Port Cities of the Atlantic World: Sea-Facing Histories of the US South

By Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott

Traces the maritime routes and the historical networks that link port cities around the Atlantic world

Port Cities of the Atlantic World brings together a collection of essays that examine the centuries-long transatlantic transportation of people, goods, and ideas with a focus on the impact of that trade on what would become the American South. Employing a wide temporal range and broad geographic scope, the scholars contributing to this volume call for a sea-facing history of the South, one that connects that terrestrial region to this expansive maritime history. By bringing the study up to the 20th century in the collection's final section, the editors Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott make the case for the lasting influence of these port cities—and Atlantic world history—on the economy, society, and culture of the contemporary South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643364575

Book preview

Port Cities of the Atlantic World

THE CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World of the College of Charleston

Series Editors

SIMON LEWIS, SANDRA SLATER, AND JOHN WHITE

Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas

JOHN GARRISON MARKS

Challenging History: Race, Equity, and the Practice of Public History

LEAH WORTHINGTON, RACHEL CLARE DONALDSON, AND JOHN W. WHITE, EDS.

Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World

ROSEMARY BRANA-SHUTE AND RANDY J. SPARKS, EDS.

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

DAVID P. GEGGUS, ED.

Port Cities of the Atlantic World

SEA-FACING HISTORIES OF THE US SOUTH

EDITED BY

Jacob Steere-Williams AND Blake C. Scott

© 2023 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208

uscpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036764

ISBN: 978-1-64336-456-8 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64336-457-5 (ebook)

Front cover image: Lloyd’s new map of the United States, the Canadas and New Brunswick, 1863. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Front cover design: Adam B. Bohannon

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Watery Connections: Port Cities of the US South and the Atlantic World

Jacob Steere-Williams & Blake C. Scott

PART 1

Peopling Ports through Race and Labor

A Native Port in a Native Market: How Indigenous Peoples Shaped the Foundation of Carolina, 1670–1710

Miller Wright

Bodies on the Beach: Sullivan’s Island and the Processing of West African Bodies for Market in the Anglo-Atlantic World

Neal D. Polhemus

Urban Slavery in Two Colonial Port Cities, Charleston and New York: Twin Trajectories?

Anne-Claire Faucquez

PART 2

From Disease to Disaster

Spanish Foundations of the French Quarter: Rebuilding Colonial New Orleans in the Wake of Disaster

Cindy Ermus

Quarantine Diplomacy: Public Health and Transatlantic Commerce during the Yellow Fever Pandemic of 1793–1805

Julia P. R. Mansfield

The Contagious Cure: Inoculation Experiments in British Colonial Port Cities

Andrew M. Wehrman

PART 3

Protest, Conservation, and Tourism in the Lowcountry

To Trip the Light Fantastic: Dance and the Drums of Revolution

Jason R. Young

Conservative Conservation: Land, Stewardship, and Hegemony in Coastal South Carolina

Levi Van Sant

A Nostalgia for White Aristocracy: Lost Cause Tourism in the US South

Taulby H. Edmondson

Afterword: Atlantic Port Cities, Creole Spaces?

Simon Lewis

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

FOREWORD

It was meant to be a year of celebration. In anticipation of the 350th anniversary of South Carolina, the 250th anniversary of the College of Charleston, and the 25th anniversary of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) Program at the College of Charleston, we at CLAW worked for several years to prepare a commemorative conference, 2020: Port Cities in the Atlantic World, scheduled for May 2020. Scholars from around the Atlantic world had planned to descend upon Charleston in a wave of intellectual curiosity to discuss the history and contemporary entanglements of port cities and port life. And then the world changed with the COVID-19 pandemic. One of our largest conferences, and certainly the most international in nature, the 2020 Port Cities meeting was going to emphasize Charleston’s historic role as a port city and to complicate the narrative of Charleston’s history. The prominent role of Charleston in the American Civil War has resulted in frequent characterizations of Charleston as a quintessential southern city. That’s true, especially from nineteenth and twentieth century perspectives, in evidence today with the explosion of tourism in Charleston. But it was first and foremost a sea-facing city, a transnational maritime city, reliant on the sea for the transmission of culture, identity, and economic viability. One of the most vital, and one of the most lucrative, maritime ports on the eastern seaboard of the British colonies, Charleston is, and has always been, an international harbor. Scholars estimate that approximately forty percent of enslaved Africans entered North America through Charleston. The waters in and around the Charleston harbor touch the coasts of Barbados and the Caribbean islands and served as the economic template for Lowcountry settlement and the brutalities of slavery. They extend further east to West Africa where enslaved women hid seeds in elaborate ways, and brought practical knowledge of agriculture, basket weaving, and eclectic culinary traditions to the shores of the Carolinas. Merchant ships carried cargo of rice, indigo, and African souls—Charleston has always been a city driven by the watery connections at the heart of this volume.

As the dangers of the global COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, it was clear that 2020 would be remembered for something else. We made the decision to cancel the conference. In many ways the spread of COVID-19 reminded us of the process of transmission—of information, culture, identity, and disease—themes at the center of this volume. Today, as in the past, Charleston more than anything, is quintessentially Atlantic, and is never in isolation from the broader Atlantic world. The eternal caresses of the sea tether the Holy City, a name bestowed upon Charleston, to other shores.

This book advances the idea of Charleston as one of many vital port cities throughout the broader Atlantic world. Drs. Blake C. Scott and Jacob Steere-Williams, as members of CLAW and on the organizing committee of the 2020 Port Cities Conference, recognized the potential of an edited collection that underscored the profoundly entangled history of Charleston with other maritime hubs. We invite you to join us as intellectual passengers on this journey across the sea.

Sandy Slater

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While supporting one another during the recent journey of publishing monographs during the COVID-19 pandemic, we frequently talked about the ‘afterlives’ of books, and how scholarly projects live independent, and often unexpected lives after their creation due to forces well outside of our intent as authors. We also know, from recent publishing experiences, that books have prehistories, predicated on serendipitous circumstances, chance connections, surprising archival finds, and inspiring conversations that bring us together and propel a project forward. The making of this volume was no different, though we did get here through some unusual circumstances. Edited volumes like Port Cities of the Atlantic World are often the product of conferences and workshops, the cross-fertilization of new ideas that come from scholarly meetings.

As faculty on the board of CLAW, the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston, we spent a significant portion of 2019 planning for an international conference scheduled for May 2020, Port Cities in the Atlantic World. Due to the disastrous events of the COVID-19 pandemic that conference never happened as an in-person scholarly event. In the aftermath of the cancelled conference, however, we decided that we did not have to cancel the central ideas that had first led us to propose the event, namely the increasing interest in rethinking port cities in the Atlantic world. The amazing array of submissions for the conference was a testament that we needed to find another way to connect these scholars and share their work with a wider audience.

Port Cities of the Atlantic World is the result. To make this volume happen, we needed a lot of help from friends, colleagues, and family. At the College of Charleston, our colleagues in the CLAW program, particularly the program’s current and former directors, Sandy Slater and Simon Lewis, supported us from the moment we proposed the idea of an edited volume. Other colleagues in our respective home departments, History and International Studies, helped and encouraged us along the way; these included Jason Coy, Malte Pehl, Mary Jo Fairchild, Lisa Pinley Covert, Simon Lewis, John Cropper, and many others. A fantastic graduate student, J.P. Wilson, was essential to the project. Wilson, a scholar of the Atlantic world and maritime history, helped with editing, formatting, and a host of other important matters.

Most of all, we are grateful for our colleagues who wrote essays for the volume, who persevered during a global pandemic, lockdowns, university shutdowns, and the sickness and death of loved ones to continue with the project of rethinking port cities of the southeastern United States and the larger Atlantic world. This kind of determination is inspiring, and we hope is clear to readers in the following pages.

To bring this volume to press also required the astute vision and support of our editor at the University of South Carolina Press, Ehren Foley, whose team was a joy to work with. Two anonymous reviewers provided incisive feedback that made each element of the book better on its own, and sync together into a cohesive whole. The University of South Carolina Press’s Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World series, of which this volume is a part, has, for over twenty years, presented excellent scholarship on the southeast United States and the Atlantic world as a whole, and we are proud to be part of this precedent-setting series.

Not only do we owe our strong collegial friendship to the success of publishing this volume, but to our respective families we owe our thanks and immense gratitude. As scholars and activists with young children, working on this project meant long nights, weekends, and lots of conversations about the place where we live, its troubled history, and our role as scholars in tackling these issues. To Abby and Nikki, our partners, and Langston, Simon, Levi, and Raya, our children, we give our utmost thanks.

Introduction

Watery Connections: Port Cities of the US South and the Atlantic World

JACOB STEERE-WILLIAMS & BLAKE C. SCOTT

The history of ports is, in great measure, the history of civilization.

—Frederick W. Morgan, Ports and Harbours, 1958

On 16 September, 1783, the slave ship, the Eagle, under the command of Captain David Miller, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, after crossing the Atlantic from an unspecified port in West Africa. Although 126 enslaved people began the journey, only 104 Africans disembarked at Charleston’s port, after quarantine on Sullivan’s Island. What specifically happened to those 22 lost souls remains a mystery to the historical record, but the broader experience of the transatlantic slave trade tells us that the terrible mix of sickness, deprivation, and violence defined their days at sea.¹ For context, consider for example the echoes of terror in the reports of Alexander Falconbridge, a British ship’s surgeon and anti-slavery advocate, who in 1788 noted that: I frequently went down among them [the enslaved] … The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house.² It was not uncommon on slave ships, Falconbridge and other witnesses observed, for as many as half of the Africans to die en route to Jamaica or Barbados in the West Indies, or Charleston in North America. The numbers and atrocities that Falconbridge documented, however, belies a bottom-up, narrative-driven approach to understanding the Atlantic world. One can never forget the diverse people and their experiences that made transatlantic history; that is the heart and goal of this volume.³

A week after the Eagle arrived in Charleston, another captain, Joseph Vesey, organized and managed the sale of the ship’s enslaved people to the Lowcountry’s elite planter class, who saw themselves as the stewards of both improving the regional environment and as rightful overseers of unfree labor. In the local newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette, Vesey advertised that on Wednesday, 1 October, 104 Africans, Prime SLAVES he claimed, would be exposed for Sale a few blocks from the Cooper River at 43 Queen Street.⁴

By 1783 Captain Vesey, born in Bermuda with commercial shipping ties across the Caribbean, had also established himself as a slave merchant and planter in the bustling port of Charleston. He was an influential transnational businessman, who also served—on the revolutionary side—as a sailor during the American Revolution. Today, though, if remembered at all, Vesey is recalled as the man who owned the remarkable sailor-slave-revolutionary who came to be known as Denmark Vesey.⁵ Denmark, as slave, and Joseph, as captain, sailed and lived together for decades.

The story of the Eagle and its landing was a microcosm of the American nation’s fundamental contradiction of liberty and bondage, epitomizing the complex connections that bind port city life. The Eagle’s journey mirrored thousands of other slave ships who sailed across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁶ These were ships that brought goods and people, fueled commerce and outbreaks of disease, and produced both ideas of terror and the countercurrents of resistance in the New World economy of the Atlantic world. As the United States entered its first year of independence, the Eagle was one of many ships that transported slaves to Charleston. The arrival of enslaved Africans to port in 1783 in this sense marked a pivotal sign of what was to come. Despite the revolution and its promise of freedom, the new nation’s future resembled its colonial past. As historian Gregory E. O’Malley recently argues in his masterful book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807, southeastern US port cities like Charleston were part of vast networks of trade, exchange, slavery, and resistance; they were, in his words, entrepôts, gateways through which African captives passed en route to a host of colonies throughout the British, Spanish, and French Empires.⁷ After American independence, these transnational networks continued and intensified.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, however, the future of the slave trade in the American South was uncertain. In October 1774, the South Carolina delegates at the Continental Congress agreed to close the port of Charleston to halt the importation of enslaved Africans. As historian Nic Butler put it, on that date, the port of Charleston closed a long chapter of importing African captives.⁸ The economic and social disruption of the war for independence, though, would reverse that policy. By 1783, the transatlantic slave trade had resumed. According to contemporary accounts, the war had wrecked slavery in the lower South, with an estimated 25 percent fewer slaves (approximately 25,000 people).⁹ Many formerly enslaved people joined the British cause, and traveled south to Florida, The Bahamas, and other British territories. Plantations were in ruins. At the end of the war, slave merchants like Joseph Vesey, and Revolutionary War veterans, saw an economic opportunity. It was perhaps an early version of Naomi Klein’s now famous concept, disaster capitalism, in which private interests exploit the social and economic disruptions of a disaster to further their own profits.¹⁰ From 1783 to late 1787, an estimated 10,000 enslaved Africans arrived in Charleston. By 1 January 1808, when a federal prohibition on the transatlantic slave trade went into effect, more than 50,000 additional enslaved people from West Africa had arrived in Charleston, within the twenty-five-year period after late 1787.¹¹

Historians note that upwards of forty percent of all Africans forcibly brought to North America came through the port of Charleston.¹² The city, which around the time of the American Revolution had an enslaved Black majority, was the wealthiest city in the British colonies of North America.¹³ It was the North American mainland’s equivalent of Port-au-Prince. Twice as many Africans as Europeans, Philip Morgan has shown, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in the Lowcountry.¹⁴ Charleston joined the other main slave ports of the Americas, New Orleans, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, and Port-au-Prince, which linked coastal rivers and harbors with plantations through enslaved, Indigenous, and later, African, labor.¹⁵ Like Venice, Charles Dickens reflected upon a visit in 1861, Charleston city seems growing out of the waves … Charleston people love their sea-side walk, for the heat bursts on you here, as from a burning fiery furnace suddenly thrown open, and all beyond the Ashley river, among the white cotton-fields, the heat is African–as the labourers are also.¹⁶ Like the African heat that Dickens described, Charleston emerged as a city dependent on broader Atlantic world entanglements, a sea-facing port linking southern fields and hinterlands to an expanding global economy dependent on slavery.

Looking back, now in the twenty-first century, the city of Charleston is slowly starting to come to terms with this tragic and transformative history, and what it means for the city and the nation.¹⁷ In 2018, after an emotional and controversial debate, Charleston’s city council finally apologized for the city’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. On the old site of Gadsden’s Wharf, one of the main entry points for enslaved Africans, community leaders and donors built a museum—The International African American Museum—to honor the legacy of those who crossed the Atlantic, who toiled on and transformed the land.

Port city geographies still hold the histories of brutal and comingled watery connections. Gadsden’s Wharf, for example, where the city meets the Cooper River and the Atlantic Ocean, is a liminal space where the journeys of sailors and slaves merged with the history of the city and its surrounding landscape.¹⁸ The beaches of nearby Sullivan’s Island, today marked by thousands of recreational tourists, was also the location of both a major Revolutionary War battle, and where slave cargo ships waited in quarantine and the point at which enslaved Africans first stepped foot in North America. But the waterfront, although deeply shaped by history, is not just about what happened in the past. Charleston’s modern-day main cruise ship terminal sits adjacent to the old wharf and the new museum. Thousands of tourists embark and disembark at this site on the Cooper River, most often on their way to the Caribbean islands, on the very same shorelines where Indigenous slaves were previously sold to the Atlantic market, and where African slaves were brought to mainland North America. Many people now visit the city of Charleston and its hinterland—dotted with plantations. Some tourists, overwhelmingly white, are nostalgic for an imagined genteel past, while others seek answers to intergenerational trauma incurred by the violence of slavery. What might this watery intersection between the past and present mean? The way cruise operators, such as Royal Caribbean, promote the city and its port, the truth of history disappears from the present narrative. Charleston is a timeless treasure of America’s Old South, they claim, every aspect of life in the Lowcountry is captivating.¹⁹

Bounding the contemporary landscape of a port city like Charleston in a historical wharf of timelessness is emblematic of the troubled entanglements of past and present, of the vicissitudes of slavery and the vagrancies of modern romantic consumerism. It is as if two ships—the past and present—were passing in the night, riding the same waves and winds seeking the same destination, but unaware of the other’s factual presence.

What does it mean to be a tourist on a cruise ship, or walking the grounds of a plantation or former slave market, unaware of the people who crossed the water, the path, or the sidewalk before you? What does it mean to return to the city for a plantation wedding, or remember the colonial architectural beauty or walk the quaint stone streets made by ships’ ballast and enslaved people’s hands? What does it mean for a city or a people to be shaped by these watery connections?

A Sea-Facing History of the US South

With these questions in mind, this volume brings together new scholarship that rethinks both port cities and the coastal connections of the US South in the Atlantic world. We take as our starting point two salient features of coastal communities and US port cities, one temporal and one geographic. Both analytical frames serve as rivets in thinking about the watery connections of ports and their environs. The first point we make is that studying port cities necessitates long historical thinking, what we call the entangled lives and afterlives of ports and their coastal communities. No matter how old and buried the wharf or how rotten the wooden tall ship, their impact still lives along our shores. We cannot escape the accumulated legacies of the Atlantic journey. The second intervention is that the influence of ports neither start nor stop at the water’s edge. Traditionally grounded histories and contemporary debates about plantations in the US South, or the preservation of colonial architecture, we argue, cannot be understood apart from the transnational comings and goings of people, goods, and ships. Following historian Sowande Mustakeem, we extend the idea that the connections between land and sea, through ports, are transformative spaces of Atlantic history.²⁰

Atlantic world ports were more than points of departure and sites of arrival. Port cities connected—physically, politically, biologically, and epistemically—land and sea, ship and plantation, town and country. They were contact zones, sites of cultural and biological creolization.²¹ The essays in this volume introduce studies of particular ports and communities in the US South and Atlantic world to show their deep connections to peripheral zones and transnational maritime networks. This reframing of port cities, both geographically outward across the sea and inward onto the land—crossing temporality and space—opens an important window into the complicated ways that contemporary tourism, changing agricultural uses, ecological conservation, Indigenous history, slavery, disaster, urban planning, and infectious diseases are all interconnected and, thus, integral to the history of the US South and the Atlantic world.²² Port history, as Tapio Bergholm, Lewis Fischer, and M. Elisabetta Tonizzi have recently argued in Making Global and Location Connections, sits, uncomfortably at times, at the crossroad of international, national and even local historiography.²³ We fundamentally agree. Although there is no dearth of monographs on individual port cities, or particular places in the Atlantic world, only recently have scholarly studies on ports started to move beyond David Armitage and Michael Brad-dick’s well-known framework of Cis-Atlantic history.²⁴

In studying and situating the connective tissues of ports this volume engages with disparate scholarly literatures on maritime history, the history of slavery, the history of disease and disaster, economic history, urban history, architectural history, urban planning, and historical geography. Malte Fuhrmann, in his recent study of port cities in the eastern Mediterranean, calls this a historiography of disentanglement.²⁵ The historical impact of ports, as proven by recent scholarship, are not moored to ships and their working waterfronts. As maritime historian Sarah Palmer concludes, we cannot stay within a port’s boundaries if we are to understand its reality.²⁶ Much of what has marked the field of port studies has been either case studies of individual ports—and the economics of trade and labor relations–or more recently, the global and international networks of ports.²⁷ This volume builds on this multifaceted historiography to create an extroverted collage of US southern history.

The essays in this volume, collectively articulate what we call a sea-facing history of the US South. The essayss that follow are neither comfortably in the field of US southern history nor in the traditional confines of port and maritime history. They exist in the nexus between historiographies, in the same way that ports and their peripheries have historically existed in uncomfortable spatial and historical geographies not easily defined. While there are exceptions, in general historians of the US South have examined and described the history of the region by the parameters of the land—its uses, traditions, and conflicts. Maritime historians, on the other hand, have traditionally defined historical analysis of US southern ports by their focus on shipbuilding, labor, and commerce.²⁸ Rarely do we learn of the intersection—of what happened at sea shaping life and work at port cities and their hinterlands—and vice versa.

Historical studies of the transatlantic slave trade and the African diaspora, though, offer a key route for understanding the transnational history of the American south.²⁹ There is a longstanding and vibrant historiographical tradition of studying US southern ports as sites of arrival and for enslaved Africans.³⁰ This body of scholarship understands ports as entry points of the violent transatlantic slave trade, the entrepôt, or intermediary center, of trade, labor, and commerce of the southern plantation economy. Ports also became the catalyst for new senses of identity for a diverse group of people—from sailors, merchants, and Africans that came to occupy the coastal region of the US South, from the Gullah Geechee groups of the Low-country to the creolization of the Mississippi Delta. As historian Ira Berlin has shown, the number of free people of color tripled in South Carolina and Georgia from 1790 to 1810, demonstrating the ways that labor and independence—not to mention, land use—transformed post-Revolutionary port life in cities such as Charleston and Savannah.³¹ Bondage is an essential component, but does not tell the whole story of the US South in the Atlantic world.

Thinking with and Thinking beyond Port Cities

Jeffrey Bolster, in his book The Mortal Sea, contests the assumption that oceans exist outside of history, showing instead through an investigation of early modern fishing practices in the North Atlantic that "the salient connections were not only across oceans but between people and the sea."³² Sowande Mustakeem has made a similar argument about the transatlantic slave trade, demonstrating the centrality of the Atlantic Ocean, and the spatial geography of oceans and ships, to the history of slavery. Yet the Atlantic Ocean, she argues, remains tangential and largely invisible to scholarly interest in slavery.³³ While we cannot quite say, to pace Bolster and Mustakeem, that port cities have existed outside of history, we can say, thinking with these scholars, that traditionally historians have conceptualized port cities as either points of departure or points of arrival, spaces where enslaved peoples, goods, or diseases were sent away from or to where they arrived. Philip Morgan’s now classic Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry demonstrates that despite structural and geographical differences in US eastern coast slave societies, there were deep cultural connections in the Black experience of oppressiveness and resistance.³⁴ More recently, James Sweet has shown through a fascinating case study of African healer Domingos Alvares, the ways in which complex realities of movement and mobility shaped the eighteenth-century Atlantic world; Toby Green, in A Fistful of Shells, has extended this by centering Africa in a longer history of modern economic development.³⁵ Following these recent scholarly threads, we argue that a geometrical framing of port cities as simply ports of arrival and departure limits our understanding of the powerful connections between ports, people, oceans, seafaring, and land use. When we think of port cities solely in terms of maritime economic activity, administrative control, or resistance, we miss the point that what happens between ports, and ports and their multiple interiors, matters as much as what happens at the port’s waterfront.³⁶

Understanding ports as violent sites of disease and disaster is also a salient feature of this rethinking of port history. Outbreaks of epidemic disease, hurricanes, and fires are fundamentally tied to port city life and identities. Alfred Crosby’s classic formulation of the Columbian Exchange has become an essential guide for scholarly ideas about networks of exchange among plants, animals, humans, and diseases in the Atlantic world. Often these exchanges, both culturally and biologically, were uneven, catastrophically so for Indigenous Americans in the early period of European exploration, settlement, and resource extraction. For decades scholars in environmental history and the history of disease and medicine have explored the ways in which non-human factors—plants, animals, and diseases—were central to imperial, and later, nation-building, settlement, and land use.³⁷ Scholars have often situated outbreaks of infectious disease, or environmental disasters such as fires and hurricanes, as meaningful episodic events. Recent scholarly work, however, coming from the emerging field of disaster studies, has opened new ways of thinking about the long-term impact of disease and disaster.³⁸ Essays in this volume extend this recent scholarly trend, examining how diseases and disasters reshaped public health measures, demographics, and trade relations, well beyond the Columbian Exchange of the sixteenth century.

In situating and thinking about port cities of the southeast US in the Atlantic world, we thus draw on several rich and overlapping scholarly discourses, including studies of the African diaspora, maritime history, disaster studies, Indigenous studies, colonial history, and urban history, along with the history of science and medicine. In this way the history of port cities defies any easy or neat categorization, making it difficult to pigeonhole this volume in what Sarah Palmer has tangentially called port studies.³⁹

Mapping the Journey: Essay Organization

Port Cities of the Atlantic World is organized into three parts, each developing a thematic understanding of ports and their influences and roughly corresponding to the chronological development of the southeast US in the broader Atlantic world. Each essay can be read alone, but collectively they offer a collage of some of the most important issues impacting life on the US side of the Atlantic world. The volume examines the back and forth between disease, the movement of ships, rebellion, festivals, and the accumulation of power and inequities over land, goods, and governance, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present. Each essay offers a fixed position on the conceptual map guiding us into the present. Our point of departure is Charleston, a port city with multiple, overlapping identities, central to the Atlantic world, including the transatlantic slave trade, coastal shipping and development, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to conservation movements, leisure, and tourism.⁴⁰

In part one, Peopling Ports, we begin on the South Carolina coast in the seventeenth century, with essays exploring negotiations among and between coastal Indigenous people and European colonists, before interrogating the violence of the eighteenth-century contact zone created by the arrival of thousands of enslaved Africans, and the economic and political renegotiation of Charleston as a port city connected with the broader American east coast and its hinterland. In the opening essay, Miller Wright brings the port of Charleston to life through the perspective of Indigenous Sewee and Kiawah peoples rather than that of colonists or the point of view of slave traders. This change of perspective, from the lens of Indigenous populations, reveals the complex commercial and political relationships, shifting alliances, land use expertise, and warfare of the seventeenth century Carolina coast. When Native peoples … are made subjects of the history of Carolina, Wright argues, the story changes from one of the emergence of an Atlantic port to the incorporation of Europeans into Native geopolitics and economics. Wright’s essay is a reminder that while southeastern US port cities like Charleston were long dominated by the transatlantic slave trade, the creation of ports was deeply defined by Indigenous people’s negotiations with European colonists. The second essay by Neal Polhemus turns the story of the southeastern US coast to the violent and oppressive history of eighteenth-century slavery. Building on the recent work of James Sweet and Gregory O’Malley, Polhemus takes readers on a journey into the multiple geographies of the transatlantic slave trade, from captivity in West Africa, to oceanic transportation, to arrival and corporeal inspection on the shores of the Atlantic East coast. Focusing on a space often neglected in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, Polhemus sheds new light on the way in which coastal quarantine stations such as that on Sullivan’s Island, off the coast of Charleston, were central to the African diasporic experience.⁴¹ The quarantine process, Polhemus argues, was a liminal stage for captives arriving in eighteenth-century South Carolina. In the brief migration from the ship at anchor onto Sullivan’s Island’s beaches, enslaved Africans crossed a cultural boundary, becoming potential subjects of a new cultural world. Historian Peter Wood famously characterized this space as the oppressive Ellis Island for Black Americans, and Polhemus’s essay is a vivid reminder of the brutality of the foundational processes forming southeastern US port cities.⁴² Anne-Claire Faucquez’s essay contributes to another well-known analogy of Charleston’s entangled life as a port city, following Edward Ball’s description of the city as the Jerusalem of American slavery, its capital and center of faith.⁴³ Faucquez, though, deepens our understanding of the connections between southeastern port cities and slavery with the broader Atlantic east coast (the north). She explores key labor practices at the harbor, including farmwork and fishing, to show the deep and long-lasting ties between slave labor in Charleston and economic markets in New York City. She demonstrates this in saying, New York and Charleston’s fates were sealed in the mid-nineteenth century as New York was described, at the outbreak of the Civil War, by the Southern editorialist J. D. B. De Bow, as ‘almost as dependent on Southern slavery as Charleston itself.’⁴⁴

Like a ship following the trade