## What Enslavement Required of Charleston’s Harbor Workers
A full account of the escape requires understanding what it meant to work on Charleston Harbor as an enslaved person in the years before the Civil War.
Charleston was, in the antebellum period, one of the most active ports on the eastern seaboard. Ships carrying cotton, indigo, rice, and naval stores moved through the harbor constantly. The labor infrastructure of that port — the loading and unloading, the rigging and maintenance, the piloting and navigation — was largely performed by enslaved Black workers and by free Black workers whose freedom was constrained by the legal architecture of South Carolina’s slave society.
The city of Charleston had a relatively complex relationship with its Black population, compared to some other parts of the antebellum South. There was a significant population of free Black residents, some of whom had accumulated modest property and operated businesses. There were enslaved people who were hired out by their enslavers to work for wages, as Smalls was, and who occupied an unusual position in the city’s labor market — physically mobile, technically skilled, but legally owned by someone else and required to remit most of their earnings.
This system of urban hire-out created conditions that were, in some ways, different from plantation enslavement. A hired-out worker in Charleston had more physical mobility within the city, more access to information and networks, more contact with people from varied backgrounds including free Black residents and visiting sailors from the North and from other countries. The relative mobility did not mean freedom. It meant a different form of constraint, operating in a different physical environment. The legal status was the same: the person was property, could be sold, could be physically punished, could have their family members separated from them at the enslaver’s discretion.