The Irish in the Atlantic World

“The Unacclimated Stranger Should Be Positively Prohibited from Joining the Party”: Irish Immigrants, Black Laborers, and Yellow Fever on Charleston’s Waterfront

“The Unacclimated Stranger Should Be Positively Prohibited from Joining the Party” Irish Immigrants, Black Laborers, and Yellow Fever on Charleston’s Waterfront Michael D. Thompson Irishmen labored on waterfronts throughout the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century. Although the work these Irish waterfront laborers performed was, more or less, similar regardless of the geographical location of the port, those who worked upon the wharves and transported goods to and from the waterfronts of port cities in the antebellum American South encountered experiences unlike those faced by their fellow countrymen elsewhere in the Atlantic World, including in the northern United States. Different, too, was the impact these Irishmen had upon southern ports. A sizable influx of working-class Irish immigrants during the middle decades of the nineteenth century shifted the racial and ethnic composition of Charleston’s laboring population and precipitated a vigorous and at times violent struggle between the city’s black and white waterfront and transportation workers. This willingness to work shoulder-to-shoulder with black men and to perform “nigger work” in the slave South enabled waterfront employers to exercise a preference for white laborers. Irish dock workers thus contributed to the significant decline in Charleston’s slave population during the 1850s and bolstered white workers’ calls for the enforcement of laws and ordinances against slaves hiring their own time. But the Irish impact in antebellum Charleston was not confined to diversifying the waterfront labor force or complicating the city’s race relations. Irishmen also influenced public health debates and policies. This chapter will consider how yellow fever epidemics and nineteenth-century theories of epidemiology, maritime quarantine, and race-based disease acclimation influenced hiring practices on Charleston’s waterfront. Though Irishmen supplanted many free blacks and 276 | Michael D. Thompson slaves on the city’s docks and drays during the 1850s, the decade’s deadly yellow fever epidemics prevented blacks from losing even more waterfront jobs. Already stigmatized for performing work traditionally dominated by blacks, immigrant Irish laborers were branded by local medical authorities as “unacclimated” to lowcountry diseases, thus giving “acclimated” native blacks an advantage over their Irish competitors. Despite public pressure and municipal regulations aimed at preventing unacclimated immigrants from finding waterfront work during the fever season, some susceptible Irishmen were hired, facilitating the unprecedented propagation of the devastating disease from the docks into the heart of the city. While visiting Charleston in 1857, Englishman James Stirling noted, “Few Irish, comparatively, come to the South. There is a natural aversion in the free labourer to put himself on a footing with a slave. Free labour, therefore, is scarce and dear in the Slave States.”1 Correspondingly, one scholar of labor in Charleston has argued that black laborers, mostly slaves, performed the arduous work of loading and unloading ships in the antebellum South and, furthermore, that white laborers “invariably” eschewed such exhausting and crude work as “an anathema and demeaning.”2 Despite such claims, by the mid–nineteenth century, Charleston’s waterfront and transportation work force—which included stevedores , wharf hands, porters, draymen, and carters—was not cornered by one race or invariably avoided by another.3 Earlier in the century, however, common dock labor was conducted predominantly by slaves and free blacks, and white Charlestonians frequently placed notices in the city’s newspapers regarding their slave property working on the waterfront.4 In April 1807 Peter Bee offered a ten-dollar reward for the return of Sancho, a twenty-eight-year-old runaway slave who “had on when he went away . . . his Badge as a Porter No. 20, by which means he gets work about Gadsden’s Wharf, as he was seen there last Monday.”5 A few months later John Smith warned readers “not to employ my two fellows, abram and jacob—the first a carpenter , the other a stevadore [sic],” both of whom had been hiring themselves out without Smith’s permission.6 The transport of goods to and from the waterfront through Charleston’s streets was also principally “Negro work.” Some cart owners seeking to hire drivers in late colonial Charleston noted that “there is but very few white people who will follow that Employment in this Town.”7 In 1799 Archibald Calder announced the absconding of his slave Cyrus, who was “well known upon all the wharves in Charleston, as a drayman.”8 Moreover all seven draymen and carters listed in the city’s 1822 directory of white and free black residents were free blacks, and all...