Fortifications

Historical documents, especially Edward Crisp’s 1711 map and Herman Moll’s 1733 map, reveal the presence of a fortification around the settlement of Charles Town. According to the 2012 Walled City Task Force archaeological study in Charleston, the wall was built to protect the city from other empires exploring new territories in North America at the time (especially Spanish and French colonizers) and from the numerous Native American tribes that were already settled in the region. The brick wall additionally protected the English colony from the threat of the sea, though it is reported that several hurricanes (in the 1720s in particular) caused major destruction to the fortress (Butler et al. 2012). After the Revolutionary War period, the fortress is no longer visible on maps of the city.

frame the colony that we

arrive at by sea. 

The 18th century was a time of incredible growth for the colony, particularly due to its involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In a span of 30 years, the percentage of enslaved African people making up the total population grew from about 17 percent to over 50 percent, and continued to increase until about 1740 (Butler 2019). Enslaved people continued to be packed and shipped from their homes along the west coast of Africa to the shores of North America into the 19th century, with Charleston acting as “ground zero” (Hicks 2011). “About 40 percent of enslaved Africans brought into the country passed through Charleston Harbor,” most of whom were auctioned at the city’s slave marts to plantation owners who put them to work on the rice plantations that helped fuel the city’s economy (Hicks 2011). The ship furthest to the left in this collage shows a slave ship whose passengers staged an insurrection, finding the Atlantic waters a welcoming alternative to the fate that laid before them on shore ("Representation of an Insurrection on board a Slave Ship" 1794). 

We are “choice cargo”.

During this period of human trafficking, Africans from the “rice coast” (the region from Senegal to Liberia) were particularly sought after because they had experience harvesting rice in their original climates (Opala). One 1769 flyer advertises that “a choice cargo of two-hundred and fifty negroes” will be sold in the coming weeks, which are “the likeliest parcel that have been imported this season” ("To Be Sold" 1769).

The marsh is but a frontier

from which they profit.

The location of Charleston along the Atlantic coast and nestled between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers enabled it to become a prime hub in the slave trade as well as in the trade of the cash crops of rice, cotton, and indigo. The marshes, which acted as prime sites for the production of rice in particular, became another frontier space—a wilderness to be tamed. Malm describes the engagement between the colonial man and the wild in this way: “The prototypical wilderness subject is a white male bourgeois individual. By making wild nature his realm, he symbolically re-enacts his conquest of the world. He leaves effeminate civilization behind, demonstrates his survival skills and penetrates virgin nature: this is how he becomes a real man” (Malm 2018, 2). However, in the case of Charleston, this marshy wilderness was governed by the white male individual who re-enacted his conquest over black bodies by instructing them to dominate virgin nature on his behalf. In doing so, the enslavement of Africans and the consumption of nature are intertwined into a single, complex story that describes Charleston’s economic success.