Yamboo was a stoic African man whose Muslim faith helped him endure a life of servitude in eighteenth-century South Carolina. His brief autobiography, published in Charleston in 1790, provides valuable evidence of the presence of Islam among this ...
Can you put a monetary value on your freedom? This philosophical question was once a legitimate query in South Carolina. Our early laws described enslaved people as property, trapped in lifetime of legal servitude without hope of advancement. By e...
The laws of early South Carolina viewed enslaved people as private property that individual owners could trade, sell, and even emancipate as they saw fit. That liberty allowed numerous slave owners to set free an unknown number of men, women, and ...
On multiple occasions between 1708 and 1822, the South Carolina General Assembly voted to spend public funds to secure the freedom of enslaved people who had performed remarkable acts of public service. These public manumissions, as we might call ...
Freedom and slavery were the opposing states of being that defined the lives of most early Charlestonians, but this community also hosted a small but vibrant population of people who lived somewhere between those legal poles. This population of so...
The secret confederacy of angry South Carolinians that formed in November 1719 assembled in Charleston that December as an elected Convention of the people. In a showdown with the legitimate proprietary government, the members of the Convention st...
Frustrated by years of neglect and contrary government, the citizens of South Carolina asserted their political will in the closing months of 1719 by organizing a rebellious confederacy that descended on Charleston to seize the reins of power. It ...
Each week we take a trip through time in the Charleston Time Machine, traveling from point to point through history to examine the lesser known stories and the tales behind major events that helped shape Charleston.
South Carolina was born as an English colony and continued as such until the American Revolution, but its first century of existence was marked by two contrasting periods characterized by different forms of colonial administration: An initial “pro...
The word “tradition” is often used to describe many of the communal activities that surround various holidays both sacred and secular. Here in the Charleston area, for example, we share a number of Christmas “traditions” with communities near and ...