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largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina
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Charleston is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina's coastline on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers. Charleston had a population of 150,227 at the 2020 census, while the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, has an estimated 870,000 residents. It ranks as the third-most-populous metropolitan area in the state and the 71st-most-populous in the U.S. It is the county seat of Charleston County.
Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 by English colonists, who named it in honor of Charles II of England. Originally established at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River (now Charles Towne Landing), the settlement was moved in 1680 to its present location, where it quickly grew to become the fifth-largest city in North America by the 1690s. During the colonial period, Charleston remained unincorporated and was governed by a colonial legislature and a royal governor, with administrative districts and social services organized by Anglican parishes.
The city was renamed Charleston on August 13, 1783, when it was incorporated by the state legislature. Although the state capital was relocated to Columbia in 1788, Charleston remained among the top 10 U.S. cities by population through 1840. A significant part of Charleston's history is its central role in the Atlantic slave trade; local merchants, including Joseph Wragg, helped break the monopoly of the Royal African Company, making Charleston a primary entry point for enslaved Africans. Almost one-half of enslaved people imported to the United States arrived in Charleston. In 2018, the city formally apologized for its role in the American slave trade.
The economy of Charleston is anchored by tourism, port and logistics, aerospace, and information technology. The city is home to the Port of Charleston, one of the busiest in the United States, which significantly contributes to regional trade and economic activity. Boeing and other major employers have established a strong aerospace presence, while its growing tech industry has led to the nickname "Silicon Harbor". Culturally, Charleston is renowned for its well-preserved architecture, historic landmarks, and rich Gullah heritage, alongside vibrant culinary, music, and arts scenes. Popular attractions include the historic City Market, Fort Sumter National Monument, and antebellum homes along the Battery and Rainbow Row.
The unified Cusabo people (including sub tribes such as Kiawah) and the Ittiwan people inhabited the area prior to colonial settlement. They were known as "Settlement Indians" by colonists.
King Charles II granted the chartered Province of Carolina to eight of his loyal friends, known as the Lords Proprietors, on March 24, 1663. Later that year, prominent planters from Barbados attempted their first settlement in the Carolinas on the Cape Fear River, building what would become Charles Towne, North Carolina. This settlement was short lived and most returned back to Barbados a few years into the enterprise. In 1670, Governor William Sayle arranged for several shiploads of settlers from Bermuda and Barbados. These settlers established what was then called Charles Town at Albemarle Point, on the west bank of the Ashley River, a few miles northwest of the present-day city center. Charles Town became the first comprehensively planned town in the Thirteen Colonies. Its governance, settlement, and development were to follow a visionary plan known as the Grand Model prepared for the Lord's Proprietors by John Locke. Because the Carolina's Fundamental Constitutions were never ratified, however, Charles Town was never incorporated during the colonial period. Instead, local ordinances were passed by the provincial government, with day-to-day administration handled by the wardens and vestries of St Philip's and St Michael's Anglican parishes.
At the time of European colonization, the area was inhabited by the indigenous Cusabo, on whom the settlers declared war in October 1671. The settlers initially allied with the Westo, a northern indigenous tribe that traded in enslaved Indians. The settlers abandoned their alliance with the Westo in 1679 and allied with the Cusabo instead.
The initial settlement quickly dwindled and disappeared while another village—established by the settlers on Oyster Point at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers around 1672—thrived. In 1680, this second settlement formally replaced the original Charles Town, which today is commemorated as Charles Towne Landing. The second location was more defensible and had access to a fine natural harbor. The new town had become the fifth largest in North America by 1690.
A smallpox outbreak erupted in 1698, followed by an earthquake in February 1699. The latter caused a fire that destroyed about a third of the town. During rebuilding, a yellow fever outbreak killed about 15% of the remaining inhabitants. Charles Town suffered between five and eight significant yellow fever outbreaks over the first half of the 18th century.
It developed a reputation as one of the least healthy locations in the Thirteen Colonies for ethnic Europeans. Malaria was endemic. Although malaria did not have such high mortality as yellow fever, it caused much illness. It was a major health problem throughout most of the city's history before dying out in the 1950s after the use of pesticides cut down on the mosquitoes that transmitted it.
Charles Town was fortified according to a plan developed in 1704 under Governor Nathaniel Johnson. Both Spain and France contested Britain's claims to the region. Various bands of Native Americans and independent pirates also raided it.
On September 5–6, 1713 (O.S.), a violent hurricane passed over Charles Town. The Circular Congregational Church manse was damaged during the storm, and church records were lost. Much of Charles Town was flooded as "the Ashley and Cooper rivers became one." At least seventy people died in the disaster.
From the 1670s, Charleston attracted pirates. The combination of a weak government and corruption made the city popular with pirates, who frequently visited and raided the city. Charles Town was besieged by the pirate Blackbeard for several days in May 1718. Blackbeard released his hostages and left in exchange for a chest of medicine from Governor Robert Johnson.
Around 1719, the town's name began to be generally written as Charlestown and, excepting those fronting the Cooper River, the old walls were largely removed over the next decade. Charlestown was a center for the inland colonization of South Carolina. It remained the southernmost point of the Southern Colonies until the Province of Georgia was established in 1732. As noted, the first settlers primarily came from Europe, Barbados and Bermuda. The Barbadian and Bermudan immigrants were planters who brought enslaved Africans with them, having purchased them in the West Indies.
Early immigrant groups to the city included the Huguenots, Scottish, Irish, and Germans, as well as hundreds of Jews, predominately Sephardi from London and significant cities of the Dutch Republic, where they had been given refuge. As late as 1830, Charleston's Jewish community was the most prominent and wealthiest in North America.
By 1708, most of the colony's population were Black Africans. They had been brought to Charlestown via the Atlantic slave trade, first as indentured servants and then as enslaved people. In the early 1700s, Charleston's largest slave trader, Joseph Wragg, pioneered the settlement's involvement in the slave trade. Of the estimated 400,000 captive Africans transported to North America to be sold into slavery, 40% are thought to have landed at Sullivan's Island off Charlestown. Free people of color also migrated from the West Indies, being descendants of white planters and their Black consorts and unions among the working classes.
In 1767, Gadsden's Wharf was constructed at the city port on the Cooper River; it ultimately extended 840 feet and could accommodate six ships at a time. Many enslaved people were sold from here. Devoted to plantation agriculture that depended on enslaved labor, South Carolina became a slave society: it had a majority-Black population from the colonial period until after the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when many rural Blacks moved to northern and midwestern industrial cities to escape Jim Crow laws.
At the foundation of the town, the principal items of commerce were pine timber and pitch for ships and tobacco. The early economy developed around the deerskin trade, in which colonists used alliances with the Cherokee and Creek peoples to secure the raw material.
At the same time, Native Americans kidnapped and enslaved each other in warfare. From 1680 to 1720, approximately 40,000 native men, women, and children were sold through the port, principally to the West Indies (such as Bermuda and the Bahamas), but also to other Southern colonies. The Lowcountry planters did not keep enslaved Native Americans, considering them too prone to escape or revolt. They used the proceeds of their sale to purchase enslaved Black Africans for their own plantations. The slave raiding—and the European firearms it introduced—helped destabilize Spanish Florida and French Louisiana in the 1700s during the War of the Spanish Succession. But it also provoked the Yamasee War of the 1710s that nearly destroyed the colony. After that, South Carolina largely abandoned the Indian slave trade.
The area's unsuitability for growing tobacco prompted the Lowcountry planters to experiment with other cash crops. The profitability of growing rice led the planters to pay premiums for enslaved people from the "Rice Coast" who knew its cultivation; their descendants make up the ethnic Gullah who created their own culture and language in this area. Slaves imported from the Caribbean showed the planter George Lucas's daughter Eliza how to raise and use indigo for dyeing in 1747.
Throughout this period, enslaved people were sold aboard the arriving ships or at ad hoc gatherings in the town's taverns. Runaways and minor slave rebellions prompted the 1739 Security Act, which required all white men to carry weapons at all times (even to church on Sundays). Before it fully took effect, the Cato or Stono Rebellion broke out. The white community had recently been decimated by a malaria outbreak, and the rebels killed about 25 white people before being stopped by the colonial militia. As a result of their fears of rebellion, whites killed a total of 35 to 50 Black people.
The planters attributed the violence to recently imported Africans and agreed to a 10-year moratorium on slave importation through Charlestown. They relied for labor upon the slave communities they already held. The 1740 Negro Act also tightened controls, requiring a ratio of one white for every ten Blacks on any plantation (which was often not achieved) and banning enslaved people from assembling, growing personal food, earning money, or learning to read. Drums were banned because Africans used them for signaling; enslaved people were allowed to use string and other instruments. When the moratorium expired and Charlestown reopened to the slave trade in 1750, the memory of the Stono Rebellion resulted in traders avoiding buying enslaved people from the Congo and Angola, whose populations had a reputation for independence.
By the mid-18th century, Charlestown was the hub of the Atlantic slave trade in the Southern Colonies. Even with the decade-long moratorium, its customs processed around 40% of the enslaved Africans brought to North America between 1700 and 1775, and about half up until the end of the African trade.
The plantations and the economy based on them made this the wealthiest city in the Thirteen Colonies and the largest in population south of Philadelphia. In 1770, the city had 11,000 inhabitants—half enslaved—and was the 4th-largest port in the colonies, after Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia.
The elite began to use their wealth to encourage cultural and social development. America's first theater building was constructed in 1736; today's Dock Street Theater later replaced it. St Michael's was erected in 1753. Benevolent societies were formed by the Huguenots, free people of color, Germans, and Jews. The Library Society was established in 1748 by well-born young men who wanted to share the financial cost of keeping up with the scientific and philosophical issues of the day.
Delegates for the Continental Congress were elected in 1774, and South Carolina declared its independence from Britain on the steps of the Exchange. Slavery was again an important factor in the city's role during the Revolutionary War. The British attacked the settlement three times, assuming that the settlement had a large base of Loyalists who would rally to their cause once given some military support. The loyalty of white Southerners towards the Crown had largely been forfeited, however, by British legal cases (such as the 1772 Somersett case which marked the prohibition of slavery in England and Wales, a significant milestone in the abolitionist struggle) and military tactics (such as Dunmore's Proclamation in 1775) that promised the emancipation of people enslaved by Patriot planters; these efforts did, however, unsurprisingly win the allegiance of thousands of Black Loyalists.
The Battle of Sullivan's Island saw the British fail to capture a partially constructed palmetto palisade from Col. Moultrie's militia regiment on June 28, 1776. The Liberty Flag used by Moultrie's men formed the basis of the later South Carolina flag, and the victory's anniversary continues to be commemorated as Carolina Day.
Making the capture of Charlestown their chief priority, the British sent Sir Henry Clinton, who laid siege to Charleston on April 1, 1780, with about 14,000 troops and 90 ships. Bombardment began on March 11, 1780. The Patriots, led by Benjamin Lincoln, had about 5,500 men and inadequate fortifications to repel the forces against them. After the British cut his supply lines and lines of retreat at the battles of Monck's Corner and Lenud's Ferry, Lincoln's surrender on May 12, 1780, became the greatest American defeat of the war.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Charleston, South Carolina”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.