Black Masters

SHORTLY before Thanksgiving 1859, James M. Johnson left Stateburg, where he had lived for seventeen years, and returned to Charleston, the city of his youth. He came back to help his father, James D. Johnson, who was preparing to retire from his lifelong work as a tailor. The old man had lived in the city for most, if not all, of his life. He was a native of South Carolina and a mulatto, but whether he was born a slave like William Ellison is not known.¹ He may have moved to Charleston sometime before 1820, possibly from Stateburg. In 1810, when Johnson was about seventeen, two free Afro-American households in Sumter District were headed by men named James Johnson. One family contained eleven free persons of color, the other, seven.² James D. Johnson may have been among them. By 1820 Johnson evidently resided in Charleston, where his eldest son, James M., was born.³ But Johnson and his family first appear in the surviving records of the city ten years later, in 1830.⁴

Charleston was an ideal place for James D. Johnson to capitalize on his skills as a tailor. In one season more potential customers passed Johnson’s shop on upper King Street, in the heart of the retail district of the city, than a tailor would be likely to see in a decade in a rural village.⁵ As the hub of trade and fashion in South Carolina, Charleston was as vital to a tailor like Johnson as the cotton fields of the upcountry were to a gin maker. In 1830 Johnson probably lived above the shop with his wife Delia, their children, and several boarders. One or two free Negro boarders probably worked for Johnson as journeyman tailors or apprentices, as did the six slaves who were also listed in his household.⁶ Four of the slaves were young boys less than ten years old, and the other two were young men between ten and twenty-three. Although the slaves lived with Johnson, he probably did not own them. Most likely, their masters hired out or apprenticed them to Johnson. While he trained slave apprentices, he also taught his craft to his sons James and Charles, whom the family called Charley. When young James moved to Stateburg in 1842, he had ten or twelve years of experience as a tailor in the competitive Charleston market. For more than fifteen years afterward his brother Charley continued to work in their father’s shop on King Street. With Charley’s help, along with the journeymen and apprentices, James D. Johnson managed to keep his head above water.

By 1834 he had set aside enough money to buy a small lot on Coming Street for $250. He purchased the lot in the name of his sons as a speculative venture for their benefit. Two years later it paid off handsomely when Johnson sold the lot for $1,800.⁷ In 1836, perhaps with some of the windfall from the Coming Street lot, Johnson bought property on King Street for $6,000, the seller agreeing to hold a mortgage until Johnson paid off the note.⁸ The lot probably contained Johnson’s tailor shop and his residence. The high price reflected the prime location of the property, and the mortgage demonstrated Johnson’s reputation as a solid, hard-working artisan. Three years later Johnson made another speculative investment, this time in a lot in the northeast suburbs of the city, for which he paid $3,000, once again with a mortgage to the seller until the debt was settled.⁹ His tailoring business did well enough for him to pay off this mortgage, but whether he ever amortized the mortgage on his King Street property is unknown.

Johnson also bought four slaves during the 1830s. In 1834 he purchased the nineteen-year-old Judy and her nine-month-old daughter Caroline.¹⁰ Two years later he bought a mulatto woman named Florence.¹¹ The next year he acquired Billy, who was about nineteen.¹² Johnson probably employed Billy in his shop, but his two slave women most likely worked as domestic servants, relieving Delia of some household chores.

Johnson did well enough during the 1830s to afford a half-interest in “Drayton Halt” in Stateburg, where his son James lived with his wife Eliza Ann.¹³ He helped provide his son with a comfortable country residence, and James M. Johnson returned the favor by giving the house his father’s name. However, Johnson’s investment in Charleston real estate turned sour during the 1840s. Less than ten years after he had purchased his lots, he sold them both at a heavy loss. In 1846 he sold his suburban lot for $1,500, half what he paid for it.¹⁴ A year later he sold his King Street property for $3,400, again, little more than half the purchase price.¹⁵ He also sold his two slave women, Florence and Judy, perhaps to obtain some badly needed cash.¹⁶ Rather than move his shop, he stayed on in his valuable King Street location, evidently paying rent.

In 1850 he decided to move his family, including Charley and his wife Sarah, into two houses on the west side of Coming Street that he bought for $1,400.¹⁷ Numbers 7 and 9 Coming, where the Johnsons continue to live during the 1850s, were in a pleasant residential section of the city populated by many of the leading free Afro-American families. Nearby stood Grace Episcopal Church, an outgrowth of the overcrowded congregation of St. Philip’s. At Grace, the Johnsons and a score of other free mulatto families worshiped among the 200 white parishioners. Johnson’s shop on King Street was a six-block walk from his Coming Street home. The large public market, the railroad depot, and even the courthouse were also within convenient walking distance. By 1860 Johnson paid city taxes on his houses, assessed at $4,000, and on three slaves.¹⁸ By a lifetime of labor he had managed to hold his own and do a little better.

Johnson’s modest economic success was probably overshadowed by his pride in his family. He and Delia reared and educated their two sons and two daughters.¹⁹ Charley married first, evidently in 1843. He and his new wife Sarah continued to live with his parents on Coming Street.²⁰ Perhaps the best evidence of the respect Johnson’s children had for him was the name Charley and Sarah chose for their young son who was baptized in Grace Episcopal Church on April 4, 1851: James Drayton Johnson.²¹ Shortly after the child’s baptism, he and his mother died. In November 1852 Charley remarried. His bride, Gabriella Miller, was a light-skinned young woman from a free colored family resident in Charleston for many years.²² Charley and Gabriella celebrated their wedding in Grace Church, and they continued to play an active part in the life of the congregation, serving as sponsors of baptisms of free colored infants and confirmations of free colored adults.

From Stateburg, James M. kept in close touch with his brother and father in Charleston. John Buckner probably came to know his stepfather’s sister Jane Johnson during the visits back and forth between the country and the city. John and Jane married in Stateburg in 1857, and in March of the next year Jane gave birth to Harriet Ann, James D. Johnson’s first granddaughter and William Ellison’s first great-grandchild, the first member of Ellison’s fourth generation of freedom.²³

The family ties between the Johnsons and the Ellisons were constantly reinforced by exchanges of letters, gifts, favors, and visits. Henry’s only child, Matilda, lived in Charleston during the late 1850s, usually staying with her maternal grandmother, Mrs. Jeannette Bonneau, who lived three blocks up Coming Street from the Johnsons.²⁴ Matilda dined with the Johnsons from time to time, and they looked in on her and her grandmother. When Henry or any of the other Ellisons came to Charleston, they always visited the Johnsons, and more often than not they stayed with them. A few weeks before John Buckner married, William Ellison Jr. placed an order with Charley for a new pair of trousers as a wedding gift, probably not the first time and certainly not the last that Charley made clothing for one of the Ellison clan.²⁵ Slaves shuttled back and forth between the two households with messages and with items plentiful in one place and scarce in the other.²⁶

In December 1858, James D. Johnson sent the Ellisons greetings “from all of our Canada folks.” Charley and his family had recently moved to Toronto, where he worked as a tailor. He was “busy,” his father wrote. Perhaps referring to the reason Charley went north, Johnson added that Charley “has never enjoyed better health although he is sewing.” Charley found the cold weather in Toronto “bracing,” but he missed his family and friends in South Carolina. “In every letter they begged to be remembered to all thier [sic] friends, especially those of Stateburg,” Johnson wrote Henry.²⁷

Charley was also missed by his father. Charley’s absence seems to have precipitated his father’s decision to retire. Charley left South Carolina sometime between March 1857 and December 1858.²⁸ Without his help in the tailor shop, the old man evidently concluded that he could no longer run the business by himself. Johnson needed somebody to help meet customers, take measurements, cut patterns, stitch seams, buy supplies, pay merchants, collect accounts, and supervise the work of the journeymen, apprentices, and slaves. He was sixty-five and not in the best of health. In his letter to Henry in December 1858, he noted that he was “quite unwell at present although not laid up since the 21st but hope soon to be better.”²⁹ Within the next several months Johnson hatched his plans for retirement. He could not afford simply to quit working. His shop had been his livelihood for thirty years, and he still needed any income he could get from it. He could hire other tailors to work for him, and he could depend upon the clientele he had built up over the years to continue to patronize his shop. Eventually he might sell the business to an enterprising younger man. But in the meantime, he would withdraw from the business gradually. He may have asked his son James to leave Stateburg and return to Charleston to take Charley’s place and ease his own transition to retirement. Or James may have volunteered to come down. In any case, late in the fall of 1859 James M. Johnson moved to Charleston and stayed for more than a year.

After seventeen years in rural Stateburg, Johnson was an upcountry transplant in the bustling city. He wrote frequent letters back to his close friend Henry, passing along news of relatives and friends in the large free mulatto community and commenting on his fresh exposure to urban life. Just before Christmas 1859, about a month after he had arrived in the city, James wrote Henry that he and Eliza Ann had recently attended a fashionable wedding that “came off in style.” The free colored bride and groom, each with ten attendants, were married by Reverend Christopher P. Gadsden, the white rector of St. Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Several bridesmaids had come all the way from Savannah. The wedding supper was a grand affair catered by Nat Fuller, a free mulatto man who often catered the parties of the city’s white aristocrats. Although James and Eliza Ann left early, before the wedding cake was cut, they stayed long enough to share in two bottles of champagne and for Eliza Ann to have the oysters Fuller served especially for her. After the reception the bride and groom left on a honeymoon ‘Tour in the country.” “You must come down,” James invited Henry, “& follow the fashion.”³⁰

Lavish weddings were hardly the fashion among the free Afro-Americans in Sumter District. The less glamorous routines of rural life surfaced in Johnson’s letter when he asked Henry to make certain the slave girl Sarah “behaves herself & salts the creatures regularly.” Salting the livestock in Stateburg and serving champagne and oysters in Charleston—Johnson’s contrast between country and city life, though doubtless unintentional, could hardly have been sharper. With his letter Johnson sent along “some little nick nacks” for Christmas gifts for the children in the Ellison family compound, William Jr.’s son and two daughters and John Buckner’s little girl. Cheerily, Johnson closed his letter by wishing Henry and “all at Wisdom Hall a Merry Christmas” from himself, his father, mother, wife, and Charley’s wife Gabriella, who was visiting from Canada.³¹

Johnson’s chatty family letter contains only one hint that he wrote it when the outlook for free Negroes was increasingly ominous. Johnson asked Henry to “tender my congratulations to your Father on the adjournment of the Legislature.” Congratulations were in order because a bill to enslave all free persons of color in South Carolina had failed to pass. He urged William Ellison to read the account in the Charleston Courier of the speech made against the bill by Christopher G. Memminger, a wealthy lawyer, planter, and politician in the Charleston delegation to the legislature. Johnson and the Ellisons had evidently discussed this and several other bills under consideration in Columbia that were designed to repress and further restrict free Afro-Americans. The Ellisons’ viewpoint cannot be inferred from Johnson’s letter, but his own confidence and optimism are unmistakable. “I prophesied from the onset that nothing would be done affecting our position,” he declared.³² Despite proposals to eliminate all free Negroes by enslaving them or expelling them from the state, despite the increasing political turbulence throughout the nation, Johnson did not express the slightest foreboding. This Christmas, as in Christmases past, he looked forward to the future with confidence that things would not change. His father would retire. His life and the lives of the Ellisons and the Johnsons would go on as they always had.

MANY white South Carolinians were determined to make the changes Johnson was certain would never come. In 1859 citizens throughout the state petitioned the legislature to enact some law that would eliminate free persons of color either by forcing them to leave or by enslaving them. The petition from upcountry York District spoke of the “great evil and mischief” of free Negroes “every day mixing and mingling with the slave population,” and urged the legislators to “adopt such measures as may in your wisdom remove this evil and reduce the colored population of this state to one uniform condition.”³³ Petitioners from Ellison’s home district echoed the York proposal, citing the “continuous dificulties [sic] arising from the association of slaves and free negroes.”³⁴ Abbeville petitioners agreed that free persons of color “have decidedly a demoralizing effect upon our slave population,” and they spelled out the racial logic for action. Free Negroes were “the most degraded people that live in a civilized community,” they proclaimed. “We know that naturally they are indolent, lazy, improvident, destitute of forethought, and totally incapable of supporting themselves and should have someone to arouse their dormant energies and direct their labor.” The petitioners appealed to the legislators to place South Carolina’s free Negroes “in a happy state of bondage, the place where God designed the African race to be.” If the legislature was “not disposed to grant this boon,” they asked the lawmakers to “appropriate a fund, and have them removed to Liberia, and thus relieve the State of their contaminating influence.”³⁵ Free Afro-Americans contaminated slaves because, as petitioners from St. Helena Parish had argued almost thirty years earlier, “the example of indolence and vice exhibited by the coloured free persons is perpetually before the slave. They encourage insubordination by precept as well as by example.”³⁶

The argument for the elimination of free Negroes had been percolating through the minds of white Southerners for years. As the number of free Afro-Americans grew rapidly in the years after the American Revolution, many leading whites concluded that free Negroes had no future in the United States. “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state …?” Thomas Jefferson asked rhetorically in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1787.³⁷ The apocalyptic reason he gave seemed plausible to many white Americans at the time and continued to haunt white Southerners who contemplated the likely evolution of a biracial free society. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” Jefferson said.³⁸

The only practical way to avoid this cataclysm was to remove free Negroes from the United States and colonize them in their African “homeland,” many white leaders believed. The American Colonization Society was founded for this purpose in 1817, and it was instrumental in establishing Liberia and in sending thousands of free Afro-Americans to settle there. Colonization was completely impractical, however. The money and ships necessary to transport the free Negro population to foreign shores were far greater than the resources available, even to the federal government. Furthermore, enthusiasm for colonization sagged during the late 1820s and early 1830s as the cotton boom emphasized the value of Negro laborers, as free Afro-Americans in the North bitterly attacked the idea that Africa was their homeland and insisted that they were as American as whites, as the colonization movement itself began to take on a subdued anti-slavery coloration, and as the South became increasingly hostile to any suggestion that slavery was undesirable.³⁹ Instead of supporting colonization, the South began in the 1820s to prohibit manumission and to restrict the liberties of free Afro-Americans.

The assumption that free Afro-Americans were neither integral nor desirable members of American society survived among most whites in both the North and South. The problem was to accommodate that assumption with the reality of a half-million free Negro Americans. Some abolitionists and religious humanitarians hoped to replace white assumptions about racial inferiority with affirmations of the brotherhood of mankind.⁴⁰ But these reformers were always a tiny minority in the North. The predominant view among Northern whites mirrored that among white Southerners. The rallying cry of free soil, free labor, and free men was composed of almost equal parts of anti-slavery and anti-Negro sentiment.⁴¹ Most white Northerners did not want Negroes in their society any more than they wanted slaves. Several Northern states restricted Negroes from entering, and most hoped that free persons of color already there would sooner or later leave.⁴² A few, like Abraham Lincoln, clung to the chimera of colonization. In August 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, after Lincoln had decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, he called five black leaders to the White House and urged them to support the return to Africa. “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race,” Lincoln said; “on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours…. I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact.”⁴³

Although white Southerners shared the racial prejudice of their Northern counterparts, slavery made the proper social policy toward free Negroes a momentous issue in the South. After the 1820s, Southerners dropped the argument that slavery was a necessary evil bequeathed to them by their forefathers and replaced it with the defense that slavery was a positive good.⁴⁴ Slavery was ordained by God, sanctioned by the Bible and all of human history, and it benefited the entire society, even the slaves. Since Negroes were inferior, the argument went, they were incapable of withstanding the rigors of freedom, as proved by the degraded circumstances of nearly all free Negroes. Afro-Americans were far better off as slaves, where masters could take care of their needs and direct their labor. Although the proslavery argument was grounded on the unshakable conviction that all Negroes were inferior to whites, the case was not compelling enough before the late 1850s to cause whites to consider seriously the enslavement of free Afro-Americans. In “What Shall Be Done With the Free Negroes,” published in 1851, the proslavery theorist George Fitzhugh rehearsed the case that, “Humanity, self-interest, [and] consistency, all require that we should enslave the free negro.”⁴⁵

Part of the reason why racial assumptions were not pushed to their logical conclusion before the late 1850s was that many white Southerners continued to think of enslavement as a form of punishment, an extreme one at that. According to state laws, freedom was something an Afro-American could forfeit by committing certain acts that states defined as criminal. But could a state confiscate the freedom of Negroes simply as a matter of social policy, in the absence of an overt, prohibited act by each individual free Afro-American? If many white Southerners were willing to answer yes, they nevertheless did not begin to try to carry out their plans until decades after the proslavery argument matured.

Whites also delayed serious discussion of the enslavement of free Negroes because it was not at all clear that enslavement was within the law. While the statutes in every Southern state defined a second-class status for free Afro-Americans, they also recognized and to a certain degree protected their freedom. Would a new law usurping the freedom of persons of color be constitutional? Would it be prohibited by the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”? The ambiguity of free Negroes’ legal status in each Southern state was compounded by such questions as whether a free person of color was even a “person” within the meaning of the Constitution. If free Afro-Americans were not first-class citizens, were they citizens at all? Were they under the jurisdiction of the federal constitution or not?

These questions were settled by the Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1857.⁴⁶ Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in a long, rambling opinion riddled with misinformation and internal contradictions, concluded in part that Negroes were not citizens within the meaning of the Constitution, and that, slave or free, the Constitution simply did not apply to them, except as they were considered property. Although the major question Taney was deciding dealt with the status of slaves, free Afro-Americans entered his opinion as part of his argument that they were not then, nor had they ever been, considered part of the American “people.” He used this argument to buttress his conclusion that since Negroes like Dred Scott never were citizens under the Constitution, regardless of where they resided, they had no right to bring suit in the federal courts, a crucial issue in Scott’s plea for freedom.

While Taney’s opinion created a storm of protest in the North, it was calmly accepted in the South. Southerners seemed to understand what Don E. Fehrenbacher, the foremost historian of the Dred Scott decision, has called Taney’s “true purpose,” namely, “to launch a sweeping counterattack on the antislavery movement and to reinforce the bastions of slavery at every rampart and parapet.”⁴⁷ The highest tribunal in the land endorsed the most extreme Southern position in the sectional controversy. The prospects for Afro-Americans had “never appeared so hopeless,” Abraham Lincoln believed. “All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against” Negroes, Lincoln told an audience in Springfield, Illinois, in September 1857. He evoked a terrifying image of Afro-American imprisonment:

Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.⁴⁸

One invention to which the Southern states quickly turned was enslavement. Arkansas was the first state to consider legislation to enslave free Negroes.⁴⁹ Made in 1856, the proposal was narrowly defeated, partly because of doubts about its constitutionality. After the Dred Scott decision those doubts vanished. The legislature debated the law in the 1858 session and passed it early in 1859. It provided that any free Negro in the state by January 1, 1860, would be enslaved. Arkansas had the smallest free Afro-American population in the South, and most free Negroes left soon after the law passed. Far more important to the South’s other free persons of color was the Arkansas precedent. Within months, nearly every legislature in the South deliberated the wisdom of outlawing freedom for Negroes.

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, quickened the pace of their deliberations. In October 1859 Brown led a small band of followers, including five free Negroes, on a predawn seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The self-appointed leader of what he envisioned as an army of liberation for slaves, Brown managed only to get most of his followers killed and the rest captured, tried, and hanged.⁵⁰ Bungled though it was, Brown’s raid frightened white Southerners. Here again were free Afro-Americans ready to carry on the work of Denmark Vesey. Once again men prepared to arm slaves and lead them in rebellion. The rather easy interaction between slaves and free Negroes that white Southerners had previously considered a nuisance now seemed to be intolerably dangerous.⁵¹ Free Negroes might be abolitionist emissaries spreading unrest among slaves and conspiring with them to rise up against their white masters. Some Southerners believed these fears exaggerated, but none could discount them entirely. Racial anxieties impelled Southerners to consider whether to make their policies toward Negroes, as they put it, “consistent” with proslavery ideology.

For whites, the most satisfying way to attain consistency was to have free Afro-Americans volunteer to become slaves. In South Carolina, several free Negroes sought legislative permission to forfeit their free status. In December 1859 an illiterate free man of color named William Bass petitioned the legislature to allow him to become the slave of Philip W. Pledger, who owned his stepfather and other kin. Bass’s petition conformed perfectly to the reasoning of many whites about the proper place for free Afro-Americans. Bass said his “condition as a free person of color, a negro, is more degrading and involves more suffering in this State, than that of a slave, who is under the care, protection and ownership of a kind and good master.” Bass emphasized less the advantages of slavery than the hardships of freedom. He said that “as a free negro he is preyed upon by every sharper with whom he comes in contact, and that he is very poor, though an able-bodied man, and is charged with and punished for every offence, guilty or not, committed in his neighborhood, and lives a thousand times harder, and in more destitution, than the slaves of many of the planters in [Marlborough] District.”⁵² Bass’s petition was featured prominently in newspapers throughout South Carolina and celebrated as a promising harbinger of enslavement by consent. The legislature’s Committee on the Colored Population considered Bass’s petition and several others and recommended the passage of a law to grant the wishes of the petitioners.⁵³ Legislators knew perfectly well, however, that although most free Negroes shared Bass’s poverty, they had no desire whatever to surrender their freedom. White notions of racial consistency could not be realized by the consent of free Afro-Americans.

In the South Carolina legislature in 1859, Edward Moore, a representative from York District, introduced a bill to compel consistency. Moore’s proposal provided that any free person of color in South Carolina on the first of March 1860 would be sold into slavery. “The whole of these trifling vagabonds should be sold or compelled to leave the State,” Moore argued. He opposed voluntary enslavement or any other attempt to “discriminate” between free Negroes and slaves. Slaves were not allowed to choose their masters. Why should free Negroes be given the privilege? Many legislators considered Moore’s bill “ultra and extravagant,” according to the Columbia correspondent of the Courier. But Moore asserted that his opponents “might just as well say that it is wrong to take the liberty of a slave as that of a free negro; the one is as much entitled to it as the other….”⁵⁴

The “unusually warm” three-hour debate in the legislature disclosed that many of the lawmakers were sympathetic to Moore’s plan, though not to the ruthless logic with which he intended to carry it out. A somewhat less extreme proposal was introduced by John Henry Screven, who represented St. Luke’s Parish in the low country. Screven’s bill provided that free persons of color who were convicted of crimes that currently were punished by fines or imprisonment would henceforth be enslaved. Screven said that he was “not disposed to encourage any sweeping remedy” or “to produce any new revulsion in the country.” His bill would respond to the complaints of citizens throughout the state about the “trouble, inconvenience and often injury” caused by free Negroes. It would “prevent these people from becoming a tax upon the country from idleness and vagrancy.” At the same time, Screven pointed out, he opposed “any measure calculated to injure those people who do behave themselves, or to impair what is the obligation upon South Carolina to extend protection to those who are good citizens.”⁵⁵

In effect, Screven’s bill gave the magistrate’s and freeholders’ courts local option on whether to enslave free persons of color. In many districts the number of free Negroes enslaved under Screven’s bill probably would have been almost the same as under Moore’s plan. The advantage of Screven’s bill was that it did not eliminate freedom without cause. If a free Negro man stole a chicken or traded with a slave, he thereby forfeited his freedom. Screven argued that he did not “believe that the country and people are prepared” for Moore’s proposal to “sell the whole class.” The alternative, he said, was mat “where this class arc disposed to be idle and vicious, reduce them to that position where they can have a master who can make them work. This would disturb no commonwealth and this population, instead of being an evil, would be protected.”⁵⁶

Christopher G. Memminger argued against both me Moore and Screven bills and defended free persons of color on grounds of justice and sound policy. Memminger expressed “utmost confidence” that slavery was based on “principles of right and justice,” principles compromised by the two bills. He ridiculed Moore’s assertion “that it is consistent with Justice to take those reared and standing among us free, and from who we arc encouraged to look for everything becoming and proper, and reduce them” to slavery. Screven’s proposal was flawed because, Memminger argued, it made slavery a punishment for crimes when “we maintain [it] to be the proper condition of the slave.” The state had protected free Negroes for years, Memminger pointed out. Although free persons of color were not citizens, they were still “entitled to the protection of our laws.” Furthermore, Memminger asserted, the real threats to slavery did not come from free people of color. Referring to the Vesey conspiracy, he asked, “Was it not through the instrumentality of a free colored man that a formidable insurrection was discovered and quelled”?⁵⁷ Indeed, only two years earlier the legislature had voted to increase to $200 the annual pension paid to Peter Desverney, the former slave emancipated by the state for betraying the Vesey conspiracy.⁵⁸ “Have we not again and again voted testimonials to people of that class,” Memminger reminded the lawmakers. In fact, Memminger declared, working-class whites were a greater threat to slavery than were free Negroes. In Charleston, Memminger said, “there were [free colored] men of most estimable character, and as a general rule, take an equal number of them and an equal number of those [white men] who come nearest to them, and there will be found more amongst the latter who are demoralizing our slaves.” Memminger concluded that it was “not the policy of the State to set those people who are our friends against us.” He moved for the indefinite postponement of Screven’s bill.⁵⁹ Although the Charleston delegation in the Assembly supported Memminger’s motion, a 66–50 majority voted to send the Screven bill on to the Senate and to table Moore’s bill and the more than twenty others dealing with free Negroes.⁶⁰

James M. Johnson’s letter to Henry Ellison just after the legislature adjourned suggests that free Afro-Americans throughout the state followed the debate on their status with more than casual interest. When the Screven bill was bottled up in the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and, like all the other free Negro bills, failed to pass, the Johnsons and the Ellisons breathed a sigh of relief. However, none of the bills was rejected by the legislature. They remained in the hopper, ready to be called up at the next session. From the perspective of Johnson and others among the free colored elite, the legislature appeared to be involved in little more than another of its periodic spasms of repression. Members of the free colored elite were cautious and concerned, but their outlook was tempered by the conviction that, as in the past, their status would not change.

DURING the preceding generation the South Carolina legislature had made only minor changes in laws governing free Negroes. After the passage of the 1822 law responding to the Vesey scare, the most notable modifications were the 1834 law prohibiting free Negroes from teaching free Afro-Americans or slaves to read or write, and the 1841 ban on the use of trusts to evade the law against manumission. At moments of sectional tension, legislators proposed more sweeping changes. In 1835 the distribution of inflammatory abolitionist literature through the mail prompted bills to prohibit free persons of color from owning slaves, to outlaw marriages between whites and free Negroes, and to require every free colored mechanic to work under the supervision of a white tradesman.⁶¹ Lawmakers debated the bills, but they passed none of them. The Mercury called the proposals “tyrannical and impolitic” and reported that an “overwhelming majority of the citizens of Charleston” opposed them.⁶² The Courier agreed, noting that “such extreme severity is not demanded by the crisis.”⁶³

The Courier explained in some detail why the proposed laws were “false policy.” “The true policy of the State is to foster slave labor,” the Courier postulated, and all else followed from that. The free Negro’s “right to hold slaves gives him a stake in the institution of slavery, and makes it his interest as well as his duty to uphold it. It identifies his interests and his feelings, in this particular, with those of the white population….” In addition, owning slaves was often the only way a free person of color could bring parent or child, husband or wife “into the bosom of the family.” The proposal to prevent free colored artisans from working for themselves would either drive free Afro-Americans out of the state, the Courier argued, or it would make them “exchange their habits of honesty and industry, for those of idleness and profligacy.” Those who stayed would become “moral pests in our community.” Forcing free persons of color to work under white supervision just like slaves would create rather than solve a problem, the Courier said. Prohibiting free Negroes from working independently would have the “inevitable result of breaking down the barrier, which now separates the free colored man from the slave, and assigns him an intermediate caste between the slave and his master,” the Courier pointed out. “It is this intermediate position in society, that has given the free colored man of the South a degree of self-respect, which has placed him, in industry and morals, so far above his degraded fellow of the North….” Furthermore, the Courier declared, the free colored population of Charleston had long been upright and trustworthy: “the conduct of the free-colored people of this city, if not of the State, has been for the most part so correct, evincing so much civility, subordination, industry and propriety, that unless their conduct should change for the worse, or some stern necessity demand it, we are unwilling to see them deprived of those immunities, which they have enjoyed for centuries, without the slightest detriment to the commonwealth.”⁶⁴

Attempts to alter the laws governing free persons of color ran up against what might be called the Charleston defense. Powerful Charlestonians argued that any blanket restriction on free Negroes fell with unnecessary and unfair harshness on free persons of color in Charleston, whose conduct was exemplary. This argument prevailed in almost every attempt by country planters to solve the free Negro problem as they saw it. As the Courier was careful to point out in 1835, free Negroes in Charleston were different from those elsewhere in the state. Outside the city, the argument that free Afro-Americans were an intermediate caste between slaves and whites made little sense simply because the number of free Negroes was so small. Outside Charleston, free persons of color comprised 1 percent of the population; they were hardly visible as a boundary between slaves and whites, much less an intermediate class. In the country only one Afro-American in fifty was free. In the city, the proportion of free persons among the Afro-American population was ten times greater, about one out of five. Charleston was the unofficial capital of the free colored population of the state. Although the city contained in 1860 only 3 percent of the state’s slave population and 8 percent of the state’s whites, it harbored 33 percent of all free persons of color. Free Afro-Americans made up only 8 percent of the total inhabitants of the city, but they were numerous enough to constitute a separate class, and they were visible enough to appear to be intermediate between the mass of slaves and the white majority.

When country planters visited Charleston, they could see that the free colored people in the city were different from their rural counterparts. In the 1859 debate in the legislature, Screven acknowledged that in some sections of the state free Negroes were “neither vicious, idle, nor guilty of crime.”⁶⁵ So long as free persons of color were favored by Charleston’s delegates to the legislature and by the city’s newspapers, they had powerful allies. Although Charlestonians did not control the legislature, the leadership and prestige of Charleston politicians and their influence with friends and kin throughout the state gave the city more influence than its population warranted. Charlestonians’ views were especially influential when new restrictions on free Negroes were considered, a fact that frustrated many country planters. The proper response to the complaints of rural planters, the Charleston defenders implied, was to use the time-tested magistrate’s and freeholders’ courts to govern unruly free Negroes. Any other response caused more problems in Charleston than it solved elsewhere in the state.

The success with which Memminger and the other members of the Charleston delegation deployed the Charleston defense in 1859 contributed to the confidence of the free colored elite that their status was secure. It must also have been satisfying to be praised in the legislature for an “estimable character” and for “everything becoming and proper.” To have these sentiments printed in the Courier was even sweeter. These testimonials, however, did not cause Charleston’s free persons of color to sit back.

Johnson and other leading members of Charleston’s free colored community took positive steps to encourage their defenders and to win their continued support. Early in January 1860 Johnson sent Henry a copy of Memminger’s remarks in the legislature and reported that “I have pledged your Father as a Contributor to a present to be sent him.”⁶⁶ What was purchased with the contributions of William Ellison and other free persons of color is not known. Surely it was something fine enough to reflect their appreciation for Memminger’s help, as well as their own gentility and good taste. Under what circumstances the gift was presented to Memminger is also unknown. It is certain, however, that a leading representative of Charleston’s free colored community supplemented the gift by personally thanking Memminger for his support. When Memminger was in the city for a few days before he left to undertake his duties as commissioner to Virginia to make the case for secession, Johnson accompanied Robert Houston, a highly respected free mulatto tailor, when he expressed to Memminger the appreciation of the free colored community. “I was present when Mr Houston Returned him thanks in behalf of our people,” Johnson wrote Henry.⁶⁷

Perhaps Houston, Johnson, and others called on Memminger at his home on Wentworth Street, just a few blocks away from Johnson’s residence on Coming. Perhaps they went to his law office or encountered him at church. Houston and Johnson were certainly not total strangers to Memminger. All three men were active members of Grace Episcopal Church. The church stood on Wentworth, just east of Memminger’s home and a few blocks from Johnson’s. In 1853 the Memmingers’ daughter Fanny was baptized in the church, as was Robert and Sarah Houston’s son Richard.⁶⁸ Houston, Johnson, and the other twenty or so free colored families among the Grace Church parishioners were familiar faces to Memminger. Perhaps they had a nodding acquaintance, perhaps more.

Exactly what Houston said to Memminger cannot be known, but he was certainly well qualified to speak for, as Johnson put it, “our people.” Houston had lived in Charleston for many years working in his tailor shop on King Street a few blocks north of James D. Johnson’s shop.⁶⁹ Although Houston owned only a modest $2,000 worth of real estate in 1860, his high standing in the free colored community was reflected by his membership in the exclusive Brown Fellowship Society, an organization restricted to fifty of the leading free mulatto men in the city.⁷⁰ Possibly Houston was selected by a group of free men of color to thank Memminger, perhaps as they pledged contributions for Memminger’s gift. Houston’s reputation for respectability and piety would have made his thanks credible to Memminger. Johnson wrote Henry that Memminger received Houston’s thanks “very cordially and throws the blame [for the agitation against free Negroes] on the up country members [of the legislature].”⁷¹ Pleased by Houston’s remarks, Memminger probably enjoyed the role of protector of the relatively powerless free colored community.

Such cordial, face-to-face exchanges and the bonds of mutual respect they symbolized were common among members of Charleston’s free colored elite and leading white families. White men like Memminger were customers of free mulatto men like Houston and Johnson. Doing business with one another and worshiping together, they came to know each other personally. These personal relationships helped bridge the chasm between the races. Powerful white friends gave the free colored elite confidence that their position was secure. Respectable, trusted free persons of color reinforced white leaders’ convictions that free Negroes deserved their freedom. However, most whites in Charleston did not have satisfying personal relationships with free Negroes. Johnson, Houston, and Memminger all knew that upcountry legislators were not the only ones behind the campaign to eliminate freedom for Afro-Americans. The most numerous opponents of free Negroes were among the white planters in me upcountry, but the most threatening opponents were among the white workingmen in Charleston.

IN October 1858, just over a year before Memminger’s conversation with Houston and Johnson, white workingmen in Charleston organized a campaign to petition the state legislature for relief from competition with slaves. A “large and enthusiastic” group of white mechanics gathered at Masonic Hall on King Street at Wentworth on the evening of October 8 for the purpose, as they announced in an advertisement for the meeting, “of considering matters involving their own interests.”⁷² The men denounced the “baneful evil” of slaves who hired their own time and complained that the laws prohibiting the practice were “dead letters upon the Statute Book.” They resolved to petition the legislature for “more rigid enforcement” of existing laws and for increased penalties for violators.⁷³ When they presented their petition to the legislature in November, it contained 163 signatures and was supported by resolutions from the Charleston Mechanics’ Society, the South Carolina Mechanics’ Association, and the Charleston Grand Jury.⁷⁴

Slaves who hired out were a perennial problem for white workingmen in Charleston. Unlike rural planters, many urban employers needed a number of hands for short periods of time to unload a ship, to haul goods between the railroad depot and the wharves, or to work on a construction project. Hiring laborers for the duration of a specific job was economical and practical for these employers. But a man who stacked cotton bales in the hold of a ship one day might be walking the streets of the city the next day, looking for work. For most white workers, unemployment was a familiar experience. Any white laborer could look around the city and see scores of slaves who had been hired to do jobs that might otherwise have gone to whites. Every time a white laborer faced the prospect of losing his job he simultaneously faced slave competition.

Urban masters often found it both convenient and lucrative to hire out their slaves.⁷⁵ Especially during the busy fall and winter months when the year’s rice and cotton crops funneled through the city on their way to northern and European markets, masters took advantage of the increased demand, for laborers and hired out any of their slaves they could do without. By confiscating most or all of the slaves’ wages, the masters pocketed cash without selling the slaves or supervising their labor.

Employers were not at all reluctant to hire slaves. They were a handy source of reserve labor, and they could not walk off the job or leave the city, as white workingmen sometimes did. Best of all from the employers’ point of view, slaves were usually cheaper to hire. Since their masters were obliged to feed and house them regardless of whether they were hired out, hired slaves did not necessarily need to earn wages that covered the cost of subsistence. Their wages were essentially a cash bonus to their masters, rather than a source of their own livelihood.

Profitable and convenient for masters and employers, slave hiring created severe competition for white workers. Since the eighteenth-century white workingmen had periodically sought to limit slave hiring. Ideally, they wanted to monopolize the labor market. That ideal was impossible to realize since it ran head-on into masters’ prerogative to use their slaves in any way they chose, including hiring them out. The most that white workers were able to achieve was a combination of municipal and state laws regulating slave hiring.

In Charleston every slave who was hired out was required to have a badge, purchased annually by his or her owner. The badge law of 1800 limited the number of badges a master could purchase (and hence the number of slaves he or she could hire out) to six.⁷⁶ Although that limit was lifted in the city’s comprehensive revision of the badge law in 1843, the price of the badges still served as a minor restriction on the number of slaves who were hired out.⁷⁷ At seven dollars, a badge for a “handicraft tradesman” was the most expensive; a badge for a carter, a porter, or a day laborer was four dollars.⁷⁸ Since the price of a badge was little more than the wages a hired slave would be expected to earn in a week or two, the badge law only discouraged masters from hiring out slaves for a few weeks during the year. The 1843 law may well have increased the number of slaves in the city who were looking for work because, once a master had purchased a badge, he or she stood to gain from having the slave hired out for as much of the year as possible. This indirect incentive for masters to hire out their slaves only applied to Charleston residents. Nonresidents had to pay three times as much for slave badges. From the standpoint of white workingmen in the city, the badge law merely limited their competition to slaves of Charleston residents.

More than it limited slave hiring, the badge law checked the activities of slaves. Hiring loosened the bonds between slave and master. A hired slave had greater freedom of movement in the city than a slave who worked directly under a master’s supervision. The badge law, however, made each white person in the city an extension of the hired slave’s master. The badge identified the wearer as a slave rather than one of the city’s free colored population. Simply by noting the slave’s badge number, any white person could report suspicious behavior to the slave’s master, since the master’s name was recorded, along with the slave’s name and occupation, at the time the owner purchased the badge. A master who undermined this system of control by failing to buy a badge for a slave who worked out was subject to a fine of twenty dollars for each offense. An employer who hired a slave without a badge faced a much stiffer fine, twice the cost of the badge for each day he employed the slave.⁷⁹ By penalizing the hirer more than the master, the badge law attempted to eliminate illegal employment opportunities rather than hold masters solely responsible for the slaves’ actions.

White workingmen were in an ideal position to observe employers who violated the badge law. However, if they ever hoped to be hired by that person, they were unlikely to report the hirer to the authorities. White workers’ need for jobs compromised their willingness to insist that the law be enforced to the letter. On balance, the badge law probably did more to cause white workers to chafe at slave competition than it did to limit it.

Of far greater potential significance to white workingmen were laws prohibiting the slaves from hiring their own time. A master who wanted to hire out a slave was supposed to negotiate directly with the hirer about the terms of the slave’s employment. If a slave carpenter, for example, reached an agreement about work and wages with an employer without the intervention of his master, then the slave was hiring his own time. He was, in a sense, participating in the labor market as if he were free. A municipal ordinance of 1796 prohibited slave mechanics from hiring their own time and an 1822 law extended the ban to all male slaves.⁸⁰ A master who violated the 1822 law was subject to the extreme penalty of forfeiting any slave who was allowed to hire his own time. This stringent sanction promised to benefit white workingmen in Charleston by making it impractical for masters to hire out their slaves for short periods of time. To comply with the law, a master had to act as an employment agent for his slaves. As soon as one job ended, the master needed to find the slave another one, a burdensome, time-consuming chore that made the whole hiring-out process considerably less attractive to masters. On the face of it, the law should have worked to reduce the number of slaves who were hired out and to open up a corresponding number of jobs to white workingmen.

Because the law was rarely enforced, it had no such effect. The law was not intended to benefit white workers but to prevent slaves from having the freedom of movement and association that, as the Vesey conspiracy vividly proved, could threaten the peace and security of the community. As the memory of the Vesey conspiracy faded, the initial motivation for the prohibition on slaves hiring their own time lapsed, and the law fell into disuse. In 1849 the legislature amended the 1822 law to prohibit all slaves—male and female—from hiring their own time, and to reduce the penalty for an offending slaveowner to a fine of fifty dollars.⁸¹ Yet even this law was neglected. Speeding its neglect was the cumbersome procedure it required masters to follow in hiring out their slaves. While the liberties allowed to slaves who hired their own time were potentially dangerous to white society, they were in practice quite convenient for the slaves’ owners. The principal effect of the ban on slaves hiring their own time was to create a thriving black market in slave labor, supported by slaveowners and employers who winked at the impractical law. When white workingmen complained in their October 1858 meeting that the laws regulating slave hiring were dead letters, they knew what they were talking about.

White mechanics’ attempts to protect themselves from slave competition were hindered by their small numbers in the state and the specialized nature of their concerns. Most white men lived in the country, and their problems were far removed from the hiring practices in the streets of Charleston. Rural slaveholders were also inordinately sensitive to any move to limit their prerogatives as masters. Furthermore, every white workingman could avoid slave competition by leaving for the North. The turnover among white workingmen in the city was compounded by the seasonal job market in the city, as hundreds of white laborers migrated South for the winter, then left during the spring and summer lull. Many of these men were recent immigrants from Ireland or Germany, which distanced them from the native-born majority of the state.⁸² Working under these handicaps, Charleston’s white mechanics did not succeed before 1858 in altering the laws or the practices of slave hiring.

By then, important changes had prepared the way for a new attempt. During the 1850s the city acquired a white majority for the first time in its history. The high price of cotton and continued expansion into the fertile lands of the Southwest created a strong demand for slave labor, pushing the prices of slaves to new highs. Urban masters in Charleston and other Southern cities sold many of their slaves, a large number of whom had probably been hired out.⁸³ Between 1850 and 1860 the slave population of Charleston fell by more than 5,600 while the city’s white population increased by more than 3,300. Thirty years earlier slaves made up 51 percent of the city’s population, whites, 42 percent.⁸⁴ Now the balance had reversed. In 1860 slaves comprised 34 percent of the city’s inhabitants, whites, 58 percent. There were nearly 10,000 more whites than slaves in the city. Never before had whites so greatly outnumbered slaves on the Charleston peninsula. Racially, Charleston had become an enclave of the upcountry in the low country, where slaves outnumbered whites five to one. Actually, the city had become even whiter than the upcountry, where in 1860 whites were still a minority.

As white workingmen took over some of the jobs previously done by slaves, the new racial balance in the city was visible to all. When Yankee author John W. DeForrest visited Charleston in 1855, he wrote his brother that “the crowd of porters & coachmen that met us on the dock presented not above half a dozen black faces. Instead I saw the familiar Irish & German visages whom I could have met on a dock at Boston or New York.” A Charleston friend explained to DeForrest that “This was different years ago … and it is only lately that the whites have begun to crowd the blacks out of the more responsible lower employments.”⁸⁵ Whether white workingmen crowded out blacks or filled a vaccuum created by the departure of slaves who were sold away mattered less than the new importance of white mechanics in the life of the city. Aspiring politicians courted them, proslavery ideologues calculated their loyalty to slavery, and Southern nationalists hoped they would buttress the South’s independence by manning shops that would produce the goods currently imported from the North.

White mechanics in Charleston seemed to hold the key to the city’s economic expansion. Newspaper commentators argued that if the city was to regain the prosperity it had enjoyed thirty years earlier, domestic industry had to be encouraged. Southern-built steam engines should power Southern-built rice mills and cotton gins. Southern-built railroad cars should roll on Southern-built rails connecting back-country plantations to the Charleston harbor. To complete the connection, the city contracted with the local foundry of James M. Eason to dredge the channel leading from the harbor to the open sea, removing the mud and sand that clogged Charleston’s artery of trade with the world.⁸⁶ By the late 1850s the city’s economic fete was literally in the hands of the city’s white mechanics.

Leaders of the white workingmen recognized that they were in a strong position to try once again to limit competition with slaves. A few weeks after the sixty-seventh anniversary meeting of the Charleston Mechanics’ Society in February 1858, the city council entertained a proposal to forbid slaves to hire their own time.⁸⁷ The text of the proposal has not survived, but more than likely it was an attempt to restrict the black market in slave hiring and to increase the penalties for both slaveowners and hirers. Exactly what precipitated the proposal is uncertain, but the current economic downturn in the North may well have been a contributing factor.⁸⁸ As unemployed laborers from Northern cities flocked south looking for work in the winter of 1857–58, they intensified the competition for existing jobs in Charleston and other Southern cities. As competition increased among whites, workingmen again envied the jobs held by hired slaves. They argued that the way to increase the number of jobs for white men was not to restrict the immigration of white laborers but to prevent employers from hiring black market slave laborers. When the city council debated and voted on the mechanics’ proposal in May, they rejected it by postponing it indefinitely. The correspondent of the Mercury found the “long and able discussion” of the proposal “one of the most interesting debates of the present Council” but concluded that since the bill did not pass, “We do not now conceive that the public interest would be benefitted by … publication [of the debate].”⁸⁹

Stymied by the council in the spring, the white mechanics were struck in the fell by a yellow fever epidemic that raged through the city for three months. Yellow fever deaths of whites climbed from 6 in the second week of August to 122 in the second week of September and then slowly declined back to 6 by the second week of November.⁹⁰ In that period, 645 whites died from the disease. Hundreds more were stricken and eventually recovered. At the height of the epidemic, the Howard Association, a charitable organization devoted to providing medical aid and relief to needy sufferers and their families, noted that “As we are all aware, it is the laboring class of our community, whose life is one long battle with want, that the scourge whose ravages we now deplore affects most severely.”⁹¹ Five out of six of those who died were newcomers to Charleston. Immigrants from Ireland and Germany were especially hard-hit.⁹² Nearly 300 representatives of the Howard Association visited the homes of the sick throughout the city. They solicited contributions from the community and raised almost $20,000 to aid the victims. The city council set aside Thursday, September 23, as a day of humiliation and prayer for relief from the plague.⁹³ But the deaths continued for another six weeks.

In starkest terms, the epidemic dramatized the common plight of white workingmen. Poor white laborers did what they could to help themselves, their families, and their friends. Nursing a sick friend during the weeks of the epidemic, taking in a widowed mother and her children, sharing a meager board, and other acts of self-help reinforced the solidarity of white workingmen and reaffirmed the necessity of cooperation and sacrifice. The work of the Howard Association reminded the larger white community of the poverty and suffering in their midst, generated sympathy and contributions for relief, and fostered a mutual awareness of the interdependence of white mechanics and all other white Charlestonians. And, as hundreds of poor white laborers lay sick and dying, their jobs were filled by blacks, who were almost immune to yellow fever. During the entire three months of the epidemic, only thirty-one blacks died from the disease, fewer than the number of whites who died each week between mid-August and mid-October.⁹⁴ For every Negro who succumbed to yellow fever, twenty-one whites died. The epidemic made it more urgent than ever for white workingmen to consider “matters involving their own interests,” as they did in their meeting in Masonic Hall early in October while the epidemic waned.⁹⁵

Four out of five of the men who signed the petition framed in that meeting were common laborers or tradesmen.⁹⁶ Twenty other signers had nonmanual occupations. Some, like John Gotgen, who ran a grocery and barroom at the corner of East Bay and Tradd, catered to white mechanics. A few employed them, like L. F. LeBleux, a civil engineer and architect at the new Custom House, which was under construction. At least nine signers worked there, including three carpenters, a stone cutter, a clerk, a foreman, and several laborers. Although the petitioners were not entirely confined to the working class, support for white mechanics was almost entirely confined to working-class neighborhoods.

The petitioners included virtually none of the wealthy planters, merchants, and lawyers in the city and very few of the prosperous white tradesmen. Only seven signers owned $5,000 or more, and more than three-quarters were propertyless.⁹⁷ Just a handful of the signers owned slaves. More than 1,200 slaveholders lived in the city, but only four of them signed the white mechanics’ petition.⁹⁸ That, it became clear, was the crux of the mechanics’ problem.

The mechanics proposed two bills to the legislature. The more moderate bill asked that the penalty on the owner of a slave who hired his own time be extended to the employer and that the fine for each violation be doubled to $100. The more drastic measure prohibited slaves from working at any “mechanical pursuit” and from being hired out, either on their own or by their master. After considering the bills, the Committee on the Colored Population issued a report that was printed in pamphlet form and reprinted in the Charleston newspapers.⁹⁹ The report embodied the sober reflections of the state’s elected leaders on the problems of Charleston’s white mechanics.

According to the committee, neither of the bills fully grasped the nature of the problem of slave hiring. The white mechanics complained “that slaves are permitted to go at large, exercise all the privileges of free persons, make contracts, do work, and in every way live and conduct themselves as if they were not slaves.” The committee agreed that this was an “evil” but asserted that the character of the evil was “more general than the specific one” of slave competition. “The evil lies in the breaking down of the relation between master and slave,” the committee announced. The breakdown resulted in “the removal of the slave from the master’s discipline and control, and the assumption of freedom and independence, on the part of the slave, the idleness, disorder and crime which are consequential, and the necessity thereby created for additional police regulations to keep them in subjection and order, and the trouble and expense which they involve.” Despite these evils, the committee concluded that it was impossible to provide the remedy proposed by the white workingmen. “We are, as a slaveholding people, habituated to slave labor,” they said. Yet in the “towns and villages” of the state there was “ordinary labor … to be performed which can be done either by whites or negroes.” To agree to the mechanics’ more radical proposal or even to enforce “to the full” the existing laws against slave hiring “would create a revolution.” It would “drive away all slave labor from any employment in the towns and villages of the State.”¹⁰⁰

The committee’s reasoning directly contradicted their diagnosis of the evil as the collapse of the relation between master and slave. In effect, they said that labor would be driven away if masters were required to maintain close supervision of their slaves. “It would be impossible to have this sort of slave labor, if there must be a contract with the owner for every specific job—as for instance, the transportation of a load in a wagon or dray, the carrying of a passenger’s trunk to or from a railroad, &c.” In short, although slave hiring made it more difficult to control the slave population, masters could not be expected to conform to the impractical demands of the law against slaves hiring their own time. “The subject … is full of difficulty, and until you can change the direction of the public prejudice, prepossession and habit, you can never enforce a law which conflicts with them.”¹⁰¹

The committee recommended that, as the white mechanics asked, the penalty for violations of the existing laws be extended to employers, but they did not recommend an increased fine. Worse, from the point of view of the mechanics, the committee recommended gutting the existing laws by exempting from the prohibition on slaves hiring their own time those slaves who worked as domestic servants, common laborers, porters, draymen, wagoners, carters, or stevedores—in sum, most of the slaves with whom Charleston’s white workingmen competed.¹⁰² In essence, the committee proposed to make the law conform to everyday practice. Rather than providing white mechanics with relief from slave competition, they offered slaveowners relief from inconvenient laws. The recommendations made clear what the committee meant when it said that the white mechanics had only a limited understanding of the problem. Despite the committee’s recommendations, none of the proposals came to a vote in the 1858 session of the legislature, and all were carried over to the next session. The bills were considered again in 1859, along with the bills to enslave free Negroes, and again they were shelved for reconsideration in 1860.

Thwarted by the legislature, the white workingmen went back to the Charleston City Council to try to overrule the Committee on the Colored Population’s endorsement of slave-hiring practices. In mid-January 1860, just two weeks after Robert Houston and James M. Johnson thanked Memminger for his defense of free people of color, Alderman John Kenifick, a druggist, introduced an ordinance that banned slaves from hiring their own time, with $50 fines for both master and employer.¹⁰³ The council referred the proposal to a special committee composed of Kenifick, E. W. Edgerton, a wealthy Broad Street draper and tailor, and William Ravenal, a rich East Bay merchant. After deliberating for six weeks, the special committee reported at the end of February that passage of the proposed ordinance would be “both inexpedient and improper.”¹⁰⁴

Their reasoning echoed that of the Committee on the Colored Population. The proposal was inexpedient because, “In all large cities, the successful prosecution of trade and commerce requires a great number of laborers, by the day or by the hour, and during the business season. They are generally employed and constantly changing their employers; at times, almost everyone engaged in business are [sic] obliged to employ this kind of labor, but very few require it permanently.” If the proposed ordinance were adopted, the committee pointed out, “stevedores, barbers, chimney-sweeps, wood sawyers, and laborers, who are slaves, would be stopped, and the business thrown into other hands.” That, of course, was precisely the point of the white mechanics’ proposal. But, the committee argued, the proposal would inconvenience families as well as businesses. “Mantua makers, nurses, seamstresses, and washer-women must necessarily change their employment, and [white] families would be compelled to seek another source to supply their places….” Furthermore, if the proposal were enacted, “the evident result would be the depreciation of slave labor, which your Committee are of the opinion is by no means desirable.” In fact, the proposal was improper because “The slave is the property of the owner, and like all other property which he holds, subject to his own management and control.”¹⁰⁵ The members of the committee, all of them slaveholders, utterly rejected the white mechanics’ request. The council accepted the report and gave semiofficial local approval to the existing black market in slave hiring.

For their efforts at the state and local levels, white workingmen in Charleston had obtained less than nothing. Not only were their proposed remedies denied, but so were their grievances. Although the mechanics had the law on their side, the legislature and the city council agreed that the law had to be violated to carry on the business of the city and to protect the rights of masters. By trying to reduce slave competition, white workingmen came into open conflict with slaveowners, a battle that, seen in retrospect, they were sure to lose. Having failed to penetrate slaveowners’ defense of slave-hiring practices, white mechanics shifted their attack. They turned to competitors who were much less numerous but much more vulnerable.

White workingmen did not entirely overlook free Negroes in their 1858 campaign in the state legislature. The mechanics’ petition did not mention free people of color, but the presentment of the Charleston Grand Jury linked slave hiring and “the practice so extensively prevailing among free persons of color—carrying on business on their own account, making contracts for the erection of houses and other undertakings” as “evils which demand the prompt intervention of the law.”¹⁰⁶ The resolution of the South Carolina Mechanics’ Association also complained about competition with free Negroes. It asked the legislature to impose a tax on free persons of color or to enact “some other remedy … that shall at least place us in such a position that we may be able to compete with them, if they are to be on an equality with us.”¹⁰⁷ Neither request was incorporated into the proposed laws, which dealt only with slave hiring. That reflected the secondary importance of free Negro competition to Charleston’s white mechanics. It was troublesome and annoying but not ruinous.

Free people of color were less important competitors than slaves because there were fewer of them in the city. Slaves outnumbered free Negroes more than four to one in 1860, and the ratio had been even higher in earlier years. Free men and women of color were also clustered a notch higher on the occupational scale than slaves who were hired out. Most hired slaves worked as common laborers or domestics, and only a small but important fraction worked as skilled tradesmen.¹⁰⁸ Among free people of color in Charleston, the pattern was the reverse.

Like the Ellisons in Stateburg, most free men of color in Charleston made their living as artisans. In 1860 more than two-thirds of Charleston’s free men of color were skilled tradesmen.¹⁰⁹ Carpenters were the most numerous (139), tailors were a distant second (55), and ranking in descending order were painters (24), barbers (22), butchers (22), bricklayers (19), shoemakers (19), and blacksmiths (16). Fewer than one out of five free men of color worked as common laborers.¹¹⁰ Only one man in twenty had a nonmanual occupation as a shopkeeper. A similar pattern prevailed in New Orleans, but it contrasted sharply with the occupations of free Afro-Americans in Northern cities, where about three-quarters of them worked as common laborers.¹¹¹

Free women of color in Charleston also exhibited this distinctive occupational profile.¹¹² Six out of ten were dressmakers, mantua makers, seamstresses, or other skilled needleworkers. The rest either worked as laundresses (24 percent) or as other domestic servants (13 percent), together composing almost twice the proportion of free Afro-American men in the city who were at the bottom of the occupational ladder. Still, the women, like the men, were far more frequently employed at skilled crafts than were free women of color elsewhere in the state.

Between 1850 and 1860 the number of free colored artisans in the city had increased modestly by 14 percent, from 370 to 420.¹¹³ The number of carpenters increased by 38, more than any other trade. The number of painters increased by 12, bakers by 11. The number of other tradesmen, such as bricklayers, butchers, and blacksmiths, increased less, while the number of millwrights, barbers, and wheelwrights stayed about the same or declined slightly. The number of shoemakers, however, declined by half, and the number of tailors fell by more than a third. This net, though uneven, growth in the number of free Afro-American tradesmen in the city indicates that white artisans made few inroads during the 1850s in crafts occupied by free colored tradesmen. White mechanics’ complaints about free Negro competition, like those about slave competition, arose not from men who were being encroached upon but from men who wanted to encroach.

Free people of color not only blocked the occupational aspirations of white workingmen but were also the focus of more complex class and racial resentments. Since free Afro-Americans in Charleston were not required to wear badges or any other sign of their status, white workingmen often mistook them for slaves. When a white mechanic reported what he thought was a slave working without the badge required by law, the person would often turn out to be free. This source of confusion was complicated by the numerous Afro-Americans in the city who had been illegally freed after the 1820 ban on manumission. Although these individuals were technically slaves and subject to the city’s badge law, they could evade the law by establishing their free status, typically by showing their receipt for the capitation tax on free Negroes.¹¹⁴ Or, if the person had not paid the capitation tax but could in some other way satisfy city officials that he or she was free, the individual could pay the tax with a penalty and, again, foil the white person’s attempt to enforce the badge law. From the perspective of white workingmen, the distinction between slavery and freedom was a slippery technicality protected by the willful blindness of many slaveowners to the legal prohibitions on manumission and slaves hiring their own time.

City law enforcement officials—the police and the mayor, who presided over the court that heard cases involving slaves and free persons of color—responded to the white mechanics’ grievances with crackdowns on Afro-Americans suspected of violating the capitation tax or slave badge laws. When white workingmen petitioned for relief from slave competition in October 1858, city police arrested fifty-three free persons of color for failure to pay the capitation tax, after having made only five such arrests in the previous four months.¹¹⁵ After the October crackdown, police made only sporadic arrests for capitation tax violations, averaging less than three per month until December 1859, when the repressive free Negro laws were debated in Columbia. Then, while James M. Johnson was celebrating a peaceful Christmas in the city, police swept up thirty-two free persons of color for not paying the capitation tax.

Both crackdowns were evidently timed to reassure white workingmen that city officials were sensitive to their demands. During those same months, police also arrested slaves who were working out without badges. But for every two such slaves arrested in the months between October 1858 and December 1859, three free persons of color were picked up, even though slaves vastly outnumbered free Negroes. The crackdowns hit free Afro-Americans harder partly because whites were sometimes confused about their status but mostly because they were more vulnerable. A free man of color who failed to pay the capitation tax had to pay his own taxes and fines. The fine for a slave arrested for violation of the badge law was assessed against the slave’s master, who had many ways to make the process of collecting difficult and unpleasant for city officials.

THE vulnerability of free Afro-Americans and the deep resentments many whites felt toward them were rooted in the same simple fact: they were Negroes who were free. Unlike slaves, they did not have a powerful class of whites with a compelling personal interest in protecting them. In addition, they refused to act like slaves. Even in the explosive racial climate following the raid on Harpers Ferry, they insisted on exercising their freedom. Their behavior rankled many whites and sparked intensified scrutiny of free people of color throughout the South.

In Charleston, some whites still saw free Negroes as the heirs of Denmark Vesey. One planter pointed out that Harpers Ferry was “no insurrection but an invasion of abolitionists and free negroes” and warned that only by constant vigilance could whites prevent free persons of color from tampering with slaves.¹¹⁶ In mid-December a group of white Charlestonians formed a Committee of Safety to search out and arrest “all Abolition sympathizers and emissaries.”¹¹⁷ A member of the committee pointed out the numerous activities in the city that were potentially subversive, such as the “negro schools kept by white persons,” the Northern papers received every week by free people of color, the circulation among the city’s Afro-American population of an illustrated life of John Brown, and Yankee pedlers “publicly expressing their peculiar opinions.”¹¹⁸ Although some white Charlestonians ridiculed the Committee of Safety for overreacting, Harpers Ferry proved to many whites that “A free negro in a slave country is a natural incendiary.”¹¹⁹

Despite the shortage of inflammatory behavior by free people of color in Charleston, anxious whites saw plenty of evidence that they were not staying in their place. Many whites felt that city officials and the white community in general had become too lenient about Negroes’ abuses of law and propriety. The importance of their views was magnified by the election campaign for mayor and city councilmen that was under way as the news of Harpers Ferry reached the city. Several writers catalogued Afro-Americans’ transgressions in a series of letters in the newspapers. The letters sizzled with racial hostility. Was it wise to permit Negroes to have “privileges”?

One slaveholder declared that every day he observed open violations of the laws. He saw “crowds of black children who throng our streets every morning on their way to school … the crowds who congregate at nightly ‘sittings up’… negro visitors to northern cities and watering places, who go and come regularly every season under the very eye of the law, and who return, possibly, with the personal acquaintance of the black Douglas [sic] and the white Greeley … [and] violations of State laws and civil ordinances in regard to the liquor traffic with slaves.” All these illegal activities could be repressed by enforcing existing laws. There remained, however, the perfectly legal, but still offensive, social behavior of Negroes in the city. What about “the ‘nuptials of blacks’ [which] are celebrated in a spacious temple of the most High—where a bridal party of a score and ten in numbers are transported to this modern centre of fashion and false philanthropy in gay equipages—and where hundreds of others, robed in extravagant costumes, witness, possibly with eyeglass in hand, this the dawn of a new fashioned sentiment, and where harangues are delivered on ‘rights’?”¹²⁰

Another slaveholder catalogued the offenses of free Negroes. He argued that the 1820 ban on manumission “is daily violated in spirit and in fact, both through the aid of negro class societies and associations, and also by the aid of our own citizens.” He asked why “the slave of yesterday is the master of today … traveling with impunity North and South, and entering successfully into competition with the worthy white citizen for the best patronage of the city—made the subjects of editorial puff and notice, and driving through our thoroughfares in stylish equipages, rivalling those of the less favored white man.”¹²¹ The alarming erosion of racial boundaries could be seen everywhere, another Charlestonian said. He asked, “Why our public hacks, in the hands of negroes, aye, and some white men, are daily filled with black and mulatto males and females, slaves and free, indulging in the privilege of taking the air, in violation of known public sentiment? Why are they permitted to attend balls, churches, and funerals in carriages, to assume to themselves prerogatives and distinctions which have been, and ought to be, among the landmarks separating the classes?” The problem with Charleston’s Afro-Americans was that they were uppity. “Shall the slave and free negroes be permitted to lay aside all respect, and put all proper restraint at defiance. Shall they, in silks and laces, promenade our principal thoroughfares, with the arrogance of equals—by their insolent bearing making the modest lady yield them on the walk, and the poor white woman to feel that to be virtuous and honest gives her place, in appearances, below the slaves, in the gratification of her desire for dress and distinction?” In 1859 these questions were more potent than ever. Racial identity shared by the demure lady and the poor white woman was the basis of the South’s political solidarity. If the poor white woman felt humiliated by Negroes, would she and her husband conclude that the problem was the slaves? Or the masters? The writer asked if the provocative behavior of Negroes continued to be tolerated by city officials, “Is it thus that the institution is to be strengthened in public esteem, and made to conduce to the general welfare and benefit of the whole community?”¹²²

These sentiments propelled the crackdown on free Negroes in Charleston in December 1859, following Mayor Charles Macbeth’s reelection in November. They also contributed to the urgency of the state legislature’s December debates about enslaving free persons of color. Moreover, they signaled a shift in the political balance favorable to white workingmen. So long as white mechanics sought protection from slave competition, they aligned themselves in opposition to slaveholders, the most powerful class in Southern society. When the white workingmen began to turn their attention to free people of color, they found large and influential segments of the white community lining up with them. In the winter of 1859–60, as white workingmen were learning once again the futility of contesting with slaveholders, they were also beginning to sense the promise in the repeated appeals for white solidarity. White mechanics were becoming more important to other white Charlestonians than ever before. The sectional crisis made it imperative for white Southerners to stand together against their enemies. The need for white unity strengthened the claims of the white mechanics, so long as they directed their attack against free Negroes rather than slaves. For this reason, the enslavement proposals debated in the legislature in December 1859 were not simply the latest in a series of crackdowns, as James M. Johnson concluded. Instead, they were the beginning of a new era of searching analysis of the place of free Afro-Americans in a slave society under siege.

At the beginning of 1860 white Charlestonians were on edge, alert to dangers they sensed were all around them, yet greeting them with all too familiar faces. How much freedom should they allow free Afro-Americans? Not enough, the city council decided in December 1859, to attend Donnetti and Wood’s troupe of performing dogs, monkeys, and goats at the Charleston Theater or to see Archibald McKenzie’s exhibit of trained canaries.¹²³ But it was acceptable, they decided in January 1860, to allow free Negroes to enjoy Rumsey’s and Newcomb’s Band of Campbell Minstrels.¹²⁴ If the logic behind these distinctions was ineffable, it was nevertheless clear that the spotlight was on Charleston’s free Afro-Americans. Whites watched their actions, noticed their gestures, monitored their expressions, and pondered their loyalties. When the Grand Jury met early in January 1860, it declared a nuisance the common practice of free persons of color and slaves riding in public carriages, often driven by white men. The Grand Jury noted that this reversal of racial roles was “loudly complained of by all classes of our [white] citizens; it is proper that the line of demarcation between the castes should be clear and distinct, more particularly at this time…. It is fully time that slaves and free persons of color should know and understand their position….”¹²⁵

Whites throughout the state shared the grand jury’s concern. Late in November 1859 a well-attended public meeting in Sumter (the new name of Sumterville) unanimously supported a resolution urging the legislature to prevent slaves from hiring their own time. The Sumterians declared their determination “to ferret out and rid us of every element in our social system which is inimical to the safety and perpetuity of our institutions.” The citizens of Sumter had a specific element in mind, one “countenanced by law” yet one that “lurks under a covering … concealed from observation,” namely, the “free colored population of our country.” The assembled white men, who included J. S. Richardson and J. D. Frierson, looked upon free Negroes as a “dangerous and inimical element—an element at once the parent of idleness, of dissatisfaction, of vice and crime among our slaves.” They asked the legislature “to devise a plan, whereby in the course of time, we may free ourselves of its dangers, and our institutions of its pestilential influence.”¹²⁶

Three weeks later the agitation struck even closer to “Wisdom Hall.” On December 10, 1859, white men gathered in a public meeting in Stateburg to form an association to prevent tampering with their slaves. Similar meetings were held elsewhere in Sumter District. The Stateburgians formed a committee to which suspicious persons could be reported. The committee was supposed to examine such troublemakers, particularly when the evidence against them was not strong enough to stand up in a regularly constituted court. The committee was composed of Ellison’s white neighbors and customers: Dr. W. W. Anderson, B. Moody, W. Sanders, I. N. Lenoir, and J. N. Frierson.¹²⁷ Although Ellison had no reason to believe these men suspected him, he could not ignore the racial tension crackling through the village.

V

Freedom Besieged