Jeffery Strickland

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Jeffery Strickland | How the Germans Became White Southerners: German Immigrants and African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, 1860–1880 | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.1 | The History Cooperative

How the Germans Became White Southerners: German Immigrants and African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, 1860–1880

GERMAN IMMIGRANTS and African Americans enjoyed relatively positive social, economic, and political relations during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, especially when compared to relations between white and black southerners. The Germans were a middleman minority community, occupying a middle tier on the racial and ethnic hierarchy below white southerners and above African Americans.¹ Exceptional relations declined in the 1870s, coinciding with the failure of Reconstruction and the so-called Democratic Redemption of 1876. It is my intention in this essay to provide some examples of positive relations between German and black Charlestonians, admittedly through the lens of the German community, and to demonstrate the ways Germans increasingly exhibited their desire to become white southerners after the Civil War, consequently degrading relations with African Americans. Relations between these ethnic groups shaped the social, economic, and political relations in the city.	1
Scholars have long studied European immigrants in the South, but their attention to German—African American relations remains scant. Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman's excellent essay, "Natives and Immigrants, Free Men, and Slaves," offered the greatest inspiration for this author's research on the Germans in Charleston, but the works of Walter Kamphoefner, Hartmut Keil, and Dennis Rousey also have inspired him to think about the special relationship between German immigrants and black southerners as well as the larger implications of the author's study.² It is difficult to explain the Germans' transition to becoming white southerners without situating the case study within a few historiographical trajectories, mainly urban slavery; pre-industrial economic history; Reconstruction social and political history; and, of course, mid-nineteenth-century immigration history.³ As the title aptly suggests, this essay is interested in the ways Germans became white southerners.⁴ They never stopped being German, but they increasingly identified themselves as white southerners. White southerners as an ethnic group, in the main, remained committed to white supremacy pre- and postemancipation, and that commitment created tension between whites and blacks. White southerners were overwhelmingly wedded to the Democratic Party, and their social and political spheres were inseparable. By 1876, Germans identified with white southern Democrats, some faster than others, while some Germans migrated out, and others withdrew from public life altogether.	2
The size of the German population was small but demographically significant. In 1860 German immigrants comprised 5 percent of the total population and 9 percent of the white population in Charleston. By 1880 the German population had declined considerably. Most of the Germans in the interim had entered the United States at some other port and gradually made their way to Charleston. The German immigrant community was a distinct minority, outnumbered by both black and white southerners. (See Tables 1 and 2.) German and general European immigration to South Carolina lagged far behind levels realized in the North and Midwest and even other southern states, including Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia. In 1866 the South Carolina legislature created a Bureau of Immigration to recruit immigrants from European countries, but primarily Germany and Ireland. G. A. Neuffer, a German hotelkeeper in Charleston, argued that South Carolina immigration officials had botched the state's post—Civil War efforts to increase immigration from Germany and Ireland. Neuffer also believed that although South Carolina had millions of acres of fertile land available, landowners were selling their land at prices well above the market rate so immigrant farmers went elsewhere.⁵ Some Germans immigrated to Charleston after the Civil War, but most had entered during the 1850s. The Charleston-born German American population was larger than the first generation, but its members largely identified with white southerners—they were southern whites first and German Americans second.	. . .

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