Accounting for “Wharfage, Porterage, and Pilferage”: Maritime Slaves and Resistance in Charleston, South Carolina

This paper argues that the economic demands of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world made Charleston, South Carolina, a center of significant slave resistance.  In the course of their daily work alongside sailors and servants, maritime slaves permanently altered both the plantation slave system and the export economy of South Carolina, making it more reflective of African and African American cultural forms.   The research presented here explores the meanings and effects of slave resistance within the context of the waterfront, the South Carolina plantation economy, and the wider Atlantic World.  Focusing on the period from 1763, at the close of a major imperial war with significant battles in North America, and culminating with the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and her colonies in 1776, this article relies on newspapers, legislative journals, court records, and the private correspondence and business papers of merchants and planters to reveal the daily activities of enslaved waterfront workers as they interacted with each other, free maritime workers, and with their employers and masters. This was a period marked by significant economic and territorial expansion, directed by the merchants and planters based in Charleston. And while these actors still dominated the plantation fields and urban households of South Carolina, the waterfront of Charleston and the waterways of South Carolina were the reserve of maritime workers. These marine and riverine environs muted the power of the white elite and greatly expanded the autonomy of all maritime laborers.  Due to their near-constant mobility and daily interactions with others who were mobile, enslaved boatmen, sailors and dockworkers created their own environment and exercised an autonomy that allowed them to challenge the brutal, oppressive system of slavery and reset the boundaries of acceptable behavior in and out of the work environment.