The Clionian Debating Society: Further Research

More commonly known as the Charleston County 1868 Voter Registration Roll, this is part of a 31-volume series covering the entire state “originally created by the order of commander of the Second Military District in accord with 14 U.S. Stats. 429, 15 U.S. Stats. 2, and 15 U.S. Stats. 14, which gave him ultimate responsibility for the registration of voters and the conduct of elections. The series was abstracted prior to 12 September 1868 from the series Voter Registrations Reported to the Military Government and was deposited with the secretary in October 1868.” 1

In the series are the names and race for each registered voter. These would have been men only in 1868. But those registered Charleston County voters would include the African American Freedmen, only three years after Emancipation. The South Carolina record series was arranged by county, then by registration precinct, and lastly by polling or election precinct. Within each election precinct the names are in rough alphabetical order, by only the first letter of the surname. Whites and African Americans are listed in separate clusters. In Charleston County there were nine registration precincts and thirty election precincts. In 1868, this would have included in addition to Charleston County, Berkeley County and part of Dorchester County. Election precincts include Goose Creek, Summerville, Pineville, and St. Stephens.

The Brown Fellowship papers are arranged in three small series. Organizational materials include a copy of the Rules and Regulations of the Brown Fellowship Society as founded in 1794, but published in 1844. The series also contains two original meeting minute logs that cover the events of mostly monthly meetings held from 1869 to 1911. Additionally, there are several pages of loose minutes not included in these logs that cover meetings held in the years 1913 through 1916. Topics discussed include maintenance of the graveyard, attendance, elections of officers, and discussions to provide assistance to members and their descendants. Numerous dedications in honor of deceased members are also included. Correspondence relates to cemetery and building maintenance, some financial affairs, and membership details. With pictorial broadsides (1904) and program (1990) re the group's 200th anniversary.

For this book the author has compiled all the names and other pertinent genealogical information that can be found in the Charleston city directories of 1803, 1806, 1807, 1809, and 1813. The names in each of the five directories are arranged in alphabetical order, obviating the need for an index to the volume as a whole. Typically, the directory entries furnish the name of the Charleston resident, his address, and, in the majority of cases, his occupation. The five directories combined furnish the names and addresses of 15,000 Charlestonian.

Dr Angela G. Ray is from Kentucky, the child of two public school teachers. Her latest book is about a debating society organized by young free Black men in Charleston, South Carolina, just before the Civil War. These black men of the Clionean debate society were legally free but in the antebellum south, white supremacy, slavery and legal constraints on black people made their lives quite dangerous. What is it like to be free but not really free? What is it like to want more out of life and to go after it despite the dangers doing so could bring.what it's like to go after things that seem out of reach despite obstacle that make the goal seem impossible. How did Professor Ray go after her goal of attaining a PhD at 30? How did the Clionian debate society run a debate society for a decade despite dangers in society that loomed against them?

Powers (history, College of Charleston) details black social-class stratification and social mobility in this revisionist work drawing on census data, manuscript collections, and newspaper accounts. He delineates social and economic contours of the black population in Charleston, SC, a historical seaport center for the slave trade. Topics include l

In 1860, when four million African Americans were enslaved, a quarter-million others, including William Ellison, were "free people of color." But Ellison was remarkable. Born a slave, his experience spans the history of the South from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In a day when most Americans, black and white, worked the soil, barely scraping together a living, Ellison was a cotton-gin maker-a master craftsman. When nearly all free blacks were destitute, Ellison was wealthy and well-established. He owned a large plantation and more slaves than all but the richest white planters. While Ellison was exceptional in many respects, the story of his life sheds light on the collective experience of African Americans in the antebellum South to whom he remained bound by race. His family history emphasizes the fine line separating freedom from slavery.

Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system exclusively maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but Larry Koger's authoritative study portrays the small yet significant role that African Americans played as masters in the peculiar institution. By profiling South Carolina's diverse population of African-American slaveowners, he demonstrates that free African-Americans embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they--like their white counterparts--exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses.

Charleston’s Free Persons of Color occupied a precarious position, living as they did in a city long a bastion of African American slavery. Caught between a slave majority on one side and a white minority of slave owners on the other, they had to navigate between these disparate worlds, in neither of which they truly belonged. They had some rights and privileges: free people of color could own property, including slaves. They sometimes purchased family and friends to protect those who could not be freed; sometimes, however, free blacks bought and sold human beings as their white neighbors did. Free men and women of a certain age had to pay taxes, but they could not testify in a court of law against a white person. As time passed and the Civil War drew near, laws restricting their freedom and movement became more stringent and many were forced to flee.

The members of this group never comprised more than two per cent of the state’s black population. Of the 1,801 free blacks present in South Carolina in 1790, 950 men, women and children lived in the Charleston District; the local population of free blacks reached a peak of 3,861 in 1850. In 1860, while only three percent of the state’s enslaved population lived here, 33% of South Carolina’s free blacks did. In urban areas, the free persons of color were often laborers, skilled artisans, carpenters, masons, and the like, with women, generally the larger percentage of the free population, often working in domestic trades and with their needles. Though small in number, they nevertheless indelibly stamped the city, creating a culture that can be traced in various locations.

Located on Charleston's Neck, immediately west of Magnolia Cemetery's main entrance, are a number of small cemeteries created by a variety of ethnicities and religions. These small cemeteries all possess the same physical orientation, giving no indication that the sites were created by differing groups. Among these are Friendly Union Cemetery, Brown Fellowship Cemetery, Humane and Friendly Cemetery, and Unity and Friendship Cemetery. All four cemeteries were created just before the outbreak of the Civil War by Free People of Color who organized themselves into benevolent societies. Free People of Color were African Americans who were not enslaved but did not enjoy the civil liberties possessed by white citizens. The benevolent societies that Free People of Color created provided a sense of security, especially financially, to people in an uncertain position. This thesis seeks to understand the people who created these cemeteries and their benevolent societies. To accomplish this, a study of the status of Free People of Color and the social structure of benevolent societies was conducted. The cemeteries were studied to determine the level of activities of each society and to understand how the societies have faded in the 20 th century. The decline of each community and the impact of this decline is the second half of this thesis.

This thesis focuses on the living patterns of Charleston's antebellum free black population by examining spatial contexts, architectural styles, building materials, and the various socio-economic factors which influenced such patterns. Wraggborough, serving as a specific case study neighborhood, was selected based on its residential diversity in terms of both race and class. The timeline from 1796 to 1877 follows Wraggborough from its origins and subsequent development, into the enslavement crisis on the eve of the Civil War, through the Reconstruction era.

These thirty-four letters, written by members of the William Ellison family, comprise the only sustained correspondence by a free Afro-American family in the late antebellum South. Born a slave, Ellison was freed in 1816, set up a cotton gin business, and by his death in 1861, he owned sixty-three slaves and was the wealthiest free black in South Carolina. Although the early letters are indistinguishable from those of white contemporaries, the later correspondence is preoccupied with proof of their free status.

Angela K. Ray's Chapter "Warriors and Statesmen: Debate Education among Free African American Men in Antebellum Charleston" describes activities of the Clionian Debating Society.

In an era increasingly marked by polarized and unproductive political debates, this volume makes the case for a renewed emphasis on teaching speech and debate, both in and outside of the classroom. Speech and debate education leads students to better understand their First Amendment rights and the power of speaking. It teaches them to work together collaboratively to solve problems, and it encourages critical thinking, reasoned and fact-based argumentation, and respect for differing viewpoints in our increasingly diverse and global society. Highlighting the need for more emphasis on the ethics and skills of democratic deliberation, the contributors to this volume--leading scholars, teachers, and coaches in speech and debate programs around the country--offer new ideas for reinvigorating curricular and co-curricular speech and debate by recovering and reinventing their historical mission as civic education. Combining historical case studies, theoretical reflections, and reports on programs that utilize rhetorical pedagogies to educate for citizenship, Speech and Debate as Civic Education is a first-of-its-kind collection of the best ideas for reinventing and revitalizing the civic mission of speech and debate for a new generation of students. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Jenn Anderson, Michael D. Bartanen, Ann Crigler, Sara A. Mehltretter Drury, David A. Frank, G. Thomas Goodnight, Ronald Walter Greene, Taylor W. Hahn, Darrin Hicks, Edward A. Hinck, Jin Huang, Una Kimokeo-Goes, Rebecca A. Kuehl, Lorand Laskai, Tim Lewis, Robert S. Littlefield, Allan D. Louden, Paul E. Mabrey III, Jamie McKown, Gordon R. Mitchell, Catherine H. Palczewski, Angela G. Ray, Robert C. Rowland, Minhee Son, Sarah Stone Watt, Melissa Maxcy Wade, David Weeks, Carly S. Woods, and David Zarefsky.

Well into the twenty-first century, free people of color who lived in the antebellum U.S. South have remained conspicuously absent from the field of American intellectual history. Their silence in the historical record is less a reflection of their actual lives, however, than it is the product of Jim Crow-era efforts to justify white supremacy by erasing the public’s memory of free black Southern intellectual life and by manufacturing a myth of black mental inferiority to replace it. This dissertation corrects the erroneous scholarly and popular assumption that free people of color did not lead noteworthy mental lives in the antebellum South. I present a comparative examination of free black communities in the region’s three largest cities between the American Revolution and the Civil War—including New Orleans, Charleston, and Baltimore—to demonstrate that free people of color pursued the life of the mind in a bold exercise of intellectual equality, masculine identity, and personal freedom. To preserve their dignity and sheer humanity as thinking men (and occasionally, women), the subjects of my work insisted upon maintaining individual and collective access to outlets for mental uplift, including literary and debating societies, illicit schools, and public and private reading practices. They did so despite considerable risk to life and liberty. One by one, Southern state and municipal governments legally denied free blacks precisely those rights that were most fundamental to their pursuit of intellectual development: their freedom of mobility, their right to assemble, their liberty to acquire and pass on literacy, and the broader constitutional guarantees of a free press and free speech. In defiance of an oppressive legal system and a hostile white public that viewed black intellect as an intolerable threat to slavery, free people of color increasingly drew on their clandestine mental activities as a crucial method of resistance against racial oppression. By 1861, the South’s “free” people of color had endured a decades-long assault on their liberties that left them stripped of all but their most basic claim to a legal exemption from physical bondage. Nonetheless, this community survived, and even thrived, to assume a leadership role for the larger black South after Emancipation. My dissertation reconstructs free black communities of discourse within their social and political contexts, in order to recover the story of how Southern people of color used intellectual life as an effective weapon of “thinking resistance” against prejudice and discrimination. While the project restores these forgotten men and women to their rightful place in the South’s past, it transforms our larger understanding of Southern intellectual history as well, by enriching and broadening the field to embrace a more diverse, racially inclusive, and thus more historically accurate, community of thinkers.

"That is the task of this lecture: to explicate the Clionians’ minute books, in order to ask what such records can reveal about how the society functioned, what it valued, and how it construed education. I propose to show that the members of this group practiced self- and communal education as a means of enacting a degree of freedom, performatively asserting their own humanity through intellectual endeavor. First we will briefly consider the history of debate as a Western educational practice and the circumstances of the free black community in antebellum Charleston. Then, turning to the Clionians’ minute books, we will analyze their representations of five regular activities, as they governed themselves, debated, lectured, established a library, and archived their own history."