THREE times during the twelve months beginning in April 1860 the nation’s attention focused on Charleston. Each time events in the city severed yet another tie between the South and the rest of the country. When the Democratic party convened in Charleston late in April 1860, Southern delegates bolted and split the only national political party into two separate parties, each appealing to a sectional constituency. About seven months later, after the November elections gave Abraham Lincoln the victory, secessionists in South Carolina organized a campaign to lead the South out of the Union, a campaign that culminated in Charleston late in December with the passage of the state’s ordinance of secession. During the next five months, as six other slave states followed South Carolina, sectional tensions stretched to the breaking point. In mid-April 1861 the uneasy peace finally ended when the shore batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor and plunged the nation into full-scale civil war. In no other twelve-month period before or since have events in Charleston been so important in the life of the nation.
The Democrats came to Charleston in April 1860 hoping to repeat their 1856 success. At their convention that year in Cincinnati they nominated James Buchanan to head the ticket, to the dismay of some Southern Democrats who had hoped for a candidate more closely identified with the South. To placate Southerners and promote party harmony, the party’s committee on the national convention decided to meet in 1860 in the heart of the South, in Charleston. In the fall elections in 1856, Buchanan proved to be the ideal Democratic candidate, a Northern man with Southern principles. He won with the support of five Northern states and every Southern state except Maryland. Another Democratic victory seemed within reach in 1860 if the party could nominate a candidate on a platform that appealed to Southern Democrats without alienating too many Northern Democrats. In Charleston, however, the Democrats’ Southern strategy fell apart. When Southern delegates failed to obtain a platform plank that guaranteed federal protection of slavery in the territories, most of them walked out of the convention. Their supporters in Charleston applauded the move and filled the seceders’ empty seats in the convention hall with bouquets of fresh flowers. Unable to heal the rift or nominate a candidate, the convention adjourned in early May. The remaining delegates left Charleston hoping that time would allow the party to reunite and to choose a nominee in harmony when the delegates reconvened in Baltimore in June.1
From his vantage point in Charleston, James M. Johnson watched the Democratic convention, but he kept his distance. He did not want to satisfy his curiosity at the risk of arousing the suspicion of the police and possibly being thrown in jail, staining his good reputation. Two weeks before the convention began, the city added seventy-five men to the police force of 150 to keep an eye on the expected crowds and on the gamblers, thieves, and pickpockets they were sure to attract. As convention visitors disembarked from steamers and made their way along the wharves into the city, they passed under the gaze of uniformed mounted policemen armed with swords, pistols, and instructions to bar entry to undesirables.2 Although Johnson was no threat to the good order of the city, he was a colored man, and he took care to stay away from the center of convention activities at Institute Hall on Meeting Street and the nearby Mills House and Hibernian Hall, where many of the delegates stayed. The day the convention began, the police passed Johnson’s tailor shop twice “making arrests of suspicious & rowdy characters,” he wrote Henry Ellison. Prudently, Johnson kept off the streets as much as possible. He wrote Henry, “If you have lost the Rights you ought to find solace in making a Retreat from the Heat,” a statement that could almost stand as a general description of the defensive political posture of the free Afro-American community.3
Keeping a low profile did not prevent Johnson from enjoying the excitement the convention brought to Charleston. He followed the formal proceedings of the convention in the daily reports in the local newspapers, which he then forwarded to the Ellisons in Stateburg. He kept up with the far more interesting unofficial activities of the conventioneers through reports from acquaintances, both Negro and white, who dropped by his tailor shop. He heard about the numerous public concerts of Boston’s Gilmore Brass Band, which came to Charleston with the New England delegation. An old free man of color told him about a local militia unit that marched to the railroad depot to celebrate the opening of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad and to salute Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City, who was campaigning for the Democratic nomination. Curious about the increased business Charleston’s hotel and saloon keepers anticipated from the convention, Johnson monitored reports that at the beginning the convention crowd was thin and the city’s merchants had to reduce prices they had only recently jacked up. After the convention was under way, business was as brisk as expected, and Johnson heard that the convention district on Meeting Street was jammed with people around the clock. At a speech to the crowd in front of the Mills House hotel one evening, General John Schnierle—a neighbor of Johnson’s and a former mayor of Charleston—objected to the remarks of a Virginian and, Johnson was told, threatened to beat the man with a stick. Johnson savored the rumor, partially corroborated by a report in the Mercury, but he did not take the political speechifying too seriously. A man who witnessed the incident told Johnson that one man “got up & delivered himself thus, ‘What fools we are. Here we are in Convention & what is it all but Humbug, Humbug,’ & sat down.” Johnson half-seriously noted that “Allowance must be made for them that after imbibing hot punches, inhaling fresh air will confuse one’s ideas.”4
The one public festivity Johnson personally witnessed during the convention was the annual parade of the city’s volunteer fire companies. Virtually the entire city turned out to watch the uniformed white firemen march beside their brightly decorated engines.5 In such a large and local crowd Johnson and other Afro-American Charlestonians could safely enjoy the occasion, despite the vigilant police.
Not every free man of color in Charleston was as circumspect as Johnson. On the second day of the convention William P. Dacoster, a prominent free mulatto machinist, was so drunk on King Street that he was arrested and “pulled thro the streets to the Guard House,” Johnson reported to Henry, who knew Dacoster.6 The authorities fined Dacoster and allowed him to go free the next day, thanks to the intervention of his neighbor, James Johnston (not Johnson), a free mulatto tailor who, like Henry and Reuben Ellison, had married one of Thomas S. Bonneau’s daughters. But Dacoster was soon drunk again and stayed drunk. He “disgraced his family,” Johnson noted, adding, “His wife is to be pitied.”7 Johnson’s reproach suggested that he also felt Dacoster’s indiscreet behavior reflected unfavorably on the entire free colored community, especially when they were under such close scrutiny.
When the Democratic convention adjourned without making a nomination, Johnson accurately reported to Henry that the seceding delegates were taken by surprise, since they were still willing to return to the fold once the concessions they sought were granted. Even more surprised by the adjournment were the hotel keepers of Charleston, who were stuck with an unusually large liquor inventory. But Johnson registered neither dismay nor foreboding about the disruption of the Democratic party. He seemed to regard it as nothing more than an unexpected outcome of traditional political maneuvers.
The bustling free colored community, not politics, preoccupied Johnson in the days and weeks following the adjournment of the convention. Like most other Americans, Johnson did not foresee the coming national cataclysm. Nor could he predict the ominous local and personal repercussions of the next nine months of deepening sectional crisis. When the Democrats met in Charleston in the spring of 1860, Johnson and others among the free Afro-American community were taking care of their usual business, aware of the attack on their freedom by upcountry planters and the city’s white mechanics but optimistic that they could survive. By the winter of 1860 their confidence had withered. By then, Johnson, the Ellisons, and the rest of the free colored community stood on the brink of extinction and despaired of their survival.
IN April 1860, a few weeks after the Charleston City Council rejected the white mechanics’ latest proposal to limit slave competition, the police began to enforce the slave badge law more rigorously than at any time since the mechanics began their campaign almost two years earlier. In April the police arrested twenty-seven slaves for working without badges, whereas in the previous three months—while the city council considered the mechanics’ request to curb slave hiring—the police had not made a single arrest for violation of the badge law. Who took the initiative in enforcing the badge law is not known. Perhaps the white workingmen decided to report every suspected violation they saw. Or, more likely, the newly reelected mayor, Charles Macbeth, with the support of the city council, ordered the police to make a visible display of enforcing the law as a way to show the mechanics that city authorities were not entirely unresponsive to their needs. Although strict enforcement of the badge law did little to reduce the number of slaves competing with white workers, it at least demonstrated that the city was unwilling to allow masters to ignore the slave laws with impunity, and it reassured all whites that the city’s racial priorities were in order. The tempo of the crackdown on slaves working without badges accelerated in May, when police made forty-five arrests, and it stayed at record levels during June and July, when a total of seventy-two arrests were made. In just four months almost twice as many slaves were arrested for badge law violations as during the preceding twenty months.8
At first, few free Afro-Americans were caught up in the new wave of arrests. Only three free persons of color were arrested in April for failure to pay the capitation tax required of free Negroes. But beginning in May and continuing through June and July, the police swept up seventy free persons of color for not paying the capitation tax, more than in the previous crackdowns in October 1858 (when the white mechanics began their campaign against slave hiring) and in December 1859 (when the state legislature debated proposals to enslave or expel free Negroes). Still more ominous, the pace of arrests did not abate within a few weeks, as it had previously. Instead, it continued through the late spring and summer with little sign of slackening.9 The cumulative effect of events of the last six months—Harpers Ferry, the local mayoral election, the proposals before the 1859 legislature, the white mechanics’ failure to obtain relief from the legislature or the city council—raised racial tensions in Charleston to a pitch unequaled in many years. All Afro-Americans, both slave and free, were put on notice that they were being watched closely.
Nevertheless, James M. Johnson failed to mention the worsening racial climate in Charleston in his letters to Henry Ellison. He saw nothing alarming about the numerous arrests of slaves and free persons of color. The police were not picking up his elite friends and acquaintances. The likelihood that he would be threatened in any way seemed remote. He was throughly enjoying his stay in the big city.
In mid-May he invited Henry to come down to Charleston for a series of special morning services at Grace Episcopal Church. He tried to entice him with the promise that, if he came, he would “hear fine preaching, see fine Ladies,” and have a chance to listen to music by the Christian and Convivial Society and to take part in two maroons, festive picnics in the country that were a springtime ritual of Charlestonians of all classes and colors.10 Johnson himself “spent a very pleasant afternoon” with a friend at the May Festival of the German Rifle Club and Turners’ Association. The festival took place at the club’s “Sporting ground,” an eighteen-acre site on the outskirts of the city complete with a large clubhouse that contained a dance hall, a billiard room, a bowling alley, and a bar. The festival attracted hundreds of Charlestonians. “The crowd was immense,” Johnson reported to Henry, “& the Fun was of a novel & diverting kind.” Johnson saw a young black man climb a fifty-foot greased pole and get the valuable watch waiting at the top, which many others had tried to reach. He watched sharpshooters compete, and he was impressed by the feats of gymnasts, especially when they locked arms and made “their evolutions like a wheel Rocket.”11
For Johnson, race relations in the city were not dangerously tense. He felt at ease in the predominantly white crowd at the German’s May festival, even though many of the whites did not know him. So long as he and the other Afro-Americans in the crowd observed the conventional rules of racial etiquette, nobody objected to their coming to the festival and having a good time. Doubtless they had to remain on the periphery of activities and be careful not to do anything that some white person might interpret as too familiar—like showing up on the dance floor. But cautious, discreet behavior was nothing new to Johnson and most other free persons of color.
Uppermost in Johnson’s mind was his daily round of work, family, and social activities. He put in long hours at the tailor shop sewing for the city’s white merchants and professional men and for the white planters who were in town for their spring provisions. Work at the shop allowed plenty of opportunities for socializing, and Johnson relished them. He enjoyed the friendly banter with his white customers. When the white factor and planter James Caldwell came to the shop in mid-May to pick up his suits and pay his bill, Johnson “joked him about gallanting the Ladies” and later reported proudly to Henry that Caldwell “was quite pleased at it.”12 Conversations with white customers had to be kept safely deferential. But much of the time the only people in the shop were Afro-Americans—Johnson, two or three free colored journeymen who worked with him, one or two of his father’s slaves, and an occasional free colored visitor. Then conversations could be less guarded, more frank; they could range across travel, religion, and politics viewed from the perspective of free men of color. They could be about rather than with whites. At such times Johnson’s shop was part of the grapevine by which members of the free colored community kept themselves informed. Johnson prized the morsels of news and gossip that free colored men and women passed along when they dropped by the shop. He relayed the most interesting material to Henry, and, after the Democrats left town, he did not write a single word about the crackdown on slaves and free Negroes.
As portrayed in Johnson’s letters, the world of Charleston’s free people of color was placid and benign. Instead of writing about who was being arrested, Johnson kept Henry up to date on the eligible young free colored women in the city: who was being courted; who was engaged; who was not yet spoken for. This information interested Henry because, after eight years as a widower, he was on the lookout for a new wife. Johnson’s attention to such matters testified to his belief that things in Charleston were normal. The most noteworthy crisis among Johnson’s free colored acquaintances was a shotgun wedding. The reluctant bridegroom, Rixy Gordon, a twenty-one-year-old free mulatto butcher, was hauled to the altar by the mother of his deceased wife. Gordon’s former mother-in-law, in cooperation with the friends of the pregnant bride-to-be, Christiana Leman, an eighteen-year-old free mulatto mantua maker, confronted him with a formidable wedding party: a white Methodist minister, one of the city’s most respectable free men of color (a Weston), and two other less reputable free men of color (Johnson called them “Bull Dogs”) who gave Gordon a choice, “Marry or Die.”13
Springtime in Charleston was anything but dull. Johnson attended a lavish reception at the Weston home, where he talked with his father’s good friend Richard E. Dereef, the proprietor of a wood business and one of the wealthiest free men of color in the city, and Frederick Sasportas, a well-known free mulatto millwright, both of whom asked to be remembered to Henry. Another notable social event in May was a supper given by William McKinlay, a wealthy free mulatto tailor, for some visiting free men of color from Georgia.14 Since it was illegal for the Georgians to enter South Carolina, McKinlay’s supper in their honor was another sign that Charleston’s free mulatto leaders anticipated no trouble from the police. In fact, free people of color in the city took advantage of the lovely spring weather to organize their own maroons, at least one of which Johnson attended. Their behavior at the picnics bespoke the lightheartedness (and lightheadedness) of a spring day full of promise. Johnson watched some of his free Negro neighbors leave for their maroon with wagonloads of “Luxuries,” including so much liquor that in the city, he joked to Henry, “Corn Juice was at a Premium.” Several hours later the revelers returned, tipsy and gorged, since the luxuries had been “too soon transferred to copper fastened vessels made of Flesh.” One man “looked like a cask,” Johnson wrote, “& methinks a tapping would have caused a rise to set the coach afloat.”15
THE blithe spirit of Johnson and his friends in the midst of the police crackdown on slaves and free Negroes is a measure of the distance that separated them from most other Afro-Americans in the city. Johnson and his circle of associates comprised an Afro-American aristocracy set apart from the rest of Charleston’s Negroes by their freedom, their color, and their wealth. Free status elevated them above eight out of ten Afro-Americans in the city who were slaves. A visible mark of their freedom was their brown skin. It distinguished them not only from slaves—more than 80 percent of whom were black—but also from the one in three free Negroes in the city who was dark-skinned.16 What put them at the top of the free colored community was their wealth. Most free people of color in the city, like those elsewhere in the state, were desperately poor. More than three out of four were propertyless. In contrast, the free mulatto aristocrats owned both real estate and slaves.17
James Drayton Johnson was not a wealthy man by any standard, but he ranked securely in the middle of the free mulatto aristocracy. His two houses at 7 and 9 Coming Street were valued at $4,000 in 1860, which put him within the top 5 percent of free colored real estate owners. By virtue of his three slaves he also ranked among the city’s top free colored slaveholders. Only forty-one free persons of color owned real estate worth as much or more than Johnson’s. Only fifty-three owned as many or more slaves. At the pinnacle of the wealth pyramid were several of Johnson’s friends. The wealthiest free person of color in the city was Maria Weston, the wife of the well-established free mulatto machinist Anthony Weston. She owned fourteen slaves and real estate valued at $40,075. William McKinlay, the free mulatto tailor, possessed real estate worth more than $25,000, though no slaves. The wood merchant Richard E. Dereef owned fourteen slaves and real property worth $23,000; his brother and business partner Joseph Dereef owned six slaves and $16,000 worth of real estate. Jacob Weston, a free mulatto tailor who lived on Coming Street next door to Henry Ellison’s mother-in-law Mrs. Jeanette Bonneau, had two slaves and real property worth $11,600. Jacob Weston’s brother and business partner, Samuel, owned one slave and real estate valued at $9,300. Few individuals were so prosperous, however. Only twelve free Afro-Americans in the city owned real estate worth more than $9,000.18 In fact, most of the city’s free mulatto aristocracy owned less than James D. Johnson.
What distinguished Charleston’s free mulatto elite from poor free Negroes was the ownership of enough property to provide a modicum of independence and security. Like James D. Johnson, they owned their homes and many of them also owned their workshops. Yet homeowners made up just one-quarter of the city’s free colored population.19 All the rest rented, and eight out of ten of them had white landlords.20 If the value of one of Johnson’s two houses ($2,000) is taken as a rough measure of the wealth required for a free person of color to have the degree of independence and security enjoyed by Johnson, then 117 individuals had the requisite wealth, and two-thirds of them owned less than Johnson.21
Slaveownership was another mark of membership in the free mulatto aristocracy. While slaveowners were spread across the economic spectrum of the free colored community, they were concentrated near the top. In 1860 almost half of the free Afro-Americans with real estate worth $2,000 or more owned slaves, over five times the proportion of slaveowners among those with less real estate. Among individuals like James D. Johnson, who owned at least $4,000 in real estate, three of every four were slaveholders. Altogether, fifty-five persons owned at least $2,000 worth of real estate and at least one slave.22 They comprised the core of Charleston’s free colored aristocracy. They made up only about 8 percent of the city’s free colored population, but they owned half of all the real estate and slaves owned by free Negroes.
Some persons with less real estate or no slaves certainly belonged to the aristocracy. Jeanette Bonneau, for example, was without question a member of the elite, as were Robert Houston and William McKinlay. Neither Houston nor McKinlay owned a slave, however, and although Mrs. Bonneau owned one slave, she had only $1,000 worth of real estate. If the boundaries of the free colored aristocracy are expanded to include these persons and others with at least $2,000 worth of real estate or one slave, then about one free Afro-American in six belonged to the group. Collectively they owned all slaves and three-quarters of the real estate possessed by the city’s free Negroes. Counting their family members, they numbered around 500, or barely 3 percent of the city’s Afro-American population.
In some respects it seems inappropriate to call these individuals aristocrats, even by antebellum standards. They had no landed estates or ancestral country seats. Instead of ladies and gentlemen of leisure, they were skilled workers, seamstresses and tailors, mantua makers and carpenters, who worked hard day in and day out. Their wealth did not even begin to match that of Charleston’s white elite. In 1860, for example, the average wealth of the white planters in the city was about $54,000, while the average wealth of the top free persons of color was less than a tenth as much. One white Charlestonian in five had real and personal property worth $10,000 or more, compared to one free Afro-American Charlestonian in one hundred. Although free persons of color made up 15 percent of the free population of the city, they owned only one percent of the city’s total wealth.23 Compared to white Charlestonians, members of the free mulatto elite were merely the most prosperous fraction of the free Negro working class.
Their prosperity nonetheless gave them a choice about living in the South. All free people of color had the choice, but only the elite could liquidate their assets in Charleston and cushion a move to reestablish themselves in the North, in Canada, or someplace else where slavery did not exist. A few did leave, like James M. Johnson’s brother Charley. But most of those who left were not among the free colored elite or even, like Charley, on its margins. To the free mulatto elite, the future was in Charleston. They could afford to leave, but they chose to stay.
For aristocratic free mulattoes Charleston was home in a sense that went beyond the houses they owned and the jobs they had. The concentration of free people of color in the city made possible a community that sustained them. The fellowship of extended families and of a broad network of friends and acquaintances in church groups, benevolent societies, and other voluntary organizations provided Charleston’s free people of color an experience unequaled elsewhere in the state or even in the Deep South outside New Orleans. As much as ownership of real estate and slaves, the community gave the free mulatto elite a sense of belonging in the city. Just as the Ellisons had carved out a niche in Stateburg society, Charleston’s free colored leaders had built a small world that was part of, yet separate from, the larger society of whites and blacks. In the years since the American Revolution, free people of color in Charleston had wedged their brown world between the freedom of whites and the slavery of blacks. All the inhabitants of this territory possessed free status. But the wealth, education, and respectability of the leading free mulatto families set them apart from other free Negroes and conferred on them the status of aristocrats of a degraded race, the top of the bottom.
FREE Negroes had lived in Charleston since the city was founded in 1683. They accompanied the early white settlers in South Carolina who came from Barbados, bringing with them a Caribbean tolerance for miscegenation and for free mulattoes as a valuable intermediate class in a slave society.24 But throughout the eighteenth century the number of free Negroes remained too small to form such a class. When the first federal census was taken in 1790 only 586 free people of color resided in Charleston, less than 4 percent of the city’s total population of 16,359. Within the next twenty years the number of free Afro-Americans in the city grew rapidly to 1,472. Although they still made up only 6 percent of the city’s total inhabitants in 1810, they were numerous enough to create a free colored community. If all the free people of color in the city in 1810 had resided in a town of their own, it would have been bigger than every town in the state except Charleston and Columbia.
After 1810, as the postrevolutionary manumissions dwindled, the free Negro population of Charleston grew more slowly. By 1830 it had reached 2,107. In the next thirty years the number of free Afro-American Charlestonians continued to increase, though more slowly than ever. In 1860 the 3,237 free people of color in the city made up 8 percent of the population. But, because the slave population of the city had declined since 1830, free people of color made up a larger fraction of the city’s Afro-Americans than at any previous time in the city’s history. In 1860 free people of color comprised 19 percent of the city’s Negro population, compared to 12 percent in 1830 and 7 percent in 1790.25 Even in 1860 Charleston’s free Afro-Americans still outnumbered the population of every town in the state but Columbia and Charleston. More than ever, free people of color in Charleston had the makings of an intermediate class.
Whites like Christopher Memminger and Alfred Huger valued the sizable intermediate class of free Negroes because it protected dominant whites from the potential for slave insurrection and insulated them from the political demands of white mechanics. Charleston’s leading free mulattoes understood this reasoning and tried constantly to reinforce it by exemplary behavior. However, the concentration of free Negroes in the city had an additional, quite different meaning for the free mulatto aristocracy. Evidence of that meaning surfaced repeatedly during the antebellum years but never more clearly than in the way the free mulatto aristocracy referred to themselves. When Robert Houston thanked Christopher Memminger for defending free people of color in the state legislature in 1859, James M. Johnson wrote Henry that Houston spoke “in behalf of our people.”26 The term “our people” recurs in Johnson’s letters and in other self-references by the city’s leading free mulattoes and expresses something of what it meant to belong to an intermediate class. Free mulattoes were separate from both whites and blacks. Furthermore, free mulattoes identified with each other; they referred to each other not as “a” people but as “our” people. And, rather than being a degraded caste, a degenerate racial hybrid, or a random aggregation of individuals, free mulattoes were a “people” who, despite their individual differences, shared a common identity, a common fate, and a common humanity. “Our people” also captures the peculiar sense in which members of Charleston’s free mulatto elite saw themselves as an integral part of the city’s society, and yet apart from it. They were outcasts who, paradoxically, belonged. Imbedded in the city’s society of whites and blacks was their brown society with a life very much its own.
Kinship was the sinew of Charleston’s free brown society. Intermarriage linked free mulatto families into a cousinry that rivaled that of the white aristocracy in its density and complexity. The shortage of reliable records makes it impossible to sort out all the interconnections, but Henry and Reuben Ellison’s marriages to the daughters of Thomas S. Bonneau illustrate the general pattern.27 Through their marriages to Mary Elizabeth and Harriett A. Bonneau, Henry and Reuben became brothers-in-law to the five other Bonneau sisters and kinfolk to their husbands and their husbands’ families. Thus the outer fringes of the Ellison family circle included the prominent Weston family (through the marriages of Sarah Ann Bonneau to the free mulatto tailor Jacob Weston and of Louisa Potter Bonneau to the free mulatto machinist John Furman Weston) and the equally well known Holloway family (by the marriage of Frances Pinckney Bonneau to Richard Holloway, Jr.). In addition, the Ellisons were kin to the families of the free mulatto tailor James Johnston (through his marriage to Eliza Bonneau) and of the free mulatto butcher James Wilson (via his marriage to Martha S. Bonneau). Simply by their relationship to Richard Holloway, Jr., the Ellisons counted his eleven brothers and their wives among their distant kin. Every member of the free mulatto aristocracy was not kin to the Ellisons, but enough of them were to give the term “our people” a distinctly familial cast.
The high rate of intermarriage reflected the relatively small number of eligible free mulattoes and their sense of themselves as a separate group. In general, free mulatto men refused to consider any of the thousands of slave women in Charleston as potential spouses. Color consciousness was part of the reason, for about 80 percent of the slave women in the city were black. However, color was not the only consideration, and probably not the most important one. In 1860 Charleston District contained almost as many mulatto slave women as mulatto free women.28 Few free mulatto men selected brown slave women as wives for the very practical reason that, had they done so, their children would have been slaves.29 Had a shortage of free mulatto women existed, unmarried free mulatto men might have overcome their aversion to slave wives. However, just the opposite was the case. In 1860 free Afro-American women in Charleston outnumbered men more than three to two.30 Henry Ellison’s unhurried survey of young free mulatto women in Charleston in the late 1850s was not a luxury reserved to a man who was probably the state’s most eligible free mulatto widower. Free Afro-American men were in a position to be choosy. Their choices indicated their desire to separate themselves from slaves.
The sexual imbalance made it more difficult for free Afro-American women to keep their distance from slaves. About four out of ten free Negro women in Charleston in 1860 could not expect to find husbands among the city’s free Negro men. A good many of them had to choose between remaining unmarried and accepting a slave husband. Although female slaves in Charleston outnumbered males, the sex ratio was much nearer parity than it was for free people of color. In 1860 there were 89 slave males for every 100 slave females.31 Slave men were not only available, but they also presumably saw the attraction of a free colored wife who could give birth to free children. For a slave man in South Carolina after 1820, marriage to a free woman of color represented the last crack in the doorway to freedom; the man could not become free and his marriage had no legal standing, but his children could be free. Precisely how many free women of color in Charleston took slave husbands is impossible to say, but the 1860 census figures suggest the number was not small.
Women headed just over half of all the free colored households in Charleston, and virtually none of these households had a coresiding spouse.32 Most of them did, however, have children.33 Even if one makes the most generous assumptions about the mortality rates among free men of color or the likelihood that men might be temporarily working away from home, it is certain that many of these children did not have free colored fathers. Since every child in households headed by free black women was listed as black, their fathers were not white, if the racial evidence in the census can be given credence.34 Instead, it is likely that many of these free black women were wives of slave men, most of them black. Certainly the women’s economic status did not elevate them much above slaves. Free black women who headed households were the poorest of the poor. Their mean wealth was only $155, and more than nine out of ten had no wealth at all. They were at the bottom of free Afro-American society in Charleston intermingled with slaves.
Free mulatto women were often in the same position as free black women. Virtually none of the households headed by light-skinned free women had a coresiding spouse, yet over half had children.35 Many of the fathers of these children were slaves. Some of the other fathers were probably white men. Certainly more than a few white men kept free colored mistresses in the city. Although the practice did not have the sanction it received in New Orleans, it was common enough and was tolerated so long as it was not flaunted.36 It was one reason for the sexual imbalance among free Negroes in Charleston. Up to the age of sexual maturity free colored females were only slightly more numerous than free colored males. Beginning about age fifteen, free colored women outnumbered men almost three to two.37 Presumably a fair number of the “excess” women in the city were concubines of white men. Although many of the free mulatto mothers who headed households had children fathered by slave men, enough of them were concubines of white men to pull unmarried free mulatto women as a group in the opposite direction from free black women. Even though nearly nine out of ten free mulatto women who headed households were propertyless like their counterparts among free black women, unmarried free mulatto women were more likely to be separated from slaves and intermingled with whites. Occupying a stratum near the bottom of the city’s free colored community, free mulatto women who headed households nonetheless composed a zone in which the distance from slaves began to increase.
Higher up, in the strata occupied by free Afro-American men who headed households, the distance became almost unbridgeable. Male-headed households were almost the mirror image of female-headed households. More than two-thirds of them had coresiding spouses.38 Furthermore, nine out of ten of the male-headed households that contained children also contained the children’s mothers, while only 4 percent of the female-headed households with children had both parents present. Free men of color clearly opted to marry free women, to have free children, and in that way to set themselves apart from slaves. This was as true of black men as mulatto men. The structure of the households headed by black men was identical to those of mulatto men, with one crucial exception that reflects the significance of color as a marker of one’s distance from slavery. More than nine out of ten of the coresiding spouses of mulatto men were mulattoes, according to the census.39 Since about a quarter of the free Negro women in Charleston were black, these men clearly avoided black women in selecting a wife. Among the households headed by black men the color consciousness was equally acute, according to the census. More than eight out of ten (83 percent) of the spouses of black men were black. Whether free black men had difficulty wooing free mulatto women or instead preferred black woman as wives is impossible to determine.40 Even if the census data are only a rough guide to the social practices of Charleston’s free people of color, it seems clear that free mulattoes sought to set themselves apart not only from slaves but from blacks. The bonds of kinship tended to encircle free people of approximately the same hue.
Color also signified economic distance from slavery. In Charleston, as in the countryside, mulattoes were better off than blacks. The mean wealth of free mulatto women who headed households was $427, almost three times greater than that of free black women, and about the same as the margin that separated rural free mulatto and free black women.41 The mean wealth of free mulatto men was nearly half again larger than that of free black men, but both groups of men in Charleston were more prosperous than their counterparts in the country. In the city free mulatto men had a mean wealth of $1,107, twice that of rural free mulatto men ($549); the average wealth of free black men in the city was $770, more than twice that of those in the country ($283). Although no free person of color in South Carolina knew these figures, their meaning was clear enough to virtually everyone. Even though almost two-thirds of free Negro men in Charleston were propertyless in 1860, the other third bathed in the glow of prosperity compared to their country cousins. A neatly dressed, well-spoken, well-mannered free Negro was assumed to be from Charleston, where free men of color tended to be tradesmen rather than farm laborers. The easily visible economic difference between urban and rural men of the same color was reproduced between mulatto and black men in the city. Color counted, especially in Charleston. The association of modest prosperity with light skin reinforced the significance of skin color as an index of distance from slavery. In Charleston, the color of a free person’s skin suggested not only ancestry but also relative economic security, and both free mulattoes and free blacks understood the code.
Color consciousness was so acute in Charleston that free mulattoes and free blacks constituted two nearly separate communities. No rigid wall stood between the two communities, but members of each group acted in many ways as if one did. The keen awareness of color reflected in the selection of marriage partners extended to almost every voluntary association among free people of color in the city. The mutual-aid societies founded by free Afro-American men are prime examples.
IN 1790 five men who declared themselves “free brown men, natives of the city of Charleston” organized the Brown Fellowship Society, the most prestigious mulatto organization in the city.42 The Society was limited to fifty members who were required to pay an initiation fee of fifty dollars plus monthly dues. The contributions supported payments of not less than $1.50 a week for members who became too ill to work and, if a member should die, a decent funeral and burial in the Society’s cemetery. If a member’s widow and orphans were indigent, the Society would provide an annual stipend of sixty dollars. The Society also committed itself to extend “needful assistance” to up to five “poor colored” orphans or adults.43 But self-help, not charity, was the primary purpose of the Society. Membership was reserved for the leading free mulattoes in the city.
The roster of the Brown Fellowship Society reads as if it were the Ellisons’ address book. Thomas S. Bonneau, Henry and Reuben Ellison’s father-in-law, joined the Society in 1816; John Mishaw, William, Jr.’s father-in-law, joined a year later. The Westons, the Dereefs, the Holloways, the Sasportases, the Kinlochs, William McKinlay, Robert Houston, and many other of the Ellisons’ friends and relatives in Charleston belonged. Since the Ellisons did not live in the city, they could not join the organization, and it appears that neither James M. Johnson nor his father ever became members.44 The Brown Fellows were the elite of what Johnson called “our people,” and they excluded from their society all free blacks. A rule adopted in 1828 required each applicant for membership to be sponsored by two members who had to declare in writing “the FACT, that said applicants are Free persons.”45 Nothing in the rule book prohibited black members, but the unwritten rule was applied uniformly. Every member whose race can be identified was a mulatto.46
In 1843 free black men formed their own organization, the Humane Brotherhood. Its rules limited membership to no more than 35 “respectable Free Dark Men.”47 Their interpretation of “Dark” was flexible enough to admit several men who were listed in the federal census as mulattoes, but the majority of members were black.48 The Humane Brotherhood had the same purposes as the Brown Fellowship Society. It provided sick benefits, burial expenses, and an annuity for widows and orphans of deceased members. Since members of the Humane Brotherhood had only a fraction of the wealth of the mulatto elite, their annuity for widows was twelve dollars, a fifth that of the Brown Fellowship Society.49 Nonetheless, like the Brown Fellowship Society, the Humane Brotherhood purchased and maintained a burial ground for its members. The cemeteries of the two societies stood side by side on Pitt Street, separated by a sturdy fence.50
That fence symbolized the color barrier than cut through Charleston’s free colored society. Like other fences, it was not impenetrable. Free blacks and free mulattoes knew one another, talked to one another, and did business with one another. John Mishaw even managed to belong to both the Humane Brotherhood and the Brown Fellowship Society at the same time, the only person ever to do so.51 On the whole, however, free mulattoes and free blacks did not socialize with one another, and they rarely married one another. The care with which free mulattoes policed the color barrier is illustrated in the minutes of another free mulatto organization in the city, the Friendly Moralist Society.
Founded in 1838, the Friendly Moralist Society required that a prospective member be certified by three existing members as “a bona fide free brown man; over the age of eighteen; of moral character, and of good standing in the community.”52 This requirement was backed by a strict penalty: “Should it be charged and proven that any member is not a bona fide free brown man, he shall immediately be expelled; and each of his recommenders shall be fined two dollars.”53 The Friendly Moralists took these rules seriously. In 1844, for example, member Robert Mishaw challenged the membership application of Richard Gregory with the claim that the “gentleman having united with a Society [of] Black men makes himself a Black Man.” Job Bass, the president of the Society and one of the members recommending Gregory, disagreed. Bass argued that mixed ancestry was the sole basis of mulatto status. Even “if the gentleman were to be exposed to the schorching [sic] rays of the sun on the shores of Africa,” Bass declared, “he would still be A Brown Man.” Black skin and “the fact of his being associated with Black men could never make him a Black Man.”54 Despite Bass’s argument, a slight majority of the Friendly Moralists evidently shared Mishaw’s doubts that a bona fide free brown man would voluntarily associate with free blacks, and they rejected Gregory’s application.55 The Society’s rigid insistence on unimpeachable racial qualifications surfaced again four years later when Edward Logan, a member of the Humane Brotherhood, applied for membership. Friendly Moralist Michael J. Eggart argued that Logan was “not eligible to membership being a black man.” When another member demanded that Eggart define “the word brown,” Eggart stated the iron-clad rule of ancestry. To be brown “the individual must be [a] descendent of brown parent, or white amalgamated with black.”56 A heated debate of Logan’s candidacy stretched over several meetings, and finally the members denied him admission.
The debate showed that Eggart’s definition of “brown” was not universally shared, even by the free mulattoes in the Society. However, the time and energy the Friendly Moralists spent screening the racial credentials of prospective members signify that all agreed it was of the utmost importance to determine whether a candidate was a mulatto or not. In theory, one drop of white blood made a man brown and eligible for membership. In practice, ancestry was difficult to prove, and an applicant’s claim of mixed ancestry could be outweighed by skin color or personal associates. These factors made the definition of “brown” debatable, but the Friendly Moralists’ uniformly mulatto membership proves that the debates were always settled by keeping blacks at arm’s length.57
The membership policies of the Friendly Moralist and Brown Fellowship societies, like the selection of free mulatto wives by free mulatto men, grew out of a widely shared sense of a separate mulatto identity. That sense underlay the term “our people” and infused it with social significance, identifying free mulattoes as the intermediate class between slavery and freedom and between blacks and whites. The most probing analysis of mulatto identity in the slave South is contained in a recently discovered speech Michael Eggart gave to the Friendly Moralist Society in 1848.
Free mulattoes inhabited “a middle ground,” Eggart declared, a social territory bounded on one side by “the prejudice of the white man” and on the other by “the deeper hate of our more sable brethren.”58 New racial theories held that mulattoes were weakened hybrids, “excrescencies, … superfluous and monstrous productions … [who] draw an unwelcome existence from their Originals.” According to these theories, Eggart pointed out, “utter extinction seems to bee our inevitable doom.” By natural selection, “the Whirlpool which threatens to swallow us up entirely,” free mulattoes’ middle ground would disappear. However, Eggart asserted, such views were wrong; “excrescencies have no living in themselves…. But ours is gods own image. [I]n our nostrals is his breath. [O]ur capacities mental and physical are as good as either of the races.” Free mulattoes were an equal race, Eggart proclaimed, neither inferior to whites nor superior to blacks. Their racial identity should become the basis of group solidarity, for only then could the middle ground be secure. The pressure of white prejudice and black hatred was unrelenting. It threatened to eliminate the middle ground by social and political, rather than natural, means. “[L]ike ancient Israel we can lay claim to no spot on Earth,” Eggart said; “the position of our people wherever they are to bee found … [is] hemed in by unsinking prejudice on the one hand, and by foul hate on the other, whither shall we fly, no spot on earth where the colored man is to bee found is clear of it.” Inescapably, free mulattoes existed on a middle ground that constantly seemed to shrink.
The only security, Eggart announced, lay in mulatto solidarity. “[T]heir is naught that we lack as A people but A unanimity of sentiment A thousand times greater than it now is,” he said.59 Mulattoes had to confront their “all absorbing” dilemma as a people, using their racial identity as a source of strength to protect their tenuous social position. First, free mulattoes had to realize that they depended on each other, that no progress would be made “untill all of us have advanced in the great art of looking beyond ourselves and those immediately connected with us, to the welfare of our people generally.” Charity toward free mulattoes less fortunate than the young tradesmen in the Friendly Moralist Society was a step in the right direction, Eggart argued, but it was insufficient. A community-wide education program promised to promote mulatto solidarity and to stabilize the boundaries of the middle ground. Education “is our life our sun our shield,” Eggart proclaimed. “Withdraw from us the bright rays it shed around and worse than Agean [sic] darkness will encompass us, [for] what but Education raises us Above the level of the slaves.” In Charleston, “The ignorant and degraded are taken as the Representatives of our people,” Eggart observed. If the entire free mulatto community in the city “would bee enlightened by the power of Education how much more vived [sic] how much brighter would the line of seperation bee between us and the slaves.” Eggart believed that the brighter line of separation would be doubly valuable. Free mulattoes would not only be distinguished from slaves, but also the line separating the two “would bee so bright that it would Eventually triump [sic] over the prejudice of the white man.” Meanwhile, free mulatto organizations like the Friendly Moralist Society and the Brown Fellowship Society could “add bone and sinew to our strength as A people” by cooperating to raise money to pay a teacher for all the mulatto children in the city. Eggart acknowledged that his proposal was expensive and unprecedented. Nevertheless, it was justified. “As far as my inexperience can perceive this is the only means by which we can dispel the heavy cloud that hangs upon our political horizon. Knowledge is power, it is A power not to bee limited, but can bee brought to bear against any Obstacles, or surmount any difficulty[.] Let us seek diligently to obtain it ourselves, and by every means in our reach to dispence it to every one bearing our mark upon their foreheads.”
Free mulattoes in Charleston never enacted Eggart’s ambitious plan, but not because they considered his ideas bizarre. Eggart spoke from within the uppermost reaches of the free mulatto aristocracy. At the time of his address to the Friendly Moralists he was twenty-six years old, a wheelwright, and the husband of Joanna Dereef, the eldest daughter of the Johnsons’ and Ellisons’ friend Richard E. Dereef, in whose household Eggart and his young wife lived.60 Shortly after Eggart’s speech the Friendly Moralists elected him to the vice-presidency of the society, and he later advanced to the Brown Fellowship Society and served as an officer.61 Eggart’s continued high standing among the city’s mulatto elite suggests that he shared their outlook, reflected their anxieties, and echoed their strategies for survival.
Eggart’s educational plan was a radical extension of the general political perspective of the city’s free mulatto leaders. Nothing in Eggart’s proposal attempted to reduce blacks’ resentment of free mulattoes’ snobbery; instead, education would sharpen the distinction between mulattoes and blacks and increase blacks’ hostility to mulattoes and their pretensions. Eggart believed mulattoes should turn away from blacks toward whites. Eggart’s scheme embodied the mulattoes’ conventional faith that some of their best friends were white, that white prejudice against mulattoes could be overcome by empirical evidence of an educated free mulatto community, that whites could ultimately recognize mulattoes as a separate, distinctive, and worthy people. Eggart deviated from widely shared views only in the depth of his anxiety. The Friendly Moralist and Brown Fellowship societies did not take up Eggart’s plan partly because they had enough to do simply attending to their routine business. But the more fundamental reason was their complacency. Eggart asked the city’s free mulatto aristocrats to doubt what they had staked their lives on, that their skilled crafts, their property, their brown color, and their white friends provided them with sufficient security. Having achieved elite status in Charleston, they were confident that the tiny sliver of middle ground they occupied was shielded and secure. Despite Eggart’s plea, Charleston’s free mulatto leaders continued to think of themselves, their families, and their closest friends—rather than all free mulattoes—as “our people.”62
OTHER free people of color in Charleston shared Eggart’s anxieties, but they came to different conclusions. Unlike Eggart, they found the middle ground in Charleston intolerable. Just a month before Eggart’s speech to the Friendly Moralists, a group of forty-five free Afro-Americans departed from Charleston on the brig Colonel Howard, bound for Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society.63 Some of these men had emigrated to the North a few years earlier, but, they told an agent of the Colonization Society, “they found themselves so depressed and despised and crowded out of employment, and so much less respected than they had been in Charleston, that they could not endure it, but returned to their old homes, quite satisfied with their trial of freedom in a free State, and much prefering [sic], as the least of two evils, such freedom as they can enjoy in a slave State.”64 After a time, however, their limited freedom in Charleston proved unsatisfactory, and they concluded “that in this country they can never possess those rights and privileges which will make them men.”65 They hoped Liberia would prove more hospitable.
Eggart reminded the Friendly Moralists of the departure of this group, noting that “Many of our people are now on their way to the Liberian Republic, anticipating that liberty which is to bee desired by every man.”66 Eggart warned that they were bound to be disappoinnted, and, as an example of what they should expect, he referred to a recent massacre of mulattoes by blacks in Haiti.67 Despite such risks, scores of free Afro-Americans emigrated from South Carolina to Liberia at mid-century. Between May 1848 and November 1852, 238 free people of color left Charleston for Liberia, the largest continent of immigrants to Africa ever to leave the state.68 They too saw the thunder clouds Eggart noted on the horizon, and they decided to run before the storm.
A few members of the free mulatto elite succumbed to the appeal of emigration. Both the Brown Fellowship and Friendly Moralist societies provided for a partial refund of accrued benefits to members who left the state.69 The minutes of the Friendly Moralist Society document requests for refunds by several members who were leaving, evidently bound for New York, Boston, Toronto, or other cities in the free states and in Canada.70 Although Charley Johnson’s move to Toronto seems to have had something to do with his health, his decision may have been colored by favorable reports of the racial climate in Canada sent back by several of his Charleston friends who preceeded him.71 Friendly Moralist Edward Holloway announced his intention to leave Charleston in 1846, and, after a prolonged stay in the North, he wrote from New York in 1857 to one of his many brothers who had remained behind in Charleston. “Emmigration [sic] seems to be the leading topic of conversation & discussion among the Colored residents of the City of New York,” he reported. “As a people there is a manifestation of considerable anxiety and dissatisfaction with matters and things in general. There seems to be a kind of reaction in the minds of the knowing ones, and every body seriously considers there [sic] present position and future prospects. The general conclusion is that this is not our abiding home.” Holloway admitted that because of the “general malady” he had “contracted the contagion.” In the United States he could never attain “political equality”; yet, he wrote his brother, “my mind aspires for greater attainment and I feel that the Day is not far distant when I shall enjoy the full fruition of Political Intellectual and Physical Manhood.” When that day arrived, Holloway did not expect to find himself in Liberia or Canada but in Jamaica, “that promised land.” Jamaica offered “Social & Political Equality,” Holloway asserted, and he urged his brother to announce among his friends in Charleston, “Let Emmigration [sic] be the Watchwords.”72
The Johnsons and the Ellisons certainly knew about conditions in Canada from their contact with Charley Johnson. Charley’s wife Gabriella made periodic visits back to Charleston and William Ellison Jr. visited Charley in Toronto at least once.73 From their other friends and relatives in Charleston they doubtless received word of the experiences of emigrants to Liberia and elsewhere. In May 1860 they heard directly from an emigrant to Jamaica, a free man of color named Jack Thomas who had been their neighbor in Stateburg until he left in 1843. Thomas’s letter was anything but encouraging. “I wish I was back home,” he wrote, “… it seems as there has been a curse upon us ever since we left home.” Only two years after leaving Stateburg with his family he “completely Failed.” They then moved to Panama, where he, his brother, and his father worked as overseers for the Panama Railroad Company. Within the space of a few months his son and his brother died, his father suffered an injury that disabled him permanently, and Thomas himself had only his work as a barber to support the remnants of his family. “You see the whole Burthen is thrown upon my Shoulders, and being in a country like this where every man is for himself, I find it awfully hard to get along,” Thomas wrote, obviously hoping to touch the Ellisons’ sympathy and pocketbook.74 Even without letters like Thomas’s, the prospect of emigration seldom tempted the Ellisons and their peers among Charleston’s free mulatto elite.
Nevertheless, the emigrants represented one response to the chronic tensions of life on the middle ground, tensions that most of the free mulatto elite had learned to live with. The tensions inherent in their intermediate position came from forces that tugged in opposite directions. As Michael Eggart emphasized, “our people” had to separate themselves from slaves as much as possible in order to avoid the degradation associated with slave status and black skin. Yet the more they set themselves apart from slaves by owning property, making contracts, and having free families, the closer they came to a hazardous equality with the status of whites. They had to make concessions to white prejudice, to reassure whites that they were staying in their place. But every concession, every failure to assert their freedom to the full, not only kept them safely below whites but also narrowed their distance from slaves. All the character traits they employed to elevate themselves above slaves had to be repressed from their fullest expression. Every time they refused to challenge white prejudice, they assumed a racial identity that hinted of slavery, an identity they found less than flattering. But only if they assumed that identity would whites allow them to exercise their freedom. To survive on the middle ground, free people of color had to affirm the freedom they shared with whites and qualify it because of the racial ancestry they shared with slaves, a demanding and frustrating assignment.
Members of the free mulatto elite carefully avoided pushing their freedom too far, but they did not confuse what was necessary with what was just. James M. Johnson maintained this distinction when he wrote Henry Ellison about the stepped-up police surveillance in Charleston during the Democratic convention, “if you have lost the Rights you ought to find solace in making a Retreat from the Heat.”75 This casual, almost flippant sentence captured the belief of Johnson and his friends that they had “Rights,” not privileges; that when whites prevented them from exercising their rights, they “ought to” (not “would” or “could”) “find solace in making a Retreat”; that by withdrawing from confrontation they retreated rather than surrendered; that their retreat was a tactic to be invoked for temporary protection rather than a prelude to defeat. The tone of Johnson’s remark expresses the free mulatto elite’s confidence that, when the searchlight of white scrutiny turned in their direction, they could nimbly duck into the shadows.
The rights of free people of color represented the contested terrain of the middle ground. Free Afro-Americans in Charleston asserted their rights when they could and retreated when they had to. They played an active part in shaping the upper boundary of their freedom, in defining the equilibrium between what they were willing to risk and what whites were willing to tolerate. In 1791 a group of Charleston free Negroes went so far as to petition the legislature, pointing out that they had been counted as citizens in the apportionment of South Carolina’s representation in Congress and that “they have at all times since the Independence of the United States contributed and do now contribute to the support of the Government by chearfully [sic] paying their Taxes proportionable to the Property with others who have been during such period, and are now in full enjoyment of the Rights and Immunities of Citizens and Inhabitants of a Free Independent State.”76 They made clear that they did not “presume to hope that they shall be put on an equal footing with the Free white citizens of the State” and asked merely to be allowed to testify against whites in court and to be tried in the same courts as whites, rather than in the magistrate’s courts that dealt exclusively with slaves.77 Despite the modest request, the legislature ignored the petition, and a few years later Charleston vigilantes harassed at least one of the petitioners. Before 1865, free people of color in South Carolina never came any closer to formal political participation. Instead, they engaged in the politics of daily life.
IN countless ways Charleston’s free Afro-Americans asserted their autonomy and self-reliance. By maintaining their freedom and passing it along to the next generation they took care of the essentials themselves. By practicing skilled trades, by accumulating property, and by acquiring an education, free people of color made a mockery of their supposed genetic handicaps. So long as they stayed in Charleston (or anywhere else in the United States for that matter) they had no alternative to depending on the white majority for customers and for the indifference that allowed them space to live. But on all the matters of life in which they had a choice, they typically turned toward each other, decreasing their dependence on whites as much as practicable and quietly making the political statement that they were human and responsible.
In 1803 Thomas S. Bonneau and several other members of the Brown Fellowship Society organized the Minors’ Moralist Society to support and educate free colored orphans.78 The Christian Benevolent Society, founded in 1839, distributed aid to sick, impoverished free people of color; in the 1850s its executive committee included James D. Johnson, Jacob Weston, Robert Houston, Joseph Dereef, Malcolm Brown, and other free mulatto leaders.79 These organizations reinforced the associations of kinship and neighborhood and gave a tangible reality to the notion of community. However, their limited resources did not reach very far into the masses of Charleston’s poor free people of color. In the seventeen years between 1839 and 1856 the Christian Benevolent Society aided seventy individuals and spent a total of $1,228, an average of four persons a year and less than $18 per person.80 Although this aid did little to relieve the poor, it indicated that the city’s free colored elite did not entirely cut themselves off from the rest of the free colored population. Furthermore, even by providing limited charity, the free mulatto leaders demonstrated that poor free people of color need not depend exclusively on whites, that they could turn instead to “our people.”
Education, Michael Eggart emphasized, distinguished the free colored elite from slaves. Free colored children not only had to learn to read, write, and calculate, but they had to be taught about their unique social position. Their education occurred at home, in workshops, and on the streets. But some of it occurred in classrooms of private schools directed by free mulatto teachers. Thomas S. Bonneau headed a school that taught children of the free mulatto aristocracy between 1803 and his death in 1831.81 Exactly how Bonneau acquired his own education is unknown. Possibly he was educated by his father, a French Huguenot who settled at Port Royal in the eighteenth century.82 In any case, Bonneau’s school served as an important cultural institution of the free mulatto elite. Bonneau put his students in touch with the wider world of learning and extended their horizons beyond the confinement of Charleston. Even more important, his students came to know each other, to see themselves as the heirs to the middle ground occupied by their parents. The influence of Bonneau’s school reached throughout the antebellum period, since Bonneau taught the teachers of the succeeding generations. William McKinlay and Frederick Sasportas were among his students and later helped with the school. After Bonneau’s death another student, Daniel Payne, headed his own school, where he taught, among fifty other children of the free mulatto elite, Michael Eggart and three of Bonneau’s daughters. By the 1850s free mulatto children in Charleston were taught by Bonneau’s youngest daughter, Francis Pinckney (Bonneau) Holloway, and by Samuel and Edward Beard.83 In these schools free colored children learned that education anchored their freedom, that it allowed them to judge things for themselves, and that free people of color did not need whites to teach them these lessons.
The schools reinforced one of the central cultural assumptions of Charleston’s free mulatto aristocracy. The schools existed, teachers taught, children learned, but after 1834 it was all against the law. The continued operation of the schools, like so much else in the lives of the city’s free Afro-Americans, demonstrated that the middle ground was a twilight zone in which illegal customary practices were tolerated so long as they remained only half-visible, and apparently harmless. The rules set by whites could change suddenly and unexpectedly, as Daniel Payne and his students knew very well. In the summer of 1834 Payne sent Michael Eggart and two of his other students to the plantation of Charleston alderman Lionel Kennedy, where they were to obtain from Kennedy’s slaves a certain poisonous snake for zoological study. Kennedy discovered the boys, quizzed them about their errand and Payne’s curriculum, and, although there was nothing subversive about either, became alarmed, probably remembering the Denmark Vesey conspiracy he had witnessed twelve years earlier. Under pressure from Kennedy and others in Charleston, the legislature passed the 1834 law, and Payne fled Charleston fearing for his life.84
Although Payne did not return to the city during the antebellum years, not long after he left Charleston tensions relaxed, and free colored schools once again held classes just as before. This episode, like so many others, displayed the significance of maintaining a sharp distinction between public and private life. So long as the schools remained in the subterranean private world of the city’s free people of color, they were tolerated. Once they were exposed to full public view, they became subject to the merciless force of the law and were temporarily rooted out, only to spring up again in the privacy of free colored homes and shops. Whites allowed the schools to continue so long as they were satisfied that what occurred in them was completely above reproach. No fools, the teachers in free colored schools fully conformed to these expectations. Yet they taught their students something that might have aroused white concern had whites given it much thought: public behavior had to comply rigidly with white assumptions about racial order and with the law; private life was another matter, more relaxed, more flexible, and more free, though never without risk.
This lesson was the great open secret about life on the middle ground. It accounted for both the rigidity of public life and the pleasant informality of private life. Even the wealthiest and most reputable free persons of color had to observe the niceties of racial etiquette in public. Late in 1860 the Charleston correspondent of the New York Tribune reported that although Richard E. Dereef was wealthy, educated, and respected, as were his sons and daughters, “if one of those daughters wears a vail [sic] over her face, the first policeman will strip it off, for that is only a privilege accorded to the white girl, with no negro blood in her veins.”85 If Dereef himself were out after the curfew, he could be clapped in jail and held until his white guardian came to free him. Needless to say, Dereef and his children understood the rules and followed them. Yet it was easy to overstep the boundary both because some whites took offense at what others ignored and because conforming to white prejudice was humiliating. James M. Johnson wrote Henry Ellison about a free man of color named Hare who, Johnson felt, foolishly called attention to himself in Kingsville, a small town about seventy miles north-west of Charleston. Hare claimed to be a white man and boasted that Maryland was an abolition state.86 His remarks provoked a white factor from Maryland named Cole who interrogated him, discovered he was a free Negro, and then stripped off his shirt and “gave him the limit of the law, ‘well filled, pressed down and shaken together,’ upon his bare back.”87 In public, prudent free mulattoes did not trespass on whites’ assumptions about proper racial behavior.
Charleston’s free mulattoes had their own expectations about racial propriety, and they insisted on observing them. When an agent of the Colonization Society attended a large Methodist church in Charleston in 1847, he found it “very singular, indeed, … that the blacks and the mulattoes did not sit together.” Whites occupied the main floor of the sanctuary, blacks filled two-thirds of the large circular gallery, and the other third “was occupied exclusively by mulattoes.” The agent was informed that the mulattoes “utterly refused to sit promiscuously with the blacks; and that, in all the relations in life, they maintain the same dignified reserve; that the two classes are as totally distinct as it is possible for them to be.”88 Free mulattoes’ stiff-necked refusal to associate with blacks caught the attention of many other observers. The color barrier within free Afro-American society seemed remarkable to most whites because the distinction between mulattoes and blacks appeared to them a fine point, almost comically trivial. Negroes, after all, were Negroes. White attitudes reflected not only their racial prejudice but their failure to understand the significance of the color consciousness of free mulattoes. Scrupulous observance of the distinction between brown and black allowed free mulattoes to make the middle ground visible, to reproduce in all the activities of daily life their separateness from blacks. Free mulattoes’ racial rituals represented their attempts to shape social reality to their sense of themselves as an intermediate class, to give repeated public demonstrations that their social niche had clear racial boundaries and that their racial niche had equally crisp social limits. Free mulattoes’ discrimination against blacks was their way of staking claim to the middle ground.
Unlike social space, geographical space was not rigidly stratified by color. Whites, mulattoes, and blacks lived in a mosaic throughout the city.89 The wealthiest whites who lived along the hushed, shaded streets south of Broad, nearest the refreshing breezes from the sea, typically had their slaves living in the house or in a separate building nearby in the yard. Few free people of color could afford to live in the expensive neighborhood of rice planters, commission merchants, lawyers, and bankers, and the same was true of most whites. They lived farther north on the Charleston peninsula, where housing was cheaper. Almost two-thirds of the free Afro-Americans in the city lived in the upper wards north of Calhoun Street, the old boundary between the city proper and the Neck.90 In every ward they were far outnumbered by both whites and slaves who lived adjacent to them, across the street from them, and on the alley behind them. Nonetheless, the free colored population had a vaguely defined center in the city, clustered around Coming Street. More free Afro-Americans lived on Coming than on any other street in the city.91 In addition, the free colored residents of Coming Street included such prominent persons as William McKinlay, Jacob Weston, Mrs. jeanette Bonneau, and James D. Johnson. Even on Coming, however, free people of color were by no means dominant; slaves outnumbered them two to one, whites three to one. But, as in the Methodist church visited by the Colonization Society agent, whites, mulattoes, and blacks who inhabited the same space were careful to partition it by color and class.
AFTER the family, the church was the most important cultural institution of Charleston’s free Afro-Americans. Its significance stemmed in large measure from the fact that, unlike the family, it was not the exclusive domain of free people of color. In church free people of color performed the most visible and the most profound rituals of the middle ground. In church the public and private worlds of free mulattoes intersected in a space they shared with blacks and whites, congregated on the common ground of their mortality. Baptisms and confirmations, marriages and funerals celebrated intimate events of family life in an interracial, multi-class community. Free people of color participated fully in congregational life, sponsoring baptisms, standing up at marriages, and serving as pallbearers at funerals. Their participation in these rites was almost as rigidly stratified as the seating in the galleries. On the whole, they looked after their own, ushering each other along the passages of Christian piety. Thereby they affirmed their identification with each other and their collective responsibility. They declared in public the human completeness they otherwise had to keep private.
Like the Ellisons, most members of Charleston’s free colored aristocracy attended the Episcopal church.92 The parish register of St. Philip’s church, where some of the city’s most aristocratic whites worshiped, reads like a social directory of the free mulatto elite.93 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas S. Bonneau took an especially active part in the life of the congregation, baptizing their children, sponsoring the baptisms of others. Free colored parishioners of St. Philip’s founded the Brown Fellowship Society, and its membership continued to be dominated by Episcopalians. Free people of color worshiped also at St. Michael’s, St. Mark’s, St. John’s, St. Luke’s, St. Paul’s, and Grace Episcopal, whose congregation included the Johnsons and other prominent free mulatto families.
James M. Johnson attended Grace regularly while he was in Charleston, and from time to time he visited other congregations. Church was a focal point of his social, intellectual, and spiritual life. He noted who appeared in church with whom, and he kept tabs on visiting ministers and missionaries. He observed the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, Thomas Frederick Davis, as he stopped through Charleston on his way to Philadelphia for surgery to correct his cataracts.94 Johnson took a special interest in Bishop Davis because he lived in Camden and was known to the Ellisons, having confirmed one of their slaves a few years earlier at Holy Cross in Stateburg.95 Johnson also participated in prayer meetings, listened to sermons, and enjoyed hymn singings. Religious activities were as meaningful to Johnson as they were pleasant. Johnson’s faith, like that of other Episcopalians, was not of the straight-laced, hard-shell variety—consider the oyster and champagne refreshments he and Eliza Ann had imbibed at a recent wedding. While worldly, his faith was genuine and deep. When his sister, the new wife of his stepson John Buckner, died suddenly and unexpectedly, Johnson was certain that she would receive God’s “condescending Love & Mercy” and that her soul would be saved. Her death was the “will of God & we dare not murmur. He doeth what seemeth good in his sight,” Johnson wrote Henry, adding that at the very hour of her death he had been listening to a sermon on the scriptures in St. Mark that warned, “But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.”96
Johnson’s religious reflections extended beyond the deathbed to other practical issues of daily life. He advised Henry, in his search for a new wife, to look not just for “beauty & form” but also for “a kind & gentle disposition & a loving Heart. And where is this to be found but in the Christian Ladies.”97 When the Diocesan Convention of South Carolina assembled in Charleston in May, Johnson went to the early morning prayer meeting at Grace and later sat in on at least one of the convention sessions. Loyal to his Stateburg home and his membership at Holy Cross, he appreciated the defense of upcountry dioceses made by one delegate in response to the sarcastic complaint of a low-country man about plans to hold the next convention in the remote back-country village of Abbeville.98 But what riveted Johnson to his seat was an intense controversy over slave marriages. “I had no time to stay,” Johnson wrote Henry, “but when Col P[hillips] got the floor I could not get away.”99
Col. John Phillips, a delegate from the low-country Christ Church Parish, attacked a proposal before the convention drafted by a committee headed by Christopher G. Memminger. Memminger’s committee had been appointed by the 1858 convention to consider “under what circumstances a clergyman may unite slaves in marriage.”100 The question arose frequently when a slave husband and wife were separated by sale: although the two might be hundreds of miles apart and have no hope of ever being reunited, were they still married? Could they take a new spouse? Could an Episcopal minister officiate at the new wedding? The highly controversial report of the Memminger committee answered “yes” to the last two questions, for reasons Col. Phillips and others found alarming. The report declared that “the relation of husband and wife is of divine institution, and the duties which appertain to it are of universal obligation, and bind with the same force the master and the slave.” This meant that it was “the duty of every Christian master” not to “infringe the Divine injunction forbidding the separation of husband and wife.” When an involuntary separation of slave husband and wife did occur, the report recommended, the slaves were “entitled to sympathy and consideration” and should be allowed to remarry under the auspices of the church. The master who separated them did not “recognize the force of Christian obligation,” the report concluded, “and is responsible to God for disregarding his commands.”101
Phillips and other opponents of the report took issue not with the humane consideration of the predicament of slaves but with the judgment against masters. The opponents agreed that the Christian master should honor the marriage bond between slaves, “and in this, as in all other respects, to govern his slaves in strict conformity to the laws of God.” However, they argued, “the evil of separating husband and wife, arises not necessarily from the institution of domestic slavery, but like all other evils incident to every form of human society, is the result of the fallen condition of man.”102 Essentially, the debate turned on whether the church should consider a master who separated a slave husband and wife merely another predictable descendant of Adam, and forgive him, or whether such a master should be condemned. The convention could not decide the question and tabled Memminger’s report.
What arguments Johnson found compelling cannot be deciphered from his brief remarks to Henry. His warm feelings toward Memminger might have inclined him toward the report, but if so, he did not hint of it in his letters to Henry. The most reasonable speculation may be that Johnson did not have a firm position on the issue, that he was captivated by the debate not because he identified with either side but because he considered the question important and difficult: what was a Christian master to do? Although Johnson himself did not own slaves, his father and his father-in-law did, and he lived and worked among them in Stateburg and in Charleston. If he harbored any special solicitude toward them, no record of it has survived. Instead, surviving evidence suggests that Johnson identified with slaves no more than the typical master, white or Negro.
When Bishop John Payne, a white Episcopal missionary on the west coast of Africa, visited Charleston in January 1860, Johnson went twice to hear his “interesting accounts of his Mission.” The second time Payne sang “‘There is a happy land’ translated in the native dialect as sung by them. It was beautiful,” Johnson told Henry.103 Johnson said nothing that suggested the native dialect was in any way part of his heritage, nothing that suggested he had reservations about what Bishop Payne referred to as “that mysterious Providence which had brought so many millions of its [Africa’s] natives to our shore, fused their several hundred different dialects into one language, and enlightened very many with the knowledge of the saving grace of Christ….”104 Instead, Johnson’s attitude toward Bishop Payne’s African mission seemed to grow out of his general support of church missions. He expressed equal or greater interest in the work of J. Lloyd Breck, a white Episcopal missionary to the Chippewa Indians in Minnesota.105 Although the sparse evidence is not conclusive, it suggests that Johnson recognized no racial brotherhood with slaves but only a human kinship that included Indians and whites as well.
Free colored Methodists infused the notion of human kinship with a vitality that manifested itself a good deal closer to home. Prominent free men of color like Richard Holloway and Samuel Weston were Methodist class leaders, directing the worship of small groups of free men of color in church and exhorting slaves in Charleston and on plantations throughout the low country to follow Jesus.106 Thousands of slaves and free blacks responded, swelling Methodist ranks to many times the size of the thin columns of Episcopalians.107 The success of the Methodists, their decentralized congregational structure, and their comparatively democratic concern for human souls of all colors and classes gave their religious message a political volatility lacking among the Episcopalians. Few people in Charleston could forget that just five years before the Denmark Vesey conspiracy thousands of black Methodists had withdrawn from the white-controlled church and set up their own African Methodist Episcopal Church, which thrived despite efforts by Charleston authorities to suppress it.108 When the Vesey investigation turned up evidence implicating the church as a center of insurrectionary organizing, the city council ordered it to be turned into a pile of rubble.109 Although black Charlestonians continued to throng Methodist churches after 1822, whites maintained control of the pulpit and the policies. That did not prevent disputes from arising when, for example, black Methodists refused to relinquish their seats in a crowded sanctuary to their white brethren.110 White Methodists were no less insistent than Episcopalians that when God’s grace exceeded the seating capacity of the church, God intended Negroes to obey His will and stand in the back.
In both Episcopal and Methodist churches, Charleston’s free people of color joined other worshipers in affirming the theological truth of the common humanity of all peoples. That affirmation helped undercut any tendency of free Afro-Americans to identify with slaves, to recognize in their shared ancestry any special bonds of kinship or loyalty. Christian theology suppressed racial identification and squelched racial politics by asserting that Charleston’s free people of color were as much kin to whites as to slaves, that their temporal loyalties encompassed the entire community of Christian believers of all colors and statuses, that the crucial question of power had less to do with relations among men in this world than with the relation between each Christian and the Lord. In their faith as in so many other ways, Charleston’s free Negroes were similar to most other Americans, who struggled along, not at war with the world but trying to make the most of it as it was given to them, trying to make do, all the while casting an anxious glance forward at death and the promise of eternal life.
AFTER the busy winter and spring months of 1860 in Charleston, James M. Johnson longed to return to Stateburg to visit his wife and enjoy the company of the other Ellisons. His father hoped to accompany him to the upcountry and say goodbye to the Ellisons before leaving on his trip to Canada. Illness delayed the elder Johnson’s trip to Stateburg until midsummer, and he refused to take off for Canada until he could get rid of what his son called “his pest,” a very expensive gun he was trying to sell in the city.111 Around the first of August both Johnsons came back to Charleston from Stateburg and made preparations for James D.’s departure to Toronto. Shortly before he left, the old man wrote Henry to thank him and William for a gift that had arrived by express, though the “delay has fermented the preserves & rashness has spilt the Honey & with the spoiling of the grapes it was a pickle pie.” He could not resist crowing to Henry, “By the way, My Worthy Friend, before I got yours I had sold my gun for $1000 less some $100 for expenses. It is said to be the best sale had in that Market & the Broker Wagers a Fine Over Coat if it is demurred to. Say no more about bad speculating until you hear she is on hand again.”112 Buoyed by his shrewdness, the elder Johnson sailed for Canada in the highest spirits, while his son took the train back to Stateburg for a few quiet August weeks in the High Hills.