Charleston Time Machine

In the decades after the founding of Charleston in 1670, more than a dozen tribes of indigenous people across the Lowcountry interacted with the growing population of White settlers and enslaved Africans. Disease, warfare, and displacement gradually reduced their numbers, however, and the first people of the Lowcountry were virtually extinct by the middle of the eighteenth century. https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/first-people-south-carolina-lowcountry

For more than three centuries, the government of South Carolina has used a ceremonial sword to represent the state’s military strength and civil authority. The original “sword of state” disappeared from the state house in 1941, however, and its theft is now a cold case of historical proportions.

A Charleston law of 1793 required the proprietors of pubs and barrooms to assist physicians attempting to revive the bodies of “apparently dead” persons lingering in a state of “suspended animation.” This medical endeavor, based on cutting-edge science of the day, involved procedures both ghoulish and comical that blazed a path towards the modern techniques of resuscitation.

The Apprentices’ Library Society, founded in 1824, sought to enhance the education of Charleston youths by providing reading material to teenagers studying traditional handicrafts, but its educational mission expanded to include programs and classes.

Although fire wrecked the society’s fortunes in 1861 and it dissolved in 1874, this forgotten institution pointed towards the future libraries of Charleston that we recognize today.

Rival claims to the land of South Carolina sparked hostility between England and Spain that shaped the first 78 years of the colony’s existence. The English considered Floridians to be jealous rivals, while the Spanish saw Carolinians as habitual trespassers. Spain held a better claim to the contested territory, but British colonists eventually won the land by force.

From Spanish perspective, the colony of La Florida once encompassed all of the land from the Florida Keys to the southern edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The creation of the Carolina colony in the 1660s usurped the northern half of that broad landscape, however, and sparked a fierce rivalry that shaped the first century of South Carolina’s early history.

Captured after a manhunt, the African prisoner Albro was committed to jail in Charleston with a former friend and an infamous pair of White criminals. A brief and biased trial judged him guilty of murder and sentenced him to hang. After a brief reprieve, the condemned man made a gallows confession before a crowd assembled at a well-known crossroads.

Following Albro’s fatal encounter with a White man on Dewees Island, the African fled through the waters of Copahee Sound and across several mainland plantations. Meanwhile, the victim’s father traveled to Charleston to summon help and initiate a manhunt. As militiamen pursued the fugitive’s trail, Albro was betrayed by an enslaved man who stopped him in his tracks.

When an enslaved African man named Albro asserted his freedom and fled from the Isle of Palms in 1819, the laws of South Carolina marked him as a criminal fugitive. Spied and then pursued by white men on Dewees Island one night in early 1820, Albro resisted their efforts to capture him and killed one of his assailants. The dramatic story of his flight and the ensuing manhunt and trial, recorded in a series of brief newspaper reports, illuminates a broader cycle of resistance and retribution that forms a large part of Lowcountry history.

Between the 1670s and 1865, thousands of enslaved South Carolinians rejected their condition and fled to gain freedom elsewhere. Some runaways succeeded, while others faced brutal punishments, and most returned to a life of servitude. Surviving details of their adventures are sparse, but a voluminous body of newspaper advertisements provides intriguing snapshots of thousands of stories of courageous resistance.