When I went to Charleston for the first time late last year, I had no real visual idea of the city. I did expect to find Civil War memorials of some kind, even if they were only the ghosts of standing confederate soldiers or a Confederate general atop his stallion that had recently been removed. I didn’t find either, although there are some, because the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that a state law preventing anyone from moving a Confederate monument or changing an historical street or building name without the Legislature’s permission was legal. Those South Carolinians who would prefer not to have the Confederacy glorified in public places appear to be limited to public protest, often the application of paint to Confederate memorials.
I found several historic inscriptions on monuments in Charleston to be of great interest. The first was an informative plaque on Broad Street smack in the downtown. The Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston at the College of Charleston had placed it there in 2021. The plaque announced Broad Street as a site of domestic slave trade. I was both suprised that the trade had been so public–no embarassment there–and that the plaque was so late coming. Let’s be clear here: an estimated forty-to-sixty percent of those enslaved people brought to the US came throught the port of the “Holy City.”
Charleston, SC (December 2022)
The second thing I noticed was the numerous war memorials in White Point Gardens section of Battery Park. I was less interested in the imposing bronze figurative statue, “Confederate Defenders of Charleston,” that the United Daughters of the Confederacy had put up in 1932 than in some of the lesser memorials.
So, what was really interesting to me? The memorial to the men of the Confederate army and navy who defended Charleston Harbor. According to the informative inscription, they were the first in marine warfare to employ torpedo boats. Among the named dead is Horace L. Hunley, the inventor of the “submarine boat.” I’d never seen this sort of inscription before. Ugh. Now I have to go learn about mid-nineteenth-century submarine warfare.
Charleston, SC (December 2022)
Of Monuments and Memory 