Living History

All of Charleston’s past, its beauty and tragedy, touches the water. On carriage tours and in our
local schools, however, you might not always hear that history. More often we learn about the
city’s landscape - of grand houses, charming streets, and troubled plantations. We forget that it
was the waterways and their international connections that encouraged people to settle and live
in the Carolina Lowcountry.

There is a saying that goes, ‘it’s impossible not to love someone, once you’ve heard their story.’
But what if we told the history differently, 350 years after the founding of the city? What if we told a sailor’s history of Charleston?

Imagine a ship in motion with all of the sea characters of Charleston’s history aboard. As the Ashley River ebbs, your imagination turns not to the shore, but to the countless journeys of diverse people who rowed, sailed, and depended on this maritime system.

Since the city’s founding in 1670 the Ashley River has had at least three names. Its history is profoundly international. Before it was named for Anthony Ashley Cooper, the English Earl of Shaftsbury, it was known as the San Jorge River, part of the Spanish American Empire. Before that, it was the Kiawah River, part of a patchwork of tribal alliances and competitions among
indigenous Americans. Although the land supplied a bounty of buckskins, rice, indigo, and cotton, it was the proximity
to the ocean that mattered. Charleston was a key node in colonial trade networks, stretching from the islands of the Caribbean across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and West Africa. Soldiers of
fortune from across Europe fought each other, and native peoples for control of this edge of the Atlantic. For centuries it was a time of violence and war.
Among the English, state-sanctioned piracy became a form of guerrilla warfare against their neighbors. Charleston served as a waystation for these attacks. Some of the city’s most powerful
families gained their wealth not only in the slavery, but in piracy on the high seas. Famous pirate crews in the 1680s and 1690s included men with names like Fenwick and Pinckney.

However, when piracy (or privateering) was no longer needed to assure the English monarchy’s wealth in the Americas, pirates became unwelcome guests. In 1718, Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and his crew blockaded Charleston harbor, collected a ransom from the city, and sailed north before being captured by the authorities. Blackbeard died in the Outer Banks, while some of his pirate brethren, including Stede Bonnett, were transported to Charleston for trial. They were
hung at White Point Garden, and buried in the nearby marsh. The story of pirates in Charleston is rather well-known, but the meaning of this story is not always clear. Pirates were anarchists of
the sea, first recruited and then hunted down, for their disdain of colonial order.
Life on the water was also a source of freedom for those scorned and mistreated on land because of their race.

Shipping out, while risky, was one of the few options of escape for enslaved and
recently freed African Americans. Tens of thousands of black seamen sailed on warships, privateers, coastal traders, and diverse fishing vessels in the antebellum south. Yet when we learn of African American history, it’s as if the Middle Passage was the only sea story to be told.

Charleston was the largest slave port in North America; it’s estimated that something like 40 to 45% of all African Americans today can trace an ancestor to Charleston’s maritime slave trade.

We must remember that history, but what about what happened next? Denmark Vesey, a sailor-slave born in St. Thomas, arrived to Charleston with his captain and master after decades of sea travel, and imagined a revolution. His dreams and ideals were hatched among sailors circulating news from distant ports. When his revolution was thwarted in 1822, white Charlestonian’s passed the Negro Seamen’s act to cut-off the flow of ideas coming from Black Jacks (African American mariners).

Forty years later, when the Civil War began, African Americans again looked to the waterways for freedom. In May 1862, Robert Smalls, a slave mariner, commandeered the CSS Planter,
stealing it away from the confederacy and navigating to freedom with his family and friends.

Not even half the stories of black mariners have been told about the area’s waterways – from the days of Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River raid, into the 20th century history of
longshoremen and “mosquito fleet” fishermen. The new International African American Museum on the Cooper River looks to tell that more nuanced maritime history.

This of course is just a snapshot of the diversity and adventure that Charleston’s history holds when we think about the city from the water’s perspective. Next time you go boating or walk along the Battery, ask yourself - what stories and lessons might we find off-the-land? More importantly, when we come to recognize and appreciate the history of Charleston’s rivers, bays, and coasts, perhaps we will also learn to more deeply consider their importance for our future.

The history of Charleston’s waterways promises to do the same.