Rediscovering Charleston's Colonial Fortifications

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, South Carolina’s colonial government raised a fortified trace of earthen walls and moats around the nucleus of urban Charleston. These defensive works constrained the town’s growth for more than twenty years, but then quietly vanished before a burst of civic expansion in the mid-1730s. Questions of when and why the earthworks were dismantled have baffled generations of historians and inspired competing theories. In today’s program, we’ll unpack the forgotten story of government neglect that gradually reduced the “Walled City” during the late 1720s.

Over the past several years, I’ve crafted a number of podcast essays about Charleston’s early fortifications. My goal has been to explain not only the chronology of the urban fortifications, but also the broader historical context that defined their rise and fall. The principal source for this information is the extant manuscript journals of South Carolina’s provincial government, augmented by related government documents, which I’ve examined in numerous visits to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia over the last two decades. As I described in Episode No. 230, for example, records created during the early years of the eighteenth century provide a relatively clear picture of when and why civic leaders decided to enclose the colonial capital within a network of walls surrounded by a moat: Fear of an imminent Spanish attack in late 1703 inspired the provincial government to appropriate funds for the rapid construction of the Charleston enceinte—a fortified enclosure—which was effectively completed by the end of 1704.

Similarly, government records created over the ensuing three decades contain numerous references to the repair and maintenance of the brick curtain wall along the east side of East Bay Street and the earthen walls enclosing the south, north, and west sides of Charleston. The extant documents might not contain as many details as we’d like to see, but they represent a nearly-continuous paper trail for tracing the evolution of the town’s early fortifications.

Reading through South Carolina’s legislative journals of the 1720s and early 1730s for the first time, I expected to find the text of a discussion regarding the fate of Charleston’s earthen walls. The provincial government used tax revenue to build and maintain the enceinte surrounding the capital, so I imagined that its removal would require some act of government, like a resolution, ordinance, or statute. I found no such discussion, however, nor any sort of act or decree that might have triggered the demolition of the public earthworks. By the time I reached the legislative journals of the mid-1730s, I found discussions of extending Church Street, Dock Street, Bay Street, Tradd Street, and Broad Street beyond the boundaries of the fortifications created thirty years earlier. The earthen walls were evidently gone by 1733, but I found no explanation of how or when they disappeared.

Detail from the 1739 ‘Ichnography of Charles Town at High Water,’ showing the outline of the former “enceinte” created in 1704.

Turning to secondary sources for help, I discovered that no historical text published in the past three centuries offered a reliable answer to the puzzle of Charleston’s disappearing fortifications. In fact, some observers living in the eighteenth century published inaccurate solutions to the question. For example, the well-known map printed in London in 1739, titled “The Ichnography of Charles-Town at High Water,” depicts the outline of the fortified walls that formerly constrained the south, north, and west sides of the town. A caption printed in the lower left corner of the map states that “the double lines represent the enceinte as fortified by the inhabitants for their defence against the French[,] Spaniards & Indians[;] without it were only a few houses & these not thought safe till after the signal defeat of y^e Indians in the year 1717, at which time the north west & south sides were dismantled & demolished to enlarge the town.” That text is definitely inaccurate, however, because extant legislative records demonstrate South Carolina’s provincial government maintained the earthen fortifications of Charleston for several years beyond 1717.

Another brief statement about the removal of Charleston’s earthen fortifications appears within an essay about defending South Carolina, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine of London in 1745: “In Queen Anne’s war [1702–13], this place was strengthened by tolerable works on the land side, which were razed by General Nicholson, when governor, to oblige some of his particular friends.” Francis Nicholson (1655–1728) was appointed governor of South Carolina the autumn of 1720 and held that title until his death in March 1728, but he actually resided in Charleston between May 1721 and May 1725. The essay published twenty years later implies that Nicholson was somehow responsible for demolishing the earthworks in the mid-1720s, either by executive decree or by steering the provincial legislature towards that end. The extant government papers from that period do not support this theory, however, although Governor Nicholson was certainly involved in the process.

Over the past decade, I’ve re-read the extant legislative journals of the 1720s multiple times and combed archives in London searching for obscure records that might illuminate this history mystery. The answer, it turns out, was embedded in the legislative journals of the mid-1720s that I initially consulted. It did not leap off the page, but it came into focus after I revisited the clues and considered the broader context. Charleston’s first earthen walls faded out of existence over a period of several years, and the facts related to their disappearance form a rather complex narrative. For the first time in three hundred years, the real story can now be told.

This story continues at Charleston Time Machine. . . . 

When Queen Anne of England declared war on France and Spain in 1702, the people of South Carolina were overwhelmed with anxiety about the security of Charleston, the colonial capital. Fortifications built along the town’s eastern waterfront provided some protection against potential invaders, but the rest of the community was undefended. After a Carolina military expedition failed to capture Spanish St. Augustine, the provincial government adopted an emergency plan in late 1703 to build an entrenchment around Charleston—an earthen wall and moat to encompass the capital’s urban core. 

“Entrenchment” is a term used in military architecture to describe a pair of linear defensive components often used to protect a specific area like a town. First, workers excavate a perimeter trench or ditch or moat to slow or deter attackers on foot or on horseback. Second, workers pile the excavated earth next to the ditch to form a defensive berm. The resulting berm or “entrenchment” serves as a protective barrier to shield defenders and repulse attackers who might approach or traverse the ditch. Due to the nature of the materials involved, entrenchments are relatively inexpensive and simple to create, but they are inherently impermanent works. They are best suited for temporary occasions, like sieges, in which an attacker arrives at the perimeter of a town or castle and rapidly constructs a line of entrenchment to defend its approach. To render such earthworks more permanent, builders can add rigid materials like bundles of sticks (fascines), boards, bricks, or stones to hold the earth in place. These materials provide reinforcement, or “revetment,” that can extend the lifespan of an entrenchment indefinitely if properly maintained. 

Inset from the “Crisp Map” of 1711

The earthen entrenchments constructed within urban Charleston during the early years of eighteenth century endured on the landscape for a single generation, but they have long formed one of the most iconic and misunderstood features in the narrative of local history. The so-called “Crisp Map” of South Carolina, published in London in 1711, depicts Charleston as what we might describe as a “walled city,” outlined by a trapezoid-shaped network of walls, moats, bastions, redans, and drawbridges. This illustration has been reproduced in countless books and articles over the past three centuries, accompanied by vague descriptions of the town’s early defenses. Absent among this literature, however, is any detailed discussion of when, why, and how Charleston’s earthen walls were created. Today’s program focuses solely on the historical context that triggered the decision to enclose the town behind a defensive wall and moat. In future programs, we’ll continue this narrative by examining the methods of constructing the entrenchments, the ongoing efforts to repair them, and the eventual decision to remove them from the urban landscape.

Shortly after moving the capital of South Carolina to the peninsula known as Oyster Point in 1680, the provincial legislature authorized the construction of some rudimentary fortifications made of earth and wood along the Cooper River waterfront of “new” Charles Towne (now Charleston). Work commenced in 1694 to build a brick “wharf wall” along the east side of modern East Bay Street, measuring nearly one half of a mile in length. The storm surge associated with a strong hurricane in the autumn of 1700 ruined much of the initial brickwork, but the project quickly rebounded and continued. By the summer of 1702, South Carolina’s provincial government mounted two dozen cannon at three emplacements along the unfinished brick “wharf wall”: an unfinished brick “fort” (later called Granville Bastion) at the southern end of the Bay, a small battery of unknown materials at the east end of Tradd Street; and a completed brick Half Moon Battery at the east end of Broad Street. Beyond these works along Charleston’s eastern waterfront, the south, west, and northern parts of the town remained unguarded.

In August 1702, news arrived in Charleston that King William II of England had died in March, and his successor, Queen Anne, had declared war on France and Spain in May. Historians refer to this international conflict as Queen Anne’s War, or the War of Spanish Succession, which was destined to last for eleven years. Although most of the fighting took place in Europe, the conflict extended across the Atlantic to include the various colonies in the Americas. For the first time since the settlement of the South Carolina in 1670, a state of formal warfare now existed between the English government in Charleston and the Spanish government at St. Augustine, Florida. The Floridians had recently completed an impressive stone fortress, the Castillo de San Marcos, to defend their capital, while the waterfront defenses of Charleston remained relatively weak and unfinished. After learning of the new declaration of war, South Carolina’s provincial government was compelled to consider methods of improving the fortifications around its capital as quickly and cheaply as possible.

This story continues at Charleston Time Machine. . . .