The Travelers’ Charleston: Accounts of Charleston and Lowcountry, South Carolina, 1666–1861 ed. by Jennie Holton Fant (review)

Jennie Holton Fant has performed a great service for students and scholars with this chronologically arranged compilation of sixteen travel narratives focused on Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry from 1666 to 1861. Charleston and its hinterland constitute one of the most important American cultural hearths, and travelers’ accounts include mundane, but interesting, observations on topics such as weather and diet, as well as extensive commentary on complex social and cultural phenomena such as slavery and regionalism.

Many of these accounts appear in published form elsewhere, and instructors in undergraduate courses will most likely not assign the work as a whole but will instead mine the volume for individual reading assignments. Readers who follow the volume straight through, however, can trace the region’s history from English exploration until the Civil War. Fant for the most part allows readers to construct their own “reasonable and cumulative history” from the “impressions” found in each account (p. xv). Those familiar with the general narrative arc of South Carolina’s Lowcountry will find in these travel accounts lively anecdotes and seemingly banal details that will flesh out what might have become an all-too-familiar story. The holistic effect is therefore greater than the sum of the accounts’ individual contributions.

Although readers will most likely be familiar with some who traveled through Charleston, such as Samuel F. B. Morse, Fredrika Bremer, and William Makepeace Thackeray, others, such as the German physician Johann David Schoepf and the Scottish banker and railroad director William Ferguson, are more obscure. Fant’s thorough but succinct biographical prefaces to each narrative are therefore quite helpful and are highlights of the work. Fant again displays her excellent skills as a researcher with her extensive annotations within each travel account. These notes not only provide the necessary context for understanding a particular traveler’s observations, but also give depth to the principal actors in each narrative, thereby rendering the volume both informative and enjoyable.

This already fine work might have been even more useful for instructors and scholars had Fant included non-English accounts from before 1666. Spanish and French explorations along the South Carolina coast predated Joseph Woory’s 1666 travels by at least a century. Even though the city of Charleston did not yet exist, the South Carolina Lowcountry was an intriguing land of opportunity that invited numerous visits and reports. These accounts would also have helped readers better understand Charleston as not just an American or a southern city but also a city of the Atlantic world, one with cultural and economic ties to continental Europe and the Caribbean. These travel accounts would have necessarily appeared in translation, however, and the level of documentary editing and textual criticism required for their inclusion might have required another work altogether.

Although these pre-1666 accounts might have improved the work, their absence does not detract from the excellent scholarship and enjoyable narrative that Fant has provided. Her careful transcription and diligent research make this edited primary source volume an excellent resource for those interested in southern history before the Civil War.