Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society
328
Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society
328Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253346155 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2005 |
| Series: | Blacks in the Diaspora |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Braided Relations, Entwined Lives
The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society
By Cynthia M. Kennedy
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Cynthia Megan KennedyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34615-5
CHAPTER 1
The Place and the People
From the American Revolution to the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina, was a city divided by a great disparity of wealth, and it was ill at ease with its black and brown majority. Charleston's gaping social divisions and fundamental inquietude originated in its geographical situation and its founders' goals, as well as the city's development as a crossroads of trade and a self-styled exemplar of the southern way of life, which was built upon the extensive and oppressive institution of slavery. Ultimately indigo, rice, and cotton would drive the city's economy and virtually every aspect of women's lives in Charleston. Rice and cotton early on became inextricably linked with slave labor, and slavery drove Carolina's politics, social institutions, legal system, cultural forms, and everyday social intercourse. The path of Charleston's early development constitutes the foundation for comprehending women's braided relations and contested lives.
Geographically situated two-thirds of the way down the South Carolina coast, Charleston sits on a narrow peninsula of low, tidal land at the convergence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, which merge to form Charleston Harbor. Carolina comprises six landform regions: coastal zone, outer coastal plain, inner coastal plain, sandhills, piedmont, and blue ridge. One of these, the coastal zone, stretches 185 miles between the borders of what ultimately became North Carolina and Georgia, and extends approximately ten miles inland, forming a total land mass of over 1.2 million acres. This coastal zone is further divided into three sections, one of which is the 100-mile Sea Island complex. Located just off the coast of Charleston, this area encompasses over fifteen diverse islands. This coastal zone is the Carolina low country, a regional denomination with colonial roots. Charleston is the centerpiece of the low country. It was here that English and Barbadian settlers carved out a new society. Charleston's merchants and traders turned to plantation agriculture, amassed their fortunes, and fashioned themselves into a wealthy master class.
Climatically classified as humid subtropical, the low country's weather is hot and humid, a meteorological reality fraught with economic and social consequences. "The heat and moisture of the climate," observed more than one traveler to Charleston, "give to the buildings the hue of age, so as to leave nothing of the American air of spruceness in the aspect of the place." Climate altered the population's health and lifestyles as well as their buildings. Visitors may not have known much about Charleston, but they seemed to be experts on the sicknesses bred by pestilential marshes surrounding the city. Architect, traveler, and social observer Frederick Law Olmsted declared Charleston to have "the worst climate for unacclimated whites of any town in the United States."
The low country's weather encouraged a peripatetic lifestyle among the master class. Those who could afford to do so fled Carolina each summer. They traveled to northern states and Europe and, by the 1820s and 1830s, to mineral springs and mountain resorts in the hilly midlands of South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. If they could not afford to migrate farther afield, low-country planters and their families relocated to Charleston, where they sought refuge in the city's late afternoon and evening sea breezes. Occasional trips to Sullivan's Island, just off the coast, ameliorated hot, humid summers as well.
In addition to weather, South Carolina topography determined Charleston's destiny. The rich, loamy, alluvial soil and abundant freshwater marshes and river floodplains of the low country supported cultivation of indigo and rice. The Sea Islands off Carolina's coast proved conducive to the production of fine, long-staple cotton. Sea Island cotton differed from upland cotton, which was cultivated abundantly in west-central South Carolina. The difference lay in the length of the fibers of the cotton bolls and, consequently, in the refinement of the spun cloth. Oyster beds dotted the inundated salt marshes, providing another commercial product and food source for coastal residents. But mosquito larvae, unwelcome beneficiaries of this climate and topography, also thrived and contributed to Charleston's devastating epidemics. The "diabolic multitude of mosquitoes ... exceed[ed] all exaggeration," carrying malaria and yellow fever.
Charleston's geography and climate made the city an exotic anomaly, so it quickly became a customary stop on tours of North America. The city's milieu precipitated comment from a host of foreign and domestic travelers, who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, vividly described Charleston's vistas. In 1769 a British sea captain drew upon his personal experiences in Charleston and penned this now-famous, yet unflattering description of the port:
Black and white all mix'd [sic] together / Inconstant, strange, unhealthful weather ... / Boisterous winds and heavy rains / Fevers and rhumatic [sic] pains / Agues plenty without doubt / Sores, boils, the prickling heat and gout / Musquitos [sic] on the skin make blotches / Centipedes and large cock-roaches ... / Houses built on barren land / No lamps or lights, but streets of sand ... / Water bad, past all drinking / Men and women without thinking / Every thing at a high price / But rum, hominy and rice / Many a widow not unwilling / Many a beau not worth a shilling / Many a bargain, if you strike it / This is Charles-town, how do you like it.
Visitors also recorded more complimentary impressions of the city. Many marveled at its compact urban estates with their characteristic "Charleston single houses," each with a veranda or piazza adorned with foliage and flowers. The single house, an architectural form original to this city, turned sideways to fit on long, narrow lots in both the lower city and the northern suburb known as Charleston Neck, and was situated to catch sea breezes. One room wide and two rooms deep, the single house included a central hall and stairway. A false door faced the street. Open porches or piazzas extended along one side and overlooked an elaborate garden. The urban compound comprised a single residence and a yard with separate slave quarters and outbuildings: a kitchen, stables, sheds for livestock, a well, a cistern, and privies at the extreme rear of the yard. A fence or brick wall enclosed the entire compound. A typical brick kitchen, measuring twenty by forty feet, was home to some urban slaves. They inhabited the second floor, which was divided into separate rooms opening onto a common corridor. The Aiken-Rhett House, for example, included a similar kitchen and matching carriage house situated in a yard approximately 100 feet wide and 175 feet deep. Several travelers likened the overall impression of such distinctive architecture and gardens to that of a "Mediterranean," "tropical," "equatorial," or "southern European" city. Upon entering Charleston early one February morning in 1820, Englishman Adam Hodgson declared, "we seemed to be transported into a garden." Nearly everyone took pleasure in the private yards overflowing with lush, fragrant orange and peach trees, roses, and magnolias. They commented as well on the wide avenues lined with palmetto palm trees.
However wide the avenues, visitors also confronted and railed at Charleston's inconveniences. The abominable state of most city thoroughfares caught people's attention, as well as feet and carriage wheels. French botanist François André Michaux complained, "every time your foot slips from a kind of brick pavement before the doors, you are immerged [sic] nearly ankle-deep in sand." By 1825 smaller city streets were paved, but because of the expense of importing paving stone from the North, completion of this municipal improvement took decades. Residents of Charleston Neck constructed log causeways in some streets. Intrepid traveler and author Harriet Martineau reported optimistically in 1838 that "the inhabitants hope[d] soon to be able to walk about the city in all weathers, without danger of being lost in crossing the streets." However, two years later there was "very little pavement yet," and the fine, sandy soil turned into "a most deceptive mud" after each rainfall, making pedestrian travel a decidedly messy and hazardous undertaking. Moreover, at low tide, great expanses "of reeking slime" lay exposed on all sides of the city, "over which large flocks of buzzards [were] incessantly hovering." Odiferous, oozing mud and buzzards that "stalk[ed] about here and there" and perched on stakes in the Ashley and Cooper rivers (and also on the roof of the city market, like gargoyles) generated an olfactory and visual spectacle that drew most visitors' notice. Another "noisome smell" occasionally emanated from adjacent wetlands, and it bespoke Charleston's position as mainland British America's largest slave entrepot. Nearly one-quarter of all Africans brought to mainland North America entered through Charleston Harbor. Those who died before disembarking in Charleston were "cast without ceremony into the harbor." In June 1769, instead of washing out to sea, a "large number of dead negroes" was swept by the tide up the Cooper River and into surrounding marshes where "their putrefaction" posed a stench and a danger "to the health of the inhabitants" of the city.
Charleston women "occupied a large space in the public eye," observed one traveler in 1857. This wry remark rang just as true seventy years earlier. During his 1783 visit, Caracas-born adventurer Francisco de Miranda observed that "the number of this sex [was] very large compared to that of the men [and] there [was] no lack of those who ma[d]e the computation of five to one." Francisco especially admired groups of young white women riding on horseback through city avenues, "the favorite diversion of the ladies in this region." Charleston was the place to come, he concluded, if one sought a wife, for the city was filled with Revolutionary War widows.
Charlestons people of color also excited lengthy commentary from city guests, who perceived them as a bizarre oddity. Visitors remarked that the "negroes swarm[ed] in the streets," and travelers particularly noted the plethora in this southern port of "fat negro and mulatto women" with "turbaned heads surmounted with water-pots and baskets of fruit." Many observers described, in detail, slave women and slave men stretched on the whipping rack or pacing ceaselessly on the prison's two treadmills. Other onlookers attended public slave auctions and painted verbal pictures of slave women "exposed for sale" in the street, describing their health, their demeanor, their clothing, and the bidding process.
From the early national period until the Civil War, women and girls of African and European descent together regularly represented 52 to 54 percent of all city residents (see table 3). Whether they were peddling foodstuffs in the Charleston market, sewing or vending articles of clothing, selling their bodies, languishing in the Poor House, visiting sick and destitute women and children, or hosting lavish dinners and balls, Charleston women constituted an enormous presence in the city. Their sheer numbers suggest that women played essential and varied roles in slave society. Moreover, women and girls composed over 50 percent of all city slaves and made up a greater percentage of city residents than did their counterparts in other southern cities, like New Orleans, Savannah, Richmond, and Baltimore. Because all slave women worked, their large numbers suggest that they formed an integral part of Charleston's economy.
Most Charleston women labored in the city's work force. Although slave women constituted, by far, the bulk of that group, most free women of color worked for wages, as did a growing number of white women. During five sample years from 1790 to 1802, women represented an average of 5.3 percent of free residents listed with their professions in city directories. These directories routinely undercounted Charleston's laboring women (often listing only their husbands' professions), and increasing numbers of Irish and German immigrant women also augmented the ranks. Nevertheless, since slave women and free women of color constituted approximately 56 percent of all Charleston women, if only 5 percent of the city's white women worked for wages, then more than 60 percent of Charleston's women labored in the city's work force.
Clustered in consumer service industries, women keenly felt the effects of Charleston's economic upturns and downswings in the early national years and throughout the antebellum period. The devastating effects of the United States's 1812–1815 embargo, national panics and depressions that began in 1819 and 1837, and the cotton boom of the 1850s affected women's lives as well as city revenues. Overproduction of cotton led to a global collapse of prices in spring 1819. The depression lasted four years. In addition, increasing use of waterways to ship cotton from upland South Carolina down to the city resulted in a sharp drop-off in the number of wagoners who had formerly hauled cotton to Charleston and patronized the shops on King Street. White women and women of color who sewed clothing, kept shops, or taught school acutely experienced the effects when women and men of the master class curtailed spending during tight times. Keepers of respectable boardinghouses also suffered when one of the many epidemics raged in Charleston, because rumors and reports of people dying discouraged the wanderlust of northerners and Europeans.
Even when the city's economy surged briefly, as during the 1840s, Charleston's laboring women struggled to sustain themselves and their families. When large numbers of Irish and German immigrants migrated to Charleston from New York in the late 1830s and 1840s, the men worked on railroad or canal projects. Irish women, however, found it difficult to procure positions as children's nurses or housekeepers, because wealthy residents had long accustomed themselves to relying on slave women. Slavery limited economic opportunities for the city's free but poor women. Moreover, there was no manufacturing base in the city, so women could not look to factory jobs to support themselves. Thus, Charleston's scant opportunities for white laboring women in particular resulted in more immigrant children in the Orphan House as well as more foreign-born inmates in the Poor House, in Shirras's Dispensary, and in Roper Hospital. After 1839 Irish people outnumbered South Carolina natives in the city's Poor House and women outnumbered men in that institution's lunatic ward. This dearth of jobs also produced more prostitutes. Sailors provided a steady clientele for destitute women who worked in brothels along French Alley (between Meeting and Anson streets) and who also plied their trade in sailors' boarding houses.
In addition to laboring in this chronic struggle to subsist, Charleston's women of the working classes of all colors were also kept busy bearing and rearing children, as were their wealthy counterparts. Not only did women outnumber men, and people of African descent outnumber white people (until 1860), but also children represented a significant portion of the total city population. More than 41 percent of white people were under age fifteen in 1800 and 1810 (see table 4). In 1820 children younger than fourteen or fifteen constituted the largest group among Charleston slaves, free people of color, and white people (see table 5); they made up over 35 percent of all city residents. Although the Charleston population was not as young twenty years later, children composed a substantial number of inhabitants throughout the antebellum period. In 1840 over 35 percent of white people were under fifteen. New census age categories ("under ten" and "ten to twenty-three") for slaves and free people of color render it impossible to compute exactly how many children of color were under fifteen. However, over 38 percent of free people of color and 27 percent of slaves were younger than age ten. In addition, 24 percent of white people were in this same age category. In excess of 26 percent of all city residents were under age ten in 1840. These consistently sizable numbers of children indicate that mothers and slave nurses had their hands full, literally and figuratively. Much of their time was devoted to caring for Charleston's children.
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Excerpted from Braided Relations, Entwined Lives by Cynthia M. Kennedy. Copyright © 2005 Cynthia Megan Kennedy. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. The Place, the War, the First Reconstruction1. The Place and the People2. Disorder and Chaos of War3. Rebuilding and ResistingPart II. Defining Women, Defining Their Braided Relations4. Marriage and Cohabitation within the Aristocratic Paradigm: Wealthy White Women and the Free Brown Elite5. Marriage and Cohabitation outside the Aristocratic Paradigm: Slaves and Free Laboring Women6. Mixing and Admixtures7. Work and Workers8. Leisure and Recreation9. Women and the Law10. Illness and DeathConclusionAppendix 1. Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant ApplicationsAppendix 2. South Carolina Court System and the Case UniverseAbbreviations NotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
[A] stunning, deeply researched, and gracefully written social history.