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

Author:Michael D. Thompson [Thompson, Michael D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, Business & Economics, Industries, Transportation
ISBN: 9781611174755
Google: Cs27BwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-04-15T02:51:07+00:00

NOTE.—The above statement holds good, with the exception, in our case, that the steamer Isabel had white acclimated persons to load and discharge early in the season, but not on the last trip.

MORDECAI & CO.152

During the 1854 epidemic, Simons had attempted to ensure that Captain Magee and the stevedore employed only blacks—who were assumed to be acclimated and indeed were far less susceptible to yellow fever—to unload the Aquatic. Also in 1854, William Hume reported that the loading of two Spanish polacres, the Concha and the Columbus, “was performed by acclimated negroes,” a fact deemed to have averted the further propagation of the disease from these vessels into the community.153 Increasingly, then, despite blacks’ vulnerability to both cholera and robust labor competition, Irish and other unacclimated white workers in Charleston were at a severe disadvantage in the contest for lightering and waterfront work during the lengthy fever season.

Even those white master stevedores who claimed acclimation from their long residence in the city now faced the added impediment of their dubious immunity. When entreating state and local lawmakers for protection from enslaved competitors, these skilled contractors felt obliged to ask, “in whom can the stranger Captain place the most reliance when he has to fly from the epidemic, to take care of his ship or when the hurricane and epidemic both prevail, as is often the case?”154 Concerned on the one hand about sedition, secretion, and theft among slaves, and pressured on the other both by powerful slave-hiring interests and growing consternation over the employment of “febrile” whites, waterfront employers’ response was far from clear.

White immigrant draymen also were unable to escape the impediment of their unacclimated status. Prompted by the outbreak of yellow fever during the summer of 1856, the City Council appointed a special committee to examine the quarantine system and suggest improvements. In April 1857 the committee published its findings, written by William Hume, and recommended that a wharf and warehouses on the city’s western Ashley River waterfront—an area where far fewer immigrants resided—be acquired for the landing and storage of “infected” cargo lightered from the quarantine ground. Then, based on the principle that “where there is no unacclimated population, there will be no yellow fever,” the committee suggested “That these cargos shall remain in these stores until wanted for immediate consumption, when they shall be delivered to acclimated negro draymen, to be conveyed on drays to their proper destination.” The report also called for draymen to be “known,” further minimizing the likelihood that recently arrived immigrant draymen, or even country slaves, would be hired to transport this cargo.155

Despite the protests of Irish and German draymen and the political discomfiture of a mayor elected with the votes of immigrant waterfront and transportation workers, Hume reiterated that the key to thwarting the spread of the “poison” into the rest of the city was that “the draymen should be acclimated negros [sic].”156 At least in this case, then, acclimation alone was not sufficient; though regarded as not entirely white in

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