Charleston in Black and White

 

Charleston in Black and White

 

I’d wager all three of my faithful readers have been to Charleston, South Carolina.  All who have visited this lovely old city already know you can’t absorb the sense of it or savor it, or feel out each cobbled street or plumb its secrets in one day or one week, or even in a year.  

 

On my last trip I took a barrage of photos, but in this very short portrait of Charleston in Black and White, I don’t attempt the impossible. I only offer seeing Charleston at a glance. Thinking you can get a taste of the Holy City would be akin to dining once in Paris and supposing you can fathom the intricacies of French cuisine. Julia Child would laugh in your face.

 

Before we get to the photos, let’s take a short stroll through Charleston’s history

 

Charleston dates back to well before the American Revolution, when Charles II of England ceded all the land south of Virginia to eight nobles, know as the Lords Proprietors.   I’m not going to name them all, but some names you’d remember, such as Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Ashley and Cooper now being the names of the two rivers that frame the peninsula that contains the oldest part of the city.  I’ve included photos of several houses that are on the tip of the peninsula known as The Battery. Some date back to the Revolution, but sadly I do not know the ages of each.

 

As you might guess, Charleston, once known as Charles Town, has layer after layer of dusty history.  Along with New York and New Jersey, South Carolina had the most major battles of the Revolutionary War and from 1780 to 1783 was occupied by the British Army.

 

As a side note:  There is the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, but the British army is simply the British Army.

 

Back in the days of yore, decades after the War for Independence, Charleston thrived, mostly agriculturally with crops of indigo and rice, and then with the biggest crop of all, cotton.  All were dependent on slave labor.

 

The War of 1812 bypassed Charleston in terms of battles, but South Carolina did supply men and material

 

And as the federal government expanded its powers, one South Carolinian leapt into the thick of the politics of the central government versus states rights, John Caldwell Calhoun.  He was the Vice President under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.  He also served as Secretary of State under President John Tyler.  Without going into details, Calhoun fought hard for Southern institutions, including slavery.  (You might want to read about the Nullification Crisis and the Compromise of 1820.)

 

Within a couple of decades, the Civil War erupted (also known as the War Between the States…and in the south, as The War of Northern Aggression).  It was Charleston where the first shots of the war were fired at the federally manned Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston Harbor.

 

Sometimes I find history is more digestible on a personal and fictional level.  For the Civil war, The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, and for the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. For Charleston’s history, check out Charleston, by John Jakes.

 

Enough blather, maybe?  Time for you to see what I saw on my recent trip to the wonderfully historic city of Charleston, South Carolina.

A Wonderful Coffee House

Graveyard near St Phillip's Church

These houses are all in the area called The Battery