Charles Town (Charleston), South Carolina

What was Charles Town like around 1715?

In 1663 King Charles II gave Carolina to eight English noblemen, the Lords Proprietors, who owned it as a business. Settlers founded Charles Town on the Ashley River in 1670 and moved it to Oyster Point, the peninsula where Charleston stands today, in 1680. It was the colony’s main town and port.

In 1704 the colonists built walls around it: earth and timber ramparts with bastions, a moat, a single land gate and a brick sea wall along the waterfront, enclosing about 62 acres. It was one of very few walled towns in English America, though the walls had largely crumbled by the 1730s.

The colonists grew angry that the proprietors gave no help against enemies or pirates. In December 1719 the assembly set aside the proprietors’ governor, Robert Johnson, almost without bloodshed, and asked the king to rule them instead. A royal governor arrived in about 1721, and in 1729 the Crown bought out the proprietors.

What was the Yamasee War?

In April 1715 the Yamasee, long trading partners of the colony, killed traders and settlers at Pocotaligo, south of Charles Town. They had good reasons: traders claimed huge debts, abused them and raided for captives, and settlers took their land. Creeks, Catawbas and others joined the war.

About 400 settlers died. Country families crowded into walled Charles Town. The colony survived when the Cherokee took its side early in 1716. By 1718 the fighting was over. Afterwards the colony ran the Indian trade itself, and many Yamasee were driven south of the Savannah River.

What did Charles Town trade?

Before the war, deerskins were Carolina’s great export. Native hunters traded skins for cloth, guns, gunpowder, tools and rum. Carolina shipped an average of about 54,000 skins a year from 1699 to 1715. The war wrecked this trade, and it did not recover until 1722.

The colony also traded in people. From the 1670s Carolina traders bought Native captives taken in raids, many of them from the Spanish mission towns of Florida. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that 24,000 to 51,000 Native people were enslaved through Carolina between 1670 and 1717, many of them shipped away to the West Indies or as far as Boston. In 1708 the governor counted 1,400 enslaved Native people in the colony. The Yamasee War largely ended this trade, though some Native slavery continued.

Tar and pitch, called naval stores, from the pine forests were also leading exports before 1720.

How did rice and slavery shape Carolina?

The governor’s 1708 report counted 4,100 enslaved Africans against about 4,080 free and indentured white people, so the colony already had a Black majority. By about 1730 Africans outnumbered Europeans roughly two to one.

Rice became the colony’s main cash crop in the early to mid 1700s. Historians including Peter Wood, Daniel Littlefield and Judith Carney argue that African know-how, in planting, flooding fields, and pounding and winnowing the grain, was the key to Carolina’s rice. Others, such as David Eltis, Philip Morgan and David Richardson, point out that planters did not mainly choose people from rice regions. Most scholars now see Carolina rice as a blend of African and European knowledge, with Africans’ skills real and important.

Their descendants on the coast and Sea Islands are the Gullah Geechee people, whose Gullah language is still spoken today.

What happened when Blackbeard blockaded Charleston in 1718?

On or about 22 May 1718, Blackbeard arrived off the sandbar at the harbour mouth with four ships, including the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Most accounts say Stede Bonnet was with him. For about a week the pirates stopped ships going in or out of the harbour, eight or nine in all, and took hostages, among them a council member, Samuel Wragg, and his young son.

Blackbeard did not attack the town. Instead he demanded a chest of medicines and threatened to kill the hostages if it did not come. Governor Robert Johnson gave in. The hostages were set free, though robbed of their valuables. The Charleston Museum suggests the medicine was probably for a disease spreading among the crew.

Why were so many pirates hanged in Charles Town in 1718?

In late summer, when the pirate Charles Vane raided ships off the coast, the governor sent Colonel William Rhett with two armed sloops to catch him. Rhett found Bonnet instead, in the Cape Fear River, and after a battle on 27 September 1718 Bonnet surrendered. In October he escaped, reportedly in women’s clothes, but was retaken.

From late October into November, Judge Nicholas Trott held 13 trials and condemned 49 men. Bonnet’s crew were hanged at White Point, at the tip of the peninsula, on 8 November: 29 had been condemned, and the printed trial record names 22 hanged. That same month Governor Johnson himself led armed ships against the pirate Richard Worley at the harbour mouth. Worley died, and 19 of his men were condemned and probably hanged at White Point too. Bonnet begged for mercy but was hanged there on 10 December.

These were among the largest pirate executions in colonial America. The Charleston Museum says the bodies were left hanging for days as a warning, though no record from the time survives to prove it.

Why did enslaved people run to St Augustine?

To the south, Spanish St. Augustine offered a hope of freedom. In October 1687 eight men, two women and a small child escaped from Carolina by boat and reached St Augustine, and Spain refused to send them back. A Spanish royal decree of 1693 promised freedom to runaways from the English colonies who became Catholic.

In 1738 the Spanish founded Fort Mose near St Augustine, the first legally free Black town in what is now the United States. Its militia captain, Francisco Menéndez, had himself escaped from Carolina and fought in the Yamasee War. In 1739 enslaved people rose up near the Stono River, about 20 miles from Charles Town, and set out for Florida. The Stono Rebellion was crushed, and the colony passed harsher slave laws in 1740.