Ernie of Maine (imported) wrote: Mon Aug 06, 2012 6:05 pm Geoge Washington never lived in The White House it was Built between 1793 & 1801 G.W. govined from New York Citie. New York state was a free state allso G.W. had freed his slaves. Ernie

please take note that pay and accounting ledgers show that slaves built the capital and the congress buildings.

I only did a quick search engine look at this question before making the original post, and didn't find anything that indicated the federal government itself ever owned slaves. However, I presume that Mac the Wolf did find something to confirm that. If the government owned slaves, I think it could be assumed that some of them were male slaves. And you can figure that a certain number of males in the general population, lose their gonads at some time in their lives because of trauma or for some other reason. I would doubt that orchiectomy was used as treatment for prostate cancer in the nineteenth century; orchiectomy for testicular cancer, might be another matter. But I would guess that therapeutic castration was less common in the antebellum period than at present. So, since the federal government owned slaves, there is a chance that some of them had lost their gonads, and the likelihood of that being the case, would depend on the number of slaves the government owned, and what the probability is, that an individual will lose his testes during his lifetime, with that probability perhaps having been lower in the nineteenth century than at present.

With that in mind, it seems that the answer to the question of the post would be, that the federal government might have owned eunuchs, but the odds probably are against it. As to whether state governments owned eunuchs, that might be somewhat more likely. It would be interesting to know the date at which a eunuch was last owned by a government anywhere.

Val