Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2003

This city [Charleston] is the oldest I have yet seen in America....The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other of the American towns....It is in this respect a far more aristocratic...city than any I have yet seen in America, inasmuch as every house seems built to the owner's particular taste; and in one street you seem to be in an old English town, and in another in some continental city of France or Italy. This variety is extremely pleasing to the eye.

Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863)

Charleston, South Carolina, prospered as a center of the British Empire because it was a crossroads of transatlantic trade. A brisk commerce in rice, indigo, and sea island cotton was supplemented by deerskins and naval stores from the pine forests of the low country. On the eve of the American Revolution, Charleston was the only large urban center south of Philadelphia. Many of the original British settlers came to the city from the West Indies. New England ship captains, selling their goods in the southern colonies, often settled permanently in Charleston. Huguenots immigrated from France and Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula. Scots poured in after the union of England and Scotland in 1707, and there were small enclaves of Swiss, Germans, and Welsh.

In the seventeenth century rice was grown on dry land, but in the next century it was chiefly grown in freshwater inland swamps or in lowland areas next to tidal rivers, where the ebb and flow irrigated the fields. Great fortunes were amassed by the owners of these vast rice plantations, which required the labor of large numbers of slaves and considerable capital to maintain the necessary dikes and floodgates.

The aggressive mores of the British West Indian settlers were the moving force in the colony where the source of wealth was less important than its presence. No one, for example, shunned the company of Miles Brewton or Henry Laurens because they became rich from the slave trade. Of the ten richest men in British North America, nine were from South Carolina, led by Peter Manigault of Saint James's Parish on Goose Creek, who had a net worth of nearly three million dollars.

Visitors were astonished by the wealth and ostentatious manner of living in Charleston. Josiah Quincy Jr. in 1773 wrote of the city: "In grandeur, splendour of buildings, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping, indeed in almost every thing, it far surpasses all I ever saw, or expected to see, in America." Northern visitors were immediately struck by the many black faces on the streets, for Charleston was roughly half black and half white. The population of South Carolina as a whole was one of the fastest growing in British North America, what with the importation of African slaves and the migration of Scots-Irish, Germans, and English from Pennsylvania and Virginia

All residents of the colony shared a common bond: the ever-present threat of death from pestilence. The sickly season, from August to November, was one of the accepted cycles of the year in South Carolina, commemorated in the saying "Carolina is paradise in the spring, a hell in the summer, and a hospital in the fall."

While studying abroad, Manigault wrote to his mother in 1753: "What can induce any one to change Carolina for England I cant imagine unless it be for the sake of their Health." Twenty years later, at the age of forty-two, Manigault died in England, where he had gone to try and recover from the fevers that ravaged him.

Wendell Garrett