Charleston is one of America’s most beautiful and livable cities, but it has a complex and shameful legacy that should never be ignored or forgotten in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ve written often about a special place very near and dear to my heart, Folly Beach, located on the Atlantic Ocean about 10 miles from where I live. It’s a diverse and eclectic hodgepodge of people, architecture and businesses, all bound up in common hopes and dreams of finding that close-to perfect beach sanctuary “away from it all.” The town’s motto is, Folly Beach: The Edge of America.”

More than 2,300 people live in the beach town year-round. For many, including myself, Folly is the best kind of retreat. It’s a tolerant place, and an area of great natural beauty, as I’ve described here so often. Its lighthouse, beaches and sea oats, dunes and marshes have been the subject of many of my journal writings and photographs. There is never a time when I am not ready to go there and experience it.

But Folly Beach is not where I live. I’ve been going there for most of my life, but my roots lie in that beautiful and complex city to the north of the beach, lying on a peninsula where the Cooper and Ashley rivers join to meet the ocean. Its history dates to 1670 when the initial settlement was formed. A couple of decades later it was an established, fortified town, and its size and wealth grew exponentially over the years following until it became one of the largest cities in the young United States.

Its architectural styles — Adams, Palladian, Georgian, Victorian, Queen Ann, Greek Revival — are stunning in their grace and elegance. There are hundreds of carefully preserved houses in a very large historic district encompassing many blocks. Its walled gardens are intimate and inviting. Waterfront Park looks out to Fort Sumter and the Atlantic. The Battery near White Point Gardens has some of America’s classic mansions. It all speaks to a way of life that symbolized great affluence and cultivation of the arts and building trades from early in the 18th century.

But as with so many of the priceless and beautiful things and places of this earth, there is a corresponding and paradoxical dark side to the story of Charleston. The ugly legacy of this most gracious modern-day city is the history of slavery that reached its apex in the slave markets of the city in the early to mid 19th century. Rice plantations that were dependant on slave labor dotted the Lowcountry along the Ashley and Cooper rivers and yielded crops of great abundance which were shipped north to the other colonies, then states, and also to foreign countries. More than 100,000 enslaved men, women and children were captured and imported from the African rice-growing countries of what are now Sierra Leone, Ghana and Liberia over the period of the rice culture, and then later as the plantations grew other crops. Slaves outnumbered the free population many times over.

I started to write a sun-dappled piece on Charlesto, but it didn’t work because my picture was incomplete. I kept thinking back to that haunting picture I saw at the county nature park’s history exhibit on the rice culture of our area. It showed a graphic illustration of the way a hundred or more slaves were shackled together side by side on the below deck quarters of slave ships, brought up to the light of day only to exercise briefly. One in six died on the hideous and grotesque passage across the Atlantic, and the slave traders and auctioneers considered that an acceptable loss.

So when I walk the truly lovely streets of the city today and look at the stunning old houses, civic buildings, and churches, there is always in the back of my mind that other perspective — the slave trade legacy that brought such misery and bondage to a race of people brought here against their will, and which led eventually to the Civil War. Merchants, politicians, statesmen, doctors and lawyers all enjoyed their great prosperity on the back of the evils of slavery, and that fact can never be sanitized away.

The past is done. Slavery was a blight on humanity. One can rightly enjoy in the present the splendid beauty of this old city by the sea, but also, it is imperative to be mindful of and always remember the past and never forget the lessons it teaches us..

Charleston links:

Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston:

http://oldslavemartmuseum.com

Here is a recent album of photos so took during a walk on April 8 in Charleston’s Historic District:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/3112W0dS1r