Imagine with me April 4, 1780, in Charles Town, S.C. It’s a warm evening. A breeze brings a perfume of salt and jasmine from the banks of the Cooper River. And if you’re a British soldier, you’re crouching in a trench as “573 heavy cannonballs” sail over the sandy earth. If you’re some 1,000 yards away in the American fort, you’re lighting another fuse, which illuminates your nervous eyes.
This moment draws from an officer’s diary as outlined in “A Gallant Defense,” an account of the Revolutionary War in Charleston by Carl Borick, who recently led me through the streets and history of the Garden District, a neighborhood north of the French Quarter. It was a warm morning, and tourists strolled the porch-lined sidewalks. Two hundred and forty-six years ago, it was a frontline wasteland.
The Revolution’s legacy in Philadelphia, Boston and New York often overshadows its history in Charleston, Mr. Borick said, but “Charleston was right along with those cities during the colonial era.” The British set it in their cross hairs during their Southern Strategy, a military campaign that incited scores of pivotal battles and skirmishes in South Carolina. The state’s new license plate argues that it is “Where the Revolutionary War Was Won.”
Some people contest the claim, Mr. Borick said as we briskly walked the streets, “but in a sense, it’s true.”
At least topographically, the Lowcountry, as South Carolina’s southern coast is known, is indeed exceptional. Charleston grips the end of a curved peninsula flanked by tidal rivers and barrier islands. As the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial, I wanted to see the region so central to the war yet so often understated in our memory of it. This past lives in the landscape, a set and ready stage for the imagination to apprehend what those uncertain days must have felt like.
As the Lowcountry’s history makes clear, the Revolution’s conclusion was never foregone.
Grapeshot and shells were flying, Mr. Borick said, as he described Britain’s six-week attack on Charles Town, as the city was named until 1783. The British, with Hessian support, employed the tactics of siege warfare, wherein a network of trenches was strategically dug toward the American line.
A trained eye can spy vestiges around town. On Elizabeth Street, Mr. Borick guided me into grass that sank below the sidewalk. The sag evidenced a British trench, he said. It was one of his favorite spots on the tour, which he gives as the director of the Charleston Museum. “Nobody’s really paid much attention to this, so that’s why this has survived,” Mr. Borick said, pointing to the dip. “Thank goodness.”
He led me to a park along King Street, now a touristy artery of shops and restaurants, to where a chunk of the patriots’ fortress still stands. As the British sieged, the Royal Navy reached the harbor. Charles Town was surrounded. When more than 5,000 men dropped their weapons, it was the patriots’ biggest surrender during the war.
When Charles Town fell, American independence looked bleak — but the battle for South Carolina wasn’t over. When the British moved into the backcountry, Mr. Borick said, they learned “that there’s a lot of people who either didn’t come to the siege or who are still willing to fight.”
The Swamp Fox
On a hot afternoon, I drove out of Charleston and into the woods. To glimpse the interior and its storied past, I’d have to cross Francis Marion National Forest.
General Marion: the name that launched a thousand namesakes. There’s the city of Marion and a lake, and Francis Marion University. And there’s Mel Gibson, whose character in “The Patriot” he inspired. More than a hero, Marion is considered a legend, whose guerrilla tactics reshaped the course of the war and earned him the nickname “Swamp Fox.”
I knew I’d reached the right boat ramp when I saw the kayaks at the creek’s edge, and greeted Daniel Cross Turner, the head of programming at the Georgetown County Library, and Hastings Hensel, an English professor at Coastal Carolina University, who also owns a kayaking company. We were gathered to trace the Battle of Black Mingo Creek, the type of skirmish that characterized the backcountry fighting.
Once we settled in the water, Mr. Hensel pointed up the bank. In September 1780, Marion and his men learned that dozens of Tories, as American loyalists were known, were camped here at a tavern.
“This isn’t a hero-worship tour,” Mr. Hensel said, but added that the site was important because the battle was pivotal; you could imply “it changed the course of American and human history.”
He led us around a bend, identifying red maples and swamp tupelos that reached over the creek. There was a diving anhinga and a sunbathing brown water snake. The tannic acids in the cypress needles made the water inky black, he said.
“When you’re kayaking, you can really get sort of an intimate sense of the geography and the terrain as they would have known it,” he said. History in a textbook can be abstract, but history in the creek is sweaty and snakey.
For patriots and loyalists alike, expertise of the land could be weaponized. In that way, the earth shaped the war’s outcome, and also its legends.
“There’s something mysterious about swamps that lends itself to mythologizing,” Mr. Hensel said, having noted that many popular stories about Marion are apocryphal. But mythmaking is central to how Americans remember the Revolution. And, Mr. Hensel said, “apocrypha sells.”
About a mile up creek, Mr. Hensel pointed up the bank. It was here that Marion’s men crossed a bridge around midnight and charged the tavern. They captured guns, horses and Tories, killing others. Success was quick and decisive.
By the time we returned downstream, I could paddle without wobbling, and the peeper frogs were singing. Victories like the one here added up, Mr. Hensel said. They frustrated British efforts, and led General Cornwallis to leave the Carolinas and end up in Yorktown, Va., where he surrendered.
“It was very close to being war over, until these little skirmishes did so much to kind of energize the people,” Mr. Hensel said, and make them “feel like they had a chance.”
A Civil War
During my mornings in Charleston, I borrowed a bicycle and zipped down the peninsula. Passing Marion Square park, I descended below where the American fortress once was, and into the center of the British occupation.
For these two and a half years, Charles Town was tumultuous, flooded with refugees, redcoats and previously banished loyalists, as the historian Christina Butler said at a lecture I attended while in town. As loyalists had under American rule, patriots under British martial law had to weigh their principles against their livelihoods: pledge allegiance to the crown, or face destitution, exile or prison.
Along Meeting Street I passed a home of Thomas Heyward Jr., a Declaration signer, and then another where the Marquis de Lafayette was once hosted. I pedaled past St. Philip’s Church, whose rector fought at Sullivan’s Island, a stunning 1776 victory over the Royal Navy, and around the corner, I passed St. Michael’s, whose rector was dismissed for praying for the king.
One Anglican was a gun-wielding patriot, the other a loyalist. The war — especially in South Carolina — divided neighbors, families. Though indeed revolutionary, the fight was also civil.
St. Michael’s glimmered in the sun as bachelorette parties in coordinating sun hats posed for pictures along the shop-lined street, which terminated at a hulking building: the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, where prisoners were held.
This warranted a stop. With a docent in colonial garb, I descended into the brick dungeon and ducked past the mannequins (also in colonial garb) displayed with rats and manacles. They portrayed the detained patriots — men, women and children; white and Black; enslaved and free. British troops who misbehaved were also thrown in. It got tight and testy, my guide said, since everyone was jumbled in together.
Back in the fresh air, I made one more stop. Having survived the dungeon, I’d earned a treat.
Tea was essential to revolutionary politics in Charles Town, which hosted three tea protest parties. I found this legacy at Oliver Pluff & Company, a shop that recreates historical teas’ flavor profiles. I bought a tin of “Colonial bohea,” a black blend that the shop worker explained was the colonies’ most popular. It’s what was ordered in pubs, she said.
When I brewed the bohea later, I discovered how the people back in Charles Town liked their tea. They liked it smoky, and they liked it sharp.
‘What Is Independence?’
To encounter the Revolution in the Lowcountry, you must encounter the landscapes. To encounter the landscapes, you must consider Carolina Gold, a rice whose name has a double meaning: The grain has an amber hue, and by the hands of enslaved West Africans, it made Charles Town exceedingly wealthy.
Gold grew in the wetlands, like along the Ashley River at Middleton Place, the former home of Arthur Middleton. He signed the Declaration and ended up imprisoned during the war. All the while, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were debated on his plantation.
Caitlin Anderson, the vice president of museums at Middleton Place, led me through the house, now a museum, to displays featuring John and Lucy Banbury, who had been enslaved on the property. As war broke out, they must have heard the British promise of freedom to enslaved people who joined their forces. Records show that by 1777, John and Lucy had each fled Middleton and crossed British lines, and were among thousands of Black loyalists the British evacuated to Nova Scotia after the war. Lucy later sailed to Sierra Leone, living out her life in freedom on the continent where she’d been born.
“What is independence?” Ms. Anderson mused. “What is liberty?”
Middleton died a few years after America achieved independence. In those years, he hunted down and re-enslaved people who had escaped.
“He could not reconcile in his head that freedom that he risked everything for did not apply for John and Lucy,” Ms. Anderson said, adding, “I can’t explain that further, but it’s deeply troubling.”
Outside the home, azaleas lined the footpaths and sheep roamed the yard. The size of the live oaks made me unexpectedly emotional.
I wandered the grounds to one of their oldest trees — possibly 1,000 years old — which is planted near the river. They call it a “witness tree,” because it has been around to watch our whole story.
The oak is stubby. Its trunk is gnarly. It survived the earthquakes, hurricanes, shipbuilders and cannonballs that shaped the Lowcountry. It was already considerably ancient during the Revolution. It was kind of pretty, kind of ugly. I suppose it had seen it all.
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