Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston by Jeff Strickland (review)

Studies of ethnicity during the middle of the nineteenth century have understandably focused on the North, where most immigrants settled before and after the Civil War. Unlike her later work on ethnic Union soldiers, Ella Lonn’s classic Foreigners in the Confederacy (1940) remains in print today because relatively few scholars have tried to study ethnic southerners of Irish or German descent during this period. Jeff Strickland’s Unequal Freedoms is one of a few recent books hoping to integrate ethnic Americans into southern history.

Strickland’s goal in this study is to go beyond the “black-white paradigm” that has dominated histories of the American South to show how immigrants, who congregated in sizable numbers in the region’s largest coastal cities, shaped politics, social life, and especially race relations between native-born black and white southerners (5). He explores how the thousands of immigrants, largely of Irish or German birth or ancestry, shaped the society and racial milieu of Charleston, South Carolina, during the Civil War era. While he does discuss the Irish, Jewish, and other immigrants in some detail, Strickland focuses most of his attention on the Germans for several reasons. The Germans, though outnumbered by the Irish in Charleston, left behind better sources, and Irish-black relations have received more attention from historians. Those interested in learning more about the Irish experience in the South should also consult David Gleeson’s excellent studies on this topic, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001) and The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (2013).

Strickland’s book is a work of social history that tries to go beyond examining the views of elites to understanding the lives and opinions of a wide variety of enslaved, free black, Irish, German, and native-born southerners. The first chapters are full of interesting breakdowns of census and other records that reveal several important facts. By 1850, nearly one-fifth of the white population of Charleston was foreign-born—a number comparable to that in some northern cities. Also, unlike in much of the North, Irish, Germans, and black Charlestonians did not settle in segregated ethnic or racial neighborhoods, leading to a high degree of interaction among these groups. This is a key point, for it is central to Strickland’s contention that immigrants served as a “buffer” between white and black Charleston (31).

Strickland persuasively argues that Germans in particular were not fully on board with slavery or the southern racial system before the Civil War. Thus he disagrees with Andrea Mehrländer’s contention in The Germans of Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans during the Civil War Period, 1850–1870 (2011) that Germans quickly adapted to southern slave society before the war. Indeed, Strickland’s story of the rise and fall of good relations between the German and black community more closely aligns with Alison Clark Efford’s German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era (2013). Efford persuasively argues that German Republicans in the North evolved from being strong antebellum and wartime supporters of black rights to abandoning their fight for racial equality during Reconstruction.

While Strickland identifies some instances of Irish collaboration with African Americans, he reaffirms previous historians’ arguments that the Irish also competed more directly with blacks for jobs and used their “whiteness” to their advantage (42). Germans, by contrast, tended to arrive with more skills and capital and therefore had less reason to compete directly with slaves and free blacks. German store owners, in fact, became notorious for willing to engage in illicit trade with free and enslaved African Americans, including selling alcohol to slaves. Native-born whites saw this as threatening the city’s social and racial order, and they responded by trying to pass license laws and fining German (and some Irish) shopkeepers for selling goods illegally to slaves. Still, while many Germans preferred...