Building Fears of Fire

Abstract

While scholars have studied both the visual and material culture of slavery and the history of efforts to design cities to avert fire, the two topics have not often overlapped. In the southern United States during the antebellum period, fire was a “weapon of the weak,” and architects devised instruments for fire deterrence—or at least fire suppression—in response to perceived threats. In Building Fears of Fire: Architecture and the Suppression of Black Insurrection in the U.S. Antebellum South, Jonah Rowen brings these two lines of inquiry together to ask: Where do architectural aesthetics convey traces of enslavementŒ If architects designed buildings for security, and enslaved people constituted internal threats, how did the apprehensions of white southerners appear in the built objects and environments that constituted the cityŒ Rowen analyzes Robert Mills’s Fireproof Building in Charleston, South Carolina (1822–26) in the context of the abortive 1822 uprising of Black people allegedly planned by Denmark Vesey, demonstrating how architecture emerged as a means of protecting against arson. Artifacts such as the Fireproof Building reveal the traces of a society in constant fear of the destructive impact of insurrection.