Episode 319: The Tamar in Rebellion Road: Asylum for Loyalists in 1775 by Nic Butler, Ph.D.

In the summer of 1775, amid smoldering tension between the British government rebellious colonists, officers of the Royal Navy in Charleston quietly negotiated with an enslaved mariner named Sampson Waldron. The warship Scorpion briefly required his piloting skills to exit the harbor, but the prospect of freedom via service to the king induced him to remain aboard and commence a new life as an enemy to colonial resistance.

Lord William Campbell, the new royal governor of the colony of South Carolina, stepped ashore at Charleston in late June 1775 to an uneasy reception. Family, friends, and old acquaintances greeted him politely, but a pervasive spirit of rebellion clouded their sentiments. Insulted by apathy for his authority and direct expressions of seditious opinions, Campbell nevertheless chose to stand his ground and jettison a convenient means of escape.

The first sparks of the American Revolution ignited during the spring of 1775, while Lord William Campbell prepared to sail from England to his post as Governor of South Carolina. His contacts and conversations during that turbulent year presaged an uncertain reception in Charleston. As civil war erupted in Massachusetts, the king’s ministers empowered Campbell to choose his future course—either trim the sails of unruly Carolina, or abandon the provincial ship of state.

The newlyweds, Lord and Lady William Campbell, settled in England after their 1763 marriage in Charleston, but the young couple actively nurtured familial connections to South Carolina over the course of the ensuing decade. Political, financial, and naval alliances made during the 1760s, followed by a tour of the colonies and a relaxing sojourn in Charleston in 1772, fortified their bonds to His Majesty’s most profitable colony in North America.

In the late winter of 1763, a young British officer sailed into Charleston Harbor aboard a warship assigned to protect the trade of a flourishing colony. Weeks later, Captain Lord William Campbell married a local heiress, Sarah Izard, and became invested in the slave-owning community. Their hasty union marked the beginning of a longer saga that culminated, twelve years later, with the unraveling of British authority in the province of South Carolina.

In the autumn of 1775, rebellious South Carolinians raised a distinctive new flag over a waterfront fort just seized from British hands. Their commanding officer later described the creation of the state’s enduring banner in his memoir, but did not recall the date of its unveiling. Across Charleston Harbor, however, two British naval officers witnessed the flag’s debut and recorded a surprising detail regarding its appearance.

The enclave known as Butcher Town flourished around Cannon’s millpond until 1850, when the expansion of Charleston’s city limits propelled the slaughtering business northward. The migration of butchers’ pens across the Neck then triggered a decades-long battle between private enterprise and public efforts to regulate the industry. Following a suite of political and technological developments in the early twentieth century, a modern municipal abattoir ultimately scrubbed the ancient blood-soaked industry from the local landscape.

The residents of early Charleston lived cheek-by-jowl with the animals they consumed, and routinely witnessed cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats trotting through urban streets to meet the butcher’s blade. Efforts to push this bloody business out of the city center commenced in the late 1690s and evolved over the following century, during which local officials gradually pushed the slaughtering trade northward to a tidewater suburb that became known as Butcher Town.

In the spring of 1807, nineteen years after the initial creation of Market Street, Charleston’s municipal government faced a looming deadline to complete the proposed but long-delayed public marketplace. To avoid a second forfeiture of the extensive property donated by generous neighbors, City Council launched a rapid series of construction projects and drafted a landmark ordinance, the text of which defined the culture of urban food sales for the ensuing century.