In Part 2, we conclude the story as we follow Oqui Adair, the Chinese gardener, southward from Washington D.C. to the land of Sea-Island Cotton and slavery in the Palmetto State. During the second half of his colorful life, another Civil War forced Oqui to flee far from the fertile coast, but he found asylum, love, and family in the capital of South Carolina.

In Hong Kong in the autumn of 1854, a young man boarded a U.S. naval vessel and embarked on an American adventure. Arriving in New York, he worked briefly in Washington D.C. before moving to South Carolina to create a formal plantation garden on Edisto Island. Displaced by the American Civil War, he found asylum at the State Hospital and raised a family in Columbia. We’ll follow the story of Oqui Adair, master gardener and South Carolina’s earliest-known resident of Chinese ancestry.

Robert Smalls became an American icon when he absconded from Charleston with the steamboat Planter in May 1862 to free his family and friends from the bonds of slavery. To better understand the details of his escape, inquiring minds want to identify the location of Smalls’ residence within the city. Later biographies don’t mention an address, but Smalls dropped a few hints in his lifetime. We’ll sift the documentary record of Smalls’ life in the Palmetto City and examine the clues that might point to a specific site.

Fearing a Spanish attack on the capital of South Carolina in 1704, English and French colonists directed enslaved Africans to excavate many tons of earth to create a moat and earthen wall around Charleston. This continuous line of entrenchment, stretching nearly a mile in length, included numerous cannon placed within bastions and redans, while a single gateway with drawbridges controlled access into and out of the town. The defensive works of 1704 transformed Charleston into an “enceinte” or enclosed settlement of just sixty two acres that restricted the community’s growth for decades.

From the earliest days of the Carolina Colony to the Civil War, many White men in the Charleston area carried various types of swords as both emblems of status and implements of self-defense. Fashion and function dictated the types of equipment used in different eras, and fencing lessons formed part of the education of many young gentlemen. On the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore the motivations for carrying different type of blades, the identities of the fencing masters, and the connections between music, choreography, and fashionable violence.

The forgotten story of Eliza Pinckney (ca. 1785–1839) was an open secret during her lifetime. Born into bondage on a plantation near the Ashepoo River, she was perhaps distantly related to a famous South Carolinian with the same name. Her owner, Thomas Pinckney (1760–1815), moved her to Charleston at the dawn of a new century and endowed her with property, jewelry, servants, and children. Documents relating to Eliza’s remarkable journey from rural slavery to urban freedom reveal signs of a turbulent and conditional relationship that shaped the trajectory of her family’s existence.

Irish immigrants who adhered to the Catholic faith were not free exercise their religion in South Carolina until several years after the American Revolution. In the years preceding the War of Independence, however, a handful of documents point to the existence of an “Irish Church” in Mr. Mazyck’s Pasture, just outside the boundaries of urban Charleston. In the next episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore clues pointing to the location and purpose of this forgotten institution, the identity of its visitors, and its connection to the more-famous “Liberty Tree” and the revolutionary “Sons of Liberty.”

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield was born into slavery in Mississippi but gained freedom and education in Philadelphia. Her fine voice launched a musical career in the 1850s that took her across America, Britain, and to an audience with Queen Victoria. The “Black Swan” was a pioneering celebrity, and Charleston audiences eager to hear her voice packed several local concerts here in the winter of 1873.

Enslaved men in early South Carolina routinely shaved and coiffed their White owners. As the population of “free persons of color” swelled after the American Revolution, Black barbers in Charleston opened segregated shops catering to White customers. Desegregation altered that tradition in the twentieth century, but modern Black barber shops continue a tangled thread of shared history from our colonial past.

For more than a century, free people of African descent in the Palmetto State were required to pay a special "poll" or "head" tax every year to maintain their freedom. The amount of the tax and the range of exemptions changed over the years, and its application spread outward from Charleston as the state's population expanded in the nineteenth century.

Read more: https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/south-carolinas-capitation-tax-free-people-color-1756-1864