The Story of Charleston: The Way Life Used to Be, And Perhaps, Is Supposed to Be

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Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And we continue with our American Stories. Tommy Dew's walking tour of Charleston, South Carolina, has been praised and recommended by the likes of the Wall Street Journal to TripAdvisor. Tommy is here to share the story of Charleston from the American Revolution to today.

Here's Tommy Dew. The South collapsed in 1865 and was left for dead. Charleston paid a terrible price for her role in the war. Secession began in Charleston.

The first secession document was signed in downtown Charleston, December 20th, 1860. And then the first shots were fired here at Fort Sumter. So the political start to the war was in Charleston, the military start, and we were a philosophical target. The federal government bombed Charleston for 587 consecutive days.

It's the second longest artillery siege in modern warfare after Leningrad. The Germans bombed the Russians for 900 days during World War II, and the Federals bombed us for 587, and by 1865 it is a ruin. And that's, for instance, why Sherman didn't come here. In large part, we were not viewed as a viable target.

He did not need to waste his time on us. As much as he wanted to raise Charleston, he did more harm to South Carolina and the Confederacy by burning the middle of the state. He cut a fire 60 miles wide to central South Carolina, and then we were occupied after the war for 14 years. There was a 6,000-man federal occupying force, martial law, and then when they pulled out, the place was essentially left for dead, and it took about 100 years to start to recover. Healthy cities in those 100 years embraced urban renewal. They were inclined to tear down their old stuff because it stood in the way of progress, and Charleston couldn't participate. So as a result, we've got about 100 buildings downtown from before 1776 and about 1,000 from before 1861.

But I think maybe more importantly than the architectural preservation is the cultural preservation. People understand that the South is different, but they don't always understand why, and I would say it's because it was uninfluenced, undisturbed by the outside world. There was hardly any immigration here until relatively recently, and even accents are impacted. Southern accents tend to be much older because immigrants move the tongue, and there was just not a lot of immigration here. And so when all these fronts were frozen in time, architecture, culture, accents. If we had been healthy, this would be anywhere USA.

Everything would have been bulldozed. We talk about slavery a lot on my tour. You can't talk about Charleston without talking about slavery. We were the number one slave trading city for the United States. A third of slaves that entered the U.S. entered through the port of Charleston.

And that's a shocking statistic, but it makes sense. Charleston was the largest city in the South until 1820. That's when New Orleans overtook us. And the slave trade had already concluded as of 1808 as part of the U.S. Constitution, so this was the largest southern harbor through legal importation. The South, with the superior farming conditions, had an appetite for that labor. The wealth here, and that's important to understand, these are the wealthiest Americans. These are the most educated Americans. I liken it to what was happening really around the world, but the plantation culture that evolved here is, in my estimation, the repackaging of Old World feudal culture.

They're playing it being English, French, and German royals in a place where that's possible. We have a year-round growing season. We have 50 to 55 inches of annual rainfall. And we have no rocks for 100 miles. We're in an alluvial plain. We're nothing but topsoil and sand. And so it's some of the finest farming in the world, the southeast coastal plain.

And so they take that Old World lens. In England, you would have large estates. You've got royals in the big house. The peasants are in the field. The peasants don't get to vote. They don't own the land.

They can be bound to the estate. And then the royals would have a town in London or Paris or Vienna. So the royals of the world would gather in the capitals after fall harvest. In the capital, you make your political relationships, and then you make your business deals. And then the social fruits are in the capital as well.

So literary season, debutante season, theatrical season, all that's dead of winter stuff. So they come in with a mindset, and they apply it, and it works. They're able to live like royals in the New World, and it is seductive. And that's ultimately the issue. They're not interested in new ideas. The North was an agent of change in the mid-1800s, and these families were prideful, and they were not great negotiators. And they would rather fight than yield. They saw the federal government as unconstitutional, 500 miles away, controlled by people that lived even further away. And they were not about to lie down before it.

And so they ended up fighting to the death, and by 1865, it's over, total collapse. And so the wealth here, the prestige here, is absolutely built on forced labor. You can't separate the two. But I do think it's important to understand that everybody now understands that slavery is immoral.

It's not negotiable. But 200 years ago, it was kind of fuzzy. People didn't see it the way we see it. Just as an example, in 1840, only 2% of Northern people were abolitionists. Just 2% critically opposed to slavery in the North in 1840. And at the same time across the South, less than 10% of white families owned slaves.

See, that is probably the biggest misconception. People assume that the average white guy in the South was a slave owner, and it's not close. Over 90% did not own slaves. If you look at the mountains of the South, the Appalachian counties were slave-free. Literally, county after county had zero slaves, because you can't own slaves in the mountains and make money, just like you can't own slaves in New England and make money. And so the conditions here were ripe, high-volume, industrial-level farming with sort of a feudal, patriarchal lens, and it's a pretty daggone good fit.

And so it is logical we're the number one slave-trading city for America. And there's always going to be pushback on that. I notice it, and I probably notice it more now than before, because people are increasingly talking about these things. I think we swept it under the rug for a long time.

I think people just maybe even tried to pretend like it didn't happen. I've never had that approach. I love talking about slavery, and I find that my guests, particularly if I have black tourists, they want you talking about this stuff. They don't want you shying away from it. Those are my favorite compliments when I have black tourists and afterwards they say, Thank you so much for being frank. Thank you so much for not mincing words. It's refreshing.

Because you don't learn if you don't discuss it. So I think one of the great joys for giving tours in Charleston is outside people do not understand the significance of Charleston, because it collapsed in 1865. This was the fourth largest city in the United States in 1790. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston. South Carolina educated more children in Europe than the other 12 colonies put together. Nine of the ten wealthiest families in America were living in South Carolina for a period of time prior to 1776. All at once.

Nine out of ten. And so the role of Charleston is not well understood. The American Revolution, I think, offers insight. This is the bloodiest theater of the Revolution. There were more battles in South Carolina and more people were killed in South Carolina than any of the other 12 colonies. And that's just a huge surprise for guests. We had four signers of the Declaration of Independence from Charleston, four signers of the Constitution from Charleston.

And that's not well understood. George Washington spent a week in Charleston in 1791. And he wrote that he had never been entertained more lavishly. He said the most elegant parties he had ever attended were in Charleston and that the prettiest ladies he'd ever seen were in Charleston. And you're listening to Tommy Doo and it's not a walking tour, but you're getting a great chronological tour, a great economic tour, and a great social tour of one of America's great cities. When we come back, more with Tommy Doo's walking tour of Charleston, South Carolina. I'm always upgrading my car.

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Learn more at meta dot com slash metaverse impact. And we continue with our American stories and with Tommy Dues walking tour of Charleston, South Carolina, which has been praised and recommended by everyone from The Wall Street Journal to Trip Advisor. Let's return to Tommy with more of the story of his hometown. Another really big surprise for outsiders is the permissiveness of Charleston. We have so many social firsts, the first theater in America, first racetrack in America, first golf club in America.

Widespread gambling, city back lotteries. The oldest profession was legal from the beginning through World War Two. Our Navy base matriculated hundreds of thousands of soldiers post World War Two and they were riddled with STDs.

And so because of medical concerns, they had to write laws against it for the first time. That's in the 1940s. The French called us the Paris of the New World.

The British called us the crown jewel of America. But at the same time, New Englanders called Charleston Sodom and Gomorrah. They saw Charleston as sinners on a biblical level.

Sodom and Gomorrah. And what surprises people, the confusion comes from the fact that they're now inclined to call us the Bible Belt. But really the North was the Bible Belt for the first 150 years.

So the real question is what happens? Why did the North and the South swap personalities? And it's about immigration once again. We stopped getting people in the early 1800s when they started industrializing and building factories. Immigrants go North. They also invest in infrastructure.

Railroads, canals. And it's a magnet for immigration and the South is back watered. So basically from the 1820s to the 1970s, there's 150 years where the Southeast is not receiving people at the same rates as everybody else. The Southern families grow deep roots and they tend to have a longer, more traditional view. And the North, which had been uptight, was overwhelmed by immigration 200 years ago and suddenly found herself to be multicultural, more liberal, more progressive. The South was increasingly homogeneous, conservative, and moralistic.

It impacts everything. Accents. We talked about that a little bit, but the Southeast coastal accent is Elizabethan English. So my accent, coming from Richmond, I've got a form of what is called the Tidewater accent. So around the Chesapeake Bay, that accent was established by people from Southern England in the early 1600s. It's called a non-rhotic accent.

It's very soft. You draw, you hold your vowel, and you pull the R out of the word. I throw a ball.

I don't throw a ball. I go to the bathroom, not the bathroom. My grandfather loved to go down into the river, eat tomatoes and patatas. And that's Elizabethan English. It's linguistically closer to Elizabethan English than what is currently being spoken in England.

And I know that's difficult to believe, but it is a linguistic fact. And if you go up into the mountains of the South, it becomes Scottish. The Scots are the next great migration and they go up the rivers looking for available land and the mountains catch them.

And it suits them. There's an old saying in the South, the glen and glade of Appalachia settled by the Scot. And so instead of drawing and holding your vowel, you lilt.

You get it up into the back of your mouth more like that. It's a brogue. And so you have a Scottish brogue in the mountains of the South and an English drawl on the coast.

And they're old because they were generally undisturbed. Another subtlety of the South and the lack of immigration is how we view ourselves. Southerners tend not to be ethnic people.

We don't care about where we came from overseas. We care about being Southern. So the joke is Southerners are Southern. Yanks are ethnic. Northern people are consistently more newly arrived people. And they tend to get excited, romanticize where their grandparents were born. So Northern people tend to have these little flavors attached to them.

Irish American, Italian American, Puerto Rican American, Chinese American. And Southerners tend not to see themselves that way. We've been here long enough to be from here. You definitely notice that if you ask a Northerner where they're from, it's usually where they woke up this morning. And if you ask a Southerner where they're from, it's where their people are. People always say, are you from Charleston? They'll say, no, I'm from Richmond. Well, you've lived here for 35 years. You're from Charleston.

And I will say, no, I am not. I am from Richmond. My people are from Virginia. I live here, but I'm from there.

And that's a subtlety. It's where your people are. That's where you're from.

It's not where you live right now. I get so many tourists who will say, this is my favorite city. I love it so much. You're so fortunate to live here. There is a secret sauce. There is a feeling I get when I come to Charleston. And I can't explain it.

What is that? And I would say, ultimately, it is the defense of the human scale. So in the late 1800s, engineering really improved. They invented the I-beam and the elevator. And the first skyscraper comes to fruition in Chicago, 1880. This place was so screwed up, it was boarded up and bankrupt. There was no money to justify big building.

And that would not come until after World War II. And by the time there was some desire to go big, it was too late because preservation laws and zoning laws were well crafted. Preservation says if a building is 75, you're not going to tear it down.

And you can't corrupt the facade. You can't do anything to the exterior of an older building that's going to compromise its accuracy. And so to put a skyscraper in downtown Charleston, you'd have to tear down a block of old things, and that directly violates preservation. And there is a four-story threshold through much of the city. And that's called the human scale. Until the I-beam and the elevator were invented, cities around the world built to four stories and stopped because the great materials of human history are wood, brick, and stone.

Wood, brick, and stone have the same load potentials. They get you to four stories efficiently, and then you've got to stop. You can actually add a fifth story, but it would double the cost of construction. You had to make the foundation so massive to carry that fifth layer.

It just did not make sense. And so there's always been an economic efficiency of four stories or less around the world for thousands of years. And so cities around the world had very similar, very predictable densities. If you maintain a four-story threshold, your population will live, worship, work, go to school, socialize, shop within a one-, two-, three-mile radius. The bulk of your existence will be in one place.

You're not spread too thin. And as a citizen, you can pour yourself into that piece of turf. Big cities embraced the new technology, ripped out the human scale, and started going vertical. They created jobs, but they also created commuters. So now large cities suffer from millions of anonymous workers, people who often travel more than an hour to get to work.

The commute was awful. It was busy. They had to be aggressive to be competitive. And unfortunately, they're anonymous. And civility inherently breaks down in that situation. In a place like Charleston, you don't get to be anonymous. You see the same people day after day, and you know them in various ways. You cannot walk the streets of Charleston without seeing people that you know.

And so you'll have frequent and often deep engagements block to block. And that enhances civility. The reason that this has been voted the most mannered city in America is because the human scale provides accountability.

You do not get to be anonymous. And so when you live in Charleston, you feel like you live in a village, yet we have the amenities and the cultural impact of a city that's millions and millions of people. I think one of the most interesting barometers of civility is how people use their car horn. People in Charleston refrain from using their horn.

They'll give you a little toot to say hi, or they may honk the horn if there's an emergency, but they don't use the horn to express themselves block to block. I had a tourist from Philadelphia on my tour a few years ago, and the night before the tour, she had pulled into town, and she was lost, and she was at a stoplight, 5 o'clock, rush hour traffic. Couldn't find her hotel. She was buried in her map, and she spaced out. And when she looked up, the light was yellow and turned red. She sat at the front of the line through an entire green light, and she looked in the rear-view mirror, and there were a line of cars, and not one car blew its horn. Every car behind her gave her the benefit of the doubt, and it blew her mind.

She had an epiphany. She said, this is the way that life is supposed to be. And so I feel people come to Charleston from busy situations, from these large metros, long commutes, spread utterly too thin, and they come here, and it nurtures their soul.

This is the way that life used to be and perhaps is supposed to be. And what a beautiful piece. A special thanks to Tommy Dew, his walking tour of Charleston, South Carolina, captured by our own Philip Graham, who moved from San Diego to Charleston. And a special thanks to Greg Hengler for the production on the piece as well. And by the way, we learned so much historically about this city and culturally about this city, if you've not been, by all means, visit.

But that idea of the defense of the human scale, and it's true, when you go there, you'll be struck most by the fact that there are just no tall buildings. And there's a lot of light because of that, and there's a lot of intimacy because of that. Tommy Dew's story here on Our American Stories. . So instead of selling my car using the Roto app on my phone, I posted an ad online. Now it's nonstop phone calls and people at my door. I'm Larry. I'm here about the sedan. Not now, Larry. See, Roto will buy your car or even buy you out of a lease without the hassle. Hey, I'm not a hassle.

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Enjoy a new way of traveling with stories activated by your location so when you're driving through a new town, discovering a national park, or just curious about the origin of your city's name, you can listen to a quick three to five-minute story covering our history from the first peoples to famous places and insights only locals would know. There's a recipe for getting your car running just right, and eBayMotors.com has all the ingredients you need. They have over 122 million car parts and accessories in stock, all at the right prices. Now that's tasty. eBayMotors.com, let's ride.