The Scandalous Black Dance of 1795, Part 1

The traditions of African-American dance and music form an important part of Charleston’s cultural heritage that survived many generations of local discrimination and active suppression. In 1795, for example, the sounds of a nocturnal “negro dance” in a private home aroused the wrath of local authorities who violently dispersed a mixed-race party of revelers. At the same time, a respected white citizen at the center of this merry scene was vilified by his neighbors, and a shade of scandal still looms over his reputation today. Beware, however; not everything is as it first appears.

On the evening of Tuesday, November 3rd 1795, sometime after 10 p.m., a number of white men patrolling the nocturnal streets were drawn to the sound of music and laughter emanating from the open windows of a building near the Cooper River waterfront. The structure in question was a newish, three-story brick residence at the southeast corner of East Bay and Gillon Streets, to the northeast of the old Exchange Building. It belonged to the estate of the late Julius Smith, but his widow had arranged to sell the building and was in the process of removing her furniture to another residence. Most of her neighbors believed the house was unoccupied, but the sounds of music and merriment streaming from within suggested otherwise.[1]

The first two men on the scene were Peter Saul Ryan and James McBride, residents of Ward No. 2 who were patrolling the area as part of a volunteer neighborhood night watch. There had a been a spate of nocturnal crime in the area in recent weeks, and local residents were taking turns walking the streets at night. Passing by Mrs. Smith’s house, Mr. McBride told his companion that he had heard rumors there was to be a “negro dance” there that evening. Around that same time, two other volunteer watchmen, William Ellison and William McBlair, arrived on the scene after hearing the same mellifluous noise. Knowing that the law prohibited enslaved people and free people of color from gathering after 10 p.m. for the purposes of entertainment, even behind closed doors in private places, the four white men agreed that the nocturnal “frolic” in Mrs. Smith’s supposedly-empty house warranted the attention of the city’s police force, called the City Guard.

After a quick stroll to the Guard House at the southwest corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, Peter Ryan and James McBride returned to the scene of the dance with police Captain Harmon Davis and a number of uniformed guardsmen carrying muskets tipped with bayonets. The armed men surrounded the house, and Captain Davis knocked heavily on the door. There was a brief pause and silence. Captain Davis knocked again and demanded the locked door to be opened. The guardsmen heard the reply of one or two voices—which they later identified as negro voices—refusing to open the door. Angered by this insolence, Captain Davis kicked the door open and forced his way into the house.

Just within the door, Captain Davis was met by William Cunnington, an older white man who was well-known in the community as a businessman and local magistrate. Mr. Cunnington demanded to know why the police had just forced their way into a private residence. Captain Davis replied that he had heard evidence of an illegal negro dance taking place within the house and was determined to put an end to it. Cunnington replied that the City Guard had no authority within the house, that Mrs. Smith had placed the house in his care, and denied that there was any such dance taking place on the premises. The volunteer watchmen who had summoned the police stood behind Captain Davis and harangued Mr. Cunnington with a torrent of insults and accusations. Many of the bystanders had clearly heard music coming from within the house, and the magistrate’s denial of the obvious seemed more than a little suspicious.

At length, Mr. Cunnington permitted Captain Davis to enter and search the house. Travelling from room to room, The senior Guard found the house empty and quiet. The dining room table was set with fine china for a large party, and decorated with a “large ic’d cake” and a number of “delicacies” surrounding a “pyramid” in the center of the table. Still, there were no guests to be found. Up the stairs and in the garret, however, he found a locked door and demanded entry. There was no reply. He kicked open the door to find a room filled with men, black and white, and women, black and mulatto. As the armed Guards began securing the black men (not the women) with rope, the crowd of spectators outside the house saw a number of other men—black, white, and mulatto—jumping from open windows and balconies into the street and running for their lives.

Captain Davis returned to the ground floor to find William Cunnington arguing with neighbors about the activities taking place within Mrs. Smith’s house that evening. The magistrate maintained his innocence, but the stream of dark-skinned prisoners parading down the stairs and into the street seemed to undermine his defense. In passing, one of the black females under arrest removed her party “head dress and bonnet” and handed them to Mr. Cunnington, asking him “to take care of it for her” while she went to jail. Cunnington politely received the headgear, and this singular act of familiarity aroused a deluge of scorn and indignation from his white male accusers.

Once the Smith residence was cleared of revelers, the police marched back to the Guard House with the prisoners and everyone else returned to their respective homes. Just after six o’clock on the morning of November 4th, however, another riot commenced within the same house. Several white men passing by, including one Henry Moses, heard loud voices within and stopped at the broken front door to investigate. Mr. Moses questioned a young black man who stepped out of the house, but he received only an “impertinent” reply. When Moses threatened the black youth, he ran off in great haste. Moses and others entered the house to find the leftovers from last evening’s entertainment, and were disgusted by the extravagant pretentions demonstrated by the black partiers. The white men began throwing decorations, furniture, and food items into the street and kicking them noisily down the sidewalk.

Suddenly William Cunnington reappeared at the scene, and a fresh chorus of accusations and insults filled the morning air. The white magistrate called Mr. Moses “a house robber or words to that effect” who had no business in the house, and escorted him in a very rough manner to the door. Witnesses later stated that they were astonished to hear such abusive words and insults coming from the mouth of a magistrate. Mr. William Cunnington, they surmised from the raucous scenes of the preceding hours, was not exactly the upstanding citizen that he pretended to be.

All of the story you’ve just read about a “negro dance” being busted up by the law on the evening of November 3rd 1795 (and spilling over into the morning of November 4th) comes from a small bundle of papers now housed at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia. The details of such mundane disturbances of the peace in early Charleston are now almost entirely lost, so we are very fortunate that a written record of this particular episode survives. Apparently the controversy surrounding William Cunnington’s actions continued to reverberate through the community in the days after the event. The captain of the City Guard, Harmon Davis, probably discussed the incident with his boss, the city intendant (mayor), John Edwards. On the seventh day of November, 1795, seven white men appeared before Intendant Edwards and recounted their eyewitness testimony of the events in question. Edwards then forwarded their five handwritten affidavits to Governor Arnoldus Vanderhorst in Columbia, who in turn submitted copies to both the state Senate and House of Representatives later that month.[2]

The purpose behind the creation of the affidavits and their submission to the General Assembly is not clearly stated in the surviving materials, but we can deduce a motivation from Governor Vanderhorst’s brief message to the assembly, dated November 25th, 1795: “Conceiving it my duty I herewith beg leave to lay before your House the affidavits of sundry citizens of Charleston respecting the conduct of a Justice of the Peace for Charleston District.” The unspoken question to be addressed by the legislature was, therefore, something like this: Does the recent conduct of William Cunnington reflect the character of man worthy of the confidence of his peers, who should be entrusted with the office of Justice of the Peace? Before we collectively pass judgement on Mr. Cunnington, let’s quickly review a few legal facts central to the case at hand.

Beginning in the earliest days of the town during the late seventeenth century and continuing until February of 1865, white authorities in urban Charleston enforced a nightly curfew for enslaved people and free people of color. The timing of the curfew changed seasonally—9 p.m. during the cool half of the year and 10 p.m. during the warmer months—and was announced by the ringing of church bells and then a paramilitary tattoo in front of the police station on Broad Street. Once the bells had rung and the tattoo had sounded, the city’s night watchmen were authorized to arrest and detain any non-white persons found in the streets, unless that person had a “ticket” written by a white person explaining the reason for their being abroad after hours. (For more information about the origins of this practice, see Episode No. 66.)

This long-standing restriction of the nocturnal movements of enslaved and free colored residents was created to lessen the general white paranoia about what mischief black folks might be making at night when the majority of the white population was asleep. Following the incorporation of the City of Charleston in 1783, the new City Council adopted additional laws to curtail further the movements of the urban black population. In June 1789, for example, they ratified an ordinance “for the better ordering and governing of negro and other slaves, and of free negroes, mulattoes and mestizoes, within the City of Charleston.” The eighth paragraph of that lengthy law explicitly prohibited black dances held after the nightly curfew. Although it did not specify what manner of punishment might await the participants in such dances, the ordinance imposed a hefty fine on any white person who countenanced such events:

No assemblies of negroes or other slaves, for the purpose of merriment or otherwise in any house, out-house, or enclosure, of any person within this city, shall be permitted to continue later than ten o’clock at night, from the twentieth day of March to the twentieth day of September; or later than nine o’clock, from the twentieth day of September to the twentieth day of March; and every owner or occupier of any house, out-house, or enclosure, within this city, who shall knowingly and willfully suffer or permit any such assembly of negroes, or other slaves, as aforesaid, to continue later than the hours aforementioned, he, she, or they shall, upon conviction thereof, for every such offence, forfeit the sum of forty shillings.[3]

The “negro dance” described in the affidavits of November 1795 seems to have been precisely the sort of nocturnal “merriment” that the City Council of Charleston sought to suppress. Such “frolics” might have been regular feature of urban life in the late eighteenth century, but there is precious little surviving record of such activities. A few modern historians have described this 1795 incident as a rare, documented example of what was likely a common phenomenon—that is, white men attending, and perhaps even participating in, illegal black nocturnal dance parties in urban Charleston. Furthermore, the presence of a number of black and mulatto women at such events, and the conspicuous absence of white women, adds further fuel to the historical imagination. Some scholars have noted that the circumstances surrounding this 1795 incident could be interpreted as evidence of a brothel, or a party designed for the purposes of sexual assignation, that was ostensibly hosted, condoned, and defended by an otherwise respectable white male citizen. As such, this brief incident has cast an enduring shadow over the reputation of William Cunnington.[4]

But every controversy has at least two sides, and the aforementioned affidavits describing the 1795 dance don’t include any information about William Cunnington’s version of the events. That’s a pity, because Mr. Cunnington—who just happened to live next door to the site of the dance—felt that he had been unfairly drawn into the controversy. He was an older merchant who wore a number of different hats: plantation owner, slaveholder, veteran of the American Revolution, Justice of the Peace or magistrate for Charleston District, vice-president of the egalitarian Republican Society, and captain of an elite militia troop of horse called the Charleston Light Dragoons. In fact, Mr. Cunnington was so upset about being slandered by his neighbors that he composed an essay describing his involvement in the notorious incident and sent it to the local newspaper for publication. I don’t think any modern historians have acknowledged this very public defense, so it merits our serious attention.[5]

William Cunnington’s narrative of the events of November 3rd and 4th 1795 appeared in the local newspaper one week after the incident. His colorful text, which contains over 2,000 words, provides a bounty of new insight into the infamous black dance of 1795. When combined with the written testimony of his seven accusers, Mr. Cunnington’s narrative helps to create a robust and more balanced record of a curious event that continues to intrigue readers more than two centuries later. Does his personal defense absolve him of guilt? Does it sweep away the clouds of calumny that have followed him beyond the grave? Tune in next week, when we’ll hear the story of the scandalous black dance of 1795 in Mr. Cunnington’s own words.