3 - Bone and Sinew

Summary

Those who came to Charleston by rail ran a similar gauntlet and saw equally startling sights. Just as the realm of exchange fanning outward from dockside to the trading houses of East Bay and the shops of Hayne and King suggested danger to disunion's advocates, so the province of production aroused alarm. Once, a sprinkling of craftsmen's workrooms and a few machine shops had dotted Charleston's backstreets. Now, massive factories squatted on city blocks and the pounding of engines mingled with pealing church bells. Once, mechanics had walked the city's streets by ones and twos, “followed by a negro carrying their tools,” bearing “nothing more of their trade than the name.” Now, rural “poverty and destitution” drove empty- handed men to “gow knocking about through the city” in search of waged labor, and “the stifled sob of the famished workman” went “unheard in the mighty din of accumulation. “ Changed times stoked dark fears.

“[T] he headlong impulse of the age drowns every cry but gain, gain,” conservatives fretted, transforming tradesmen into “operatives,” productive citizens into obedient “hands” to be used and discarded according to capital's whim. Questions piled upon troubling questions. Was man “to become a mere money- making, cotton- spinning, iron- founding machine?” What would happen when “the great mass of our poor white population begin to understand that they have rights,” exerting them in the political arena? Was there any way to avert the growth of “clubs, combinations and trade- unions,” to curb a laboring class with “nothing to lose and everything to gain … tempted to try the chances of revolution”? Such worries warped Charlestonians’ political calculations disastrously at the hour of disunion.

Elites argued endlessly over the root cause of risk: was it the expansion of industry per se, or the growth of a benighted white working class in their midst? No consensus was in sight by 1860, and certainly no solution. In Europe and the North, as they saw it, the “love of gain” had “nearly effected the conquest of Christendom.” Worse still, on the eve of Lincoln's election, that “offspring of the devil,” capitalism was taking root in the Holy City itself.