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Published: January 17th 2012
Nathaniel Rusell House
Front of the Nathaniel Rusell House. Note his initials in the balcony ironworkCharleston calls itself the Holy City, due to all its
churches.
It certainly can’t refer to its
historical inhabitants.
Today I explore one of Charleston’s darkest, but most important, legacies: slavery.
Local residents like to point out that a tiny elite (around 3%!o(MISSING)f the population) owned most of the slaves in South Carolina.
What they don’t like to point out is that this tiny elite
dominated the colony socially, economically, and politically; and ran it for their own benefit.
This elite ultimately tore the country apart rather than give up the base of their wealth.
It was probably inevitable that the war would start here.
The Fort Sumter visitor’s center has a
very telling map: the distribution of slaves as a percentage of the population in each county in the US in 1860.
The darker the county, the higher the percentage.
The darkest parts of all on the map are eastern Virginia, the Mississippi River valley, and nearly ALL of South Carolina.
Charleston was the center of the US slave trade.
I’d learned about it in high school, of course, but that can’t compare to being here, where the events took place.
Formal Garden, Nathaniel Russell House
Formal garden at the Nathaniel Russell House Today, I explore that legacy.
Nathaniel Russell House
Ironically, the first site I see is from the elite.
The
Nathaniel Russell house was built by a
Rhode Island native who came to Charleston in 1765 to become a merchant.
He was very good at it, and ultimately started his own ship company.
He married into the Charleston elite, and built his house to show off that status.
The house is the most impressive of the house museums that is period accurate (the Calhoun Mansion is bigger but not furnished authentically).
Like all proper Charlstonians of that era, he
owned slaves, eighteen of them that he used as servants.
He also traded slaves thorugh his shipping company.
The mansion itself is a brick
Federal masterpiece.
Symmetry and balance are the overriding design features.
There are a number of false windows and doors to ensure rooms are balanced correctly.
The house is most famous for its flying staircase.
The central stairs was built by laying each step on the previous step, so it curves from floor to floor with no external support.
One section has a cutaway to show
Custom's House, original slave market
The US Custom's House in Charleston. Slaves were originally sold on the steps. how the steps fit together.
I have no idea how it stays up, but it was solid enough when we walked on it.
The other standout room is the upstairs music room, with a row of high windows overlooking the street, perfectly balanced by mirrored doors on the other wall.
Very little of the furniture is from the original owners, but all of it is correct to the period.
The guides are very skilled at pointing out the history of each, to the point the house feels more like a decorative arts museum than a house tour.
Gullah Tour
The next item for the day was a unique tour of Charleston, the
Gullah Tour.
Most of the slaves who were brought from Africa came from the west coast.
They had skills growing rice in swampy land, which is very similar to the land around Charleston.
These slaves managed to keep much of their cultural traditions alive during the long period of bondage, and they ultimately blended with English ones to form the Gullah culture.
There are many parts of US cities that resemble parts of Europe and Asia
Charleston Armory
Built in the early 1800s to defend against slave revolts (Little Italy, Chinatown, etc.) but coastal South Carolina and Georgia is the only part that resembles Africa.
The tour is run by a native who tells stories in the Gullah dialect, and describes the African American experience in deep detail.
It’s a very different history from the one told on most tours.
On top of that, he is funny and engaging, and even offers refunds if people don’t like the tour!
I loved it.
The tour mentions a number of things about Charleston.
Slaves were originally brought to an island off the coast, Sullivan’s Island.
They spent a month there in quarantine, to make sure they were disease free.
The island is now called the
African Ellis Island, since nearly half of all African Americans in the US have at least one ancestor who first touched shore there.
After quarantine, they were brought into Charleston
to be sold.
The nasty business was first conducted openly on the steps of the Customs House.
Starting around 1800, city authorities thought this sullied their image, so they forced the trading to move indoors.
Only one of these marketplaces is still standing, and
Catholic Cemetary, Charleston
One of Charleston's many atmospheric cemetaries the tour describes it in detail.
Basically, it was a jail.
The tour discusses religious politics.
Most churches were integrated during the slavery era.
Burials, by state law, were not.
A group of free Blacks formed a benevolent society to run their own cemetery, the
Brown Fellowship Society.
Most of them were lighter skinned mulattos.
They did not allow darker-skinned Blacks to be buried in their cemetery.
This group formed their own benevolent society, the Society of Free Dark Men of Color, and deliberately placed their cemetery next to the other one!
Eventually, the two merged, which was the whole point.
Unfortunately, both cemeteries had a cruel fate.
In 1954, South Carolina closed all cemeteries not affiliated with a church or city.
The benevolent society sold its cemetery to the local Catholic diocese.
A decade later, the church needed to expand, so they simply moved the headstones and turned the burial ground into a parking lot!
Such a way to honor the dead (it must be pointed out that several majority white cemeteries suffered similar fates).
The tour guide also discusses
Former Brown Benevolent Society Cemetery
The cruel fate of the oldest African American cemetery in Charleston. The Catholic Church nearby turned it into a parking lot! the
Gullah language.
It’s a creole language created from English and several African languages.
To an uneducated listener, it sounds like really bad English, the source of many negative stereotypes.
To take one example, Gullah substitutes a ‘D’ sound wherever English has a ‘TH’.
The sound does not exist in West African languages, so slaves had great difficulty pronouncing it.
The final item on the tour is the studio of one of Charleston’s most famous African American artists,
Phillip Simmons.
In his half century plus artistic career he single-handedly revived the art of hand-forged wrought iron in Charleston.
The gates, fences, and other works he created are now found across the city.
His studio is a remarkably low-key place that looks like a back yard workshop more than anything else.
Charleston Slave Market
After the tour, I went to the slave market, which is now a
museum.
It’s the only one of its type in the South.
The museum is small but very well done.
It certainly does not sugar coat how brutal the business was in all respects.
It has examples
Phillip Simmons Heart Gate
The Heart Gate, by famous Charleston artist Phillip Simmons of shackles and whips used to control slaves.
Traders used whips with wide leather straps because anything smaller would leave scars and reduce the slave’s sale value.
It has a listing of the typical sale prices of slaves in 1850 based on age and occupation that a trader compiled.
It has a set of correspondence, which make clear that traders saw slaves the way most farmers view livestock.
Finally, the museum discusses the delicate negotiation that went on between trader and slave.
The traders needed the slaves to present themselves well to potential buyers to make the most profits.
Slaves knew this, and manipulated the situation to get the best outcome possible (which still wasn’t very good, it must be noted).
The highest priority was to keep families together, followed by finding situations where skills were most valued.
Both of these lessened the risk of abuse.
The museum is a moving, and essential, place.
My final item of the day was a concert.
Charleston has a long history of supporting the arts, which was started by the original colonists to create an aristocratic air.
The
Phillip Simmons workshop
Former studio of Phillip Simmons, one of the most famous artists in Charleston history concert showcased this legacy.
It started with music (mostly from England) played by the earliest music groups, and then moved to music by Charleston composers.
The section of Civil War songs was very interesting, and also very Confederate (for obvious reasons).
The most moving part was a selection of slave spirituals, songs sung in church.
All of them are ultimately about hope for the future.
The concert closed with selections from the famous opera
Porgy and Bess, which is set in Charleston.
I had dinner tonight in one of Charleston’s better restaurants,
Slightly North Of Broad.
The name is a play on its location, two blocks north of the expensive Broad Street residential area.
The cheeky acronym shows the attitude rather well.
The restaurant does not take Charleston’s Southern manners at all seriously.
Thankfully, it takes Southern cooking very seriously.
The food was a little pricy for my budget, but it was one of my best meals so far (and a real antidote to week after week of road food).
Charleston, in the end, is a mostly cosmopolitan city.
While large parts of it feel stuck
Charleston Slave Market
The Charleston Slave Market, now a museum. It is the only building of its type remaining in the South in the past, it’s a past that people are learning to live with.
Most sites, officially at least, call the conflict that made the state infamous “
The Civil War”, and discuss the nastier parts of its past.
Charleston is still the Deep South, however.
For example, gift shops in Richmond sell a book called “
The Southern Belle Primer”, a satiric look at the ways of the South’s upper crust.
Charleston gift shops, by contrast, have books like “
Charleston Primer for Yankees” and “
The Official Southern Lady’s Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding”, both earnest discussions of their subjects.
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