The Travelers' Charleston

Description

The Travelers' Charleston is an innovative collection of firsthand narratives that document the history of the South Carolina lowcountry region, specifically that of Charleston, from 1666 until the start of the Civil War. Jennie Holton Fant has compiled and edited a rich and comprehensive history as seen through the eyes of writers from outside the South. She provides a selection of unique texts that include the travelogues, travel narratives, letters, and memoirs of a diverse array of travelers who described the region over time. Further, Fant has mined her material not only for validity but to identify any characters her travelers encounter or events they describe. She augments her resources with copious annotations and provides a wealth of information that enhances the significance of the texts.

The Travelers' Charleston begins with explorer Joseph Woory's account of the Carolina coast four years before the founding of Charles Town, and it concludes as Anna Brackett, a Charleston schoolteacher from Boston, witnesses the start of the Civil War. The volume includes Josiah Quincy Jr.'s original 1773 journal; the previously unpublished letters of Samuel F. B. Morse, a portrait artist in Charleston between 1818 and 1820; the original letters of Scottish aristocrat and traveler Margaret Hunter Hall (1824); and a compilation of the letters of William Makepeace Thackeray written in Charleston during his famous lecture tours in the 1850s. Using these sources, combined with excepts from carefully chosen travel accounts, Fant provides an unusual and authoritative documentary record of Charleston and the lowcountry, which allows the reader to step back in time and observe a bygone society, culture, and politics to note key characters and hear them talk and to witness firsthand the history of one of the country's most distinctive regions.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Sullivan's Island
• Carolina del Sur
• Life and Letters
• Charleston Harbor
• Applicant (sketch)
• Charleston Museum
• Notes on the State of Virginia
• My Reputation
• His Family
• Southern hospitality
• Ashley River (South Carolina)
• Travel writing
• University of South Carolina
• State
• On the Beach (novel)
• Sullivan's Island, South Carolina
• South
• South Carolina
• History of the Americas
• The Southern Review
• Susannah
• United States
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• Voltaire
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• Fort Sumter
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• VA
• GA
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175851
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Travelers Charleston
The Travelers Charleston
Accounts of Charleston and Lowcountry, South Carolina, 1666-1861
EDITED BY
Jennie Holton Fant
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-584-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-585-1 (ebook)
Front cover illustration by Brock Henderson
C ONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
JOSEPH WOORY (1666):
Discovery
JOHN LAWSON ( EARLY 1700 S ):
Charles Towne and Travel Among the Indians
JOSIAH QUINCY JR . (1773):
Society of Charleston
JOHANN DAVID SCHOEPF (1784):
After the Revolution
JOHN DAVIS (1798-99):
The Woods of South Carolina
JOHN LAMBERT (1808):
Look to the Right and Dress!
SAMUEL F. B. MORSE (1818-20):
Hospitably Entertained and Many Portraits Painted
MARGARET HUNTER HALL (1828):
The Dowdies and their Clumsy Partners
JAMES STUART, ESQ . (1830):
Devil in Petticoats
HARRIET MARTINEAU (1835):
Many Mansions There Are in This Hell
JOHN BENWELL (1838):
July the 4th
FREDRIKA BREMER (1850):
The Lover of Darkness
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1853 AND 1855):
The Fast Lady of Charleston
WILLIAM FERGUSON (1855):
Such a One s Geese Are All Swans
JOHN MILTON MACKIE (1859):
The Last Hour of Repose
ANNA C. BRACKETT (1861):
Charleston, South Carolina, 1861
Bibliography
Index
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
Charles II
John Lawson, 1700
Josiah Quincy Jr.
Johann David Schoepf
Elephant Broadside
Mary Ann Wrighten (Pownall)
Samuel F. B. Morse
Margaret Hall (n e Hunter)
James Stuart Duel Broadside
Harriet Martineau
City of Charleston
Fredrika Bremer
William Makepeace Thackeray
Entrance Hall to an Hotel at Charleston
Selling Sweet Potatoes in Charleston
A Peanut Seller
The Principle Church in Charleston
William Ferguson of Kinmundy
View on the Battery
The Housetops in Charleston During the Bombardment of Sumter
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have incurred many debts of gratitude in the research and preparation of this manuscript with its combination of letters, documents, and illustrations. I owe special thanks to my editor, Alexander Moore at the University of South Carolina Press, who accompanied me on this long journey to publication, and to whom I am infinitely grateful for his support, his expertise, and his belief in this book. The research for this volume would not have been possible without the faculty library privileges I was granted as an employee of Duke University Libraries, with its wonderful resources. I am infinitely grateful to the staff of Interlibrary Loan at Duke Libraries, who, over a number of years, granted my fathoms of requests for materials in and beyond the university, some relatively obscure. I am further indebted to Interlibrary Loan at Durham County Library, Shannon Road, for granting my many requests as well.
I owe appreciation to the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan for permission to publish the Joseph Woory 1666 account. My gratitude to the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to reproduce a portion of the original journal of Josiah Quincy Jr. from the Quincy Family Papers. During the research for this book, the Library of Congress digitized the handwritten correspondence of Samuel F. B. Morse. My appreciation to them for permission to publish a number of letters written to and from Morse while he was in Charleston between 1818 and 1821. My sincere gratitude to Michael Mallon, literary executor of the Sir John Pope-Hennessy estate, for permission to publish from the original letters of Margaret Hunter Hall. Additional thanks to Mallon s literary agent and agency, Darryl Samaraweera and Artellus Ltd. in London for help locating Mr. Mallon in Paris. Further, I am indebted to Catherine Wilson, great-great-granddaughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, for her kind guidance through the various rights of the Thackeray estates in my quest to obtain permission to reprint a number of the Thackeray letters first published by Gordon N. Ray some years ago.
My deep appreciation goes to staff members of innumerable libraries, archives, and museums: Michelle Gait at the Special Collections Centre, the Sir Duncan Rice Library, Aberdeen University; Jamie Cutts at Aberdeenshire Council, Aberdeenshire Museums Service; Ondine LeBlanc, Elaine Heavey and Anna Clutterbuck-Cook at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Jennifer Johns at Ruthmere Museum, Elkhart, Indiana; Dale Sauter at Manuscripts and Rare Books, Joyner Library, East Carolina University; Jeffery Flannery and Lewis Wyman at the Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; M rta Fodor at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Alice Hickcox at the Beck Center, Emory University Libraries; Diana Sykes at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan. My added thanks to the National Portrait Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum; National Library of Scotland; New-York Historical Society; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs; Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina; United States Office of Medical History; and the National Library of Medicine.
Finally, my love and gratitude to friends and family who supported me over the long gestation of this project, especially Rhet Wilson-Deehan and John Deehan, Eleanor Hawkins and Mary Cecil Hawkins Parker. I salute your long-suffering belief that one day this tome would, indeed, make it to the reader. My regard to the many friends (you know who you are) who tolerated my long sequester; nevertheless, at every stage in the preparation for this book showed such interest. I further owe a debt of gratitude to my friend and excellent on-call IT resource, James Wood, a genius with technology.
I NTRODUCTION
These charming gardens, in connection with the piazzas resting on ornamental pillars, make the whole town graceful. One sits, in the morning, in these open chambers, inhaling the refreshing air from the sea, its perfume mingled with that of the flowers below; and, at midday, closing the Venetian shutters to exclude the sun, he rests in grateful shade. Here, too, throughout the longer portion of the year, may be spread, at evening, the tea table; while the heavens still glow with the purple-and amber of the sunset. And here lingers the family until the bells from the tower of St. Michael s, sweetly ringing their silver chimes through the calm, starry air, announce, at last, the hour of repose.
John Milton Mackie, From Cape Cod to Dixie and the Tropics , 1864
Soon after he was restored to the English throne in 1660, King Charles II rewarded eight men who had supported him in exile with a large section of the American continent. These men, constituted lords proprietors, were granted the province of Carolina by a charter dated 1663, which gave them permission to develop all that territory, or tract of ground called Carolina scituate, lying, and being within our dominions of America. Carolina extended over a vast and unexplored terrain from Virginia to Florida.
Five months later, a group of Barbados businessmen sponsored an expedition to explore the coastal regions of the grant. Commanded by Captain William Hilton, the expedition left Barbados in August of 1663 and arrived in the province of Carolina. They sailed in the proximity of the Combahee and Edisto rivers, Port Royal, and St. Helena Sound. In a report, Hilton described the region as one of the greatest and fairest havens in the world.
Influenced by Captain Hilton s favorable description, at the end of 1663 a second English group set out from Barbados to settle an area on the Charles River (later named the Clarendon River, now the Cape Fear River), which they named Charles Town. When that colony proved unsuccessful, the lords proprietors encouraged the Barbadians to explore the territory further south for settlement, that region described by Hilton. An expedition ensued in two small vessels, the Speedwell and the Rebecca , commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Sandford.
It is here that this book begins-with an account written four years before Charles Town was founded in what is now South Carolina. The Sandford expedition set out on June 16, 1666, and explored down to Beaufort (Port Royal). Lieutenant Joseph Woory, a crewman aboard, wrote an account of the discovery of these coastal regions. As a result of this sighting by Sandford and his crew, Port Royal became the original destination for ships carrying the first settlers of Charles Town in 1670. They arrived near Beaufort only to be convinced by Kiawah Indians that the territory around what is now Charleston was a better choice for farming, and realized it was (thankfully) even further away from the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine.
From its beginnings, the lowcountry region was considered distinctive. A unique geography formed by an intricate system of sea-islands, sounds, rivers, inlets, and creeks, it was a watery paradise rich in untamed nature and graced with a subtropical climate. Isolated in a lush coastal wilderness, a tiny struggling colony hewed out an existence. By 1670, John Locke wrote a memorandum that described Carolina: Country: Healthy, delightful. Bears anything. From little more than an outpost, boundaries expanded as the colony was relocated to the peninsula, and a society was formed. Land was reclaimed