slave housing charleston

8/16/2019 Slave Housing Charleston

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BERNARD L HERMAN

Slave and Servant Housing in

Charleston1770-1 820

ABSTRACT

Studies of Charleston, South Carolina, architecture and archae-ology tend to focus on the artifacts and landscapes of the city’swhite populace. This essay builds on the growing wealth ofarchaeologically recovered African-American material cultureand initiates a discussion on Charleston’s slave quarters andtheir settings.

Billy Robinson claimed innocence. Standingbefore the justices trying the plotters in DenmarkVesey’s thwarted slave insurrection, Robinson lis-tened attentively first to his accuser and then tothe witnesses in his defense. Perault Strohecker,slave to a Cumberland Street blacksmith, impli-cated Billy Robinson in the insurrection, averringthat the defendant was intimate with other plot-ters already convicted and that after their arrestshe tried to organize a scheme to rescue Veseyand those condemned with him from hanging.Perault Strohecker testified that at least two ofthe conversations he shared with the accusedtook place at Billy Robinson’s own house. BillyRobinson’s attorney summoned Andrew Miller,the white boardinghouse keeper who kept thepremises where the defendant lived, to answerPerault Strohecker’s claims. Miller stated(Pearson 1998): ”I live in a house in ElliotStreet-there are two rooms on a floor the frontoccupied by Mr. Howe [who worked as a grocer

on nearby Tradd Street]-the back by mE-Billyoccupies a room above the Kitchen and no onecan go into his room without passing through myKitchen-I never saw Perault go into Billy’sroom or into my Yard-Billy has lived in thatroom for 3 years.”

Howe, along with two other witnesses appar-ently living in Miller’s boardinghouse, supportedtheir landlord’s contention that Billy Robinsonwas innocent because Perault could never have

rendezvoused with Billy Robinson in Robinson’squarters without their seeing him enter and leave.They did not witness such a meeting, thus itcould not have happened. Moreover, they re-

ported that Billy Robinson was of good charac-ter and tractable disposition. “Great mildness hepossesses,” offered one witness. On cross exami-nation, though, Perault Strohecker “describedBilly’s residence exactly as Mr. Miller haddone’,- and effectiv ely demolished BillyRobinson’s architectural defense. The followingday the court sentenced Billy Robinson to death,and then showed clemency, commuting hangingto deportation “out of the state by sea on thefirst opportunity” with the proviso, “death for areturn” (Pearson, 1998).

Billy Robinson’s defense, largely forgotten inthe greater gripping narrative of DenmarkVesey’s Revolt, focused on the most basic ofeveryday actions and spaces, a private meetingbetween two slaves in a servants’ quarter, a placetheir masters claimed to surveil. The significanceof Billy Robinson’s protestations of innocencelies in how the accused drew on white percep-tions of urban space and the implicit assumptionsthey held about their ability to regulate not onlythat space, but the people in it. Billy Robinsonrecognized a cultural blindness in his masters andattempted to exploit it first to the ends of insur-rection and then as a means for acquittal. Theplot for the insurrection would never have ad-vanced so far if black Charlestonians, slave andfree, had not acquired an invisibility engenderedby white custom, habit, and arrogance. Fromthis perspective Billy Robinson’s defense reveals

more than a desperate ploy to win acquittal; it isabout urban settings where the authority andidentity of the processional landscape of the plan-tation countryside and city merchants’ mansionsexist in a larger context of segmented social andcultural relationships (Upton 1988). BillyRobinson and his fellow conspirators seen froma slaveholder’s vantage point occupied the mar-ginal spaces of the city, the street, work yards,and back lot domestic compounds. For slaves

Historical Archaeology, 1999, 33(3) : 8- 10 1Permission to reprint required.


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SLAVE AND SERVANT HOUSING IN CHARLESTON, 1770-1820 89

Figure 1. 1739 Roberts and Toms map of Charleston. Elliott Street extends just below Broad Street from the East Baywaterfront toward Church Street, and is marked by two arrow points. (Courtesy of The Charleston Museum.)

and many free African Americans, those samespaces defined a locus of political and economicagency; but what were those spaces? What was

the urban architecture of slavery in Charleston

and other Southern cities? Additionally, how didthe slave spaces associated with Charleston townhouses relate to the architecture of servants and

service in Northern and English cities? In the


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context of town house design, the answer residesin the organization of domestic work and lodgingspaces in, and behind, the dwelling.

Andrew Miller’s testimony in Billy Robinson’s

defense offers a way into the architectural topog-raphy of urban slavery. Andrew Miller describeda house one room wide and two rooms deepwhere he lived with several other white lodgersoccupying different rooms. Behind the housestood Miller’s kitchen, and for three years BillyRobinson lived in its second-story apartment.Miller asserted that anyone going in or out ofBilly Robinson’s quarters necessarily camethrough his kitchen and to his notice.

A row of four town houses reflecting this ar-rangement remains standing on Elliott Street justabove its intersection with the city’s CooperRiver waterfront (Figure 1). Each of the dwell-ings occupies the full span of its street frontageand contains a ground-floor commercial area andupper-story living spaces. In 22 Elliott Street,the ground-floor arrangement included street ac-cess into a heated shop paneled with planed andbeaded cypress boards. While an outside entryprovided direct access into this business roomfrom the street, a second arched passage extendedalongside the shop and provided separate accessto the ground-floor back room, stair, and workyard behind the house. The stair leading to theupper stories rose from a position abutting thepassage, turned over the passage, and ascended toa spacious landing that opened into a 16 x 25 ft(5 x 8 m) front parlor and smaller back diningroom. The two second-floor rooms were the bestfinished in the house. The front parlor possessedpaneled wainscot with applied astragal moldingsand a relatively plain neoclassical mantelpiecedistinguished by its reeded pilasters and intricatebed molding. The ground-floor passage alsoopened onto the yard that continued roughly 50ft. (15 m) to the kitchen with its second-storyservants’ rooms. The kitchen faced the rear ofthe house, which presented multiple possibilitiesfor access. The covered passage led back out tothe street, a door in the rear elevation openedinto the heated back room of the main house,

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33( 3)

and a second narrower door apparently openedunder the stair. The yard itself was a work areapresenting either a brick paved surface or crushof shell, dirt, bone, and debris.

Billy Robinson’s lodgings occupied the singleroom most removed from the street. When An-drew Miller testified that Perault Strohecker hadto pass through “my kitchen” to get to BillyRobinson’s room, he recognized only one ele-ment in a more complicated journey. Passing inand out of Billy Robinson’s lodgings required apassage that led through and under the house. Inthe architectural settings of the surviving ElliottStreet houses, householders like Andrew Miller

literally placed themselves above commerce anddomestic work. The views afforded of the workyard and the street were intrinsically proprietorial.The householder looked down into the open ex-panse of yard that separated the kitchen and itsupper lodgings from the house; the householderoccupied the second-story rooms as a dwellingwhich stood above the world of work and com-merce. Despite the advantages of elevation andpassage, the householder’s dwelling remainedporous and vulnerable in key ways. AndrewMiller, for example, asserted his control overBilly Robinson’s movements through continuity-he held visual authority over adjoining spaces.The ability to actually penetrate Billy Robinson’slodgings never enters into Miller’s testimony.Andrew Miller’s claims center on his ability tomonitor passage through his spaces, but they donot reach past the door into Billy Robinson’sroom.

Andrew Miller’s narrative identifies severalcategories of domestic space: his house, hisKITCHEN Billy Robinson’s lodgings, and the urbanlot that contained all the buildings. The signifi-cance of the setting in the context of BillyRobinson’s trial centered on explicit distinctionsdrawn between those categories, in particular thearchitectural and social relationships representedby the location and placement of service andservants’ quarters in relationship to the principaldwelling. Andrew Miller’s evidence identifiesimplicit relationships between rooms and build-


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ings and the possibilities for movement, observedand unobserved, in and out of those spaces. Theassertion of innocence on the presumption ofsurveillance raises questions surrounding the

“transparency” of servants and their ability toclaim and transgress the household spaces oftheir masters. Understanding the meaning ofBilly Robinson’s defense depends on the abilityto reconstruct those spaces, their settings, andtheir significance to the people who built andoccupied them. To do this one needs to startreading Charleston’s architectural history from theworld of Billy Robinson’s quarter.

In Charleston the dwelling represented only

one element in an ensemble of buildings thatincluded kitchen, washhouse, quarters, privies,stables, work yards, gardens, and a variety ofother structures ranging from rickety gardensheds to two-story brick warehouses. Throughthe usage of everyday life and work, the urbanlot with all its attendant buildings (and not justthe principal dwelling) defined the Charlestontown house. The organization and architecturalcontent of individual lots varied according to

shape and size of the property, the form of themain dwelling, the household economy, and thelocation of the property within the city. Regard-less of size, as one late-18th-century observerwrote, the Charleston town house at a minimumwas the product of two elements: “at presentthere are not quite twelve hundred dwellinghouses, with nearly as many kitchens which arebuilt separate” (Chalmers 1790:333).

Billy Robinson’s Elliott Street ran from the

Cooper River waterfront to Church Street. Oneof the city’s older and narrower streets, Elliottwas interrupted by Bedon’s and Gadsden’s Alleysthat intersected with Tradd to the south andBroad to the north. In 1822 Elliott Street wasan environment defined largely by grocers’ shopsand boardinghouses. Of the 22 residents betweenEast Bay Street and Gadsden’s Alley alone, 8identified themselves as grocers and 4 as eitherboardinghouse operators or residents. The re-

maining population included a cooper, barber,hair dresser, mariner, and cigar maker. Lined

with commercial premises and inhabited by indi-viduals operating at the lower end of the eco-nomic spectrum, the streetfront architecture andoccupational profile of Elliott Street possessed

more in common with Philadelphia and Bostonthan with nearby streets in Charleston. TheElliott Street of Billy Robinson’s day also repre-sented a street in social decline. Merchanthouses, along with the shops of tailors, a printer,and watchmaker had dominated the street a gen-eration earlier. Unmentioned in street directories,however, were the slaves like Billy Robinsonwho occupied quarters located behind the shopsand boardinghouses.

Twice ravaged by fires in 1740 and 1778,Elliott Street presented a streetscape that was theresult of successive rebuilding efforts (Stoney1987:133). Among the houses and shops thatfronted the street were the double tenementscommissioned by tailor William Mills, GeorgeGibbs’s three-story dwelling and bakery, and coo-per David Saylor’s compact but fashionable bricktown house with its paneled interiors. Thesebuildings and their neighbors followed a standardurban practice with the ground-floor front roomdedicated to commercial pursuits and the bestparlor and chambers located in the upper stories.A mid- 19th-century plat for one Elliott Streetproperty depicts the outline of half of a doubletenement. The brick two-story main house mea-sured roughly 26 50 ft. 8 x 15 m) with acovered passage leading from the street to theback lot. The passage opened into a brick-walled L-shaped yard with a two-story brickkitchen pushed back into the far corner with itsgable at right angles to the back of the house.The cooking room occupied the front half of thekitchen building with a quarter comparable toBilly Robinson’s placed in the second floor. Inthis arrangement, Andrew Miller presumed thepower of surveillance. After all, the only way inand out of Billy Robinson’s quarter was throughthe kitchen, across the yard, and down the pas-

sage to the street-three spaces that Robinson’smasters assumed they controlled.


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92 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33 3)

smaller washhouse or laundry placed behind it.Both kitchens possessed bake ovens in additionand the largest hearth. The 16 x 33 ft (5 x 10m) Cooper-Bee kitchen stood just over 15 FT (4.5

m) behind the back dining room on the groundfloor of the main house, a placement that wastypical until the mid- 19th-century when Charles-tonians began to fill in the yard between houseand kitchen with intervening rooms. Less isknown about the upper floors. The second storyand garret of the 18 x 39 ft. 5.5 x 12 m)Heyward-Washington kitchen were divided intomultiple quarters, winder stair built in thespace between the ground-floor rooms, and the

front wall led up to a narrow, unlit landing. Adoor on each side of the landing opened into afront room measuring approximately 8 x 14 FT(2.5 x 4 m) and illuminated by two windows.second partition running parallel to the ridge cre-ated a back room of nearly equal dimensions, butlit and ventilated by only a single window.Movement in and out of the back rooms appearsto have occurred only through the front quartersproducing an environment of constant intrusion

and little privacy beyond that afforded by every-day comportment. The stair continued up to apair of garret rooms, each provided with a dor-mer window and measuring just under 13 FT 4m) square.

Figure 2. Heyward-Washington house kitchen-quarter,Church Street-ground floor plan.

Kitchens with slave quarters that stood in thebackyards behind the town houses that linedCharleston’s older streets generally assumed oneof two forms (Figures 2-3). In the 18th century,the most popular configuration incorporated alarge central chimney furnished with back-to-backfireplaces. Sited in alignment with the principaldwelling, the quarters contained a kitchen facinga back entry into the ground-floor back dining

room across a small intervening yard. Behindthe kitchen, a second ground-floor door servedas a washhouse. The stair to the quarters in theupper stories of the kitchen-washhouse eitheropened into the kitchen or occupied a smalllobby entry between the two rooms and was en-tered by a separate door. The upper stories weresubdivided into numerous small rooms, each pro-vided with its own door and window. Where theplans of upper-story quarters can be recon-structed, the typical arrangement centers on oneheated room which apparently served as a sharedquarter when warmth was necessary, but not asa regularly used cooking space.

Kitchens of this type include those behind theHeyward-Washington and Cooper-Bee houses inthe older parts of Charleston (Figure 4). TheHeyward-Washington and Cooper-Bee kitchenspresented four-bay elevations with the interiorasymmetrically divided into a larger front kitchenclosest to the back entry into the house and the

Figure 3. Robinson House kitchen-quarter, Judith Street-ground floor plan.


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Figure 4. Heyward-Washington house kitchen-quarter,Church Street. (Courtesy of The Charleston Museum.)

Toward the end of the 18th century, a secondtype of slave quarter gained popularity (Figure5). The new form jettisoned the massive centerchimney arrangement, placing the fireplaces forkitchen and laundry in two separate stacks risingagainst the rear wall of the building abutting theneighboring property. The arrangement created aspace in the middle to insert a straight-run stairleading up to the second-floor quarters. On thesecond floor, the quarters on each side of thestair were often subdivided into multiple rooms,some as small as 7 ft (2 m) square. By the1820s the kitchen and washhouse with second-

story quarters emerged as the favored form for

this building. At least two factors appear tohave contributed to the ascendancy of the newkitchen plan. First, the removal of the fireplacesto the rear wall underscored the orientation of the

building to the yard and to the master’s gaze.Second, the placement of the stair, provided withits own external entry between the work rooms,clearly articulated the division of functionalspaces, each with its own avenue of accessneatly arranged by a symmetrical five-bay eleva-tion pierced with three entries announcing alter-nate paths of access to different working andlodging areas. One result of this reorganizationwas the architectural segregation of the quarter

from the kitchen. In the old center-chimneykitchens, the stair to the upper-story chamberswas reached through the kitchen proper. Thenew arrangement ostensibly restricted access inand out of a space previously open to servantsociety. One intended objective was the architec-tural segmentation and regulation of domesticspaces where servants often worked out of thesight and hearing of their masters.

The back-wall chimney arrangement achieved

the same standardized quality as its center-chim-ney predecessor. The earliest examples of thisform appear to date from the 1780s and includeunfinished upstairs lodgings, such as the servantrooms over the Bocquet kitchen on Broad Street,

Figure 5. Aiken-Rhett kitchen-quarter (on the left), Elizabeth

Street. (Courtesy of The Charleston Museum.)


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where two roughly 15-ft. (4.5-m) square lodgingrooms housed an unknown number of residentservants. In their original appearance, the tworooms possessed whitewashed walls of raw brick;

exposed, but poorly finished ceiling joists;roughly planed board partitions; and unglazedwindows. These rooms stood in marked contrastto the neat flemish bond, symmetrical, five-bayexterior of the kitchen. The juxtaposition of apublic exterior and an interior seldom entered bymasters and mistresses speaks to larger issues ofarchitectural contiguity and social differences in aworld where buildings were intended to signifyand codify the quality and texture of human re-

lationships. As the back-wall-chimney formgained popularity in the early 19th century, italso tended to incorporate multiple entries, moreprecisely defined work spaces, and slightly betterfinishes in the upper story servant rooms.

The Robinson kitchen on Judith Street, erectedin the 182Os, presented a symmetrical five-bayfront to the yard. Of the three doors, oneopened into the kitchen, one provided access tothe stair that led to the upper-story quarters, and

the third led into the washhouse. Unlike thecenter-chimney kitchens, where the front kitchenwas typically larger than the back room, the twomain ground-floor spaces contained roughly thesame area. A suite of two small rooms on ei-ther side of the landing composed the second-floor plan. Each pair of rooms consisted of aheated 10 x 14 ft. (3 x 4 m) room that adjoineda smaller 7 x 14 ft. (2 x 4 m) unheated cham-ber overlooking the dooryard below. All 4

rooms possessed individual entries that openedonto the common passage that continued up to afinished loft containing a landing and two addi-tional 12 x 14 ft (3.5 x 4 m) rooms. Similarquarters erected on the Aiken-Rhett house nextdoor were remodeled in the mid- 19th-centurywhen the kitchen was doubled in length. Thenew arrangement introduced a full-length passagerunning along the front of the room and termi-nating at either end in a large heated room pro-

vided with multiple windows. Between thesetwo rooms and off the passage, the builders

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(3)

Figure 6. Edmund Petrie house and outbuildings, ca. 1797,Queen Street. (Detail redrawn from McCrady Plat No. 464,Charleston City Archives.)

strung a range of smaller chambers along thewall backing onto the adjacent property. With-out windows of their own, these quarters em-ployed interior glazing to “borrow” light and airfrom the passage. Most Charleston kitchens with

their attendant washhouse and quarter functions,however, adhered to the Robinson kitchen andthe earlier form of the Aiken-Rhett kitchen.Variation in size and level of finish distinguishedindividual buildings, such as the 12 x 20 ft. (3.5x 6 m) kitchen washhouse erected as an L shapebehind 31 Hassell Street. Each of the twoground-floor rooms contained less than half thearea of the Robinson kitchen, and the total areaof the second-floor quarter just equaled that of

the smallest Robinson kitchen chambers. Mattersof scale aside, the Hassell Street kitchen and oth-


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SLAVE AND SERVANT HOUSING IN CHARLESTON, 1770-1820

ers like it displayed remarkable continuity interms of plan and the disposition of functions.

Although back kitchens conforming to thetypes illustrated by the Heyward-Washington and

Robinson backbuildings document the most com-mon choices, there were additional options, espe-cially in the older, more congested parts of thecity. A survey of Edward Petrie’s Queen Streetproperty in 1797 recorded a plan of a lot where

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Figure 7. Robert Geddes and Michael Cromley houses andoutbuildings, ca. 1799, King Street near Blackbird Alley.(Detail redrawnfrorn McCrady Plat No. 536, Charleston City

Archives.)

Figure 8. Charles Frish house and bakery, ca . 1801, UnionStreet. (Detail redrawnfrom McCrady Plat No. 562 Charles-ton City Archives.)

a single structure with a central chimney stackcontained two discrete kitchens with upstairsquarters for a pair of adjoining tenements(Charleston County Register Mesne ConveyanceOffice [RMCO] 1797)(Figure 6 . A plat drawnfor two neighboring houses on Blackbird Alley in1799 shows one with a one-room, two-storybrick kitchen connected to a small carriage house

and the other with a two-room gable-front


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kitchen quarter outfitted with only a single fire-place for the back room (RMCO 1799) (Figure7). Townhouses erected in the rapidly develop-ing reaches of upper King Street at the close of

the 18th century employed other plans (RMCO1790s-a; 1798). A house and store sharing a loton the corner of King and Liberty streets, forexample, were supported by one-and-one-halfstory wood kitchen similar to its gable-frontedcounterpart on Blackbird Alley, but enlarged witha small pantry built against its exterior end chim-ney. Nearby, at the intersection of King andHassell streets, a cluster of town houses pre-sented kitchen designs ranging from freestanding

outbuildings to L shapes, all exhibiting alternativeforms based on chimney placement. In othersettings, KITCHEN conforming to one of the twoprincipal types were extended as part of a rangeof backbuilding functions or acquired other usesspecific to the property. The outbuildings behinda pair of Queen Street town houses begin withcenter chimney kitchen-washhouse combinationsand then continue with storage rooms, stables,and privies (RMCO 1790s-b). The operators of

a bakery on Union Street modified their center-chimney kitchen to include a commercial bakeoven (RMCO 1800s-a)(Figure 8). What unitesthese varied solutions in Charleston’s urban land-scape is their concern with the explicit segrega-tion of service from the main body of the house,the provision for slave and servant quarterswithin these structures, and the conceptualizationof the total lot as a house of which the maindwelling was only one element.

The routes in and out of Charleston’s town-house compounds reinforced both the assertion ofdomestic authority and its very vulnerability.The 1774 Pringle House on Tradd Street illus-trates the larger pattern of access in and out ofthe city’s urban plantation landscape. The mainhouse abutted but did not front the street. Ac-cess from the street into the single house, there-fore, followed one of two routes: from the side-walk onto the piazza or from the sidewalk or

street down the carriage way. The piazza routeled to the main and most formal entry into the

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 3 3 3 )

stair passage, to a secondary entry into the break-fast room, or to a set of steps at the far end ofthe piazza which led down to the dooryards ofthe back buildings. While these two options di-

rected traffic of varying levels of formality andfamiliarity directly into the house, a third, thecarriage way, provided an access into the single-house compound at street level. Servants enter-ing by the carriage way literally passed beneaththe gaze of the occupants of the main house asthey went about their business at the rear of thehouse or among the backbuildings. Carriages orhorses carrying social equals entered nearly ateye level with the piazza. Passengers and riders

stopped at the rear steps, stepped down into theyard, then up onto the piazza, and back towardthe main entry. This mode of entry was onlyslightly less formal than entry from the sidewalk.In all instances the organization of the single-house unit ran from street to backyard wall in apattern of decreasing formality, declining architec-tural detail and finish, and increasing dirtiness.In an environment where architecture symbolizedstature, the slave’s eye view of the big house

from the quarter and the work yard spoke to dif-ferent relationships and forms of movement thanthose defined by the master’s and mistress’sguests and business associates. Billy Robinsonand Perault Strohecker, for example, relied oncustom and familiarity, moving through the inter-stices of houses with an autonomy that ultimatelysurprised and frightened their disbelieving mas-ters.

The Charleston kitchen and its upstairs quarter

was an architectural emblem of a domestic envi-ronment and social structure based on a cultureof dependent relations. The kitchen and its oc-cupants served the house, and the house and itsoccupants depended on the kitchen. Householdservants asserted their voice in the operations ofa hierarchical urban landscape that constantly castthem as dependent on white authority, but wherewhite masters inescapably depended on blackdomestic labor. The status of servant and slave

from their masters’ perspective objectified theinmates of the kitchen, washhouse, and quarter.


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SLAVE AND SERVANT HOUSING IN CHARLESTON. 1770-1820 97

Like household furnishings that functioned asbackdrops and props in the world of sociability,servants found a degree of autonomy in thetransparency that Billy Robinson sought to ex-

ploit first for insurrection and then for legal de-fense. Timothy Ford captured the quality ofdependent relationships and the critique of au-thority they contained in the 1780s:

It would readily be supposed that the peoplerequire a great deal of attendance; or that theremust be a vast superfluity of Servants. Both aretrue though not in equal degree. From the high-est to the lowest class they must have more orless attendance- I have seen tradesmen go

through the city followed by a negro carryingtheir tools-Barbers who are supported in idle-ness ease by their negroes who do the busi-ness; in fact many of the mechanics bearnothing more of their trade than the name(Barnwell 1912: 142-143).

The presence of servants as fixtures was ofparticular importance in the genteel households ofthe “higher classes” where “one or more servants(in many places) plant themselves in the corners

of the room where they stand upon the slight-est occasion they are called” (Barnwell 1912:142-143). Servants were not without the ability toprotest the whims of their masters and foundopportunity to do so in the execution of theirduties: “At dinner it wd. Seem as if the appe-tite were to be whetted the victuals receiveit’s relish in proportion to the number in atten-dance. They surround the table like a cohort ofblack guards here it appears there is a super-fluity; for no sooner is a call made than there isa considerable delay either from all rushing atonce; or all waiting for one another to do thebusiness” (Barnwell 1912:142-143). In situationslike the one Ford describes, the social failings ofservants rebound to the discredit of their mastersas surely as ineptitude in conversation, taking tea,or playing cards. (Barnwell 1912:142-143).

Still, the sociology, plans, and functional divi-sions ascribed to servant spaces inadequately de-scribe the textures and daily experience of servicespaces like the kitchen and quarter occupied by

Billy Robinson. Kitchens, for example, wereoften floored with heavy slate pavers, a practicethat enhanced maintenance, but further blackenedan already dark interior and exhausted the legs of

those who stood and crouched on those hardsurfaces. Windows in the upper-story quarterswere shuttered, but often left unglazed, leavingthe occupants in summer prey to mosquitoes,flies, and other insects or sweating in close,poorly unventilated rooms. In winter, loose-fit-ting shutters offered little protection from thecold and damp. The smells of cooking and laun-

ry filtered year around into the servant’s quar-ter along with the earthy stench of cesspits and

stables. In the kitchen dooryard, bits of shatteredpottery intermixed with chicken bones and fishscales crunched underfoot. Wooden fences andbrick walls constrained sight lines in a city whereback-lot gates and service alleys were a rarity.The view from the quarter outward focused onthe work yard, the back of the house, and thenarrow passage or carriage way that led past thehouse and beneath the implied gaze of whitemasters. Voices in conversation, some whis-

pered, some shouted, penetrated the crevices be-tween board walls melding together in an unre-markable white noise monotony where the plot-ters engaged in the thwarted Denmark VeseyRevolt calculated their moves seen, but unseen;heard, but unheard.

Quarters over kitchens were not the only slavelodgings in Charleston. Additional quarters wereplaced above storehouses, shops, and carriagehouses. In the case of the Aiken-Rhett house, apair of heated second-story lodging rooms wereplaced in incendiary juxtaposition to the hayloftover the stables. The desire to have house slavesavailable around the clock produced accommoda-tions where servants slept on pallets in theirmasters’ rooms or occupied attic chambers.Charleston slaves engaged in occupations thattook them away from the house and even rentedtheir own lodgings, sometimes pooling limitedfunds and leasing an entire house. Travelersoften remarked on the presence of slaves sleep-ing in city doorways (Wade 1964). The archi-


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try and outbuildings, including a rear-wall-chim-ney kitchen and washhouse, double privy, cistern,well, and wall for the yard and garden with threegates (Horlbeck Brothers Day Book 1849:67).

City lots, even those in the older parts of town,were typically narrow and deep with many prop-erties retreating from the street well in excess ofa 100 ft. (30 m). The standard arrangement ofa town-house lot placed the principal dwelling onthe street, usually with several possible paths ofaccess. For a town house with commercial func-tions, an entry from the street opened into a frontshop while office and a gated passage led fromthe sidewalk past a second private entrance into

the main house and into an open yard. Theyard, typically enclosed with a tall board fenceor brick wall contained a well or cistern, kitchenwith quarters, privies, and other structures, likecarriage house, store, or stable. The overall planwas linear.

Room-by-room inventories for furnishings ofthe spaces where servants lived and labored arescare and invariably emphasize the working en-vironment. Inventories thus list predictable arrays

of objects related to cooking, washing, stabling,and craft work. The appraisers found in MarthaGodin’s kitchen, for example, a pair of fire dogs,large and small iron pots, skillets, stew and drip-ping pans, a spit, and pewter basins (CharlestonCounty Probate Court [CCPC] 1786:2-3). Bedsand bedding, chairs, and tables for the four adultslaves and their four children went unrecorded.Francis Simmonds’s Legare Street kitchen held acomparable array of pans, kettles, pots, spits, and

fireplace equipment as well as a fire screen andtwo wooden tables valued at 1 OO-contrastedwith the 30.00 mahogany dining table with endsand the pair of 45.00 card tables in the mainhouse (CCPC 1815:259ff.) The functional divi-sion between kitchen and washhouse is reflectedin bricklayer and builder Matthew WilliamCross’s inventory that lists 50 dozen hearth tilesin addition to a full assemblage of cooking uten-sils described as a “Lot of Pots, Kettles, dutch-

Ovens, frying pans, grid Irons, pot-Covers, pails,

Figure 9. Benjamin Smith house, commercial premises,and outbuildings, late 18th century, Broad and ChurchStreets. (Detail redrawnfrom McCrady Plat No. 557 Charles-

ton City Archives.)

tectural expression of the servant’s quarter, how-ever, found its closest association with thekitchen in the domestic yard behind the house.

The organization of the Charleston town-houselot and the placement of kitchens and servantlodgings followed a limited number of alterna-tives. In some situations the construction of the

house and its outbuildings occurred at differenttimes or were the result of radical remodelingefforts, such as the mid-18th-century Smith houseon Union Street, where the owners substantiallyremodeled or replaced many of the backbuildingsin the early 1800s (RMCO 1800s-a; 1880s-b:122;1837) (Figures 9-10). In other instances, thehouse and its outbuildings were conceptualizedand built as a piece, as in the case of an 1849commission to the Horlbeck brothers for the con-

struction of a brick house with piazza and pan-


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piggins, &c.” (CCPC 1811:43 ff.). Thewashhouse half of the building held large ironpots for heating water, wash tubs for laundering,smoothing irons and ironing table, and clothes

horses. The location and furnishings for thequarters of the 13 slaves employed in Cross’sbuilding enterprise went unrecorded, as did thosefor the 14 servants (and their children) employedin the house. The domains of “WasherIroner” Amey and Dinah, the cook, are obvious,but the accommodations for house servants likePhillis, Mary, and Juliet remain uncertain. Spe-cific mention of servant quarters over kitchensand other work buildings as well as the enumera-

tion of slave possessions are nonexistent in late-18th and early- 19th-century Charleston invento-ries.

Figure 10. Benjamin Smith house, commercial premises,and outbuildings, ca. 1837, Broad and Church Streets.Note the reorganization of the area behind he house into acontinuous range of service and storage buildings frontinga paved yard. (Detail rom McCrady Plat No. 485, Charles-ton City Archives.)

Although few clues exist for the lodgings ofCharleston house servants outside of the quartersabove kitchens and washhouses, tantalizing refer-ences in the fiunishings in the house, particularly

garret rooms, suggest an additional location forquarters. John Ingliss’s 1775 inventory itemizesthe contents of both the front and back garretrooms. The front room with its mahoganyclothes chest, writing desk, bed outfitted withpavilion and curtains, and framed prints hangingon the walls belonged to a member of Ingliss’sfamily, but the back garret room with its poorerquality bedding, mahogany chest of drawers, and“Hair Trunk containing Remnants of Negro cloth,

calico, &C.” may well have quartered one ormore house servants, (CCPC 1775:452ff.). Otherinventories, such as planter Alexander Ingliss’s1791 estate listing, typically mention only thefront garret chamber, leaving the contents of therear garret, like those of the kitchen quarter, un-recorded (CCPC 1791:369ff.). Typically venti-lated and lit only by single dormer windows inthe front and back elevations and unheated, gar-ret rooms were scorching hot in summer and

numbing cold in winter, factors that elicit cautionin assigning these spaces functions greater thansleeping and storage. Servants slept and dressedin these rooms, but they did not live there.

The architectural ambiguity of servant lodgingsin Charleston town-house garrets and kitchenquarters speaks to the greater problem of servantidentity and material life. The cumulative ab-sence of direct evidence documenting the pres-ence of servant quarters through the contents ofspecific household spaces suggests three interpre-tive possibilities. First, enslaved household ser-vants could and did possess personal propertyindependent of their master’s authority. Second,from a white perspective, the personal posses-sions slaves owned were by default the propertyof those who owned the servants. Third, despitethe brutal constraints of slavery, Charleston’schattel servants were able to claim some measureof privacy and independence in spaces located atthe very heart of the urban plantation.


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Given the town-house environments of serviceand servant quarters and the paucity of evidencedescribing how those spaces were used, whatdoes one make of Billy Robinson’s defense?

The most striking element in the court case isthe belief articulated by white witnesses that, byvirtue of location and custom, Billy Robinson(and by implication other servants, slave andfree ) was perpetually visible. PeraultStrohecker’s testimony, however, exposed the fal-lacy of this assumption. The autonomy of slavespaces within the quarter and the interstices ofthe house, house lot, and city, was revealed againand again in other trials associated with the

Vesey revolt. Cross-examined in the trial ofJohn Vincent, Charles Drayton stated, “I think‘twas in his own room in an Alley on ChurchStreet next Elliot Street that he told me about hismaster” (Pearson 1998). Other witnesses anddefendants narrated encounters behind the house:“He brought the first news of the [planned] ris-ing into our yard” and “Perault, when haulingcotton from my store, told Bacchus in the yardsecretly” (Pearson 1998). Similar exchanges

were reported in Monday Gell’s workshop andon the city’s wharves. Laid bare in these terseaccounts is the persistent sense of the vulnerabil-ity of elite power at its most intimate point-thehouse. Servants throughout the North Atlanticrim at the turn of the 19th century laid claims tospaces within their masters’ houses-and madethem their own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All my work on Charleston owes a tremendous debt toseveral individuals whose knowledge of that city is boththorough and intimate: Martha Zierden, JonathonPoston, Gary Stanton,. Carter Hudgins, and David andLucinda Shields. Thanks are also extended to themany patient and hospitable house owners whoprovided access top to bottom, from front to back. Asever, am indebted to the wonderful institutions whocare for and curate Charleston’s material past: HistoricCharleston Foundation, Charleston Museum, and theSouth Carolina Historical Society.

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33 3)

REFERENCES

BARNWELL, OSEPH . (EDITOR)19 12 Dairy ofTimothy Ford, 1785- 1786. TheSouth Carolina

Historical and G enealogical Magazine 1313.

CHALMERS, IONEL.1790 A Sketch of the Climate, Water, and Soil in South

Carolina. In The American Museum or RepositoryofAncient and Modern Fugitive Pie ces, c . Prose andPoetical, For April, 1788. Carey, Stewart, Co.,Philadelphia, PA.

CHARLESTON OUNTY ROBATE OURT CCPC)1775 Inventory ofJohn Ingliss. Inventory Book A, pp. 452,

Charleston County Probate Court, Charleston, SC.1786 Inventory of Martha Godin. Inventory Book B, pp. 2-

3, Charleston County Probate Court, Charleston, SC.1791 Inventory ofAlexander Ingliss. Inventory BookB, pp.

369, Charleston County Probate Court, Charleston,s c .

181 1 Inventory of Matthew William Cross. Inventory BookE,pp43, Charleston County Probate Court, Charleston,s c .

18 15 Inventory of Francis Simmond. Inventory Book E, pp259, Charleston County Probate Court, Charleston,s c .

CHARLESTON OUNTY EGISTER ESNE ONVEYANCEOFFICE RMCO)

1797 Plat of Edward Petrie’s property. McCrady Plat No.464, Charleston County Register Mesne ConveyanceOffice, Charleston, SC.

1798 PlatofKing Street. McCradyPlatNo. 178, CharlestonCounty Register Mesne Conveyance Office,Charleston, SC.

1799 Plat of a property on Blackbird Alley. McCrady PlatNo. 536, Charleston County Register MesneConveyance Office, Charleston, SC.

1790s-a PlatofKing Street. McCradyPlatNo. 172, CharlestonCounty Register Mesne Conveyance Office,

Charleston, SC.1790s-b Plat of Union Street. McCrady Plat No. 562,

Charleston County Register Mesne Conveyance Office,Charleston, SC.

1837 PlatofBroad Street. McCradyPlatNo. 485, CharlestonCounty Register Mesne Conveyance Office,Charleston, SC.

1800s-a Plat of Broad Street. McCrady Plat No. 557,Charleston County Register Mesne Conveyance Office,Charleston, SC.

1800s-b Charleston County Deed Book X-6. CharlestonCounty Register Mesne Conveyance Office,

Charleston, SC.


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HORLBECKROTHERSAYBOOK1849 Account records of the Horlbeck Brothers. South

Carolina Historical Society, Charleston.

PEARSON,DWARD.1998 Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Transcripto

the Denmark Vesey Conspiracyo 1822. University ofNorth Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

STONEY,AMUELAILLARD1987 This is Charleston: A Survey of the Architectural

Heritage o a Unique American City. Carolina ArtAssociation, Charleston, SC.

UPTON, ELL.1988 White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century

Virginia. In Material Life in Early America 1600-1860 Robert Blair St. George, editor, pp. 357-369.Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA.

WADE, ICH RD C .1964 Slaveryin the Cities: The South 1820-1860. Oxford

University Press, Oxford, England.

BERNARD . HERMANDEPARTMENT F A RT HISTORYUNIVERSITY OF DELAWARENEWARK, E 19716

slave housing charleston

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