Race, residence and ideology: Charleston, South Carolina in the mid-nineteenth century

Abstract

By the eve of the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina had become the centre of a moral order which was articulated by Tidewater planters who transformed the city, not into an industrial metropolis on the Northern pattern, but into a leisure capital. The utilitarian notions of conventional American urban theory have little to contribute to understanding the allocation of residential space, which was facilitated less by competitive processes than by control along class and racial lines. Analysis of manuscript Federal population census schedules, city directories and local census data for 1860 reveals not only the micro-segregated patterns of a slave city, but also the relegation to the urban periphery of the free black population. A comparable analysis for 1880 shows much less change than might be expected in a city so greatly disrupted by military and political events, thereby supporting recent interpretations which emphasize the failure of Reconstruction to impose lasting change on South Carolina society.