Patriots, Pistols, and Petticoats: "Poor Sinful Charles Town" during the American Revolution

By The Estate of Walter J. Fraser, Jr.

Patriots, Pistols, and Petticoats vividly portrays the lively—at times bawdy—atmosphere in Charleston during the Revolutionary War era. This brawling port city—the fourth largest in Britain's North American colonies and the largest in the South at the time of the Revolutionary War—boasted commerce, politics, cultural events, and entertainment as sophisticated as any found in America. From the city's taverns and streets to the drawing rooms of its elite, from its shipping trade to its agriculture to its political rivalries, Walter Fraser's thorough research and revealing anecdotes offer an entertaining and informative history of this distinguished city and its role in the colonial fight for independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643363356

Book preview

CHAPTER I

Poor Sinful Charles Town

Coming in by sea to the fourth largest city in the 13 North American Colonies of Great Britain, a New Jersey merchant watched a northeast wind churn ocean swell-tops white. As the schooner approached at dawn that day in 1772, he saw the Light House near the Charles Town Bar. The captain fearing to fall to Seaward of the bar beat on and waiting for a Pilot boat continued to stand on till the tide suited to run over the Bar.

Apprehensive until they had cleared the town’s natural defense against invasion by sea, a sand bar at the harbor’s entrance, passengers aboard ships once inside the obstruction observed that Charles Town makes a very handsome appearance. What adds greatly to the prospect is Sullivan’s Island at the mouth of the Bay on the right hand, and Ashley and Cooper Rivers running on each side the Town. As their ships moved closer they could see fine fertile looking country, well wooded with noble lofty pines and oaks forming a prospect upon the whole strikingly beautiful.

Courtesy Carolina Art Association/Gibbes Museum of Art

Charles Town’s Harbor, 1762

The good natural harbor and a productive hinterland linked to the town by a network of roads and rivers had made Charles Town the importing and exporting center of the Southern Colonies. A Rhode Island merchant in town on business during the 1760’s noted that the Port has vessels entering every day from all the Islands, Europe, North America, St. Augustine, Pensacola, and Mobile. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts upon entering the harbor in 1773 observed that the number of shipping far surpassed all I have seen in Boston. About three hundred and fifty sail lay off the town.

The city itself was situated on the tip of a narrow peninsula laced with tidal creeks. By the early 1770’s Charles Town embraced a population of approximately 12,000, of which one-half were Negro slaves. It was the seat of the Royal Governor of South Carolina, his Council, and the popularly elected Commons House of Assembly. Bay Street, lined with wholesale stores and residencies, ran parallel to the Cooper River, which bounded the city on the east. Like long fingers, wharves stretched into the Cooper which resembled a floating market during the fall months. It was choked with brigantines, sloops, and schooners from abroad and pettiaugas and canoes from the interior which brought the country produce to town and returned down the rivers and creeks loaded with goods ordered by the planters.

Courtesy Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, S. C.

Another View of Charles Town’s Harbor, 1760’s

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1928

Gabriel Manigault

Christopher Gadsden’s wharf on the Cooper was described in the early 1770’s as the most extensive of the kind ever undertaken by any one man in North America. Gadsden was a country factor who purchased products in the hinterland, delivered them to his wharf, and sold and shipped them abroad. In 1774 he described his wharf as one at which thirty of the largest ships that can come over our bar can be loading at the same time and all float at low water with their whole loads in. Other wharves jutting into the Cooper included those of John Gaillard near the Fish Market at the end of Queen Street and one owned by Samuel Prioleau, Jr. By the mid-1770’s wharf construction was underway along the Ashley River, which bounded the town on the west. The factor William Gibbes was building one of the most elaborate.

Tons of exports and imports flowed across these wharves each year. Charles Town factors like Gadsden, merchants like Gabriel Manigault, who imported wares for sale in his shops in Tradd Street, and Henry Laurens grew wealthy in the trade. They invested their profits in land. By the early 1770’s Laurens owned at least eight plantations and had an annual income of 2,500 pounds sterling. He was one of the wealthiest men in the British Colonies. When Gabriel Manigault died in the early 1780’s he left an estate which included 47,532 acres of land and 490 slaves, a fortune equaled by few in America.

Planters along the Ashley and Cooper Rivers and on the sea islands near Charles Town like Henry and Arthur Middleton, William Henry Drayton, and Rawlins Lowndes grew rich on the export trade of rice and indigo. By the 1760’s an initial investment in slaves and land for the planting of indigo could be recouped after three or four good crops. Men of humble birth and failures in their first careers became rich during middle age by shrewd investments in land and slaves. The lowcountry Carolinian Joseph Allston was poor at 40, but at 50 he had an annual income of 6,000 pounds sterling from the exportation of rice and indigo grown on five plantations and worked by over 500 slaves. John Stuart also jumped from near bankruptcy to rich planter in a few years. He bragged in brick and timber of his wealth by building a magnificent Georgian style home on Tradd Street.

Courtesy Middleton Place

Arthur Middleton and Family

Factors, merchants, and planters owned outright or jointly hundreds of vessels which plied the export-import trade routes each year. By the 1760’s Gadsden had an interest in at least 5, Manigault in 6, and Henry Laurens in 12 ranging from the 10-ton coastal trading schooner Dependence to the 180-ton open-sea ship Nelly.

The names given to those vessels registered or built in Charles Town during the early eighteenth century indicate the owners’ pursuit of wealth and status — Merchants Adventure, Good Hope, Enterprize, Success, and Endeavour. On the eve of the American Revolution, however, names given to vessels out of the Carolina port are indicative of the growing nationalism and desire for economic and political independence. Keels were laid for the Fair America and Heart of Oak, and after 1764 nine ships out of Charles Town were christened Liberty.

Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.

Henry Laurens

The hazards facing the owners and masters of these trading vessels, any dozen of which could be accommodated on the deck of a modern aircraft carrier, were many. One such danger is illustrated by the cryptic notice in the South Carolina Gazette published in Charles Town on March 26, 1771: Captain Edward King of the sloop Ruth was washed overboard in a violent storm on voyage from this port to Dominica.

Courtesy South Carolina Historical Society

Seal of Henry Laurens

Courtesy South Carolina Historical Society

Charles Town House of Henry Laurens

The holds of outward bound ships carried the lowcountry’s prime export, rice, from Charles Town to colonial ports, to Barbadoes and Barcelona, to London and to Leith. During 1771, the peak year of rice exportation, 130,784 barrels went out of the port town. The need for diversification of crops, Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s successful experiments with indigo growing near Charles Town, and England’s demand for a dye needed by the growing textile industry contributed to the rise of the second major lowcountry export. By 1775 over a million pounds of indigo was departing through the port annually. The mercantile policies of Great Britain which provided price supports, a ready market, and protection by the Royal Navy helped to make men rich quickly in the lowcountry. Such items as tar, pitch, turpentine, lumber, corn, peas, potatoes, beef, pork, deerskins, tallow, tobacco, snake root, and oranges also were in great demand abroad; these left the port town by the thousands of barrels, bushels, tubs, casks, and boxes each year. These products flowed from plantation to port down the Ashley and Cooper by small boats and by wagons drawn along the network of roads leading to Charles Town.

Wealthy planters spent the cooler, fever-free months in Charles Town. During the sickly season they deserted the city for their plantations along the Ashley and Cooper. These country seats bore such exotic names as Vaucluse, Sans Souci, and Stromboli; Runnymede indicated the owner’s English origins. Others were named for the nearby topography — The Oaks, Ashley Bluff, Millbrook, and Palmettos.

A visitor to George Marshall’s 84-acre plantation on the Ashley about three miles from town in June, 1765, viewed his plantation, saw his rice and indigo growing in the field, and a very beautiful orangery, and fine garden with a variety of fine vegetables. A neighboring plantation was advertised for sale. It included a large two-story Mansion House facing the river, a barn, kitchen, overseer’s house, and slave cabins of wood. The owner advertised that there is land sufficient to work 50 or 60 Negroes on corn, rice, and indigo for one hundred years. In short, the plantation is calculated for Profit. Any person that loves profit, mixed with Pleasure may make it the garden of the Province. Another plantation of over 400 acres near the confluence of the Ashley River and Wappoo Creek was advertised as having exceeding good land for indigo, a good oven, two sets of large white oak indigo vats, and a large pump and two sets of brick vats. Included in the sale were upward of FIFTY likely strong NEGROES. two of whom were cask makers; two cooks, "one of which is a professed cook; seamstresses, housewenches, washer women and waiting-men, plantation slaves and handy boys and girls."

The accumulation of fortunes by Ashley and Cooper River planter-merchants through the growth and sale of rice and indigo would have been impossible without the toil and sweat of West Africans. It is little wonder that one of the port town’s major imports was black slaves. From 1735-1775 more than 400 Charles Town merchants and factors imported 1,108 separate shiploads of Africans. In 1765 over 7,000 blacks were brought into Charles Town’s port aboard slave ships. Thousands of these slaves were sold in South Carolina and thousands more in the neighboring colonies. Describing the sale of imported blacks, a Charles Town resident wrote: They are exposed on a sort of stage, turned about and exhibited, put up and adjudged to the highest bidder.

Slaves performed the heavy and menial labor on the plantations and in Charles Town. Negro women performed services as wet nurses. Infant sons and daughters of wealthy planters and merchants are usually suckled by Negro wenches and associate with the Negroes for several of the first years of their lives, a Northern-born visitor was surprised to learn. A visiting Jerseyman was struck by the number of personal black servants attending the gentry. Even every child has one accompanying it, he exclaimed.

A merchant from Jamaica who stopped in Charles Town in 1773 observed: There are swarms of Negroes about the Town and many Mulattoes. The Jamaican had heard of one Gentleman who professedly keeps a Mulatto Mistress. The Pennsylvania-born geographer-historian Ebenezer Hazard learned of black dances in Charles Town — balls given by Negro and Mulatto women to which they invite the white gentlemen. He was informed that the Mulatto women dress elegantly and have no small acquaintance with polite behavior. At least one Charles Town wife left her husband because of his attentions to a slave woman. On November 14, 1768, Mary Myers announced in the South Carolina Gazette that Mr. Myers had driven her away by inhumanity and preferring an old Negro wench for a bedfellow.

Many of the slaves were not content with their existence. Some tried to flee from their owners. While Ebenezer Hazard was visiting near Charles Town in the 1770’s, he wrote in his journal: Saw a Negro man on the road who had run away from his master: I came up just at the instant that another Negro was tying him with a rope. Hazard noticed the slaves’ white owner sitting nearby "on horseback,