Ceramics for Slaves: Colonoware

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Colonoware vessel, Georgia ca 1750

Ceramics are often the primary find at archaeological digs. They are important in determining the economic status, food ways and eating habits of those that lived there.  In colonial digs here in Charleston, early porcelain shards from Germany and England are common, reflecting Charleston's status as the major seaport on the  eastern seaboard. Late colonial and antebellum digs reveal the Chinese Export porcelain so cherished and displayed today in the china cabinets of many an Old Charleston family. Occasionally, the alkaline glazed stoneware  produced in the upstate of South Carolina is to be found in post -1820 sites. These ceramics are thoroughly documented.

Mixed among the shards are another ceramic not so well documented , and it is dubbed  Colonoware. Colonoware is a hand coiled and pit fired pottery long produced as an inexpensive trade item by American Indians and sold or bartered in the city.  It is never found stashed in the back of barns, or at estate sales. It is never  found passed down as precious family heirlooms. It is commonly found at dig sites of 18th century pioneer settlements and at 18th and  19th century plantation communities. Normally found as broken shards, intact specimens are recovered from riverbeds. Since trade goods were transported by water, the occasional overturned boat provides intact specimens. The example below was recovered from the Savannah River.(see Figure 1 below). 

As Native Americans dispersed from the southeast, it appears that Colonoware production was taken up by plantation blacks to provide cooking and eating vessels. This is a practice most likely encouraged by plantation owners. It was, after all,  an inexpensive source of cooking and eating  ware that put elderly or substantially disabled individuals back to work. 

Typically, plantation slaves would have prepared food in a common pot. The food would have been transferred from the pot to a large wooden trough for serving and eating where it would be shared by all, or the food would be transferred into small bowls or pots, such as the colonoware bowl  here illustrated.

Figure 1.Colonoware Vessel

Classic cooking bowl form

Eighteenth century digs at plantation sites where the enslaves lived reveals little in the way of serving spoons or cutlery of any sort. Most white frontiersman were eating with wooden spoons, and this was probably the norm for the enslaved as well. Although the archaeological record is silen, we do know that they were not eating with metal implements. As pewter became available, it use was reserved initially for whites. Thus, for the first half of the eighteenth century many plantation slaves would have eaten without utensils, using shells or makeshift items. 

Some scholars suggest that Colonoware was folk craft handed down from Africa. There are certainly precedents. Similar coiled and low fired ware was produced in Africa, as it was in virtually all cultures. Indeed, more sophisticated high fired wares were produced in Africa and all over the world. Whatever its origin, we know that the Catawba Tribe was trading in Colonoware well into the nineteenth century, wares that were used on the plantation by slaves. Colonoware shards from the earliest sites reflect the aboriginal styles of the native Americans, but it was not long before the ware produced for sale took on the look of European vessels such as the one pictured above.

 In the short story “Loves of the Driver”, author William Gilmore Simms notes that during his boyhood in the 1810s that 

It was the custom of the Catawba Indians …to come down, at certain seasons, from their far homes in the interior, to the seaboard, bringing to Charleston a little stock of earthen pots and pans….which they bartered in the city. They did not, however, bring their pots and pans from the Nation, but descending to the Lowcountry empty handed, in groups or families, they squatted down on the rich clay lands of the Edisto and and there established themselves in a temporary abiding place, until their simple potteries had yielded them a sufficient supply of wares with which to throw themselves into the market.”

That colonoware was produced for the slave population can be inferred by the statement of Phillip Porcher, a St Stephens SC resident , recounting that :

“….the Catawba Indians ….traveled down from the upcountry to
Charleston, making clay ware for the negroes along the way. They would camp until a section was supplied and then move until finally Charleston was reached.”

Finally, Charley Watson, a former slave from Winnsboro, SC, in a WPA interview in 1935 recalling plantation days of the 1850s  said:

“De Indians fetch their pots and jars to sell”

Note that by this time , (1850s) exceptional high fired utilitarian stoneware was being produced and sold in the Winnsboro area. The stoneware, with a glassy alkaline glaze, was both durable and easy to clean. It was used for food production but also for serving as well, although fancy ware from Charleston was preferred at the dining table by country housewives who could afford it.  By this time tinsmiths were producing plates and cups in the upcountry and rail was bringing goods inland from the coast. Apparently, the use of these items were reserved for the white population, and colonoware use was reserved for the slave population.

Below are examples of contemporary Catawba Pottery. This is a highly collectible product that is different than the Colonoware produced for trade
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Figure 2. Contemporary Catawba Ware

Contemporary Catawba Pottery

Because Colonoware was a low fired product it was delicate, not unlike porcelain.  But unlike porcelain, this porous and unglazed product  stained easily and would have retained flavors from previous  use.  It  would not have been uniformly sanitary after cleaning and would have been a breeding ground for microbes. It seems that its major advantage was low cost.  I suspect that, in its own way,it was a  symbol of repression. Colonoware was an inferior product, a fact perhaps not noted by the 18^th century enslaved population , but certainly by nineteenth century enslaved, observing the expansion of ceramic and tin options. As food preparation and serving vessels improved with the introduction of  tin and stoneware, colonoware continued as the Master's choice for the slave street.

This premise is proven by the distribution of Colonoware shards at dig sites all throughout the southeast from Florida to Alabama to Virginia. Shards are commonly found interspersed among other shards in archaeological digs. Present in both eighteenth and nineteenth century digs, it is far more predominant in earlier sites than later. It is interesting to note that it is virtually nonexistent at post civil war sites.

It would seem that freed African Americans in post civil war society left colonoware behind when allowed to choose their own vessels.

February 18, 1865 - The Dramatic Fall of Confederate Charleston

February 18, 1865 was the end of one era and the beginning of a new one for Charleston. For those of you "from off" who know that the Civil War--that is, the War Between the States--is a big deal in the South but you aren't really sure why that is after all this time, let me tell you a little story.

At that date Charleston had been under Federal Bombardment since August 8, 1863, a total of 587 days. Fort Sumter had been shelled even longer,  since April. General Quincy Gilmore with his Federal Troops, using African-American soldiers, had worked his way up the coast and had finally seized Battery Wagener and Morris Island . From there he commenced to bombard Fort Sumter at close range and the city at a distance using new technology, cannon with a rifled shaft. The rifling allowed cannonballs to be hurled as far as six miles, twice the previous range. These guns were aimed at the city and its civilian population. They were nicknamed "The Swamp Angels".

The civilian population in the lower city were ordered to evacuate as far north as Calhoun Street. People scattered to the countryside . The bombardment continued but the city refused to surrender. General Gilmore had taken a lot of heat for bombarding civilians in the Northern Press and in Congress, utilizing the same "Total War" approach that prompted Sherman to burn Atlanta. In May of 1864, he was transferred to the Army of the James and was replaced by Alexander Schimelpfennig, a Prussian with no reservations about the siege campaign.

The stalemate continued until the very end, and Charleston surrendered not because of Federal advances here but rather General Sherman's burning of Columbia two days earlier (February 16) which destroyed the last transmission lines between Charleston and the outside world.
Confederate General Hardee's orders were that in such a contingency he was to evacuate his men. And so, Hardee ordered his men onto boxcars at the Northwest Rail Depot at the corner of East Bay and Chapel Streets. Sherman had destroyed the rail lines west at Branchville, and north to Wilmington was the only option.

General Hardee was leaving nothing behind for the Yankees. Perhaps the city had resisted so long because of General Beauregard's "Ring of Fire" , eight batteries strategically arranged around the harbor that provided withering resistance to Yankee attempts to raid the Harbor from the ocean. Those guns had to go! They were spiked and deafening explosions were heard throughout the city even as word spread of the ongoing evacuation.

The departing army did, however, save the docks on the Cooper River. Cotton there was gathered and piled into pyres at Citadel Green, and there it was lit afire, a symbolic burnt offering to a way of life careening to a close. The eerie glow from the fire and the black pall of the smoke added to the sense of panic as people fled to the streets, rumors spreading that the Yankees were already burning the city as they had Columbia. Although that fire was a controlled one, docks and warehouses on the west side were set ablaze indiscriminately. On Lucas Street was a long shed filled with 1200 bales of cotton. That, along with Lucas' Mill containing some thirty thousand bushels of rice and R.T. Wilkin's warehouse at the foot of Broad Street were set ablaze and destroyed. The bridge west over the Ashley River was ordered blown up, and fire from that explosion set ablaze inhabited neighborhoods uptown. Confederates burned cotton warehouses, arsenals, quartermaster stores,  railroad bridges and two ironclads. It is ironic that as rumors spread of Yankees burning the city, it was General Hardee's orders that made the burning a reality.

And so the bitter cold, rainy night commenced with a spree of looting and vandalism. Rumors spread that the evacuating troops had left food on the platform at the train station. They had also left bad gunpowder. As a desperate populace stormed the Depot looking for food, children played with the gunpowder,  carrying handfuls across the street  to watch it flare in a makeshift fire. They created a powder trail that led back to the Depot and that flaming trail ignited an explosion that killed approximately 160 people instantly. Two hundred others were wounded. What irony that over 587 days of siege, only 53 persons had died as a direct result of the Federal shelling. Three times as many died on evacuation night. The Charleston Courier gives this description:

"The explosion was terrible, and shook the whole city.....The cries of the wounded, the inability of the spectators to  render assistance to those rolling and perishing in the fire, all rendered it a scene of indescribable terror."Charleston Courier 11/20/1865"
The fire could not be contained and consumed most buildings from  Chapel Street to Calhoun Street and from Alexander Street to Washington Street  with few exceptions.

Early the morning of the 18th, Lieutenant Colonel A.G. Bennett, of the 21st  U.S. Colored Troops,  received City Aldermen Gilliland and George Williams as emissaries from Mayor Macbeth, with a letter of invitation from the Mayor requesting that he take possession of the city and establish order. I can see the post script to the letter (BTW, General Hardee took the last train out last night)  Although General Schimellfennig was still here, ill with malaria,  Gilmore had arrived back in Beaufort on February 10, ostensibly to accept a pending surrender, a "save face/restore honor" move.  Imagine Gilmore's rage and disappointment to receive a letter of invitation from the Mayor! With no formal surrender and no sword to be handed over, Gilmore must have been a bitter man.

Nonetheless, Federal Troops moved in and took possession of the Arsenal just minutes before it was to be blown. The U.S. flag was hoisted over the Citadel, the Arsenal and the Customs House within two hours.Federal troops were put to work putting out the flames.The navy took possession of Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie within 24 hours. They were cautious because the Confederates had left dummies, or "automatons" standing guard to give the impression that the forts were still occupied.

 That afternoon the the Federal Troops entering the city were led by the Fifty Fifth Massachusetts Regiment, black soldiers recruited from the ranks of liberated slaves. Marching through the city they sang "John Brown's Body." Their standard was not the Stars and Stripes, but  rather  a flag which read "Liberty" was waived to and fro, much to the horror of the remaining white citizens. White Charleston was miserable and in desperate straits, the wealthy  having long since removed themselves from the city. With the exception of a few businessmen who stayed to protect their interests, only the poor remained. and they were confused and astounded by the jubilation of the blacks at Yankee occupation. Some 200 Confederate deserters surrender themselves, declaring that they were tired of fighting. Jacob Schirmer, a local white businessman, writes in his diary, "We have writ our own destruction, and now we must live with it".

The New York  Tribune reports that the city was surrendered at 9 AM on Saturday morning , February 18. The departing confederates had left behind two hundred guns and a fine supply of ammunition.

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