by Tiya Miles
Where they could not exert complete control, slaveholding mistresses such as Octavia disparaged Black women’s fashion as outlandish because of its bright colors, contrasting patterns, and whimsical embellishments made of natural elements like gourds, cranberries, or animal horns. Fanny Kemble, a British actress who married into a family of wealthy rice planters on the Georgia coast, ridiculed the women on her new estate, noting: “Their Sabbath toilet really presents the most ludicrous combination of incongruities that you can conceive—frills, flounces, ribbons; combs stuck in their wooly heads…, finery, every color of the rainbow…chintzes with sprawling patterns…; beads, bugles, flaring sashes, and, above all, little fanciful aprons.”71 Mary Boykin Chesnut, a South Carolina plantation mistress and senator’s wife whose diary is a classic text for the study of elite white women’s experiences in the Civil War South, did the same. Chesnut opined upon the garish state of slave women’s dress, praising their drab everyday-wear in comparison to their personal Sunday concoctions: “The maids here dress in linsey-woolsey gowns and white aprons in the winter—and in summer, blue homespun. These deep blue dresses and white turbans and aprons are picturesque and nice looking. On Sundays their finery is excessive and grotesque. I mean their holiday, church, and outdoor getup.”72
That mistresses saw Black women’s independent designs as crude reflected an investment in the social hierarchy of dress. For surely Kemble and Chesnut realized that Black women were speaking out through these flamboyant outfits, expressing their right to personal worth as well as an aesthetic taste influenced by their African homelands. Black women’s sartorial rebellion ripped through the cloth cages imposed by their owners. Rose may have hoped to capture some of this spirit when she put a dress in the sack for Ashley. From the tattered scraps of old dresses, from the shards of slavery’s separations, Black women continued to care for themselves and others.
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We have spoken of many dresses, but Rose had only one to give. Perhaps that single dress had been laundered over and over again, like the “little dress” saved by one formerly enslaved woman for a lifetime. Labeled “my little breeder” by her mistress but beloved by her mother, this woman, unnamed in an interview, wore the dress as a girl when her father died on a Civil War battlefield. For the speaker and her mother, both, that dress was entwined with the memory of him. After the woman’s father was gone, her mother washed the dress weekly, until finally passing away. As the new caretaker of her childhood garment, the woman chose not to sew a visible rip she saw in the lace. This blemish reminded the woman of “going to her mother” in the dress as a child, the physical motion that had caused the original tear. “My mother been dead 44 years,” the woman said to an interviewer after living many decades in freedom. “It gives me pleasure to look at this little dress.”73 The aged garment that had at first carried a memory of a deceased father now also bore a tie to her absent mother.
The torn dress Rose possessed and then gave to her daughter was probably made of coarse cotton or the linen-woolen blend characteristic of Negro cloth. If Rose was hired out by her owners and permitted to retain a fraction of her income, she may have had the chance to purchase a fabric she favored. It is a guess more than fair, given the proficiency of enslaved women with the needle, that Rose sewed this garment for herself years before that fateful winter. Perhaps she had worn it over time, imparting to it a singular scent that only her child might recognize. And maybe there was another significance interwoven into the cloth that Rose was determined to pass down. We know from the stories of enslaved women that special items of apparel were not acquired without sacrifice.
Printed floral skirt worn by Lucy Lee Shirley as a child. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of the Black Fashion Museum, founded by Lois K. Alexander-Lane.
“A tattered dress is a thousand things,” my friend who sews her own wardrobe told me when I shared the words stitched onto the sack with her.74 I think we sense this to be true of our own aged dresses that morph into many meanings and memories of intimate ties: a hope of happiness for the grandchild who marries in this same satin gown; a parent’s loving look of pride frozen into a pink tulle tutu; a slave mother’s final embrace, arms outstretched, then empty. This dress belonging first to Rose and then to Ashley—a fabric scar, a second skin, a shield—was a sign of women’s lives frayed by slavery but nevertheless resplendent with beauty.
THE AUCTION BLOCK
I am going to tell you unwelcome truths, but I mean to speak those truths in love.
—Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, 1836
Every day shows how many mansions were in this hell.
—Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 1838
The auction block underwrote the purchase of pianos, wedding dresses, the education of slaveholding women and men, tours of Europe, northern vacations, the purchase of vacation homes, gifts to white children, marriage presents, and the maintenance of the slave society of the South.
—Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, 2020
How did we arrive here, with the memory of a tattered dress and yet another Black mother’s daughter on an auction block? How did South Carolina become a place where the sale of a colored child was not only possible but probable? The answer lies in the willingness of an entire society to bend its shape around a set of power relations that structured human exploitation along racial lines for financial gain. While vending Black people to underwrite material pleasures, South Carolina sold its soul. As we explored in a previous chapter, by the onset of the American Revolution, Charleston had built a culture of luxurious living and conspicuous wealth from slave-produced rice profits.
Unlike in Jamestown, Virginia, or the younger Savannah, Georgia, enslaved African people had been present in South Carolina since the colony’s fledgling first year and made up most of the population by 1710. By 1820, the pattern of a Black majority had spread into the interior “middle country” of the state, where cotton planters joined the ricing elite in rampant slaveholding and political power grabbing. This demographic imbalance set Carolina apart from all other colonies and states.1 The sizable Black population, shaped by the international slave trade, as well as the natural increase in Black families, fueled agricultural production and the frenzied exchanges of Black people for cash, mortgages, and bonds. Society here was shaped and supported by “the most undemocratic political structure in the Union.”2 South Carolina’s history, punctuated by the sale of little children, might be read as a cautionary tale about how a self-centered ruling class could rely on racial prejudice in the service of unchecked capitalism and to the detriment of moral character.
Charleston’s tolerance for racial exploitation was fully on display. Visitors commented on the contrast between white opulence and Black diminishment that fed and was sustained by a culture of human sale. Adam Hodgson, a British businessman, was dumbstruck by Charleston’s extremes during a tour of North America in 1819. He exclaimed in his travelogue published a few years later: “The real plague-spot of Charleston is its slave population; and the mixture of gaiety and splendor, with misery and degradation, is too incongruous not to arrest the attention even of the superficial. It reminded me of the delicate pink peach-blossoms which surround the black hovels of the slaves on the plantations.” Harriet Martineau drew similar conclusions after her 1834 visit, commenting in an unveiled critique: “Charleston is the place to see those contrasting scenes of human life brought under the eye which moralists gather together for the purpose of impressing the imagination.” Martineau then described a “slave market” into which she was “plunge[d]” while strolling about the streets. She observed Black mothers with babies, as well as children alone, being hawked by the “restless, jocose zeal of the auctioneer who counted the bids.
” After watching a boy of eight or nine who “shrunk” in “helplessness and shame” when ordered to stand on the auction block, Martineau “entered a number of fine houses” where she was “presented with flowers and entertained with lively talk.” This contrast, to Martineau, was abominable. “If there be a scene which might stagger the faith of the spirit of Christianity itself,” she declared, “if there be an experience which might overthrow its serenity, it is the transition from the slavemarket to the abodes of the slavemasters, bright with sunshine, and gay with flowers, courtesies, and mirth.” Both Hodgson and Martineau captured Charleston as a city characterized by flowers fertilized by the ugly practice of human captivity. In this socially sanctioned split between the sellers and the salable, Martineau charged, “All intercourse lost its innocence.”3
MANSIONS IN HELL
Charleston was, indeed, no innocent. As a pivotal international port, Charleston both received hundreds of thousands of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans and dispatched Indigenous slaves to the West Indies. Charleston became, at the same time, a redistribution center for internal slave sales among American colonies and, later, states. Following the United States prohibition of the international importation of slaves that took effect in 1808, Charleston continued as a “hub of human trafficking,” attracting sellers and buyers from the southern interior. Slaveholders from the border states of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware were losing productivity on depleted lands, so they sold masses of enslaved people through Charleston to the newly seized lands of the Deep South, wrested from Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, and other Indigenous people in the throes of federal Indian removal from the 1810s through the 1840s. From the early 1700s through the mid-1800s, Charleston was a primary slave trade portal, eventually losing ground to New Orleans and Richmond, Virginia, in domestic trafficking numbers in the nineteenth century, but consistently ranking among the top few sites of human import and export.4
“Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina. From a sketch by Eyre Crowe,” Illustrated London News (November 29, 1856), collected in vol. 29, July–December 1856 (London: William Little, [1857]), 555.
The presence of enslaved Indigenous people and, increasingly, enslaved Africans, fueled a roaring economy and shaped the flamboyant local identity of the Lowcountry super-rich. In wealth, manners, and reputation for high-minded sociality along the lines of English gentry, Charlestonians surpassed all other southern city dwellers. By the early 1800s, Charleston slaveholders possessed 82 percent of the city’s wealth, and most loans in South Carolina were secured with slaves as collateral.5 Charlestonians rolled in financial returns from interests in slave production, slave sales and mortgages, and cotton land speculation to the west. They flaunted their glamorous lifestyle, too, erecting manor homes like Robert Martin’s, swaddling themselves in imported textiles, draping their wives and daughters in jewelry, and likening their society to ancient Greece and Rome.6
Charleston had reached its economic apex prior to the American Revolution. War damage and fluctuations in the financial markets (especially a decrease in cotton prices in 1819 and a national financial panic in 1837) disrupted the city’s so-called golden age of the 1700s.7 This downward turn in the early 1800s was the period in which Rose was probably born. But decades after this decline, the town still glowed with the bronzed patina of old money. Fanny Kemble, the English actress married into a Georgia planter family, first visited Charleston in 1838 and marveled at the town’s elegant aspect:
The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other of the American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, it is a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the Northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity.8
New England writer Frederick Law Olmsted commented similarly, if less loquaciously, about his visit in the 1850s: “Charleston, more than any town at the North, has the character of an old town, where careful government and the influence of social organization has long been in operation.” The “careful government” to which Olmsted referred, as well as the “social organization,” operated in tandem to keep enslaved people subject to the will of wealthy white overlords.9
By the 1850s, after Rose had given birth to Ashley, Carolina was once again scaling the heights of slave-produced profit. Money flowed into planters’ pockets and merchants’ coffers not only from rice but also from cotton, the crop that had spurred the industrial revolution in England. After Eli Whitney’s invention of a machine that revolutionized the efficient separation of the fiber from the seed in 1793, cotton production and profits had soared. As mentioned in chapter 2, planters along the southeastern coast had begun cultivating a silky, long-grain variety of the plant called sea island cotton in the 1790s. Would-be planters like Martin who were not aristocracy but hoping to become wealthy enough to join the old coastal clans’ social set moved inland in greater numbers during the first decades of the 1800s to raise short-staple cotton, the basic stuff of the lion’s share of global textile production.10
Slavery continued to underwrite the wealth of this place, and most free white residents discounted the immorality of it by insisting that Black people were inferior and therefore destined to serve others. They told themselves that this unequal system actually bettered the lives of the enslaved. Abolitionist Angelina Grimké described the internal contradiction of slave society in an 1829 diary entry. After tracing the travails of a Black boy, John, who had run away because of a whipping threatened by her own brother, Grimké sharply observed: “O, who can paint the horrors of slavery & yet so hard is the natural heart that I am continually told that their situation is very good, much better than that of their owners.” When Grimké “pled the case of humanity” in defense of the fearful boy, she elicited her brother’s rage.11 But gain built on suffering produced an excess of risk, a reality white Charlestonians keenly felt, betraying their actual understanding of tense racial relations. Here, the glitz was shadowed by what Harriet Martineau called a “moral gloom.” This gloom “oppress[ed] the spirit of the stranger” in Charleston and fomented the discomfort of residents who were “never content” in a “society…composed of two classes, which entertain a mortal dread of each other.”12
The presence of a mistreated and commodified Black majority fed anxiety among white elites, who built an elaborate apparatus of surveillance and punishment between the late 1700s and early 1800s to cauterize resistance and ensure compliance. The only way to compel submission was through force—the force of physical violence, the force of psychological threat, the force of intimidating brick, stone, and iron environments. Charleston constructed an “architecture of racial control” made up of private homes surrounded by high walls, as we have seen, and municipal watchtowers and workhouses.13 City officials fostered a pseudo-militarization of public space consisting of a hired slave patrol that harassed Black people who were out on the streets without written passes or after curfew or who failed to display the “slave badges” required by law for unfree people hired out by their owners to work for others in the city. Following a thwarted rebellion organized by formerly enslaved carpenter Denmark Vesey in 1822, city leaders ordered the construction of a military-grade arsenal stocked with weaponry and manned by soldiers (where the Citadel military college campus stands today).14 This is the intimidating infrastructure that Frederick Law Olmsted would make special note of in his travelogue, highlighting the “frequent drumming…the citadel, the guard-house…the frequent parades of militia…and especially the numerous armed police, which is under military discipline.”15
The Charleston Work House jail. Image published by S. T. Souder, 263 King Street (between 1870 and 1890?). Library of Congress.
Charleston also fine-tuned government-run pr
ograms of torture, which slave owners could access for a price. By the early 1800s, the city had institutionalized the violent correction of unfree people in a local holding facility known as the Work House. The development of the Work House as a notorious site of slave punishment, known to city residents, country planters, and abolitionists in the North, had occurred gradually over time. Built in 1738 on the outskirts of the city and originally intended to house impoverished white people who would work for their keep, as well as white elderly and disabled people, the Charleston Work House later took on a punitive and racial cast. In the mid-1700s, so-called criminals and people with illnesses were consigned to the Work House alongside the “worthy” poor, as the facility served various functions.16 When white residents complained about the mixed cohabitation of whites, Blacks, the needy, and criminal detainees there, the city funded a separate building on the extensive existing four-acre lot at the intersection of Magazine and Queen streets for the “confinement and correction” of “fugitive seamen, runaway slaves, vagrants, and disorderly people.” In piecemeal fashion, the city was creating what amounted to a multipurpose social services and imprisonment campus. In 1768, this new facility, located on the same large lot as the home for the poor and elderly and a hospital, was used to incarcerate accused criminals of all races. The criminal corrections facility, which became known by the same name as the whole complex—the Work House—was destroyed in 1780 in a Revolutionary War battle, leading city officials to temporarily rent a sugar factory for the housing and punishment of criminals. By 1783 a rebuilt structure in the original workhouse complex was holding an inmate population skewed toward enslaved Black people. Revamped city management in 1839 tightened operations such that the Work House operated primarily as a punishment center for slaves but still functioned as a punitive facility for miscreants of any race picked up by the city guard. Here, the major objective would be the “correcting of slaves,” and the warden’s first duty was to oversee whippings.17 Enslavers in the city and on surrounding rural estates, such as Middleton Place, could send owned people who displeased them to this facility and relieve themselves of meting out messy corporal punishment. Work House wardens whipped and flayed unfree people for a charge, based on set prices.18