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ON EMPIRE'S SHORE: FREE AND UNFREE WORKERS IN GALVESTON, TEXAS, 1840–1860
| By Robert S. Shelton |
Cleveland State University |
| During the summer of 1854 the editor of a Texas newspaper wrote in anguish that dances attended by blacks and working-class whites were common in the state's larger cities and that anyone observing such an event "almost imagines himself in the land of amalgamation, abolition meetings, and women's rights conventions." The illegal but common practice of allowing slaves to hire out their own labor and find their own housing, the editor complained, had led them to "impudence" and the taking up of such alarming habits as smoking, gambling, drinking, and carousing with "low, unprincipled white men," who "because they are conscious that they do not deserve the respect of decent persons of their own color...resort to Negrodom for society and sympathy." If such practices were left unchecked by proper authorities, the editor warned, "we will ere long have a Southampton insurrection, or a general Negro stampede for Mexico." The editor then urged the board of aldermen to enact stricter ordinances to control the behavior of slaves—and of "low, unprincipled" whites.1 |
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As the editor's observations suggest, in antebellum southern cities such as Galveston—the small but thriving seaport that served as Texas's commercial emporium—poor whites and enslaved African-Americans at times interacted in ways uncommon in southern slave society and unsettling to the slaveholders whose economic, social, and political dominance required a unified white commitment to black inferiority. Social interaction among enslaved black and "common" white people, who shared few of the material advantages of white supremacy, represented a dangerous blurring of established racial lines and posed a potential threat to the social control of slaveholders and to the rigid hierarchy of southern slave society. Such relations did indeed develop, however, as African-American bondspeople and white casual laborers in Galveston spent much of their waking hours together working at the most menial and arduous tasks; living side-by-side in cheap houses, shacks, and shanties; and socializing in homes, liquor stores, brothels, saloons, and on beaches away from the immediate supervision of authorities. As in other antebellum port cities, the degree of interracial socialization in Galveston worried the slaveholding elite to such an extent that the city repeatedly passed laws carrying increasingly harsh penalties designed to draw more clearly the color line between black and white workers.2 |
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Historians have long recognized that the urban landscape proved inhospitable to the kind of slavery found on the South's plantations. In southern cities, common practices such as allowing slaves to find their own jobs, earn their own wages, rent their own dwellings, and manage their own time bred an independence that eroded the discipline of slavery. Moreover, as scholars have abundantly documented, and slaveholders frequently lamented, free black citydwellers further undermined slavery by providing enslaved African-Americans information, sources and markets for illicitly traded goods, domestic partners, and temporary and permanent refuge.3 Perhaps what distinguished Galveston among southern urban areas, however, was the virtual absence of free persons of color—only two by 1860 owing to state and local laws that drove free blacks out of the state, into hiding, or back into slavery. Consequently, in Galveston slaves had far more contact with poor white casual laborers than with free black people. Yet even in areas of the South with large free black populations varying degrees of interaction between enslaved African-Americans and poor non-slaveholding white people have been discovered by scholars studying northern colonial cities and the antebellum southern countryside.4 Furthermore, scholarship of Atlantic seamen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has revealed a rough equality, albeit frequently marked by racism and white supremacy, that existed in the maritime world on ship and shore.5 These findings modify the conclusions of historians who have argued that the legal segregation that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century originated during Reconstruction as an alternative, accepted by African-Americans, to the exclusion of black people from public accommodations and services that had prevailed during the period of slavery.6 |
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