Slavery, memory, and the history of the “Atlantic now”: Charleston, South Carolina and global racial/economic hierarchy

Abstract

Using the bicentenary of the banning of the international slave trade by Great Britain and the United States, this paper looks at the way in which the history of slavery has been under‐represented and erased in Charleston, SC, the single most important port of entry for enslaved Africans into continental North America prior to 1808. Although current efforts to commemorate slavery and its abolition in the area are encouraging, recent disputes on the waterfront in Charleston reveal how the Atlantic remains haunted by a racialized economic hierarchy.

Keywords:

• slavery
• slave trade
• abolition
• Charleston, SC
• historical memory
• global economy

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to his colleagues Scott Peeples, David Gleeson, and Harlan Greene (College of Charleston) and Byron Caminero‐Santangelo (University of Kansas) for their advice and suggestions at various stages of this essay's development.

Notes

1. Current census figures (2000): African American population as percentage: US – 12.9; South Carolina – 29.2; City of Charleston – 33: City of North Charleston – 50; Charleston County – 35.8; Berkeley County – 28.1; Dorchester County – 35.3. (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=n&_lang=en&mt_name=DEC_2000_PL_U_GCTPL_ST2&format=ST-2&_box_head_nbr=GCT-PL&ds_name=DEC_2000_PL_U&geo_id=04000US45, accessed 13 February 2008).

2. The full texts of the bronze plaques read as follows:

Seventeenth Century

Charles Town, named for Charles II, was settled in 1670, a few miles north of this site, on the west bank of the Ashley River. It was the capital of the colony of the Carolinas. In 1671, the Lords Proprietors ordered a port nearer the sea to be laid out on Oyster Point at the juncture of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, where there was a “bold landing” for ships. Charles Town moved to its present site in 1684 as one of America's first planned cities. The “grand modell” centered on a square with a street along the Cooper River known as “The Bay.” Now East Bay, it lies to the west of this location and is still a principal commercial thoroughfare. The city was centered on the area around the Old Exchange Building, landward of this point. Exports of lumber, naval stores, salted beef and deerskins were the basis of the city's first fortunes. Home to a diverse citizenry, early Charles Town took pride in her religious freedom and vigorous maritime trade.

Eighteenth Century

Charles Town was a walled city from about 1704 to about 1720. The walls protected the city from hostile attacks by the Spaniards, French, Indians and pirates. In 1719, South Carolina overthrew the Lords Proprietors and became a royal colony. Charles Town grew rich from exports of rice and indigo and became a cultural center with close ties to England. When colonial rights were threatened, she was a leader in forming a new nation. Her fine harbor made her the South's major port and largest city. It also attracted British invaders. The Royal Navy attacked the forts at the harbor entrance to the east. The attack was repelled, but later the city was captured and occupied by British armies coming up from the south. Four Charlestonians signed the Declaration of Independence. John Rutledge and Charles Pinckney contributed significantly to the writing of the United States Constitution.

Nineteenth Century

Charleston, so spelled after 1783, was quick to recover from the revolution and military occupation. Rice, Sea Island cotton and trade provided the highest per capita wealth of any American city in 1860. Grand houses, public buildings and plantations were built. Her advocacy of states' rights, nullification and secession gave her national importance. The Civil War began in 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter, three miles southeastward of this point. During four years of struggle, the waterfront was the scene of naval activities involving armored warships, torpedo boats, a submarine and blockade runners. This area was under heavy shellfire from the barrier islands. Besieged, bombarded, and impoverished by the war, Charleston lost her economic and political stature. Banks, railroads, phosphate mining and agricultural exports revived trade by the 1880s. A major earthquake in 1886 devastated the city but failed to kill her spirit.

Twentieth Century

In the early part of the 20th century, Charleston continued her slow recovery from war, military occupation and social upheaval. In 1901, a naval base was established on the Cooper River, four miles upstream. In 1902, the West Indian Exposition on the site of Hampton Park on the north side of town, drew international attention, and the Cooper River bridge opened in 1929. Growth of the military presence in both World Wars buttressed the economy. The nation's preservation movement began in Charleston where the first Historic District zoning ordinance was adopted in 1931. The rebuilding of the port, which began after 1945, restored the harbor to its former maritime importance. On this spot, Clyde‐Mallory Line's ship terminals, once the city's busiest, were destroyed by a spectacular fire in 1955. Since the late 1970s, racial harmony, economic revitalization, a cultural renaissance, and attention to urban design have brought Charlestonians a new measure of prosperity and pride in their city. A fierce hurricane, steering straight for this Waterfront Park, as yet incomplete, fell upon the city and harbor in September 1989. It created new challenges, but as the 20th century drew to a close, Charleston was looking to the future with her usual confidence and vision.

3. See 〈http://clyburn.house.gov/district-gullah.cfm〉; 〈http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc108/h4683_ih.xml〉; 〈http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6283153〉; 〈http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/jan/08/corridor_slated_get26911/〉.

4. See 〈http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7593249〉; 〈http://www.donaldmceachin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=9〉. Florida has recently followed Virginia's example (see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/27florida.html?ref=us). In the 2007–08 legislative session of the South Carolina General Assembly, Representative Christopher Hart of Columbia, SC introduced Bill HR 4506 “TO EXPRESS THE PROFOUND REGRET OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA GENERAL ASSEMBLY FOR THE HISTORY OF WRONGS INFLICTED UPON BLACK CITIZENS BY MEANS OF SLAVERY AND LEGALIZED RACIAL SEGREGATION, AND TO CALL UPON ALL CITIZENS TO TAKE PART IN ACTS OF RACIAL RECONCILIATION”, but the resolution did not make it out of committee (see 〈http://www.scstatehouse.net/sess117_2007-2008/bills/4506.htm〉 for the full text of this wide‐ranging resolution).

5. For discussion of the role of the Charleston delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 see Mercantini 245–48; for Charleston's role in attempting to reopen the trade, see Sinha; for the intensification of the internal slave trade, see Walter Johnson and Rothman; on the Grimke sisters, see Lerner; on Denmark Vesey see Egerton and Michael Johnson.

6. Very few historians have paid attention to these documents. One exception is Menard who in 1994 used the mortgages to address some of the “mysteries” of the transformation of the Carolina economy between 1690 and 1740. Responding to what he saw as the surprising lack of attention paid by scholars to “the source or sources of capital necessary to effect such a transformation”, Menard turned to the “evidence on the size and structure of a major sector of the local credit market” (667) to be found in the slave mortgages at South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Menard based his arguments about the importance of the local capital market on a small sample of 305 cases covering the 1710s to the 1740s. Legal historian Thomas Russell has also touched on the mortgages but only in the context of Fairfield in the South Carolina upcountry. Similar mortgage records exist elsewhere not just in the American South but also around the Atlantic world – for example, in the former Cape of Good Hope (Shell).

7. In addition to a detailed and complex account of these events in Erem and Durrenberger, a video of the confrontation between police and protesters can be viewed at 〈http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3630782398230140343〉.

8. The resonances between the January 2000 “riot” and the Denmark Vesey “rebellion” are indeed curious, not least, for the purposes of this paper, in both events' imbrication of global and local issues. In the Vesey case, the local plot and the fear of such plots was linked to the Haitian Revolution, an event that everyone, black and white, enslaved and free, was aware of but never acknowledged (see Fischer). Although merely coincidental, the Danish connection in both cases indicates how even apparently peripheral European powers are implicated both in the globalized system of the slave trade and in the current global trade systems. (Denmark Vesey took his first name because of the fact that he was born on the Danish Caribbean island of St. Thomas.)