Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (review)

Abstract

406Southern Cultures study of a major educational leader. One hopes that his efforts will inspire other historians to look carefully at the men and women who have guided southern higher learning into the modern era. Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885. By Bernard E. Powers, Jr. University of Arkansas Press, 1994. 384 pp. Cloth, $36.00. Reviewed by Charles Pete T. Banner-Haley, associate professor of history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. South Carolina has loomed large in southern studies and properly so. It is a state that has a rich and diverse history not only regionally but also nationally. Well known as the first state to secede and thus plummet the nation into the Civil War, South Carolina is also a state that, after Virginia, brought forth an abundance of cultural, political, and intellectual voices. This was, after all, the state that produced John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond and the Hammond family, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Lowndes Yancey, Denmark Vesey, Robert Smalls, Alonzo R. Ransier, Robert C. DeLarge, and Francis L. Cardozo. The first five of those named are certainly familiar to students of southern history and American history in general. With the exception of Vesey—familiar to students of African American history—the remaining five are not as well known. Either free-born or ex-slave, they are all African Americans who did much to shape the state of South Carolina in the antebellum period and in the Reconstruction era. Most people who know anything about South Carolina history know that John C. Calhoun was a powerful and articulate exponent of states' rights, minority rights (the minority here being slaveholding southerners), and the highly contentious theory of nullification . Recently, Calhoun's exposition on minority rights and representation has been advanced from an unlikely source: the African American legal scholar and lawyer Lani Guinier. Guinier argued Calhoun's position in favor of proportional representation for the African American minority. The power and influence of South Carolina looms large indeed. Scholars of the South have spent a considerable amount of time studying South Carolina. Lacy K. Ford and Peter Colcanis, for example, have examined the yeomen of the upcountry and low country in the antebellum period. And Peter Wood and Daniel Littlefield have done extensive work on blacks in the colonial period. The interest in South Carolina has intensified over the last decade and a half as the studies have moved from the colonial and antebellum periods into the Civil War and Reconstruction. Bernard E. Powers, Jr.'s, Black Charlestonians goes even farther: it looks not only at the Civil War and Reconstruction but also continues to the eve of what Rayford Logan so memorably called the "The Nadir of the Negro." Powers has written a social history of black Charlestonians that deserves a wide and careful reading. He has built upon the best studies of the area produced by historians such as Joel Williamson and Thomas Holt to give a rich and fascinating portrait of black life, culture, and economy in nineteenth-century Charleston. Since South Carolina and Charleston, in particular, were culturally and socially diverse, many important lessons can be culled from their history. As in so much else, Charleston, South Carolina, stands as a Reviews407 metaphor for our nation's present struggles regarding race and race relations. Powers tells us that "although this study is about the condition of black lives, goals, strategies, and attitudes, the circumstances in which these developed were influenced by blacks' interactions with whites." South Carolina was a southern state that had more people of African descent than of European ancestry. So many of the people of South Carolina were imported from Africa that the low country of South Carolina as well as the region along the coast of Georgia sustained the most Africanized slave communities in the nation. It would be an easy temptation for Powers or any African American historian to trumpet the Afrocentric horn, but Powers refrains and instead lets the evidence speak for itself. The story that is told here is indeed imbued with Africanity as well as a creolization that should make us ponder ever more deeply just what constitutes American...