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

Notes

209 Abbreviations CC Special Collections, College of Charleston, Robert Scott Small Library, Charleston, SC CCPL Charleston County Public Library, Charleston, SC CLS Charleston Library Society, Charleston, SC LCP Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA LOC Library of Congress, Washington, DC LRP The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, ed. Walter B. Edgar, Columbia, SC, 1972 MESDA Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, NC NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh NHS Newport Historical Society, Newport, RI NYPL New York Public Library, New York City, NY PHL The Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. Philip M. Hamer et al., 16 vols., Columbia, SC, 1968–2002 SCDA South Carolina Deed Abstracts, ed. Clara A. Langley, 4 vols., Easley, SC, 1983 SCDAH South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC SCL South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC SHC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC Introduction 1. Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, 479. 2. The most comprehensive comparisons of colonial urban population appear in Nash, “Social Evolution of Preindustrial American Cities,” 115–45, and Price, “Economic Functions and the Growth of American Port Towns,” 175 (appendix A). 3. For a chronology of Charleston’s development and a detailed exploration of its physical expansion, see Poston, Buildings of Charleston. Other histories of Charleston include Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the Revolution; and Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys. For details of urban speculative development, see PHL, vol. 5, 589–95. 4. On towns and urban settlement in South Carolina, see Piker, Okfuskee; Ernst and Merrens, “Camden’s Turrets Pierce the Skies!”; and Migliazzo, “A Tarnished Legacy Revisited .” On the dominance of Charleston within South Carolina, see Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 11–13. 5. See the tabular appendix in this volume for a comparison of urban populations across Notes 210 notes to pages 4–6 the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. See also Nash, Urban Crucible, appendix (table 13); Price, “Economic Functions and the Growth of American Port Towns,” 175; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1790, South Carolina, 38–44; Langton, “Urban Growth and Economic Change,” map 14.1. 6. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 4. 7. On Charleston’s function as a socioeconomic hub, see Pearson, “Planters Full of Money,” 299–321; DalLago, “City as Social Display”; Earle and Hoffman, “Urban Development ”; Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream; Coclanis, “The Sociology of Architecture”; and Nash, “South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy.” On Charleston’s role as a center of government, see Greene, Quest For Power; Sirmans, South Carolina Politics; and Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 57–101. 8. The principal scholars who have written on Low Country slave society in the colonial period include Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects; Wood, Black Majority; Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston”; and Herman , Town House, 119–54. The term “slave society” is applied to the Low Country in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 142–76. 9. On the link between staple agriculture and settlement patterns elsewhere in the colonial American South, see Earle, Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System; Ernst and Merrens , “Camden’s Turrets Pierce the Skies!”; and Farmer, “Persistence of Country Trade.” 10. Price argues that because Charleston’s “autochthonous business community” was smaller than that of northern cities, the town was “reduce[d] to the level of a mere ‘shipping point’ rather than a real ‘commercial center’ or ‘general entrepôt.’” See Price, “Economic Function,” 162–63; see also Nash, Urban Crucible, ix. Even a recent and exciting addition to the scholarship on the colonial city—Benjamin Carp’s study of cities and revolution— makes Charleston’s part-time residents, the elites, the major focus (though the lower ranks of urban society receive attention in Philadelphia, Boston, Newport, and New York). See Carp, Rebels Rising. Some scholars have focused their attention on the non-staple sector of the Charleston community; notable among these are Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty ; Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the Revolution; and Martin, Divided Mastery , 20–25. However, these snapshots of various sectors of the urban community do not add up to a thorough assessment of Charleston’s influence over South Carolina during the colonial period. 11. For example, Welch, Slave Society in the City, and Burnard, “The Grand Mart of the Island.” 12. The staple narrative of colonial...