Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

Conclusion

185 Conclusion W hen the amateur poet Captain Martin wrote about the Charleston that he had encountered during his visit to South Carolina, he seemed to capture perfectly the position that the town had carved out for itself between 1740 and the Revolution. Martin saw “Black and white all mix’d together” and “Houses built on barren land.” He had also encountered “Pleasant walks . . . scandalous tongues, if any mind ’em,” and “Many a beau not worth a shilling/Many a bargain, if you strike it,” concluding that “This is Charles-Town, how do you like it.” The Low Country metropolis was a place that befuddled Martin with its various South Carolinian oddities and yet, at the same time, sections of his verse could have been describing many an eighteenth-century English-speaking town. Indeed, some forty-five years earlier, Daniel Defoe had noted analogous features of society in the provincial spa and leisure town of Tunbridge Wells, characterizing it as a place of “tattle and slander” and “walks covered with ladies completely gay and dress’d to profusion.” Martin had experienced, at the southern margins of the colonies, a town that was legitimately comparable to a British provincial town. Such similarities were a consequence of the pursuits of Charleston’s inhabitants, who had, between 1730 and 1775, created a place that was fully integrated into an urban British Atlantic world. As Captain Martin wrote his ditty in 1769, however, non-importation boycotts and anti-British sentiment had already gripped Charleston, beginning a conflict that would pull that British Atlantic world apart. Full-scale revolution quickly intervened to demolish the established order in town and in colony. For elites facing uprisings by white and black South Carolinians, battles with invading forces in the backcountry, and the invasion and occupation of Charleston by the British, the order of peacetime became a distant memory. In response to these challenges, South Carolina’s rulers devoted themselves to the maintenance of their authority and to the ejection of the British govern- 186 building charleston ment from their territory. Delegations sent out from the Low Country to the backcountry sought to keep Regulator settlers, who had already developed a hearty dislike for the Charleston-based authorities, in the Patriot fold. Such expeditions met with mixed success, and Loyalists proved to be a force to be reckoned with in South Carolina’s more remote parts throughout the Revolutionary era. Most worrying for white South Carolinian slaveholders, however , was the determination of their slaves to take advantage of the disorder to evade the control of their masters. The colony’s black majority ran away from their plantations, fled to the invading armies, headed for Charleston during the British occupation, or simply disappeared to another state. Thus was South Carolina’s Revolution as much a civil war among ruling planters, slaves, and backcountry settlers as it was a conflict between American Patriots and the British government. Perhaps more than Americans’ commitment to Revolutionary principles, battles between rich and poor, and black and white, guided the course of the struggle. But what of Charleston’s influence over the colony in the turbulent years between 1775 and 1783? And what of its middling sorts in this era and the immediate post-Revolutionary period? This final section of our story of the rise of the town and its people traces their fortunes across these difficult years, as well as offering some suggestions as to why the nineteenth century witnessed the eclipse, and then the demise, of Charleston as a major American city. A City Under Siege Until its occupation by the British in 1780, a strong economy, and preparation of the city for war, ensured that Charleston’s tradesmen actually continued to enjoy the prosperity to which they had become accustomed. Looking back on the conflict, the contractor Thomas Doughty claimed that “there was a good deal of business done till 1779 . . . mechanicks stood it the besst.” Doughty’s assessment was probably based in his recollection of the increasing number of lucrative public contracts handed out so that Charleston might better defend itself from a British attack. Men who won such work profited handsomely, and the carpenter Daniel Cannon received a SC100,000 contract to build forts on Sullivan’s Island and Haddrell’s Point during the years leading up to the Revolution. At the same time, with the northern colonies embroiled in rebel- [18.221.235.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 15...