Unequal Freedoms

Can a few thousand newcomers alter social, economic, and political relationships in an established southern port city with a well-defined power structure forged to sustain an entrenched slave society? Jeff Strickland argues in Unequal Freedoms that the wave of German and Irish immigration that reached Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1840s and 1850s did just that as these immigrants interacted with the much larger and established populations of African Americans, enslaved and free, and native white southerners. Of the two major immigrant groups in the city, Strickland focuses primarily on the Germans, less numerous but more economically influential than the Irish. Strickland documents the evolving racial and ethnic relations in Charleston between the late 1840s, when revolutions in Europe scattered millions, and 1877, when Reconstruction ended with a clear victory for white supremacy. German immigrants, Strickland argues, mediated between white southerners, who did not initially accept them as equals, and black southerners, whom the Germans (for self-interested reasons) fostered positive relationships, at least before emancipation. The nature of German interaction with African Americans was mixed. They lived in the same areas of town; some German men took slave concubines, and German merchants and grocers sold alcohol illegally to enslaved and free blacks. As business owners and shopkeepers, the Germans stood apart from the Irish who were overwhelmingly working-class and often found themselves in direct competition with enslaved and free black artisans and mechanics

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