The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Charleston claimed to be the “London of the Low Country,” the richest, most sophisticated town in North America’s richest colony. Eight of the ten wealthiest men in America were said to be South Carolinians, and Charleston’s collective worth was supposedly sixfold that of Philadelphia. “Every tradesman is a merchant, every merchant is a gentleman, and every gentleman one of the noblesse,” a local newspaper boasted. Three thousand broad-wheeled wagons a year rolled into the port with rice, indigo, and other exports. Its master shipwrights had long built sloops, schooners, and brigs for merchant houses in Europe and America. By the early summer of 1776, the town had grown to twelve thousand residents—half white and free, half neither. Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery, as plain as the blue-stained palms of the indigo pickers sold on the Custom House auction block, or the ships packed with shackled Gambians and Angolans at Fitzsimmons’ Wharf, or the pillory near So Be It Lane for “negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos, who are apt to be riotous and disorderly,” according to a town ordinance. In recent years, rumors of war and then war itself had brought “cucumber times”—hardship and disquiet—to noblesse and chattel alike, but the town maintained a cosmopolitan swank. Three theaters produced the likes of King Lear and John Dryden’s All for Love, music societies sponsored frequent concerts, and specialty shops sold toothpick cases, scented pomatum, gilt w...