Stolen Charleston by J. Grahame Long

Author:J. Grahame Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

VI

TROUBLE FROM HOME

Although pillage defined how many Charleston civilians experienced the city’s military occupations, it was most assuredly not the only element of strife they had to endure. In the face of any crisis, trouble can come from all sides, and as noted earlier, it is an all-around reckless claim to suggest that every calamity Charleston suffered, every heirloom lost, was at the hands of its enemies.

Wartime struggles aside, weather and various manmade misfortunes did excellent jobs of severely diminishing—nigh wiping out—whatever prominence Charleston had established up to that point. The turn of the eighteenth century, for example, should have marked success for the Charles Towne endeavor, but severe fires, crippling spates of disease and a massive hurricane (the storm surge of which pushed a wall of seawater “in upon Charlestown with amazing impetuosity”) almost ended the place. A 1698 letter from colonial governor Joseph Blake described the dire situation: “We have had the small-pox amongst us nine or ten months, which hath been very infectious and mortal. We have lost by the distemper 200 or 300 persons…a fire broke out in the night [February 24] in Charles-Town, which hath burnt the dwellings, stores and out-houses, of at least fifty families, and hath consumed in houses and goods, the value of £30,000 sterling.”125

The colonists slowly recovered and rebuilt, just in time to go through it all again not three years later. This time, fires, storms and sicknesses took even more lives and pushed nearly everyone to consider moving to Pennsylvania:

Few families escaped a share of the public calamities. Almost all were lamenting the loss, either of their habitations by the devouring flames, or of friends or relations by the infectious and loathsome maladies. Discouragement and despair sat on every countenance. Many of the survivors could think of nothing but abandoning a country on which the judgments of heaven seemed to fall so heavy, and in which there was so little prospect of success, heath, or happiness. [We] had heard of Pennsylvania, and how pleasant and flourishing a province it was described to be, and therefore were determined to embrace the first opportunity that offered of retiring to it with the remainder of [our] families and effects.126

It is furthermore crucial to note that Charleston has twice burned while at war, each occurrence an unquestionably clear cause for many lost valuables. In 1778, as redcoats put their southern strategy into high gear, fire burned away many of the city’s warehouses and shops in less than a day’s time. James Munro, a silversmith and jeweler, whose inventory had been looted in the fire’s aftermath, used the South Carolina Gazette to beseech the return of his merchandise. Additionally, “The Charles Town Library Society’s valuable collection of books, instruments and apparatus,” wrote William Mazyck, “[was] almost entirely lost.”127

Of course, the greatest conflagration came on December 11, 1861, not quite a year after South Carolina secession and a mere eight months into the Civil War. The damage was bad. The timing, however, could not have been worse.

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