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WORK TITLE: Unequal Freedoms
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Strickland, Jeffrey Glenn
BIRTHDATE: 1970
WEBSITE:
CITY: Montclair
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.montclair.edu/profilepages/view_profile.php?username=stricklandj * http://www.montclair.edu/profilepages/media/932/user/strickland_CV_december_2015.pdf * https://sites.google.com/site/stricklandhistory/ * http://upf.com/book.asp?id=STRIC001
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2015016524
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2015016524
HEADING: Strickland, Jeffery Glenn, 1970-
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670 __ |a Strickland, Jeffery Glenn. Unequal freedoms, 2015: |b email from publisher (Jeffery Glenn Strickland, born 11/22/1970)
PERSONAL
Born November 22, 1970.
EDUCATION:University of Pittsburgh, B.S., B.A.; Nova Southeastern University, M.S.; Florida Atlantic University, M.A.; Florida State University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, associate professor of history.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
In Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-era Charleston, Montclair State University history professor Jeff Strickland examines the ways in which whiteness—specifically, the whiteness of new, non-English-speaking immigrants from Europe—was construed in the years before and after the American Civil War. “Strickland,” declared Chad Morgan in the Journal of Southern History, “explores the interplay between ethnicity and race in Charleston from the beginning of the surge in immigration in the 1840s to the entrenchment of white supremacy following Reconstruction, and he takes pains to reinforce his argument at every turn. He maintains that the interaction of ethnic communities that would later come to be thought of as white with free and enslaved African Americans ‘defined’ the course of events in antebellum Charleston and that ‘slavery and emancipation profoundly influenced relations between European immigrants and black and white southerners.'”
Before the Civil War ethnic immigrants maintained their own identities and kept largely to themselves. “Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants,” explained a reviewer for Florida Scholarship Online, “shared the same workplaces, neighborhoods, streets, residences, and even households.” It was only after the war, “with the abolition of slavery,” wrote S.A. Syme in Choice, that “questions of ethnicity, race, and white supremacy increased in importance.” “Strickland’s well-researched study offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of the urban South’s racial and ethnic diversity in the mid- and late nineteenth century,” asserted Watson Jennison in the Civil War Book Review. “His portrait of Charleston’s population undermines the simplistic black-white binary often associated with southern race relations in this era and illustrates the complexity and dynamism of the racial order both before and after the war. Strickland’s argument that middle-class and elite Germans improved their position in Charleston, achieving `white’ status after the Civil War is compelling and well supported by his evidence.”
Critics appreciated Strickland’s work in exploring the complex relationship between ethnicity and power in Charleston. “One of the most interesting parts of Unequal Freedoms,” said Richard Stott in the American Historical Review, “is the discussion of postwar civic rituals. Southern whites were unenthusiastic about celebrating the nation they had been fighting against, so the Fourth of July became a largely black festival in Charleston with a parade and speeches. The schuetzenfest (shooting festival) emerged as the main public ritual among Charleston’s whites after the war. It originated as a German-American shooting competition…. It was often compared to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and for a time became nationally known.” Unequal Freedoms, Jennison concluded, “is recommended for those interested in the history of the nineteenth-century urban South.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, October, 2016, Richard Stott, review of Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-era Charleston, p. 1280.
Choice, March, 2016, S.A. Syme, review of Unequal Freedoms, p. 1074.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Chad Morgan, review of Unequal Freedoms, p. 175.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (August 2, 2017), Watson Jennison, review of Unequal Freedoms.
Florida Scholarship Online, http://florida.universitypressscholarship.com/ (August 2, 2017), review of Unequal Freedoms.
Montclair State University Website, http://www.montclair.edu/ (August 2, 2017), author profile.*
Jeffery Strickland
Chairperson, History
Office:
Dickson Hall 425
EMail:
stricklandj@mail.montclair.edu
Phone:
973‑655‑4124
Degrees:
BA, University of Pittsburgh
BS, University of Pittsburgh
MS, Nova Southeastern University
MA, Florida Atlantic University
PhD, Florida State University
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Profile
Jeff Strickland is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the United States during the Nineteenth Century. His first book is Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston http://upf.com/book.asp?id=STRIC001. He is currently writing a book on the work house prison break that occurred in Charleston, South Carolina in 1849.
Strickland, Jeff. Unequal freedoms: ethnicity, race, and
white supremacy in Civil War-era Charleston
S.A. Syme
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1074.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Strickland, Jeff. Unequal freedoms: ethnicity, race, and white supremacy in Civil War-era Charleston. University Press of Florida, 2015. 380p bibl
index afp ISBN 9780813060798 cloth, $84.95
53-3213
F279
CIP
Charleston, South Carolina, was one of several coastal ports that developed differently from those cities that grew along the Atlantic fall line, as
well as others further inland. In his first book, Strickland (Montclair State Univ.) examines the complicated structure between and among
merchants and planters, free blacks, slaves, and immigrant groups (especially German and Irish), all of which added to the 19thcentury mix. After
the Civil War, the problem became even more complicated. With the abolition of slavery, questions of ethnicity, race, and white supremacy
increased in importance. Before the war, the Irish and Germans had tended to remain within their familiar cultures, but with the development of
more actively radical conservative racial views of whites and the rise of Republican strength within a former Democratic bastion, things began to
change. Indeed, as the authors last sentence notes: "Although German and Irish immigrants had maintained their cultural traditions after the Civil
War, they had assimilated to racial norms and become white southerners." Carefully annotated, this book shows clearly how various ethnic and
racial groups were constantly being redefined during the later part of the 19th century. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division
undergraduates and above.--S. A. Syme, Coastal Carolina University
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499643617897 2/2
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Syme, S.A. "Strickland, Jeff. Unequal freedoms: ethnicity, race, and white supremacy in Civil War-era Charleston." CHOICE: Current Reviews
for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1074. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA445735633&it=r&asid=d0281e69bfcce56ffd42c4998894f3fd. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A445735633
Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston
Chad Morgan
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p175.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu.portal.oaklandcc.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston. By Jeff Strickland. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. xx, 380. $84.95, ISBN 9780-8130-6079-8.)
Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port. By Michael D. Thompson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. x, 284. $44.95, ISBN 978-1-61117-474-8.)
Studies of ethnicity and its relationship to race in nineteenth-century America have focused disproportionately on the cities of the North, an understandable bias given that they were home to by far the largest concentrations of immigrants. Going back to Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman's 1983 article on the ethnic composition of the white working classes in southern port cities, though, historians have known that immigrants constituted as much as 60 percent of those cities' free unskilled workers ("Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South," American Historical Review, 88 [December 1983], 1187). The two works under review here shine a light on workers of all races and ethnicities in Civil War-era Charleston, South Carolina, and, in so doing, fill in a crucial piece of the picture sketched by the founding works of whiteness studies in the 1990s. Charleston makes sense as a locus for both studies, being home to sizable Irish and German immigrant communities and the chief port of entry for African slaves. The books also represent two markedly different ways of writing the history of their overlapping subjects.
The first is more of a traditional "hammered thesis" approach, exemplified by Jeff Strickland's Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston. Strickland explores the interplay between ethnicity and race in Charleston from the beginning of the surge in immigration in the 1840s to the entrenchment of white supremacy following Reconstruction, and he takes pains to reinforce his argument at every turn. He maintains that the interaction of ethnic communities that would later come to be thought of as white with free and enslaved African Americans "defined" the course of events in antebellum Charleston and that "slavery and emancipation profoundly influenced relations between European immigrants and black and white southerners" (p. 2). More interestingly, he claims that Irish and German immigrants played a mediating role between black and white southerners in the years before those European groups came to be fully accepted as white. They did this by flouting city license laws, by assisting runaway slaves, and by just being themselves as the nativist wave that swept the country during the 1850s crashed into Charleston. It is worth noting that, in coming up with his interpretation, Strickland concentrates on relations between Germans and African Americans rather than between the Irish and African Americans for reasons having to do with available documentation and the fact that more has been written about the latter. Having participated in what was seen as the defense of the South and having moved up the socioeconomic ladder in the generation since their first arrival, German and Irish elements of Charleston were largely accepted into the "white" population after the war. Their social ascension came at the expense of their former mediating role, and immigrants who had once served as a buffer between races not only acquiesced to but also actively participated in the imposition of Jim Crow. The Faustian dimension of the Irish and German experiences in Charleston makes for an elegant and tragic narrative arc, which Strickland does occasionally undermine by belaboring a point. But overall, Unequal Freedoms stands as an exciting addition to historians' understanding of race and ethnicity as well as the complexities of life in an antebellum southern city. It is also an unusually well researched monograph.
In terms of sheer amount of research done, it would be hard to better Michael D. Thompson, who may be said to epitomize Richard Hofstadter's "archives rat," and whose Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port includes over one hundred pages of endnotes and bibliography. In contrast to Strickland, Thompson slightly soft-pedals his thesis. Instead of focusing on specific ethnicities, though they are inevitably discussed, he tries to recreate the experience of Charleston's waterfront working class as a whole. By focusing on workers' experiences and how they created meaning in their lives, Thompson is working in a rich vein of New Labor History that goes back more than fifty years to the pioneering work of another Thompson and yet, as this book shows, still yields valuable new insights into long-studied subjects. By assigning primacy to workers' experiences, Thompson suggests a very different view of antebellum Charleston than that of the standard declensionist interpretation that emphasizes the city's slide from the fourth-largest city in the United States in 1790 to the twenty-second largest seventy years later. The decline was only relative, Thompson emphasizes; over the same period, Charleston's population more than doubled, and waterfront workers' lived experience was that of a thriving Western Hemisphere port city. The approach has its benefits. Thompson conjures up the variegated Charleston of the mid-nineteenth century more vividly than does Strickland. More to the point, it is a Charleston in some ways diametrically opposed to the one portrayed in Unequal Freedoms. Whereas the ethnic workers of Strickland's Charleston gladly signed on to be white after the war and joined in the creation of Jim Crow, Thompson begins his account with a cross-racial longshoremen's association winning concessions for its members in 1869. In the pages that follow, he scrupulously documents the fluidity of class and race dynamics in the antebellum period that made such an alliance possible. Among many other topics, Thompson profiles the seeming epidemic in "[r]apid and reckless driving" by draymen in the waterfront districts, the pilferage of loose cotton by workers, a (failed) effort by former governor Thomas Pinckney to replace slave laborers with free white workers in the wake of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, and the shutting out of Irish and German dockworkers in the 1850s (p. 56). What emerges is portrait of the antebellum Charleston working class in all its complexity and contingency.
The divergent conclusions of two such thorough studies should not concern readers overly much. Strickland and Thompson bring radically different assumptions to much of the same subject matter, and their findings correspondingly contrast. For readers looking for an explanation of how such a polyglot antebellum population ended up succumbing to a particularly noxious brand of white supremacy, Strickland provides at the very least a crucial piece of the puzzle. But as Thompson reminds the reader, those workers had rich lives that amounted to much more than bit parts in an overdetermined historical narrative--whether of Charleston's relative decline or of Jim Crow's rise--and documenting those lives is a necessary and vital project. If Strickland's portrayal of Charleston is less granular and more mechanistic than Thompson's, he is only paying the price for the increased explanatory power of his book with a loss of nuance. Simultaneously, the countless interracial interactions detailed by Thompson remind the reader that Jim Crow was far from the only possible outcome for the post-Reconstruction South. Read together, Unequal Freedoms and Working on the Dock of the Bay provide a stirring and strikingly complete picture of the mid-nineteenth-century Charleston working class.
Chad Morgan
North Carolina Central University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morgan, Chad. "Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 175+. Academic OneFile, login.portal.oaklandcc.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=lom_oakcc&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354158&it=r&asid=70bf689dc02625480442a938a8fb3b25. Accessed 31 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354158
Unequal Freedoms:
Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston
Jeff Strickland
Hardcover: $84.95
Series: Southern Dissent
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-6079-8Pubdate: 9/22/2015 Details: 408 pages, 6.125x9.25
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Reviews (6)
"Ambitious and convincing. This is the first examination of the role of European immigrants in the most southern of U.S. cities and the way that they and their ethnic children conformed to or dissented from the norms of the dominant white Southern culture."--Walter D. Kamphoefner, author of The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri
"Demonstrates the importance of Charleston's Germans and their relationships with African Americans throughout these thirty turbulent years."--Dennis C. Rousey, author of Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889
"A provocative study that complicates and deepens our already extensive understanding of how both race and shifting ethnic identity shaped this important city in a critical era."--Bernard E. Powers, author of Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, and class shaped the political economy and society of seaport cities from New Orleans to New York to Boston. Immigrants, African Americans, and native-born whites lived and worked together and nowhere was this level of interethnic relations so pronounced as in Charleston, South Carolina, the South’s most economically and politically significant city.
Jeff Strickland examines how German and Irish immigrants in Charleston were both agents of change during the transition from slavery to freedom, as well as embodiments of that change. As fears of strengthening antislavery sentiments took root in Charleston, racial tensions became ever more pronounced. Immigrant artisans and entrepreneurs occupied a middle tier in the racial and ethnic hierarchy, acting as a buffer between the disparate white southerners and African Americans. While relations between European immigrants and black southerners were often positive during the Civil War era, reconstruction brought new opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobility to Charleston's immigrants. By the end of the nineteenth century, German and Irish immigrants were easily able to cross the permeable white boundaries and, through their assimilation as white southerners, effectively embraced the ideals of white supremacy.
Using an innovative framework, Jeff Strickland adds much to our knowledge about the ways European immigrant communities functioned in the South during the nineteenth century, and the significance of his research extends far beyond the geographic south.
Jeff Strickland is associate professor of history at Montclair State University.
Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston
Jeff Strickland
Abstract
Charleston, South Carolina, was a cosmopolitan city during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Germans, Irish, and a host of European and Latin American immigrants shared the same workplaces, neighborhoods, streets, residences, and even households. Charleston was a slave society, and its economy relied on the forced labor of thousands of slaves. Immigrants also worked as entrepreneurs, skilled artisans, and laborers. Immigrants and African Americans interacted on a daily basis, and their relations were often positive. White southerners found those positive relations threatening, and nativist s ... More
Keywords: German immigrants, Irish immigrants, African Americans, White Southerners, Black Southerners, White Supremacy, Slavery, Reconstruction, Confederacy, Charleston, South Carolina
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780813060798
Published to Florida Scholarship Online: January 2016 DOI:10.5744/florida/9780813060798.001.0001
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jeff Strickland, author
Montclair State University
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Subject(s) in Florida Scholarship Online
American History: 19th Century
History
Contents
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Front Matter
Introduction
1 Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Urban South
2 Slavery and Urban Life
3 Antebellum Municipal Politics and Social Control
4 Postwar Wage Labor and Petty Capital Formation
5 Racial and Ethnic Relations during Reconstruction
6 The German Schuetzenfest and the Culture of White Supremacy
7 Postwar Municipal Politics and the Failure of Reconstruction
Conclusion
End Matter
Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston
by Strickland, Jeff
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Retail Price: $84.95
Issue: Spring 2016
ISBN: 9780813060798
Ethnicity Complicated White Supremacy in Civil War Era Charleston
In Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston, historian Jeff Strickland complicates the traditional racial portrait of the antebellum South by exploring the differences among the region’s white residents. Instead of seeing them as divided solely by class, he focuses on ethnic divisions in his study of Charleston. Although the city was home to whites from a range of European countries, immigrants from Ireland and Germany constituted the largest portion of the foreign-born white population. As such, he maintains, it is essential to understand how these non-native-born whites viewed their place in society and how their aspirations for inclusion changed over the course of the tumultuous middle part of the nineteenth century. Situated between white southerners and black southerners, he argues, Irish and German migrants represented a “barrier” between white and black Charlestonians in the antebellum era. Over time, the migrants, particularly the Germans, rose socially and economically. By the end of Reconstruction, having increasingly joined the middle and upper classes, they assimilated into the ranks of the city’s native-born white population to become white southerners who shared the same views about blacks and the need to embrace white supremacy. Interactions among these groups, Strickland contends, “defined social, economic, and political developments in Civil War-era Charleston” (2).
Strickland recounts the transformation in seven chapters, the first three of which cover the antebellum era. Chapter one provides a demographic portrait of Charleston in the decades prior to the start of the Civil War. Like many other southern coastal cities, Charleston had a black majority, though the percentage declined over the 1840s and 1850s as whites arrived in greater numbers. Drawn from the North as well as Europe, the new residents had a profound impact on the city, altering its composition and physical layout as well as its racial order. The second chapter examines the complicated and sometimes contradictory nature of relations between immigrants and enslaved and free blacks. In contrast to the plantation districts in the city’s hinterland, Charleston’s grocery shops and backroom bars, many owned by German proprietors, provided relatively safe spaces where non-elite whites, often immigrants, and blacks socialized and engaged in illicit trade. These relationships undermined the racial hierarchy and white solidarity. At other times, however, tensions between immigrants, particularly the Irish, and blacks erupted into violence as the groups competed for housing and employment.
In the 1850s, as both the sectional crisis and nativism mounted, white Charlestonians came to view the immigrants in their midst with increasing suspicion, fearing that they held anti-slavery sentiments. Chapter three chronicles the city government’s efforts to police the immigrants’ interactions with slaves by prohibiting the sale of alcohol in groceries. When German shopkeepers ignored the ban because it severely curtailed their profits, the authorities imposed harsh punishments on the violators. In spite of their perceived lack of commitment to southern slavery, several hundred German and Irish immigrants in Charleston fought for the Confederate cause once the Civil War began, though many served in the militia which allowed them to remain close to home. The book devotes very little coverage to the Civil War. In fact, surprisingly only five of the book’s 292 pages discuss the wartime period. And yet, events during this period must have left deep impressions on the tumultuous state of race relations in the post-war period.
The second half of the book explores the economic, social, and political impact of the Civil War and emancipation in Charleston. Chapter four examines the tumult in the city’s labor market as the population exploded in the years after the war’s end. Competition between and among freedpeople and immigrants pushed down wages but simultaneously resulted in new opportunities for the city’s laboring classes, often to the dismay of white southern employers. At the same time, peace brought entrepreneurs of all ethnicities and races new chances for prosperity. German immigrants and their southern-born children fared particularly well in the post-war pursuit of profit, expanding their commercial investments and purchasing land and plantations. The conflict between blacks and immigrants was not limited to the economic realm. Indeed, as chapter five relates, racial tensions in the city escalated, particularly after 1870, as blacks laid claim to the civil and political rights imbued by the post-war amendments. Freed people displayed particular resolve in commemorating their freedom with annual parades through the city. These rituals reflected black Charlestonians’ claims not only to public space but also to full citizenship. Chapter six traces the post-war history of the Schuetzenfest, a festival organized annually by the German immigrant community, which, like the black parades, held important cultural and political significance. Though it began as a celebration of German culture that attracted white as well as black attendees, the festival evolved into a “platform for white supremacy in the early 1870s” (209). The rise of the festival also marked the assimilation of middle-class and elite German immigrants into mainstream white southern society. The final chapter charts the rise of Charleston’s Reconstruction-era municipal political system and its balkanization along racial, ethnic, and class lines. As the electorate broadened to include freedmen and growing numbers of naturalized Irish and German immigrants, conflict over control of the local government intensified. Most of the city’s majority black population supported the Republican Party while most of the city’s white population, including the Irish and Germans, joined the Democratic Party. German immigrants displayed their growing political influence several times in the late 1860s and 1870s when they threatened to throw their support behind the Republicans in municipal elections, and thus undermine racial unity, before securing concessions from the local Democratic leadership. In the wake of South Carolina’s “redemption” and the attendant political violence, the Republican Party in Charleston dissolved, sharply reducing black residents’ access to political power while augmenting the German and Irish immigrants’.
Strickland’s well-researched study offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of the urban South’s racial and ethnic diversity in the mid- and late nineteenth century. His portrait of Charleston’s population undermines the simplistic black-white binary often associated with southern race relations in this era and illustrates the complexity and dynamism of the racial order both before and after the war. Strickland’s argument that middle-class and elite Germans improved their position in Charleston, achieving “white” status after the Civil War is compelling and well supported by his evidence. His argument regarding Irish and German immigrants’ status in the antebellum period is less convincing, however. For example, while it is clear that the two groups were not regarded as the social equals of white southerners prior to the war and that many immigrants became the proprietors of bars and groceries who made money through the illegal sale of liquor to and illicit trade with slaves and free blacks, it does not necessarily mean they served as a “buffer” between black and white southerners, as Strickland contends. Instead, it suggests that the immigrant proprietors placed a premium on improving their economic plight and were willing to contravene laws that stood in their way of that pursuit. In spite of this criticism, the book is recommended for those interested in the history of the nineteenth-century urban South.
Watson Jennison is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is author of Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860 (Kentucky, 2012).
Jeff Strickland. Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston. Jeff Strickland. Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston. Foreword by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller. (Southern Dissent.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. xx, 380. $84.95.
Richard Stott
Am Hist Rev (October 2016) 121 (4): 1280-1281.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.4.1280
Published:
03 October 2016
The first wave of historical community studies in the new social history mode that began in the 1970s mostly ignored the American South. It was thought to be a rural section with barely any cities worth studying. But while southern cities were relatively small compared to the North, they were important to the region. Aware of their significance, Jeff Strickland provides a detailed examination of race and ethnicity in Charleston from 1850 to 1876 that contributes to our understanding of urban places in the South.
Strickland culls material from the manuscript population censuses and manuscript manufacturing censuses and the R. G. Dun and Company credit reports at the Baker Library at Harvard for this impressively researched book. He also makes good use of local newspapers, court and tax records, diaries and letters, and other manuscript sources. He brings in relevant secondary sources on other southern cities to provide a comparative dimension.
An 1861 census of the city found that 56 percent of Charleston’s population were white, 36 percent were enslaved, and 8 percent were free blacks. The 1840s had seen a sharp increase in European immigration to the city, and by 1861, 28 percent of whites were foreign born, with 14 percent from Ireland and 8 percent from Germany. There were no ethnic neighborhoods in the city, but both ethnic groups, especially the Germans, maintained their identity. Economically, the Germans were far better off than the Irish—almost two-third of Irish-born men were unskilled laborers. They achieved only modest group mobility—in 1880 almost half of the Irish male labor force was unskilled. Germans and free blacks were more successful. Many Germans were shopkeepers or craftsman. Almost 60 percent of free blacks were skilled workers. Slaves mainly worked as laborers and servants, but a number worked in skilled and semiskilled occupations. While the book contains much information on the city’s enslaved and Irish populations, Germans receive the most attention. Strickland notes that evidence on them is more abundant than on other groups, but it does create a German-focused book. The Germans, especially the 48ers, were reluctant to buy slaves, and indeed, Strickland suggests, were privately opposed to the institution. Many Germans were grocers and this brought them into contact with black customers, to the suspicion of native-born Charleston whites.
As sectional tensions heated up in the 1850s, Germans realized it was in their interest to make clear their identification with fellow white Charlestonians. While the newly created Republican Party received considerable support from Germans in the North, Germans in Charleston, whatever their personal views might have been, refrained from publicly supporting the party. The Irish had long supported the Democratic Party and increasingly the Germans did so as well. The Irish and German response to the war, Strickland writes, was “mixed.” Many immigrants volunteered for military service and aliens as well as naturalized citizens were eligible to be drafted, but it seems that immigrants were more hesitant than native-born white southerners to put their lives on the line for the cause of slavery.
Reconstruction proved tumultuous and sometimes violent. The city was occupied militarily in February 1865 and the presence of black troops proved particularly volatile. Blacks from the countryside flooded into Charleston. African Americans, not surprisingly, supported the Republican Party. A complicated struggle between the military authorities, the freed people, immigrants and native-born white southerners, and the shifting alliances among them, played out in a series of highly contested, and sometimes violent, elections in the late 1860s. As groups struggled to gain an upper hand, the Germans proved especially adept, eventually electing one of their own—John A. Wagener—as mayor. One of the most interesting parts of Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston is the discussion of postwar civic rituals. Southern whites were unenthusiastic about celebrating the nation they had been fighting against, so the Fourth of July became a largely black festival in Charleston with a parade and speeches. The schuetzenfest (shooting festival) emerged as the main public ritual among Charleston’s whites after the war. It originated as a German-American shooting competition. The festival became increasingly elaborate, beginning with an opening parade to the shooting grounds where there was food and beer for sale and various entertainments and contests. It was often compared to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and for a time became nationally known. The days-long festival became embraced by white Charlestonians and helped cement the Germans’ place in the white postwar social order.
For decades the Civil War served as a stopping or starting place for monographs, but like much recent work, Unequal Freedoms straddles the war. Rich examples gleaned from Strickland’s research enhance the book. But this strength can also be a weakness. Too often Strickland goes into excessive detail—lists of German businessmen, of interracial couples in the census, and of grocers arrested for selling liquor to blacks, to name just a few. Strickland seems hesitant to generalize, especially in the social history sections, and the book struggles to develop an effective narrative. Given this, a good conclusion is essential, but unfortunately the concluding chapter simply summarizes the book chapter by chapter, and the big picture remains unaddressed.