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

Chapter 6: “A Very Essential Service to this Community”: The Politics of the Town

156  n “A very essential service to this community” The Politics of the Town W hen South Carolina Gazette printer and Charlestonian Peter Timothy declared to Benjamin Franklin in 1767 that the “public works” were “carrying on with spirit” in his home town, both of these correspondents would most likely have recognized the importance of this assertion to the image of South Carolina. Timothy was recounting Charlestonians’ activities not just as an interesting footnote, but was offering them to Franklin as evidence of the “flourishing state” of his town. Difficult to achieve without considerable effort, improvements reached into every corner of the Charleston landscape, and Timothy’s account of activity took in the raising of everything from sewers to state houses. Building also required the skills and participation of many tradesmen, the toil of an army of laborers , and a serious and ongoing commitment by authorities to the betterment of all aspects of the urban environment. Public works were thus a reflection of a civilized and industrious society, and they were an accomplishment worthy of boasting about to one of colonial America’s most conscientious and active citizens. Rather than monuments to the endeavors of worthy tradesmen, however, the raising of public buildings and the improvement of Charleston’s urban environment have usually been viewed in a very different way by the colony’s The Politics of the Town 157 historians. The State House, the Exchange, and the Court House, among others, have been seen as the chief symbols of the enduring might of elite power in South Carolina, not as evidence of a broader-based civic imperative . Charleston’s landscape was, historians have argued, part and parcel of a dynamic that placed colonial South Carolina at the epicenter of an exclusively southern political culture that “prized attributes of civility and gentility precisely for their usefulness in muting political conflict.” These finely conceived, exemplary classical buildings, raised with no expense spared at the behest of the gentry, were also symbolic of the elite’s ability to ignore the pleas of those free white people who lived and worked in the city all year round, and who frequently berated their superiors about that class’s uncaring attitude toward the maintenance of daily order outside of their chief loci of power—their plantations. The elite’s dominance of Charleston’s civic landscape thus became an extension of their overall superiority in government and politics. Smothered by the “harmony for which we were famous,” the political set-up of South Carolina was not only peaceful, it was distinctive within early America. Especially by the time that Timothy was penning letters to Benjamin Franklin, other ruling elites across early America were confronting domestic disorder. In major cities and in rural areas, like Virginia, gentry assemblymen faced down the challenge of raucous and populous lower sorts who emerged as the most radical protestors against British taxation efforts and as a major threat to the authority of their native leaders. Thus, in the North’s cities, “the mass disorders surrounding the Stamp Act revealed to many in the urban patriciate the ghastly logic of . . . political development.” If they were to reunify free whites in their colony, Virginia’s elites would be forced to appropriate the rhetoric of the evangelical preachers who had so successfully rallied the lower sorts. In contrast, although some among Charleston’s artisans did mount a handful of radical protests, on the whole they appear to have demurred to the leadership of their betters, failing to threaten the overall harmony of South Carolina’s political scene. But, reexamining this political landscape through the lens of the town’s emerging middling sort renders this narrative of exceptional harmony much less convincing. In particular, an investigation of the politics of urban improvement, as touched upon by Peter Timothy, paints a different picture— not just of South Carolina’s political experience within a colonial context, but 158 building charleston also more broadly of the sources of, and the motivation behind, urban radicalism in late colonial and Revolutionary America. Although the merchantplanter elite appeared to have maintained a grip on the reins of political power in South Carolina, from the 1740s onward Charleston’s middling sorts were successful in building an influential position through their involvement in public works and the regulation of the urban environment. Such activity was an extension of their values within the...