The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

In Charleston, Brown’s raid also produced a general awakening to the “demoralization” of enslaved Blacks. This did not mean the city suddenly began to worry about slave morale; rather, that Blacks had been given too much opportunity to consort among themselves in their own churches, schools, and communal residences and were showing far too much independence. The city, it seemed, had allowed its vigilance to wane. Some Blacks even had the nerve to subscribe to the antislavery New York Tribune. One domain where the city’s watchfulness had slipped was that of fashion, a particularly obvious marker of newfound pride. Blacks had begun dressing like wealthy white men and women, particularly on Sundays—“negro day”—when the city’s free Blacks supplanted whites in promenading along the Battery. One white visitor, in a letter to his wife, described how “the negro wenches crowd the streets in the height of fashion,” their male counterparts—“the n—r bucks”—doing the same. He found it risible. “All through the week they sweat and bark in the sun with a slouch hat, shirt sleeves rolled up and on Sundays they dress up in fine clothes, wear a silk hat and gloves.” He told his wife it was “enough to make a horse laugh.” It was simply too much, and interlopers were deemed responsible.