Slave and servant housing in Charleston, 1770–1820

Landscape and Social Relations at Charleston Townhouse Sites (1770–1850)

“…Both Herman (1997Herman ( , 1999 and Theodore Rosengarten (1986Rosengarten ( , 1998 discuss the "seen but unseen" aspects of behavior and survival exhibited by the urban slave population, what Rosengarten has termed the "parallel worlds" of black and white Charlestonians. Herman (1999, p. 88) describes such urban settings as places where "the authority and identity of the processional landscape of city mansions exist in a larger context of segmented social and cultural relationships" (see also Berlin 1998;Herman 2005;McInnis 2005;Morgan 1998;Upton 1992).…”

“…What emerges from this analysis is a late eighteenth-century landscape where the Euro-American emphasis on Georgian symmetry seems to have ended somewhere beyond the work yard and at the edge of the Brewton garden, in an area still swampy and, though no longer wooded, still weedy and uncontrolled, in what Bernard Herman has termed "a progression of decreasing order and increasing dirtiness" (Herman 1999(Herman , p. 88, 2005Zierden and Herman 1996). The agents responsible for transformation of that environment were most likely Brewton's anonymous slaves.…”

“…The terms used in this paper-and "owner" and "slave"-describe the legal and social relations experienced in nineteenth-century Charleston, and are used for that reason [also Cantwell and Wall 2001]). The interdependence of these diverse occupants, their daily affairs, and the landscape elements under their purview have been revealed in the research of scholars from a host of disciplines, including archaeology (Cothran 1995;Herman 1999Herman , 2005McInnis 1999McInnis , 2005Zierden 1999). …”

Bridging prehistory and history in the archaeology of cities

“…At the same time, she has demonstrated the changing tastes of single households over the rise, apogee, and decline of Charleston, documenting the ways that modes of gentility were modified in light of dynamic economic conditions (Zeirden 1999: 79-82). In a related vein, architectural historians have shown how the built environment of these urban plantations were indexes of racial and economic relations, and the ways that space, slave housing, and outbuildings were designed to be surveilled through lines of sight (Herman 1999(Herman , 2005Vlach 1999).…”

New Directions in the Study of Urban Slavery

“…In fact, as Bernard Herman's work on enslaved people's living quarters in Charleston shows, enslaved people often created some sense of privacy and control in the spaces they inhabited. 10 Similarly, Jared Hardesty found that enslaved Bostonians often used their enslaver's kitchen to receive guests, which suggests that they may have considered these kitchens their domain. 11 In New York City, free New Yorkers had very little control or oversight over the backyards and alleyways through which enslaved people moved, especially at night.…”