Michael D. Thompson - Working on the Dock of the Bay

Labor and Enterprise in
an Antebellum Southern Port

2015 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Thompson, Michael D.

Working on the dock of the bay : labor and enterprise in an antebellum Southern port / Michael D. Thompson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61117-474-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61117-475-5 (ebook) 1. StevedoresSouth CarolinaCharlestonHistory19th century. 2. African American stevedoresSouth CarolinaCharleston--History19th century. 3. LaborSouth CarolinaCharlestonHistory19th century. 4. Charleston (S.C.)Race relationsHistory19th century. 5. Charleston (S.C.)Economic conditions19th century. 6. Charleston (S.C.)Social conditions19th century. I. Title.

HD8039.L82U695 2015

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Cover illustration: Henry Alexander Ogden (after his original), South CarolinaOur Great National IndustryShipping Cotton from Charleston to Foreign and Domestic PortsA Scene on North Commercial Wharf. From Frank Leslies Illustrated, November 16, 1878. Courtesy of Deborah C. Pollack.

Like any long-term project, this book benefitted from the support and assistance of many selfless individuals. My most profound thanks goes first and foremost to my mentor, Jim Roark, who generously and patiently has guided my professional and scholarly development over the past decade. I similarly owe a debt of gratitude to David Gleeson for taking an early interest in my work and for offering regular encouragement ever since. I am grateful as well to my editor, Alex Moore, for fielding the countless questions of a first-time author and for offering thoughtful and always constructive feedback. The writing and revising of this book also was facilitated by much appreciated comments and suggestions from Jonathan Prude, David Eltis, Bernard Powers, Jeffrey Bolster, Dylan Penningroth, James Schmidt, Leon Fink, Brian Luskey, Wendy Woloson, Glenn Gordinier, Kerry Taylor, Graeme Milne, and the anonymous peer reviewers for the University of South Carolina Press and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Meanwhile it was my privilege to encounter many of the nations most outstanding and professional archivists and librarians while conducting the research for this book. I especially would like to thank Allen Stokes, Henry Fulmer, Robin Copp, Graham Duncan, Brian Cuthrell, Charles Lesser, Faye Jensen, Mary Jo Fairchild, Mike Coker, Jane Aldrich, Nic Butler, Harlan Greene, Eric Emerson, Carol Jones, Janice Knight, Laura Clark Brown, and Amy McDonald. Both the research and writing of this book received generous financial support from Emory Universitys Department of History and Laney Graduate School; the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; the South Caroliniana Library and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina; the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture and the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston; the Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies at Mystic Seaport; the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the John Hope Franklin Collection for African and African American Documentation at Duke University.

Finally, I am appreciative and thankful for the abounding friendship of former graduate school classmates as well as many colleagues at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, particularly Zeb Baker, Aaron Althouse, James Guilfoyle, and Will Kuby. But without the unwavering love and support of my familymy wife, Melissa; my son, Benjamin; my daughter, Lily; my father, Howard; my mother, Rochelle; and my brother, Mattthe completion of this book would not have been possible. Thank you, and I love you.

On October 28, 1869, hundreds of dockworkers gathered for an emergency meeting along Charlestons commercial waterfront. George B. Stoddard, a forty-seven-year-old Massachusetts-born stevedore who had settled in the city during the 1850s by way of Mobile, had been fired while loading the ship A. B. Wyman. A skilled and experienced cotton stower, Stoddard was dismissed not for professional deficiencies but because he was a white Republican and a member of the ports mostly black Longshoremens Protective Union Association. Notwithstanding the mounds of cotton bales blanketing the wharves and awaiting shipment, Charlestons exporters refused to any longer engage those vessels employing Stoddard. Either the ship or the stevedore had to go. In the wake of Stoddards discharge, fellow union members immediately initiated a strike and then assembled to discuss further actions. Convinced that this conflict was but the first move of a determined effort to crush out the longshoremen who have demanded and received higher wages in recent years, the attendees agreed to prolong the work stoppage until the shippers withdraw all discrimination against longshoremen on account of their political sentiments, whether such members be Republicans or Democrats. Utterly dependent upon these dockworkers vital labor and confronted with united resolve, the exporters quickly capitulated and the longshoremenincluding George B. Stoddardreturned to work by November 2.

This episode is remarkable not least because G. B. Stoddard just years prior had led Charlestons white master stevedores in public remonstrations against enslaved black competitors, many of whom as freedmen risked their livelihoods in 1869 to aid their former rival and to save their now common labor union.

How was such an effective association, predominantly made up of former slaves, possible so soon after the Civil War? Southerners unbudgeable commitment to the extensive ownership and employment of black slave laborers, as well as racial, ethnic, social, political, and occupational divisions among workers, had precluded the formation of waterfront labor organizations in antebellum Charleston. Though these schisms and contests at times persisted after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the citys postbellum dockworkers unitedand struckoften and long enough to extract employer concessions ranging from regular work hours and higher hourly wages to overtime pay and the exclusive use of union members. Even on wars eve a few years earlier, such explicit workplace demands and negotiations remained muffled and latent, and such tangible and collective advances proved unattainable. But far from passively accepting their exploitation, those toiling along Charlestons waterfront and elsewhere in the urban and maritime Old South audaciously laid the groundwork for astounding triumphs in the otherwise tragic New South.

This long and arduous struggle to shape the terms of wharf labor neither began nor ended during the early to mid-nineteenth century, however.

Impactful and relevant far beyond Charleston and the South, this preCivil War confrontation and its complicated dynamics of race, class, and labor relations should be viewed through the street-level experiences and perspectives of the workingmen, and occasionally workingwomen. Like their postbellum and present-day counterparts, those laboring on the wharves and levees of antebellum citieswhether in Charleston or New Orleans, New York or Boston, or elsewhere in the Atlantic Worldwere indispensable to the flow of commodities into and out of these ports. So crucial were these workers, in fact, that government authorities and employers everywhere wrestled with balancing on the one hand the necessity of free movements and communications among the labor force, and the impulse on the other hand to manage those who worked, especially if coerced or enslaved. But despite their large numbers and the key role that waterfront workers played in these cities pre-mechanized, labor-intensive commercial economies, too little is known about who these laborers were and the work they performed. Though scholars have explored the history of dockworkers in ports throughout the world, they have given little attention to waterfront laborers and dock work in the preCivil War American South or in any slave society. Labor, however, can be further used as a prism to elucidate the borders of slavery and freedom, restriction and agency, reaction and progress, and workers liminal position betwixt and between.