Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War–Era Charleston by Jeff Strickland, and: Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port by Michael D. Thompson (review)

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...