I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. Michelle Obama, 2016

There are hundreds of buildings physically built by slaves in America. I even used to live in one. Some very famous ones include:

The homes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

The White House and US Capital.

The University of Virginia.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Washington and Lee University.

But that's not really what that statement means. When we get to the root of the meaning behind the "US was built on slavery" idea it isn't so much the many buildings we still see today that we are talking about but rather the economy as a whole. For instance, if we include colleges that were founded by slave owners and/or built with donations made from the slave trade, Princeton (which actually sold slaves to raise money for the school), Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown and countless other schools (and institutions) join the list. It was that deliverance of wealth utilized to further our own capabilities in regards to knowledge, trade, and power that allowed slavery to "build" America. The "wall" built that the name Wall Street originates with, which became a market district known for trading, was built by slaves. One of the first items traded and sold on Wall Street? Enslaved humans financed through NY banks. New York's South Street Seaport was where many enslaved humans and their descendants began their long struggle in America. Louise Mirrer, the head of the New York Historical Society, said;

All of the original built environment in New York basically was built with the labor of enslaved people.

okie dokie, I'm not in the habit of defending authors all night, so we'll use a different example as all this does is establish America profited massively from enslavement, namely in free capital. Also, this is just a copy of a section of a post I already made in here In The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (which I recommend for further reading on the topic) Edward E Baptist says;

>1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

Brown Brothers Harriman is the oldest and largest private investment bank and securities firm in the United States, founded in 1818. USA Today found that the New York merchant bank of James and William Brown, currently known as Brown Bros. Harriman owned hundreds of enslaved Africans and financed the cotton economy by lending millions to southern planters, merchants and cotton brokers.

JPMorgan Chase recently admitted their company’s links to slavery. “Today, we are reporting that this research found that, between 1831 and 1865, two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana— accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans,” the company wrote in a statement.

New York Life Insurance Company is the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States. They also took part in slavery by selling insurance policies on enslaved Africans. According to USA Today, evidence of 10 more New York Life slave policies comes from an 1847 account book kept by the company’s Natchez, Miss. agent, W.A. Britton. The book, part of a collection at Louisiana State University, contains Britton’s notes on slave policies he wrote for amounts ranging from $375 to $600. A 1906 history of New York Life says 339 of the company’s first 1,000 policies were written on the lives of slaves. (Atlanta Blackstar)

The Very Different but Connected Economies of The Northeast and the South Before the Civil War, Carole E. Scott (who is a professor of economics)

So we see historians and economists saying, "This credit on which American progress was built was created by the institution of slavery, and that resulted in a lot of wealth, including through foreign investment," which the firms involved with that investment are also saying, "yeah, that happened."

So it wasn't the building of physical things per se, but the allowance of wealth creation on the labor of others that was implemented in banking, industry/industrialization, institution funding, etc that catapulted the US to the status of major economic player.

For some more information on some very famous physical structures in the US built by slave labor, Bob Arnebeck's Slave Labor in the Capital: Building Washington's Iconic Federal Landmarks would be a good place to start.

I gave a response to this sort of question here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cr0lrf/how_large_of_a_role_did_slavery_play_in_building/ex23th1/?context=3

There is an interesting angle to answering this question that revolves around the philosophy of the economy itself, and the philosophers that defined contemporary understanding of the world within and around the US between the early colonial era and the Civil War. The way in which I will take this is to first ask a different question: "what did people at the time think is the way to make the economy prosperous?" A "building of the economy" can only really mean prosperity - widespread wealth - and that means that what people think wealth is, also defines wealth and how it is acquired. Today we think of wealth as, say, Bitcoin, or advertising revenues, or Disney's intellectual property, or whatever Donald Trump portrays himself as - wealth, especially "prosperous wealth", has become a relatively abstract, intellectual thing. But in the colonial era, wealth was heavily tied to physical property ownership - land, goods, gold, ships, and people, just to name some.

The colonial era begins with the idea of merchantilism, an ad-hoc system, which can be aptly summed up with this quote from Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, 1549: "We must always take heed that we buy no more from strangers than we sell them, for so should we impoverish ourselves and enrich them." It's a largely straightforward, common-sensical extrapolation of what makes individual traders wealthy scaled up to a nation: Buy low, sell high! Export more than you import! Protect your industry! The mercantilist's accounting method is focused only on the nation by itself, causing a strategy to emerge: By simply changing the status of land from "foreign lands" to "property", and the status of a person from "foreigner" to "property", you have made both yourself and the nation wealthier! And it is economic logic of this sort that motivated many of the early expeditions to the New World, the subsequent colonies, and the slave trade: Colonialists were - increasingly, as time went on and the modern state became more established - bought in on the idea of their nation as a going concern, and therefore sought to create a permanent, advantageous trade system based on "beggar thy neighbor" ideas, knowing that they would be able to rely on their homeland for support in funding and enforcing these ideas. A powerful nation-state was an ally to colonial interests where it respected and enforced claims to property.

And thus from the merchantilist ideas we come to the labor theory of property, a concept John Locke wrote about in the Two Treatises of Government, 1689. This is a principle that you are probably familiar with informally: if you mix your labor into something, you own it. Locke, in the second half, primarily writes about justifications for this principle, and is particularly fixated on justifying the idea that this principle of property is good for prosperity, but he also addresses slavery in the process. It is, in certain respects, an excuse for colonial practices.

By the time Locke wrote, not quite 200 years since Columbus landed, chattel slavery was a major part of society in the colonial world, and it rubbed shoulders with indentured servitude and impressment; that is, labor exploitation through a legalized denial of liberties referred to a whole spectrum of ideas in the 17th century. And Locke wasn't exactly critical of the idea of slavery; he simply realized that he had to say something about it to discuss liberty and property. Locke's work also wasn't greatly noticed at the time. It's not a tightly written work of philosophy, and most students can easily spot some contradictory elements in what he says, which makes it all the more interesting as a work of its era and for the grasp that its ideas still hold over us.

By the time of the founding of the US, nearly a century after Locke, liberty had become a much hotter topic - constitutional liberty being one of the foundational ideas of the US, of course - and Locke's ideas got swept up in it. Wikipedia's article on Two Treatises overviews many of the debates that emerged from this period.

From Locke we can turn to Adam Smith, who was around to see the start of the 18th century debates - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in, as it so happens, 1776, the same year the US was founded. Smith's ideas were immediately influential in defining capitalism as we know it: the idea of division of labor, addressing large markets, money as medium of exchange, fine points about wages, profit, and their conflicts etc., with a healthy dose of critique about exploitative practices, including those which had defined mercantilism. Smith is not Marx, but he anticipates some of Marx's ideas in his critique.

And it's Smith's ideas that are the ones that propel much of the US and its approach to economic issues, yet the slaves are also there, and widespread, and it is this juxtaposition that sets up the compromises and problems of the 19th century. The vestiges of the mercantile model - where their possession as property is the wealth of America - and Smith's model - where their value is related to the labor they can provide, independent of their ownership - begin to duel with each other. In 1776, it's not clear who's right, because the economic premise of the colonies revolved around mercantilism! How could there be a "United States of America", if it weren't for that system? "What happened to the good old days of beggar thy neighbor?" you can almost hear the conservatives saying.

And so when we say, "did slaves build the US?" It does not even have to be true that they contributed anything economically by current-day measurements. It just has to be true that the US was built around the idea that slaves were a necessary part of the whole, which I think I have shown here.