with steeply pitched roofs over walls made of tightly woven rush or waddle woven in complex patterns. But surely the most widely reproduced image appeared in a vignette on a 1743 map of West Africa produced by Homann Heirs (Figure 14). The vignette includes four buildings, with an open-sided kitchen at the far left and, at the far right, an open-walled structure, little more than an elevated roof, used for discussion and business beyond the household complex. Notably, both have elevated floors, raised up on stilts. Between these stand the two buildings that constitute the heart of the domestic yard: a thatch-roofed house described as fortified with red clay, also with an interior raised floor, and a round, clay-walled rice storehouse topped with a conical thatch roof. This same collection of four buildings would be shuffled and reprinted, now with the title “Negro-Houses of Cape Mesurado,” by Thomas Astley in his 1745–47 A New General Collection of Voyages and Travel. These visual representations supplemented written accounts such as Johannes Rask’s posthumously published A Brief and Truthful Description of a Journey to and from Guinea (1754), in which he describes a negerier filled with small clay-walled huts, some long and others round.³⁹ In short, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the growing number of British travelers to the coast of Africa had supplied written descriptions, maps, and other visual images of local houses.⁴⁰ By the mid-1750s, as John Wood was designing the King’s Circus, the small round hut capped by a thatched conical roof, often raised on a platform, had become a visual sign of “African” architecture. Yet when clustered with sugarcane, a windmill, or an overshot waterwheel, these African houses could, in the minds of their viewers, occupy either the coast of Africa or the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean.

If these images are African huts, they would also have been shaped by a contemporary discourse establishing a hierarchical taxonomy among the races, always with Africans as the lowest form of humanity.⁴¹ Enlightenment naturalists and their readers understood race in two ways: the first derived from Carl Linnaeus and the second from the Comte de Buffon. The 1735 publication of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae extended the taxonomic classification of animals and plants to include humans, the first step in creating “scientific” categories of human beings. In his 1742 essay “Of National Characters,” David Hume applied Linnaeus’s observations about difference to civilization and culture: “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white.” He continued that among nonwhites there were “no ingenious manufactures” and “no arts, no sciences.”⁴² As cultural historian Simon Gikandi argues, “For Hume, the most obvious sign of black inferiority was aesthetic lack and a general incapacity in the realm of taste.”⁴³ The second important frame was offered by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in his 1753 Histoire naturelle defined “species.” He argued that any animals that can crossbreed and produce offspring that can also procreate are all of the same species. This widely accepted premise, which became known as “Buffon’s rule,” made it clear that all human beings are the same species. Buffon cited climate as the reason for what he presumed to be human degeneracy, the reversion of some races to more primitive states.⁴⁴ Just five years later, in 1758, Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his monumental Systema naturae, in which he asserted that the genus Homo comprised two species: Homo troglodytes (the apes) and Homo sapiens (men). The latter of these had four natural varieties derived from four different continents: America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. To each of these varieties, Linnaeus assigned discrete social, physical, cultural, and personality markers. Following Thomas Aquinas’s “Great Chain of Being,” Linnaeus elevated Homo sapiens over Homo troglodytes and organized the former into a natural hierarchy beginning with African, then Asian, and American, all organized under European.⁴⁵ By the time of Wood’s Circus, then, most social theorists accepted a racial hierarchy that assumed Africans to be the lowest expression of the human condition. By extension, the African hut was not just emblematic of an African—it bore also the implications of a precivil and submoral condition.

And it might well have been that Wood enlisted the primitive or savage hut to amplify the artistic sophistication of his reimagined classical Roman circus, the small sculpted metopes and the grand urban design an index of Bath’s advanced state of civilization.⁴⁶ In 1741, Wood published a treatise on architectural theory titled The Origin of Building: Or, the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected. While in this work he argues primarily for the symbolic functions of architecture as representing both the aspirations of humankind and the wisdom of God, he begins with an introduction to the world’s first shelters. He tells us that at the dawn of history, men “were born in Woods and Caverns, like the Beasts” and built “Huts with Leaves . . . while [others] imitating the Industry of Swallows made, with little Branches of Trees and Pieces of Clay, Places to shelter themselves in.” A few pages later he reports that these “huts” were “made with Poles set in a Circular Manner at Bottom, and meeting together at the Top in the Manner of a Cone or Sugar Loaf with Sods of Turf, or Pieces of Clay put round about them to keep out the Wind and Weather.” He argues that these ancient huts, with curved walls of sticks and clay or thatched with leaves, preceded cottages constructed of “Forked Sticks set upright in the Ground, with Poles laid upon them [with] the Intervals interlaced with Boughs, Reeds, or Straw, and then plaistered with Clay.”⁴⁷ Clearly dependent on similar huts characterized in Vitruvius, Wood’s huts served to remind his readers that architecture was a measure of civilization; the transition from the hut to the cottage was humankind’s first step in that journey. The mention of the sugarloaf, the principal product of the West Indies, might also imply the convergence of African and West Indian imagery in Wood’s own imagination. In his framing of the primitive hut as a theoretical device, cultural historian Anthony Vidler argues that most writers who used the trope before the 1750s depended on the hut to benchmark the progress of civilization; it was a visual index of a premoral condition, signaling savagery, idleness, laziness, indolence, and sloth.⁴⁸ As a theorist, Wood was aligned with most other architectural writers of his day. The hut as shelter evinced a precivil and premoral state; architecture was evidence of civilization, humanity in a moral state.

This stands in contrast to the view of the primitive as the “natural” state of humankind, already noble and virtuous, shaped by social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and adopted by Marc-Antoine Laugier in his Essai sur l’architecture, which first appeared in 1755 (Figure 15).⁴⁹ In the frontispiece to this work, a child—or rather a virtuous putto—is directed by the Genius of Architecture toward the primitive hut, which is set not in contradistinction to architecture but as its first instantiation. Laugier’s white Christian toddler is born fully endowed with the capacity for classical virtue.⁵⁰ Rousseau, seeking to examine the origins of human inequality, is a bit more complicated. In his 1755 Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (translated into English in 1761 as Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men), he argues that the primitive occupies a presocial condition of amour de soi, a confident sense of personal worth quite different from the civilized and morally corrupt amour-propre, which finds self-worth in the esteem of others. Like Laugier’s Essai, Rousseau’s treatise also has a frontispiece, and as Peter Minosh has observed, these two images are in conversation (Figure 16).⁵¹ Rousseau’s image contrasts two men. The first, extravagantly dressed, complete with plumed cavalier hat, is surrounded by the appeals of his peers and framed by the tall bastions of a fortification overshadowed by looming storm clouds. His wealth and position in society have not brought him peace. This cavalier considers the appeal of a Hottentot, simply dressed and pointing to his peaceable community warmed by sunny skies. Amour-propre considering amour de soi. In both of the frontispieces, the acting figures—the putto and the Hottentot—are imbued with virtue as per Rousseau’s formulation. But as Minosh has observed, Rousseau’s African Hottentot produces round African huts, while Laugier’s white putto invents the classical.⁵² Wood’s own writing makes clear that he was deeply concerned with the primitive as an index of architecture, so it is highly improbable that he was unfamiliar with Laugier’s and Rousseau’s treatises, both of which appeared in the very years when he was devising the sculptural program for the Circus. But even if these works are not the source, and even if Wood did not intend his round buildings to evoke African huts, the growing familiarity of the round-walled and thatch-roofed house as the image of African architecture by these years meant those forms likely functioned—in concert with the caimans, sugar cane, umbrellas, and palm trees—to remind Bath’s substantial merchant middle class of African and Caribbean landscapes.⁵³

By the late eighteenth century, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that all humans occupied a natural hierarchy, with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom, just above the apes.⁵⁴ Importantly, this hierarchy applied to all characteristics of personhood, including intellectual capacity and moral character. Historian William Max Nelson argues that race became in the eighteenth century “an heritable and inescapable way of being that encompassed physical, moral, intellectual, and psychological characteristics and provided a basis for hierarchical differentiation,” and that hierarchy clearly elevated Britons, who imagined themselves as white, far superior to Black Africans.⁵⁵ Through the first half of the eighteenth century, Britons deepened their commitment to classical architecture as an ever-growing expression of their intellectual and cultural sophistication, as demonstrated by the rise in the numbers of classical titles in personal libraries and classical subjects for paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy. Yet in the same years, expanding colonial encounters birthed a British and European imagination for African architecture. The writings of Bernier, Linnaeus, and Buffon, the travel accounts of Froger and Barbot, the maps produced by Homann Heirs and later copyists, and the very real travels of those from London, Bristol, and Liverpool involved in the West African and West Indian trade—all of these images, descriptions, and experiences undergirded the potential for the African hut in the British imagination. And finally, the appearance of two monumental treatises that explored humankind’s civil and moral origins and either implicitly (Rousseau) or explicitly (Laugier) tied that condition to architecture amplified architecture’s role as an index of moral and civil society just a year or two before the Circus’s sculptural program was under way. The emergence of a visual imagination for African architecture became useful evidence of the presumed primitive condition of those raced Black and the civility and supremacy of those raced white, so effectively visualized through the architecture of the neoclassical. And as the next vignette will show, the implications of these comparisons were not just racial but also national. As Linda Colley has so aptly stated: eighteenth-century Britons “came to define themselves as a single people . . . in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.”⁵⁶ If architecture in Bristol, Liverpool, and Bath demonstrates that this process of self-definition was born through racialization, Colley makes clear that there were also nationalistic implications.

If the metopes of Wood’s King’s Circus used architecture to visualize racial hierarchies, those of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate deployed those racial differences toward the political work of shaping the public imagination of the body politic (Figure 17). Commissioned in 1788 by Friedrich Wilhelm II, king of Prussia, the classically restrained Brandenburg Gate marked the beginning of a reign concerned principally with domestic order. This focus on internal discipline and self-regulation stood in sharp contradistinction to the rule of Frederick the Great, famous for his belligerent foreign policies and his opulent and effusive rococo constructions. The Brandenburg Gate evoked the new regent’s restraint and commitment to civic virtue. And that commitment was rendered explicitly in the gate’s sculpted metopes. Resurrecting the ancient story of the centaurs versus the Lapiths from the metopes of the Parthenon, the Brandenburg Gate promoted civic virtue through the visual power of a binary: debauched and debased centaurs against beautiful and virtuous Lapiths. But in light of contemporary social theoretical discourses that aligned “Germanness” with whiteness against racialized others, this superior/inferior binary was easily racialized, working in concert with the emerging penchant to essentialize race in the Western imagination. Even though Prussia was very delayed in its imperial ambition, its critical role in the fabrication of both racial theory and aesthetic theory through the third quarter of the eighteenth century means that the intersection of aesthetics, race, and nation making cannot be understood apart from Prussian contributions.

Designed by Prussian architect Carl Gotthard Langhans, the Brandenburg Gate is an explicit reimagining of the Athenian Propylaea, the gateway to the Acropolis, rendered in detail in volume 2 of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, published just one year before. Even the equestrian monuments discussed in the Antiquities as once associated with the Propylaea became reimagined by Langhans as the bronze quadriga ushering the allegorical figure of peace into the city. The design was so derivative, in fact, that architect Johann Carl Richter mocked it as an unimaginative copy. But it had significant political implications: the Brandenburg Gate was Friedrich Wilhelm II’s first commission, only two years after his elevation to the Prussian throne. Its severe classicism represented a dramatic departure from the Francophilia and baroque aesthetics of his predecessor and uncle Frederick the Great. The gate’s design signaled the new regent’s major social and urban reforms, which included ceasing military expeditions, improving roads and canals across Prussia, eliminating state-held monopolies, reducing taxes, and encouraging trade. He also elevated German as the state language, overturning his uncle’s preference for all things French. The Brandenburg Gate announced the arrival of a new political regime. Thus, scholars traditionally describe it as architectural evidence of the rise of a peace-loving Germanic monarch.⁵⁷

But there is one feature of the Brandenburg Gate that suggests a different or at least additional reading. While the metopes of the Propylaea in Antiquities are blank, those of the Brandenburg Gate are filled with a centauromachy, each square showing a contest between a man and a centaur (Figure 18). The famous source for this visualization of the ancient story of the Lapiths and the centaurs comes not from the Propylaea but from the south elevation of the Parthenon. In the ancient story, the Lapiths are descendants of the valiant and heroic Lapithes and the centaurs are descended from his brother Centaurus, who, being deformed and bestial in nature, had mated with a mare to birth the centaurs. Having gathered for a wedding feast, the centaurs became drunk, which exacerbated their innate bestial, lusty, and belligerent nature. The virtuous Lapiths engaged the centaurs to defend the honor of the bride. Contrasting virtue and vice, beauty and deformity, order and chaos, the centauromachy on the Parthenon was intended to distinguish the virtuous Athenians from the belligerent Spartans. But what did the battle between centaurs and Lapiths mean in late eighteenth-century Berlin? As David Bindman has argued, there emerged in early eighteenth-century European accounts of non-Europeans an “implicit connection . . . between physical beauty and virtue, and between ugliness and vice.”⁵⁸ Could the figures on the Brandenburg Gate be read in these terms? In late 1780s Berlin, the Lapiths were clearly Berliners, or maybe Germans more generally, but who were the centaurs? Situating this building in the social and intellectual context of late eighteenth-century Berlin raises the prospect that the centaurs were read as Africans by some—maybe many—middle-class Berliners.

Inspired by a brief commentary in David Hume’s 1757 “Of the Standard of Taste,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant had also published explorations of racial categories, which surfaced first in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, published in 1764.⁵⁹ In Observations, Kant argued:

Further exploring these questions, Kant published in the 1770s On the Different Races of Man, in which he echoed Buffon’s conclusion that all men were of the same species, but that there were different races, hierarchically disposed according to morals and reason.⁶¹ Making a very clear connection between race and capacity for reason and sentiment, Kant’s writings had a profound impact, securing ranked racial categories in the popular imagination and tying those categories to limitations of human potential.⁶² The consequences were enormous for anti-Black racism (notice that Kant contrasted the most different races: whites and Blacks). For Kant, Blacks had no capacity for feeling, therefore they had no capacity for aesthetic appreciation, therefore they had no capacity for moral virtue. And their lack of moral virtue made them unfit for citizenship.⁶³

Kant’s treatise appeared within months of another seminal German volume, this one by Johann Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, long seen as the foundation for the discipline of art history.⁶⁴ As so ably explored by Anne Lafont and others, Winckelmann, like Edmund Burke before him, trafficked in the assumed physiological and aesthetic inferiority of Blacks:

As articulated by Kant, Winckelmann, and others, just seeing Africans could elicit a negative aesthetic response. In an assessment of eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory, Sander Gilman puts it bluntly: “Blackness, and therefore the Black, produced terror.”⁶⁶ And this was not an exclusively German viewpoint. Burke, for example, in his famous 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, stated that Blackness—here explicitly including the Black body—was a physiological source of terror, and therefore a source of the experience of the sublime, not quite the antithesis of beauty but certainly not correlated with virtue.⁶⁷

The construction of race as a critical category was thrust into the forefront of the public imagination of Berliners in the late 1780s by a series of widely popular books and articles published in Berlin by Christoph Meiners.⁶⁸ His publication of Outline of the History of Mankind in 1785 and a number of articles in the three years that followed meant that the theorization of race was prominent in the public discourse in the years immediately preceding the design and construction of the Brandenburg Gate. In his Outline, Meiners made it clear that for him the most critical distinction between races was aesthetic; he organized races along a hierarchy from beautiful to ugly, with corresponding implications for intelligence and virtue. In a lengthy article published in 1787—the year before the commissioning of the gate—titled “On the Nature of African Negroes and the Liberation of or Restriction of Blacks,” Meiners argued that of all races, Negroes “approached animals most closely,” and that the condition of race was “immutable.” The next year he published “On the Legitimacy of the Negro Trade,” a defense of the West African slave trade, in which he asserted that Negroes had a very high threshold for pain, “as if they had no human, barely animal, feeling.” And in a work published many years later, he expanded his themes to include an assessment of sexuality, helping to launch the long-enduring and deeply harmful stereotype of the hypersexualized Negro.

Meiners’s work appealed specifically to the middle class, the very same audience cultivated by Friedrich Wilhelm II, and his History of Greece and Rome, published in two volumes in 1781–82, offered thinly veiled advocacy for the middle class. Meiners’s methods (if not all his conclusions) were openly contested by contemporaries Georg Forster and (less openly) Johann Blumenbach in dozens of essays. Meiners responded to Forster with his own series of published essays, culminating in 1792 with “Other Considerations on the Slave Trade and the Liberation of Negroes.” These open debates only amplified the public’s familiarity with Meiners’s work, and the heated arguments of the participants ensured that in the late 1780s, the nature of race—especially of people descended from Africa—and the correlation of race to beauty, intelligence, and virtue were topics of wide discussion.⁶⁹

Quickly popular with the growing German middle class, Meiners’s books and articles, and Forster’s responses, appeared on the shelves of Berlin booksellers in the very same year that Langhans accepted the commission for the Brandenburg Gate. As they considered the half-human, visually repulsive, and subvirtuous condition of the centaurs, especially in contrast to the beautiful and virtuous Lapiths, Berliners could not help but slip between the ancient myth and the current debates around racial categories and even the legitimation of African enslavement.

In the wake of Christoph Meiners’s publications, Carl Langhans installed on both fronts of his Brandenburg Gate a series of metopes that clearly evoked an ancient story of the competing descendants of two brothers, one noble and virtuous and one deformed and immoral. The story of conflict pits human strength, beauty, and virtue against subhuman degeneracy. The emerging racial theory just then shaping the public imagination assumed that physiology and morality were inextricably linked and immutable. In light of a scientific and philosophical discourse shaped by Meiners, Kant, Winckelmann, and others, Berliners passing through the Brandenburg Gate were certainly expected to imagine the centaurs as racial “others.” As Enlightenment naturalists undertook the work of constructing racial categories, aesthetic theorists began the work of signifying white as virtuous, beautiful, and good, and Black as dangerous.⁷⁰ The sociopolitical construction of these views is made all the more evident by the achievements of Anton Wilhelm Amo. A Black man, Amo was the first West African–born person to attend a European university, later serving as a professor at universities in Halle and Jena, both in Germany. In 1729, Amo completed his law thesis titled “The Rights of the Moors in Europe,” and in 1734, he completed his philosophy dissertation, “On the Absence of Sensation in the Human Mind and Its Presence in Our Organic and Living Body.” But Amo died in the late 1750s, and his formidable intellectual contributions were, it seems, erased from memory by the 1780s.

Friedrich Wilhelm and Christoph Meiners shared an interest in confirming German nationalism, the regent through the means of cohering political constituents from the rising middle class and the philosopher by providing a framework for German self-definition. In his creation of a German race dependent on Caucasian origins, Meiners favored Germans over “dirty white” non-German Europeans. Germans, he argued, enjoyed racial purity. The adoption of ancient classical Greece in the project of nation making allowed Prussians to contest the narrative of Germans as a hodgepodge of people living in diverse principalities and duchies.⁷¹ And by the closing years of the century, Meiners even argued that northern Germans, inclusive of Berliners, were purer than Germans from the south.⁷² Meiners’s work also had political implications, as he made clear his disdain for the French Revolution, unfolding in exactly these same years; he criticized the revolutionaries’ challenge to social and political hierarchies and especially their desire to include Jews as citizens of the French state. As historian Susanne Zantop has observed about Meiners and other contemporary writers, “These German theories point to a crisis in male national identity, or more specifically, a crisis in the self-perception of a demoralized, politically impotent bourgeoisie in search of affirmative models of collective identity,” the rise of a national consciousness against perceived aristocratic decadence.⁷³ Thus, the same decades that saw the emergence of a severe classical revival also generated natural philosophy that defined race with enormous physiological, social, moral, and aesthetic consequences, and for the popular imagination of German national identity. Put simply, by the late eighteenth century, classicism had emerged as the aesthetic of whiteness. For those Berliners who read Kant, Meiners, or Winckelmann and contemplated the Brandenburg Gate, the half-human centaurs and barely human Blacks had a lot in common. Over time, these associations might well have been cemented in the popular imagination.

It is possible, of course, that the Berlin centauromachy is nothing more than a convenient transfer of sculpture from the Parthenon to the otherwise unornamented gate. But given the renewed interest in the biological history of Homo sapiens and the assumed physical, intellectual, and moral supremacy of the newly defined Caucasians, Berliners could have easily seen the Brandenburg Gate metopes through the lens of scientific racism. And it is also not insignificant that this ornament was part of a major gate into the city, the edge that separated the order of the city from the chaos of the wilderness and the moment that filtered citizens from aliens in exactly the same years when Germans were reimagining their identity through a nationalist lens. In the Brandenburg Gate, a politically informed severe classical architecture was directly linked to an Enlightenment logic that not only differentiated between categories called races and ordered them hierarchically but also tied those categories to assumptions about the human potential for intellectual capacity and moral fortitude. The result was that the public—especially the middle class—became trained to value those framed as pure, orderly, and virtuous, and to see with repulsion those categorized as deformed, degenerate, intellectually incapable, and morally repugnant. The translation of these convictions to the architecture of a public gate enlisted the public square into the project of shaping a public imagination about who was and who was not a Berliner.

Sometime after his coronation in 1811 as Henry I, king of Haiti, Henri Christophe inaugurated the construction of the royal palace of Sans-Souci on a hill above the northern Haitian town of Milot (Figure 19). In the same period, he also began the construction of a massive citadel—the Citadelle Laferrière—atop the tallest hill in Haiti’s Massif du Nord. Sans-Souci was the largest of a series of royal palaces that dotted the northern regions of Haiti. The Citadelle, designed as a massive refuge for Haitians in the event of a foreign invasion, would become the largest of Christophe’s series of fortifications. He understood Haiti’s continuing vulnerability to foreign invasion by the French, British, and Americans, whose vast holdings in race-based enslavement were foundational to their economies. Haiti was an existential threat to their racialized world order.⁷⁴ Designed first on the principles of the French engineer the Marquis de Vauban and then on the principles of the Marquis de Montalembert, the fortification was a sophisticated example of military engineering. Christophe began building on both sites during his term as governor, or president, of the north under Haitian emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines. After the expulsion of the French in 1804, Dessalines had been named president of postrevolutionary Haiti, the first widely recognized Black nation established in the Western Hemisphere. Soon thereafter, Dessalines became emperor, with aspirations to build an expanding empire of postslavery states across the Caribbean. But his assassination in 1806 launched a struggle for power between the governors of the north (Christophe) and the south (Alexandre Pétion), ultimately resulting in Christophe’s self-declaration as king of northern Haiti in 1811. Just prior to his coronation, Christophe undertook the work of creating the social and political structures of a kingdom, appointing a hereditary nobility, a religious hierarchy, and a military hierarchy, all in the matter of a few weeks. Yet at the same time Haitians launched an economic model of “counterplantation” that contested colonial models of race and economic exploitation.⁷⁵ Following his coronation, Christophe inaugurated a massive building and rebuilding campaign that resulted in the construction or renovation of fifteen palaces and numerous fortifications, Sans-Souci and the Citadelle being the largest of each type. These two buildings offer a rare but direct refutation of the prevailing eighteenth-century claims of Black incapacity and the interweaving of neoclassical architecture and Enlightenment race theory in the project of nation making.⁷⁶

Sans-Souci’s primary, northern elevation rose prominently from the hillside, appearing to soar over the rest of the complex. As can be seen in a print of the site produced soon after Christophe’s death, a broad parade ground below and in front of the palace to the north allowed access to the palace via a complicated series of staircases that ascended the steep slope (Figure 20). The final flights of stairs rose on either side of a fountain set within the heavily rusticated masonry of the terrace façade. Water spilled from a culvert into a broad round basin set within a niche capped by a complex five-part keystone and flanked by obelisk-shaped pilasters. The stairs rose over the fountain to meet an arcaded propylaeum on the main front of the palace, a slightly projecting central block fronted with a range of six Doric pilasters supporting an entablature, topped by a platform with a terrace accessible from the chambers of the upper story. Early images of the palace show this central block sheltered by a complex curved roofing system terminated at each end with a curvilinear gable rising to a sharp point. Expanding to the east and west were simpler ten-bay wings with round arched windows terminated by three-story towers. In total the enormous façade was more than thirty bays wide.

To the west of the palace was a large open courtyard called the Cour Caimitier, which was framed to the south by the long, low Palais des Ministres and dominated by an enormous caimito tree, or star apple tree. Likely following certain West African practices of convening around and governing near a sacred tree, this courtyard signaled the distinctly African origins of this new Black kingdom. The open courtyard allowed a view of the entire complex and included a large mahogany throne from which Christophe could see the whole of the palace from the shade of the tree, as described by contemporary observers. To the east and slightly downhill from the palace stood the Church of the Pantheon, a large round church fronted by a Doric portico of four columns supporting an entablature and pediment (Figure 21). In the same gesture later used by Jefferson on his own Rotunda at the University of Virginia, the pediment would transition back to the drum of the church’s rotunda with a parapet wall intersecting the pediment. An enormous dome with an ogee profile rose prominently over the church’s round drum. Although the name and form of the building clearly referred to the ancient Roman Pantheon and its dome referenced North African Islamic architecture, the church’s use echoed that of the Panthéon in Paris: it was dedicated to housing the remains of revolutionary heroes. Taken as a whole, the complex encompassed an extraordinary aggregation of architectural forms and references: ancient classicism in the Church of the Pantheon and the Doric portico of the palace, contemporary Paris in the memorial functions of the church, baroque garden design in the rusticated fountain, Egyptian references in the obelisk pilasters, West African influence in the use of a tree-centered courtyard, and Islamic gestures in the ogee dome.

Through these buildings—the palace of Sans-Souci, the Church of the Pantheon, and the Citadelle—Henri Christophe and his court posed an important challenge to the intertwined development of neoclassical architecture and constructions of race. Both Dessalines and Christophe understood and contested the implications of Blackness imposed by the prevailing culture of the Atlantic world. Aware that French colonial authorities had excluded them by reason of their race from those natural rights assigned to humankind by the Enlightenment, Dessalines directly contested that presumed natural order by making Blackness the foundation of the state; all Haitians were declared Black, directly contesting the inherited order. Rejecting questions of precedent or reception, Peter Minosh excavates a meaning of these buildings rooted in the surviving architectural evidence and a careful reading of their own moment, framed by the potential intentions of their makers. He understands the palace as four disparate elevations, each reflecting a different condition of the state, refusing perception of an architectural whole. This perceived incoherence reveals that “the palace operates in the space between sovereign legitimation and the inherent lack of legitimacy of Haiti as anything other than a rebellious, breakaway colony.”⁷⁷ Christophe and his builders responded to this lack of legitimacy by rupturing the inherited symbolic order so strongly articulated in the language of neoclassicism. In a critical line, Minosh explains, “San-Souci’s simultaneous deployment and dismantlement of the symbolic order of the neoclassical is not reducible to the determinations of precedent; it seems instead to empty out these forms, showing them to be internally vacant.”⁷⁸ The design for Sans-Souci, in Minosh’s reading, was a direct challenge to architecture’s responsibility to confirm the legitimacy of the state, a function so tightly interwoven with the architectural language of ancient classicism and its post-Renaissance revivals that it is nearly impossible to imagine them disentangled.

Positioned in the longer arc of neoclassical architectural practices, my reading of the palace is a little less ambitious, even if it agrees with Minosh in spirit. The palace’s many referents represent, I think, a powerful attempt to work within the inherited structures of legitimacy while still contesting their fundamental assumptions about race. In a commentary in 1813, Christophe’s secretary, Pompée Valentin Vastey, offered one of the few statements from the state about the social and political work these buildings were intended to accomplish:

In this one passage are two important claims. Vastey contests Kant’s well-known claims that the “Negroes of Africa” have no aesthetic sensibility, and by extension no capacity for virtue. Vastey’s cultural-historical logic assumes a continuous capacity for sophisticated artistic expression among Africans, interrupted only by the depravities of enslavement. In this way, Vastey (unknowingly) contradicts John Wood’s logic of primitive African huts in the King’s Circus metopes and (maybe knowingly) Rousseau’s assumptions of the natural, precivilized state of the African—or, in this case, the person of African descent. Vastey’s comment also includes as part of his African patrimony a wide range of architectural traditions, from Ethiopia and Egypt to Carthage and presumably Moorish Spain. An important extension of this second point is that by naming Carthage, Vastey also claims the architectural traditions of ancient classicism, increasingly understood around the Atlantic and across Europe as an exclusively white inheritance. Together with the Citadelle’s engagement with the engineering of both Vauban and Montalembert, the palace at Sans-Souci demonstrated a clear knowledge of classical design precedent, visual cultural referents associated with North Africa, and the architectural strategies of aggregation that so often characterized neoclassical design practices. But even in their direct assault on the prevailing norm, these buildings highlight the persistence of that very norm. In creating his kingdom, Christophe simultaneously confirmed and rejected the logics of contemporary empires by establishing social and religious hierarchies while also fostering an economic structure that directly contested the logics of empire, race, and exploitation. As architectures of the state, these buildings acknowledged the inherited interreferential nature of aesthetics and nation by integrating African expressions (consciously understood to be non-neoclassical)—the ogee dome, the obelisk, and the tree-centered courtyard—into those formulas while simultaneously contesting the logics of Atlantic world empires by extracting race (and the following economies of exploitation) from the same.

By the end of the eighteenth century, neoclassicism was a well-established architectural tradition inextricably tied to the practices of empire and state making, and humanity was conveniently ordered into categories, even if the number of categories remained in dispute. The writings of Linnaeus, Rousseau, Buffon, Hume, Meiners, Kant, and Winckelmann, among others, created and betrayed commonplace assumptions about aesthetics and race. By Jefferson’s time, these ideas were in the groundwater. Architects John Wood and Carl Gotthard Langhans depended on these same ideas as they designed new works that gave shape to critical examples of the British mercantile empire and to the new Prussian state under Friedrich Wilhelm II, respectively. And Henri Christophe openly contested these ideas and practices in building his new palace at Sans-Souci. But for Jefferson, such ideas were not uncertain. As Mabel Wilson has shown, his work to design a new capitol building in the 1780s on the crest of a hill in Richmond, Virginia, undertaken when he was in Paris, was deeply informed by his views on race and citizenship as articulated in his contemporary Notes on the State of Virginia.⁸⁰ In fact, the first personal visit Jefferson made upon his arrival in France was to the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, author of Buffon’s rule. While Jefferson wished to consult with Buffon principally regarding questions about the youth or antiquity of species in the Americas characterized by Buffon as his theory of New World degeneracy, Jefferson also engaged with him on the debates around race.⁸¹ In a manner quite consistent with Linnaeus, Kant, Winckelmann, and others, Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published the year he arrived in France, that African Americans were

Knowing very well Buffon’s conclusion that all humans were of the same species, Jefferson found racial difference in physiognomy, intellectual capacity, aesthetic sensitivity, and moral acuity. Rather than arguing for different races, Jefferson argued that Blacks and whites in the new United States were in fact “separate nations.” This was an important distinction, because in Jefferson’s mind a sustainable democracy depended on a well-educated populace. If African Americans were physiologically, intellectually, aesthetically, and morally inferior, they could not become democratic citizens. Simon Gikandi has argued that Jefferson’s views were inherited from European political theory: “As racial difference became foundational to European identity, political theories depended all the more on the construction of a pathological Black as the counterpoint to European beauty, taste, and civic virtue.”⁸³ In this Jefferson was quite aligned with Winckelmann, who decades earlier had argued:

So when it came to designing first a new capitol building for the Commonwealth of Virginia and then, decades later, a new university to educate citizen leaders, Jefferson naturally built in the spirit of the ancients, thus tying architecture to an Enlightenment tradition that assumed—even justified—a hierarchy among the races. And that hierarchy, visible in a reading of the landscape of the university, with its elevated classicized spaces for white faculty and students and submerged, barely articulated spaces for those enslaved, directly shaped his view of a democratic citizenry.⁸⁵ The interdependence of aesthetics and virtue in the public architecture of Thomas Jefferson visibly communicated to all who gazed upon its white columns who could and who could never enjoy the protections of citizenship. This becomes all the clearer when we recognize that Jefferson, fearful that eventual emancipation would result in a “state of war,” devised a plan to export Black Americans past American shores, to Liberia or Haiti. Neoclassicism matured as an interlocutor with scientific racism, and it was deployed in the postrevolutionary era as visual reification of citizenship. These interdependencies became deeply inscribed in buildings, and they have a long memory.

By way of conclusion, I would like to examine in greater detail Jefferson’s potential motivations in his design for the University of Virginia and what these might mean for our own moment in American democracy. Kenneth Hafertepe has argued, and I agree, that in using forms from the ancient classical world, Jefferson did not believe that somehow these forms would inspire in viewers the virtues necessary for democratic citizenship.⁸⁶ There is little evidence from his writings to suggest that he believed the arts manifested their power through such direct association. But he did believe that classical forms were the best vehicle to represent those ideal proportions that manifested beauty, and that exposure to and consideration of those proportions had the power to shape the virtuous self. And such virtue, he believed, was necessary for democratic citizens. Jefferson also believed, however, that one had to have the innate capacity for virtue in order to be shaped by external conditions like beauty. In his imagination, only those people whom he identified as white had such capacity. This led him to the view that whites and Blacks in America were necessarily “separate nations,” whites destined for democracy and Blacks destined for exportation back to Africa or, later, to Haiti.

Jefferson did not come to these ideas entirely on his own, but it is also true that the century of racialized architectural thought and practice that preconditioned his work was not linear but complicated, aggregative, and episodic. And while we might imagine these narratives to be lost to the depths of historical time, the events in Charlottesville in 2017 were a shocking reminder (if only to most white Americans) that the undercurrents of white supremacy had not been erased but had only retreated. The events of the months that would eventually be called the Summer of Hate were a stark reminder that public places are not politically neutral, that architecture is never innocent, that Jefferson’s intentions are not forgotten.⁸⁷ In fact, the social imaginary that connects classical architecture with white supremacy is animated not just in the minds of white supremacists. Recent sociological research suggests that classical architecture evokes racial violence and exclusion for Black Americans more so than for their white counterparts.⁸⁸ Other research has found a correlation between white southern sorority houses and the classical architecture associated with the plantation “big house.”⁸⁹ The classical architecture of our American democracy is a potent expression of political mythos. We are asked to see only the inspiring impressions left by tall, sun-washed columns, and not be distracted by the dark shadows.

It is no accident that in the wake of his failed reelection, President Trump sought to galvanize his base by taking two particular actions. The New York Times’s 1619 Project, launched in 2019, offered a national narrative that was very different from the familiar one warmly embraced by many Americans. In response, Trump inaugurated the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, which sought to reassert a more traditional narrative—one largely panned by historians. The commission’s declared purpose was to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the foundation of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect union.”⁹⁰ Its 1776 Report, released in January 2021, followed an executive order that Trump issued a month earlier, originally titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” This order stated that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson deployed classical architecture “to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue.”⁹¹ And in a starkly ironic twist, the release dates of these two documents—each of which asserted the need to reclaim civic order and national dignity—flanked 6 January 2021, the day the U.S. Capitol was assaulted by a mob seeking to undermine the constitutional election process. National history and civic architecture are interdependent expressions of the politics of state making, and if we seek to establish a more perfect union, we must not only face with courage the truths of our past but also confront the ways civic architecture bears the weight of history and myth to shape the public imaginary.

Imagining a healthy and sustainable democracy is hard work. That imagining for the present and the future depends on our imagination of the past. And while all imagined communities—nations, for example—depend on mythos, there are times in their histories when they must acknowledge that mythos as incomplete, even harmful. In doing this work, history confronts myth. This is our moment, a moment when we as a nation ask ourselves if we can imagine a solely positivist view of Jefferson’s outsize contributions to our civic architectural tradition.⁹² Do we see only the columns, or must we also recognize the spaces in shadow? The answer, of course, is clear. When architectural historians fail to interrogate the sinister intentions and the long legacies of harm inscribed on the buildings that shape our public imagination, we do a terrible injustice to those marginalized by these architectures.