LEARNING ABOUT SLAVERY IN CHARLESTON

Have you ever gone on vacation but, when you get there, find yourself following an unexpected journey? That’s how it was for me in Charleston, South Carolina, on a girlfriend getaway with friends I’ve known since childhood. We were there to explore, eat, hang out, and reconnect, and that we certainly did. What I hadn’t expected was that learning about slavery in Charleston would become an integral part of our trip.

Why learning about slavery in Charleston was inevitable

Charleston has a charmingly attractive historic center, with cobblestone streets lined with pastel-colored colored homes and shaded by oak trees dripping Spanish moss. There’s the intoxicating fragrance of blooming jasmine, the clip-clop of horses pulling carriages laden with tourists, and women selling handmade baskets of sweetgrass, using techniques passed down through generations. Charleston offers tours of historic homes, Fort Sumter National Historic Park, the South Carolina Aquarium, museums, and opportunities for shopping, dining on regional specialties, kayaking and beach walks. In short, with its compact historic center, interesting architecture and museums, Charleston is just the kind of town I like.

I knew, of course, that South Carolina was part of the Confederacy, but it was only after I arrived that I began learning about slavery in Charleston and how much of a role it had played in the city’s history. I hadn’t known South Carolina was one of the most ardent slave-holding colonies even before becoming a state in 1776 or the role it had played in events leading up to the Civil War. I hadn’t expected that the more I learned about Charleston’s dependency on slavery, the more haunting the city’s beauty became.

“Charleston was built on the backs of slaves,” my guide put it bluntly while leading our group on “The Charleston Stroll–A Walk with History Tour” offered by Bulldog Tours.

While strolling the streets, I learned that on the brink of the Civil War, South Carolina was the richest of the thirteen colonies and that Charleston could be considered the “cradle of slavery” in the United States. Up to half of enslaved people brought from Africa passed through Charleston, my guide said, making it the “second-busiest slave market in the world.” [I wasn’t able to corroborate this, but according to this article I found in Smithsonian Magazine, New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States].

It was my first day in the city, but subsequent days only confirmed that Charleston would never have attained its wealth without exploiting slavery. It’s a far cry from what I had learned about the causes of the Civil War as a child, which was basically that the South seceded to preserve its “lifestyle,” with no reference to the fact that slavery was the main component of that lifestyle. The fact that so many of Charleston’s historic sites and museums don’t shy away from the city’s role in the slave trade speaks volumes to how far it has come. In January 2023, the International African American Museum will open on Charleston’s waterfront, with the express purpose of promoting untold stories of the African American journey from enslavement to the present.

Learning about slavery in Charleston’s museums

I like visiting local history museums as a painless way to learn about a city’s past, so on my first day I also visited The Charleston Museum. There I saw exhibits ranging from the region’s natural history to textiles and Charleston silver. But I also learned that plantations were the backbone of the region’s economy, with labor-intensive crops like rice, cotton and indigo dependent on slave labor. As plantation owners acquired more land and more slaves, they grew incredibly rich. The museum informed me that slaves were also the driving force behind Charleston’s economy, working in rice mills, unloading cotton from trains and loading it onto ships for export, building the city’s impressive architecture and providing “the manpower for nearly every trade and craft in the city.”

In fact, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. Fort Sumter National Historic Park, considered the birthplace of the Civil War and accessible by ferry from Charleston, has a museum that doesn’t mince words about the role of slavery played in the state’s decision to secede.

“Slavery was at the heart of issues involving economics, politics and sectional power,” reads a signboard at Fort Sumter’s museum about how South Carolina led the way to Civil War. The National Park Service’s website goes even further, stating that of the state’s 169 delegates who convened and voted unanimously to secede from the Union, 153 held slaves.

Although the U.S. abolished the international slave trade in 1808, I learned at Fort Sumter’s museum that an estimated quarter million Africans were smuggled into the country from 1808 until the Civil War. One of the most heartbreaking stories of slave smuggling occurred in 1858, after the U.S. Navy captured and brought to Charleston Harbor the slave ship Echo, which had about 450 mostly young girls and boys on board, including 144 who had died in passage. President James Buchanan ordered their return to Africa, but only 196 of the original 450 were still alive by the time they reached Monrovia. The captain and crew of the Echo were tried but acquitted on a technicality.

In any case, even though the international slave trade was banned in 1808, slavery continued unabated, with the selling and owning of slaves now dependent on the domestic market. Charleston, which continued to flourish in the slave trade, sold slaves openly on its streets until 1856, when the city forbade open-air markets. That prompted as many as 40 indoor slave markets to open for business, including Ryan’s Market, the most important auction site in Charleston and now home to the Old Slave Mart Museum. Such a visual link to the city’s dark past makes this one of the most poignant places for learning about slavery in Charleston.

Domestic slaves were auctioned here from 1856 to 1863, which, according to the museum, were valued not only for work on plantations but also as cooks, midwives, laundresses, weavers, gardeners, hunters, jockeys, carpenters, boat pilots, barbers, and shopkeepers.

Before being sold, slaves were held in barracks behind Ryan’s Mart auction room (now an empty lot), where they were provided fresh clothing, fattened up, made to exercise and subjected to other measures to make them more attractive, including the plucking of gray hair and dyeing men’s beards black.

Slaves being auctioned were divided by everything from gender and age to height, weight and skin color, because every category carried its own price. A list of prices at the museum shows that in 1860, “Number One Girls” might sell for $1,275 to $1,325 ($30,000-$31,000 at 2007 prices), while “Second Rate or Ordinary Girls” might fetch only $800 to $1,100 ($21,000 to $26,000 at 2007 prices).

Especially impactful are storytellers who are sometimes at the museum to give voice to the enslaved who passed through. On the day of my visit, Christine King Mitchell talked about what it was like for those who were being sold at auction and about slavery in general. The purchase of infants, she said, was considered a good investment, not only because as adults they provided cheap labor but also because they could be sold for profit. She said that owners who wanted to punish slaves paid to have them jailed by the city and put to work. Slave owners even took out insurance policies for their slaves.

“All the beauty you see was built on the backs of slaves,” she said about Charleston, reiterating what my tour guide had said.

The Old Slave Mart Museum’s aim is not to serve as a repository for items used in the slave trade (though it does exhibit such things as ankle shackles used on children and bricks with thumb marks left by the slaves who made them), but rather to educate. It was here that I learned that in 1860, 57% of South Carolina’s residents were slaves and that of the 15 people in the U.S. who owned more than 500 slaves, eight lived in South Carolina.

Learning about slavery at Middleton Place

The privileged life of slave owners are on full display at historic homes and plantations open to the public.

Middleton Place was one of many plantations that dotted the region surrounding Charleston and served as the private pleasure estate of four generations of the Middleton family, from 1741 to 1865. Like most plantations, it was destroyed by Union forces during the Civil War. Restored, however, are 65 acres of formal gardens, now recognized as the oldest landscape gardens in America.

While the gardens are indeed impressive, most noteworthy to me is its “Beyond the Fields: Enslavement at Middleton Place,” a presentation that doesn’t shy away from the brutal life most slaves endured.

The man who gave the presentation on the day of my visit informed us that 70% of the plantation’s slaves were field hands, engaged in the backbreaking work of growing rice. Slaves, in fact, did everything necessary to run a plantation, including producing all the plantation’s food, tending the animals, building their own homes, making their own clothes, and, at Middleton Place, laying out and caring for the formal gardens.

House slaves, on the other hand, fared better, as they were generally better dressed and well fed. They performed a wide range of duties to assure the comfort and well-being of the Middleton family, including working as butlers, house servants, hairdressers, cooks, pastry chefs, washerwomen and sometimes wet nurses. Many of them also traveled with the Middletons to their homes in Charleston and elsewhere.

But all slaves lived in fear and were “treated less than human from the moment they were put in chains,” our presenter said.

“Every day, field hands would awake with fear in their hearts because they had no idea what would happen to them,” said our presenter.

Families could be broken up to work at the owner’s other plantations, never to be seen again. Sweat huts and whipping were the main forms of punishment, with all slaves made to watch as a way to deter bad behavior. Slaves were forced to breed to produce babies. If a plantation owner ended up with too many slaves or incurred debt, he could sell slaves at market for profit.

“No one had control,” he said, alluding to one of the least talked-about evils of slavery. “All women and girls were fair game to all men and visitors.”

The Middletons grew so wealthy through their ownership of slaves, which we were told was much cheaper than paying wages, their holdings grew to 19 plantations. I was most astonished to learn that despite Middleton Place’s extravagance, it served only as their winter home. Like many plantation owners of the area, they spent spring and autumn at their home in Charleston so that they could partake in a lively social life. Summers were spent at their mansion in Newport, R.I. After all, with no sewer system and rampant disease, Charleston was no place for those who could afford to spend their summers elsewhere.

Learning about slavery at Charleston’s historic homes

I love historic homes; my home, nothing elaborate, was built in 1890. I was especially enamored with Charleston’s so-called “single houses,” usually two-story homes built sideways on narrow but long lots, with two-story porches facing the side lot to catch coastal breezes.

Before visiting Charleston, I hadn’t realized that all of the city’s antebellum homes open to the public were once owned by people who had slaves.

The Nathaniel Russell House Museum, built in 1808, is one of the most opulently decorated antebellum homes open to the public. It’s famous for its three-story “floating staircase” and has been restored as much as possible to its original appearance, complete with elaborate period furnishings. There is little, however, to remind visitors that Nathaniel Russell’s lavish lifestyle was due to his work as a successful merchant and slave trader or of the 18 slaves who lived in the home.  

That’s why I especially enjoyed touring the Aiken-Rhett House, built in 1820 and later expanded by Governor and Mrs. William Aiken, Jr., in the 1830s and 1850s. It’s considered one of the best-preserved townhouse complexes in the nation, but it hasn’t been decked out in its former glory. Rather, it has been kept in an “as-found” state, with architecture and finishes that have been left as is since the mid 19th century. Its rooms stand rather bare, and it’s one of the few homes in Charleston with backyard slave quarters still intact, looking much as they did in the 1850s.

While touring the house, I learned that Aiken, who served as governor of South Carolina from 1844 to 1846, was one of the largest slave owners in US history and therefore one of the wealthiest men in the state. Most of his 800 slaves worked on his rice plantation, with others working at his other properties and for his railroad company. [The Old Slave Mart Museum identified Aiken as the third-largest slaveholder in the United States, with 904 slaves. Whatever the number, he owned a lot of humans.]

About 10 to 20 slaves lived at the Aiken home, in one-room slave quarters that were mostly without exterior windows so that there was no view of neighbors’ yards and also to make it harder for slaves to communicate. Pegs on the walls were for hanging clothes, along with hooks for other possessions like a mirror. Furniture might have been a bed or bedrolls, a table and chair. With no ventilation, the rooms would have been unbearably hot.

The Heyward-Washington House was built in 1772 by Thomas Heyward, Jr., one of four South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence. His extended family, one of the most influential in the state, also owned many slaves. The Old Slave Mart Museum identified his brother, Nathaniel Heyward, as being the largest slaveholder in the state, with 1,843 slaves. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston goes further, declaring that Nathaniel owned about 2,500 slaves and at the time of his death owned 17 plantations.

In any case, Thomas Heyward sold his home to the Grimké family in 1794. The Charleston Museum, which acquired the home in 1929 and opened it to the public the following year, has an exhibit featuring Sarah Grimké, who lived in the home as a young girl from 1794 to 1803. The exhibit describes how Sarah grew up to become an abolitionist and feminist, possibly after witnessing the brutal whipping of a household female slave in the work yard of her home.

Charleston suffered badly during the Civil War, including a devastating fire in 1861 and heavy bombardment from Union forces. Most plantations were burned to the ground. There are many stories about the role slavery played in Charleston’s wealth and its demise, many of them unspeakable, others worth repeating again and again. Learning about slavery in Charleston turned out to be the journey I hadn’t expect, but I’m thankful the city provided the opportunity.

My girlfriends and I did a lot more besides visiting museums and historic homes. For suggestions on what else to do, see my article “A Charleston Girlfriend Getaway,” originally published at gettingontravel.com, which has sadly ceased operations.

I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, one of the most famous abolitionist towns in the world. I wrote about the massacre that occurred there in 1863 by pro-slavers in A Kansas Town Remembers a Massacre.