During my internship at Cliveden (Benjamin Chew Sr. House), I assessed the circulation patterns of enslaved people, juxtaposing the social and racial divide between masters and the enslaved. Its architectural records revealed opulent interiors for enslavers but dilapidated, simplistic, and hidden service wings and stairs for the enslaved, a distinction that symbolized a cultural spatial practice of dehumanization. Paralleling this Georgian edifice to earlier classical forms, its circulation patterns stem from England, where the English Baroque architectural layout embodied a class separation. Facades express control, while the interiors favored Ciceronian principles of power. In maintaining this architectural ideology, enslavers concocted an American domestic landscape that reproduced similar elements of spatial neglect, but through a racialized lens that restricted Black autonomy and visibility. Cliveden encompassed three tiers of servitude, where white paid managers settled in refined spaces of movement, enslaved servants occupied sparsely detailed rooms, while cooks inhabited kitchen dependencies stripped of ornamentation, only reached by narrow staircases, not visible from the symbolic centers of the estate. As this spatial dichotomy evolved, later post-Renaissance plantations in the American South amplified classical motifs to subjugate Black populations. Thomas Jefferson, exposed to the portico, symmetry, and paneling, occupied visible circular spaces in Monticello, while he concealed the enslaved. By Jefferson splitting the slave living conditions from the main body of the estate, he projected an earlier cultural morphology of racial segregation that hinged on status and erasure.
Drawing from HSPV 5340 and HSPV 6000—which centered on historic research methods and archival resource navigation—I gained proficiency in interpreting the aesthetics and material culture of slavery, emphasizing primary and secondary materials on Chew Sr.'s stances on servitude. In comparing him to Jefferson, I garnered that Chew Sr. echoed ancient philosophers Aristotle and Cicero, who posited that power aligned with the master. Adhering to this pro-slavery ideology, Chew Sr. projected a social order that abstracted the "rights of men" only to himself; thus, punishment and spatial neglect were necessary vestiges of domination. Emphasizedin letters between himself, his brother Samual Chew, and his son, Benjamin Chew Jr., Chew Sr. positioned himself as a natural ruler destined to subject slaves to his will. By traveling to Stenton (James Logan House) and Hope Lodge (Samuel Morris House)—where marginalized corridors and peripheral service areas for the enslaved were symbols of subjugation and invisibility—I analyzed how such spatial practices served as a paternalistic mechanism to generate social capital and control for Chew Sr.
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