History of Charleston, South Carolina
The history of Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the longest and most diverse of any community in the United States, spanning hundreds of years of physical settlement beginning in 1670.
Restored to the throne following Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, King Charles II granted the chartered Carolina territory to eight of his loyal friends, known as the Lords Proprietors, in 1663.
The community was established in 1670 by English colonists from Bermuda, under the first William Sayle, governor of South Carolina, on the west bank of the Ashley River a few miles northwest of the present city.
It was soon designated by Anthony Ashley Cooper, leader of the Lords Proprietor, to become a "great port towne", a destiny which the city fulfilled.
His pirates plundered merchant ships and seized the passengers and crew of the Crowley while demanding a chest of medicine from Governor Robert Johnson.
[7] The wreck of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, has since been discovered and found to include a urethral syringe (used to treat syphilis), pump clysters (used to provide enemas), a porringer (possibly for bloodletting), and a brass mortar and pestle for preparing medicine.
Because of its prominent position within the city and its elegant architecture, the building signaled to Charleston's citizens and visitors its importance within the British colonies.
[9] The South Carolina and Georgia colonists ultimately adopted a system of rice cultivation that drew heavily on the labor patterns and technical knowledge of their African slaves.
French, Scots-Irish, Scottish, Irish, and Germans migrated to the developing seacoast town, representing numerous Protestant denominations, as well as Roman Catholicism and Judaism.
Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, between 24,000 and 51,000 Native Americans were captured and sold, from South Carolina – many more than the number of African slaves imported into the colonies of the future United States during the same period.
[16] A major establishment of African slavery in the North American colonies occurred with the founding of Charleston (originally Charles Town) and South Carolina, beginning in 1670.
[17] By the mid-18th century, Charlestown, described as "the Jerusalem of American slavery, its capital and center of faith",[18]: 89 was the hub of the Atlantic trade of England's southern colonies.
On June 28, 1776, General Henry Clinton, with 2000 men and a naval squadron, tried to seize Charleston, hoping for a simultaneous Loyalist uprising in South Carolina.
The Battle of Sullivan's Island saw the 9 ships and 2000 soldiers under Admiral Peter Parker and General Henry Clinton fail to capture a partially-constructed palmetto palisade from the few hundred men composing Col. William Moultrie's militia regiment over the course of a day's fighting on June 28, 1776.
In the end, the spongy palmetto-and-sand defenses completely neutralized the British naval bombardment and gave the Royal Navy its first defeat in a century.
His men didn't see resistance until they reached within 10 miles (16 km) of the city and begun to invest it,[20] but an intercepted message alerted Prévost that Lincoln had been informed of the assault and was returning from Augusta.
Prévost began an orderly withdrawal and the major engagement of the affair was his rearguard's successful defense of the crossing at Stono Creek on June 20.
Gen. Lincoln was aware of the attack and set about fortifying the city, but an outbreak of smallpox over the winter was used by local slaveholders to excuse themselves from sending men to assist the effort.
Clinton returned to New York, leaving Charles Cornwallis with 8000 men to rally Loyalists, build forts across the state, and demand oaths of allegiance to the King.
The grandeur and number of buildings erected in the following century reflect the optimism, pride, and civic destiny that many Charlestonians felt for their community.
In 1832, South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification, a procedure in which a state could in effect repeal a Federal law, directed against the most recent tariff acts.
A compromise was reached by which the tariffs would be gradually reduced, but the underlying argument over state's rights would continue to escalate in the coming decades.
On January 9, 1861, Citadel cadets fired on the merchant ship Star of the West, entering Charleston's harbor with supplies for Fort Sumter.
[24] In 1865, Union troops moved into the city, and took control of many sites, such as the United States Arsenal, which the Confederate army had seized at the outbreak of the war.
General William T. Sherman lent his support to the conversion of the United States Arsenal into the Porter Military Academy, an educational facility for former soldiers and boys left orphaned or destitute by the war.
An elaborate public building, the United States Post Office and Courthouse, was completed in 1896 and signaled renewed life in the heart of the city (this was called the bottleneck of society).
Well-organized factions within the Democratic Party in Charleston gave the voters clear choices and played a large role in state politics.
They argued that preservation activities in Charleston served as a way of coping with perceived negative aspects of modern urban industrial society, and allow people to take pride, despite their relative poverty compared to rich Yankee cities.
For the first time women and African Americans were recruited on a large scale to work in the Navy Yard and related industries in a full range of jobs, including well-paid skilled positions.
[33] The shooter, a white male named Dylann Roof, was captured the morning after the attack in Shelby, North Carolina, tried, and sentenced to death, later changed to life imprisonment.
