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A Trailer Boat Cruising Guide to Charleston, SC
History
Charleston is steeped in history like few places in North America. It became one of the first English settlements in the south when, in 1670, the small village of Charles Town was established on the west bank of the Ashley River just a mile upstream from the present-day downtown. The settlement immediately became a strategic military outpost which was intermittently raided from the sea by England's geopolitical rivals, the Spanish and French.
As the settlement grew to become a major shipping center for the southern colonies it also became the target of pirates. No less a person than Blackbeard himself once blockaded the harbor and kidnapped several prominent citizens, leaving the city in peace only after a suitable ransom (primarily of medicine to cure his crew's syphilis) had been paid by the terrified city government.
As the Revolutionary War broke out, a proper fort was needed to defend the harbor entrance from the powerful British navy. An artillery battery protected by a wall of palmetto trunks was hastily placed along the north shore of the harbor mouth at the tip of present day Sullivan's Island that was not quite complete when a British naval squadron arrived with 2000 soldiers to seize the city. To everyone's surprise, the soft palmetto trees absorbed the cannon fire hurled at it with little damage, forcing the British to abandon the attack and return to their base in New York. The fort was christened Fort Moultrie in honor of its commander during the battle and would remain an active military base defending Charleston Harbor for over 170 years thereafter.
Two years later, as the war in the northern colonies ground on with little success, the British decided to pursue a new strategy by bringing war to the as yet untouched southern colonies, and Charles Town was once again in the crosshairs of the Royal Navy. This time the British arrived with 14,000 men and a massive fleet, capturing Fort Moultrie and seizing the city itself after the longest siege of the war. The conflict soon moved inland and Charles Town remained under British occupation for the remainder of the war. After independence was recognized, the British returned control to the newly established United States and the city was officially renamed Charleston.
Charleston continued to thrive and grew into one of America's largest seaports and most prosperous cities. Rice and indigo were successfully cultivated and a series of plantations were established in the surrounding countryside that made many of the local shippers and landowners tremendously wealthy. This wealth was used in part to build the fabulous spired churches that give Charleston its unique skyline and many of the opulent homes, plantations, and public buildings that are available to tour to this day. By 1820 the city's population had grown to 23,000, more than half of whom were slaves.
Over the years additional forts were built to further strengthen Charleston's sea defenses and, in 1827, construction began on a massive defensive fortification at the mouth of the harbor to be christened Fort Sumter. Although Fort Sumter was designed to be one of the strongest fortifications in the world, construction was conducted in a fairly lackadaisical fashion and the fort was still incomplete in 1860 when the contentious issue of slavery drove several southern states, led by South Carolina, to secede from the United States and form their own governments. As Union facilities were being bloodlessly seized all across the newly-formed Confederacy, the commander of Fort Moultrie realized that his position there was untenable and made the fateful decision to move his command to the lightly armed but more easily defended Fort Sumter. When a union steamship arrived to resupply the fort, the first shots of the Civil War rang out from Charleston Harbor as cannon fire from the now Confederate-held Fort Moultrie drove it away in a small-scale reenactment of the initial British foray into the harbor during the Revolutionary War.
A tense standoff ensued for three months, during which the Union forces refused to surrender Fort Sumter and Confederate forces refused to allow Union ships into the harbor to resupply the garrison. Things finally came to a head on April 12, 1861 when guns from Fort Moultrie and batteries on nearby Morris Island began a 34-hour bombardment of the fort, kicking off the Civil War in earnest. During the attack, residents of Charleston gathered along the downtown shoreline to watch the show, sipping sweet tea and toasting the start of what they expected to be a short and victorious war. Fort Sumter had been designed to fight warships offshore with the support of the surrounding forts and was poorly equipped to defend itself against close assault from land. Knowing this, and not wanting to bring about the needless deaths of his own men or those of the Confederates, the Union commander conducted a half-hearted defense until his ammunition ran out, at which point the garrison surrendered. The shelling of Fort Sumter became a rallying cry across the north and solidified opinion that the southern states must be forcibly defeated and brought back into the Union.
Remarkably, despite being the proverbial match in the powder keg at the start of hostilities, Charleston weathered the war better than most Confederate cities. Charleston Harbor was blockaded by the Union navy but quickly became a base of operations for the numerous blockade-runners attempting to sneak their cargos through the line of warships offshore to reach welcoming European markets (the successful ones became fabulously wealthy for the risks they took). Although shelled into rubble in the process, Forts Sumter and Moultrie fulfilled their duty, successfully defending the city from numerous Union attacks during the later stages of the war. Charleston was never captured but, instead, was peacefully occupied when the battered remnants of the Confederate army melted away after General Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
The city suffered through a prolonged period of poverty brought about by the destruction of the antebellum lifestyle it had evolved to rely on but, like all great cities, it eventually rediscovered its inner strength and recovered, even opening several schools and academies to house and educate its citizens, both black and white, displaced by the war. In 1886, mother nature nearly succeeded in accomplishing what the combined might of the United States military could not when the city was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake that was felt as far north as Boston and as far south as Cuba. The quake was so deep and extreme that the occasional tremors felt throughout the area to this day are thought to be merely aftershocks from that singular cataclysmic event.
Rebuilt after the war, Forts Sumter and Moultrie would lie in neglect and disuse for years, only to be hastily modernized during the thoroughly phony panic of the Spanish-American War and the very real one of World War II. While Fort Sumter would merely be supplied with a pair of anti-aircraft guns, Fort Moultrie was completely re-equipped during World War II, where it served to protect the harbor once again, this time from German Submarines that were sinking ships by the dozens off the American coast and even going so far as to lay mines outside the harbor itself. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, and after nearly 300 years on the front line of almost every war in the hemisphere, Charleston finally felt safe enough to do away with its harbor defenses. Both forts were permanently decommissioned and placed under the control of the National Park Service.
Post-war Charleston once again languished economically for several decades but has recently been enjoying a great revitalization and is now one of America's fastest growing cities. The waterfront was severely battered by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 but quickly rebounded. Many of the historic homes in the old city center were also damaged but most have been fully restored. The most recent addition to the city's skyline is the spectacular Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, which spans the Cooper River and is the largest cable-stayed bridge in North America.
