From the Archives: Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Immigration Law of 1924

If you've been hanging out here in the Margins for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea about where I stand on political issues in general even though I try not to shove my opinions in your face because this is a history blog, not a political blog.  One thing I feel strongly about is immigration.  This post first appeared in December, 2015.

 

America has always been a nation of immigrants, fueled by a constant stream of those with the energy and imagination to leave the familiar in search of something more.  And it has always had people who wanted to keep out the immigrants who came a generation or two after they themselves arrived.

Between 1880 and 1923, America saw the greatest voluntary migration in human history. Twenty-one million people moved to the United States in search of a better life.  By 1911, the United States Immigration Commission reported that three-fifths of American wage-earners were born somewhere else.

Not everyone was happy about the new arrivals.  Many groups  argued that Congress should shut down the flood of immigration, just as some people now argue for tighter control of immigration.  Labor unions feared that the flood of immigrants would take American jobs and depress wages.  (Sound familiar?) Many longtime Americans felt that newcomers from eastern and southern Europe were inherently inferior to earlier immigrants from northwestern Europe.  Others disliked the fact that many of the new arrivals were Catholic or Jewish.  (Members of the Ku Klux Klan were the most violent proponents of this position, but they weren't alone.)

Responding to these pressures, Congress passed a new immigration law in 1924. In addition to limiting the total number of immigrants allowed into the country each year, the new law established immigration quotas for each country based on the proportion of each nationality in the United States in the 1890 census, effectively reducing immigration from central and southern Europe. Asian immigrants were excluded altogether, with these exception of those from Japan and the Philippines.* The quotas remained in place, largely unchanged, until 1965.

You'd think we'd learn.

*Japan kept tight control over the number of emigrants allowed to leave.  The Philippines were a US possession.

Road Trip Through History: The Old Slave Mart

Restored plantations are favorite history-nerd attractions when you travel in the American south.*  It is harder to find historical road trip stops that deal with the slave labor behind the plantation gloss.

By Brian Stansberry - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10411286

The Old Slave Mart in Charleston, South Carolina, is a museum devoted to the history of the slave trade.

Before the American Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina was one of the richest and most cultured cities in North America.  It was also a major slave port.  More slaves were shipped to South Carolina than to any other mainland British colony.**  By 1708, slaves made up the majority of the colony’s population.  In the last two years before Britain and the United States outlawed the slave trade in 1808,*** Charleston had more registered slave ships than any port except Liverpool.  After 1808,  the demand for slaves in the United States was met through a domestic slave trading system.****

Charleston was a major center for collecting and reselling slaves within that system. The Old Slave Mart Museum is located in what is believed to be the only building used as a slave market still in existence in the American South.  As Ryan's Mart, it was part of a complex of buildings used in the slave trade, including a barracoon, or slave barracks,***** a kitchen, and a "dead house" or morgue.  The museum building was the auction house.

The museum is divided into two sections.  The exhibit on the first floor tells how the slave market operated.  The exhibit on the second floor, titled "Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery" looks at slave resistance and culture throughout the world of the Atlantic slave trade.  To my mind, the first floor exhibit is the more successful because it is more focused.  The museum uses the details of how a particular market worked and tells the stories of individual slaves, creating a grim and vivid picture of slave trading system in the American South.  The fact that surprised me most?  Charleston sold slave owners annual badges for their slaves, similar to modern tags for pet cats and dogs. Fees were set based on the  category and skills of the slave. It was both a tax on slave owning and a way to control the movements of black slaves who were hired out by their owners.  A small indignity when seen against the horrors of slavery, but one that upset me out of proportion to its reality.  Perhaps because it is such a banal symbol of oppression.

The second floor exhibit takes on an enormous subject in a small space.  It is much more general and consequently less powerful--though the map showing when and where slave revolts occurred was an eye-opener.  In all fairness, I might have enjoyed the second floor exhibit more if I hadn't just finished writing a book on the Atlantic slave trade.  A visitor who doesn't have all that detail in her head would learn a lot.

Uneven as the museum it, I strongly urge you to visit it when you're in Charleston--"lest we forget" sums it up.

*For that matter, restored houses of the rich and relatively rich are popular just about everywhere.  We are fascinated by how the wealthy lived.  I must admit, after visiting dozens of these over the years, I’ve lost my taste for restored plantations, gracious homes and palaces unless they have a larger historical significance.

**As I mentioned recently, the majority of African slaves were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean.

***The laws were not entirely successful. (Think Prohibition or the war on drugs.) In fact, immediately after the laws were passed, slave trading continued on an even larger scale.

Brazil replaced Britain as the most important slave-trading nation.  Other European companies continued to trade in slaves, often with money from British investors.  British slave traders continued to sail throughout the nineteenth century, sometimes registering their ships with foreign countries.

At first, Britain used diplomatic measures to pressure other governments to outlaw the trade as well.  For instance, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain convinced France and the Netherlands to abolish the trade.  Soon, however, Britain resorted to force.  Beginning in 1819, the British Navy attempted to enforce the ban by patrolling the African coastline and treating all slave ships as pirates.  France and the United States reluctantly joined the effort.  At least 160,000 slaves were rescued.  Those who were not saved often suffered worse conditions in their voyage across the Atlantic than had previously existed in the Middle Passage.  Since convicted slavers were executed for piracy, slavers sometimes threw their captives into the ocean when they were pursued by the authorities.

Despite the dangers of running the naval blockade, the slave trade continued through the 1860s.  Scarcity meant higher prices for the shipments of slaves that reached the Americas.  An American-owned slave ship was caught sailing from New York only months before the Civil War.  (We need to remember that the American economy as a whole benefited from slavery and the slave trade, not just the South.)

****And smuggling.

*****Barracks somehow seems too nice a word.  Other possible translations include hut, holding pen, and enclosure.  Since the salesroom is the only surviving building, it's hard to know which is more accurate.

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Road Trip Through History: Fort Sumter

My Own True Love and I are spending a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina.  For me, it’s a vacation/work sandwich.  Yesterday we bopped around together doing history-buff stuff.*  Today he heads off for twenty-four hours with his grandson’s Cub Scout troop aboard the USS Yorktown while I settle in for a day of reading and writing.  Tomorrow, we resume bopping.

The center of our first day was a visit to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War officially began.**  As always, the National Park Service did an excellent job.

Because Fort Sumter is on a island in the mouth of Charleston’s harbor, the visit begins with a boat ride, offered through an official park vendor.**** I must admit, I grumbled at the idea of a narrated boat “tour” of the harbor with only hour on the ground at the fort. I should have had more faith.  A hour was just about the right amount of time.

If you have the choice, I recommend the first trip of the day because it includes a flag-raising ceremony.  The ranger began with a brief, impassioned account of  the fall of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, including a description of the role that the American flag played in the events on Sumter.  (Stay tuned for some of the details.)  Then she asked for help raising the flag.  Twenty or thirty visitors (including me and My Own True Love) lined up to help unfold and hoist the flag.  Before we began, she asked us to introduce ourselves to our neighbors in the line.  It was moving and meaningful—a moment of unity in which no one mentioned the election or the inauguration that was going on as we shook hands and remembered a time of national division.

Once the ceremony was over, we were  free to explore the ruins of the fort and the excellent small museum. We would have enjoyed the visit even if all we got out of it was a more detailed version of the events of April 12, 1861—the ranger was interesting, the boat ride of lovely, the weather was amazing.  But, as is so often the case, the NPS did a good job of putting the place in its broader historical context, including a small exhibit on the role of African-American slaves in the fort’s history.  Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:

The fort was built as part of a string of coastal fortifications, planned as a result of the inadequacy of coastal defense in the War of 1812. (At some level, armies always plan for the last war.  And really, what choice do they have?)  They built a man-made island in the mouth of Charleston’s Harbor in 1829, using sand and 70,000 tons of granite from New England.  Intended for a garrison of 650 men with 135 guns, the fort was almost completed by 1860 but it was not yet manned   When Anderson and his men arrived at the fort, they raised the American flag there for the first time.

The military professionals of the Union and Confederate armies were drawn from the same small pool of big fish:  Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard led the Confederate troops that bombarded Anderson and his men.  Anderson was Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point.  This is the kind of thing that would lead to dramatic tension—or charges of implausibility—if I wrote historical fiction.

Major Anderson was allowed to surrender with full honors, including the right to take his flag with him.  At the war’s end, on April 9, 1865, he raised the same flag over Fort Sumter  once more.

The story of Fort Sumter didn’t end with Anderson’s surrender.  The fort remained a Confederate stronghold for the next four years despite repeated Union efforts to recapture it.  The Confederate garrison never surrendered.  They withdrew from the island when Sherman’s march threatened the South Carolina capitol.

The ruined fort was brought back into service during the Spanish-American War, when the army constructed a large concrete battery on the former parade ground, and it remained in service as part of the coastal defense until Pearl Harbor, when it became clear that aviation was the name of the coastal defense game.

Don’t touch that dial.  More historical adventures from Charleston are coming up.

*And eating.  Because everything you hear about food in Charleston is true.  The only thing that saved us from dyspepsia and blimpitude has been lots and lots of walking. I strongly recommend Jestine’s Kitchen.  And pimento cheese.

**For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story or want a refresher, here’s a recap:

In November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.  On December 20, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union.*** By March 2, a total of seven states had seceded and seized Federal forts and naval yards throughout the South.  Fort Sumter, an unfinished red brick fortress built on a man-made granite island,  was one of the few to remain in Federal hands, thanks to preemptory action by Major Robert Anderson.

Anderson commanded two companies—a total of 85 men, including musicians—at nearby Fort Moultrie.  Six days after South Carolina seceded, he decided Moultrie was impossible to defend and moved his troops in the night to Sumter.  The Confederate government saw Anderson’s transfer as an act of aggression.  (Unlike, say, seizing Federal forts.  Partisanship blinds us all.)

The fort became the emotional focal point of the conflict between Union and Confederacy.  The small garrison was cut off from resupply or reinforcement, but refused to surrender the fort to Confederate control. Anderson, a Kentucky native and former slaveholder, was praised as a hero in the North and reviled as a traitor in the South. President James Buchanan, at the end of his term of office, was unwilling to trigger civil war by attempting to relieve the besieged unit and equally unwilling to trigger a public outcry by recalling the troops from Sumter. He chose instead to leave the problem for his successor.

When Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, the garrison at Sumter had less than six weeks of food left. Lincoln's cabinet told him it was impossible to relieve the fortress and urged him to evacuate Anderson's troops as a way of reducing tension between North and South. Popular opinion screamed for Lincoln to send reinforcements to the “gallant little band”.  With public opinion eager for action, and no sign that delay would improve the chances of reuniting the country, Lincoln chose to resupply the garrison but not send reinforcements unless the Confederates attacked either the fort or the supply ships—a compromise that pleased no one.

Shortly after midnight on April 12, with resupply ships on the way, the Confederate government gave Anderson until 4:00 AM to surrender. Anderson refused. At 4:30 AM, the bombardment began. Although they had neither the men nor supplies to mount a meaningful defense, the Union forces held out for a day and a half before surrendering.

The war had begun.

***No matter how contentious the recent election was, no one threatened to secede—unless I missed something.

****Only two round trips a day in January.  There are more in the high season, but there are also more people who want to go.  Plan ahead so you aren’t disappointed.