Line Street: Vestige of the War of 1812

In the autumn of 1814, during a brief war with Britain, Charlestonians scrambled to construct a zigzag line of fortifications across the Neck of the peninsula. They sought to deter an enemy invasion, but the return of peace in 1815 preempted the need for such defensive works, which the State of South Carolina subsequently claimed and maintained. After hanging thirty-five men “on the lines” during the turbulent summer of 1822, local authorities subdivided and sold the fortified landscape to fund the creation of a military post known as the Citadel.

Line Street as we know it today became a public thoroughfare in 1823, but the story of its genesis lies within the larger historical framework of the “War of 1812.” The seeds of that two-and-a-half-year conflict were planted in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, when agents of the United States and Great Britain first negotiated terms of peace. In the quarter century following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, merchants on both sides of the Atlantic complained about unfair trade practices related to trans-Atlantic shipping. More pointedly, Americans grew increasingly outraged by the Royal Navy’s occasional practice of “impressing” or abducting civilian mariners from merchant vessels flying the stars and stripes of the United States. Tension between the two nations was further strained by contemporary developments on the Continent, where the French Revolution and then the autocratic rise of Napoleon Bonaparte radiated disruption and conflict across Europe.

Bonaparte’s declaration of war against Britain in the spring of 1803 sparked a decade of warfare on land and sea that strained the military resources of both nations. Under pressure to recruit more sailors to man the fleet of the Royal Navy in June 1807, His Majesty’s ship Leopard fired without provocation on the United States Ship Chesapeake, then cruising near Hampton Roads, Virginia, and carried away a number of Anglo-American sailors. The Chesapeake-Leopard affair, as it became known, triggered a widespread call for immediate war with Britain, but the federal government steered a conservative path towards reconciliation.

Congressional measures designed to injure the British economy, especially the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, failed to appease the national outrage and dramatically reduced the volume of domestic trade. During these same years, free American men aged eighteen to forty-five embraced existing federal and state laws requiring them to participate in a robust calendar of local militia activities. The standing, full-time military of the United States was quite small at that time, but federal officials coordinated with various state and local governments to fund the construction and improvement of numerous coastal defenses along the Atlantic seaboard. Within the environs of Charleston Harbor during the years 1808–10, residents watched gangs of Black and White laborers rebuilding Fort Johnson on James Island (first built in 1708), Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island (first built in 1776), Fort Mechanic at White Point (first built in 1794), and Castle Pinckney on Shute’s Folly (first built in 1798).

Following several years of ineffectual negotiations, the United States government issued a formal declaration of war against Britain on 18 June 1812. Federal quotas dictating the strength of each state’s militia inspired citizen-soldiers across the Palmetto State to exercise and maintain readiness in case of hostile action.[1] At the same time, the governor of South Carolina began issuing “letters of marque” to the owners of private vessels, empowering them as “privateers” to attack British vessels. State records demonstrate the creation of thirty-one commissions for twenty-six vessels, most of which were agile two-masted schooners. The Charleston newspapers of that era contain numerous reports of privateer clashes on the high seas and details of various prize vessels and prisoners brought to this port.[2] Concerns about the presence of British spies infiltrating the Lowcountry in 1813 prompted Charleston’s City Council to adopt an ordinance “to prevent communication with the enemy.”[3]

Action during the first two years of the War of 1812 was largely restricted to the Great Lakes region of the northeastern United States, along the nation’s border with Canada. Elements of the Royal Navy occasionally cruised along the seaboard of the South Atlantic states, but Britain’s ongoing war with France restricted the number of warships assigned to North American waters. Citizens of the United States then witnessed a dramatic shift in the war during the summer of 1814, following the abdication of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in late June. Immediately thereafter, the pacification of Anglo-French relations enabled the British government to focus the bulk of its military might against the United States.

In response to the news of these European developments, the people of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and other Atlantic seaports scrambled to defend their communities against potential British attack. Meanwhile, the federal government had already expended the bulk of its treasury fighting the enemy along the Canadian border and had no further resources to contribute to the defense of the Atlantic states. On 11 August 1814, the United States Secretary of War, John Armstrong, penned a letter to Thomas Pinckney, Major General of the Sixth Military District of the United States Army, then residing in Charleston. Armstrong apologized that the federal government was not in a position to contribute to the defense of South Carolina. He advised Pinckney to inform the governor that the citizens of the Palmetto State should pool their resources and defend their own communities.[4]

Augmented by forces withdrawn from Europe, Britain’s Royal Navy landed a ground assault on Washington D.C. in late August 1814, burning the White House and other federal buildings. The king’s forces then pressed southward, terrifying the residents of coastal communities. At that same moment in Charleston, General Pinckney communicated to Governor Joseph Alston the disappointing news received from Secretary of War Armstrong. Alston did not respond in a timely manner, but Pinckney’s conversations with officials in Charleston spawned a series of five crowded public meetings in late August and early September.[5]

At the final public meeting, held at St. Philip’s Church on Monday, September 12th, the same day that British guns began bombarding Baltimore Harbor, the white male citizens of urban Charleston adopted a series of resolutions that guided the community’s efforts during the ensuing months. In the absence of federal and state leadership, the crowd resolved to ask City Council to appoint a board of commissioners to supervise the construction of additional fortifications designed by a local engineer.[6] To pay for the new works, the crowd resolved to ask City Council to borrow $100,000 to defend the city against the threat of British attack, to solicit donations from the citizens of urban Charleston and the adjacent rural parishes, and to coordinate with state officials to ensure that the federal government would absorb the burden of the city’s emergency debt at the end of the war.[7]

The disappearance of City Council’s early records during the Great Memory Loss of 1865 limits our ability to understand the full scope of the city’s efforts, but newspapers published during the autumn of 1814 and early 1815 provide much useful information. As soon as “the works are laid out by the proper authority,” reported the Charleston Courier, the citizens proposed using the money loaned to City Council to hire 500 enslaved laborers to shoulder the bulk of the work of creating the proposed fortifications. In reporting this news, the editors offered an appeal to their fellow citizens: “Your Country is in danger—and shall the patriot hesitate to fly to her support? The enemy is even now at the door, and shall we still slumber at our post? Let it not be said that we must look only to the government for protection. This is not the moment for political speculation. We must now act, or submit to the enemy.”[8]

On September 13th, the members of City Council met at the Exchange and adopted two important measures. First, they appointed several men to a board styled the “Commissioners on Fortifications” to coordinate with General Thomas Pinckney and supervise the construction of various defensive works designed by City Surveyor John Wilson.[9] Second, they revolved to open subscription books that would allow individual citizens to invest their private funds as a loan to the city corporation—like war bonds—that would accrue interest at the rate of seven percent per year.[10]

While John Wilson and the commissioners perfected designs for the proposed fortifications in mid-September, Charlestonians read a number of patriotic essays in local newspapers imploring them to volunteer their labor and that that of their enslaved servants to construct the new works. The community had resolved to borrow money to erect new defences, “but money is of no use, unless it can command labor,” opined City Intendant Thomas Rhett Smith, “and for this, we must be principally indebted to the adjoining parishes.” Smith recognized that harvest season was not the best time to remove enslaved laborers from Lowcountry fields of rice and cotton, but he begged planters to send them to the city “as soon, however, as your laborers can possibly be spared.”[11]

The primary goal of the new works hastily designed in September 1814 was to defend the City of Charleston against an amphibious British attack—a plan that that stirred memories of a similar assault during the American Revolution. Many alive at that time, including Thomas Pinckney, had witnessed the memorable British siege of Charleston in the spring of 1780. Rather than attack the densely-populated southern tip of the Charleston peninsula, the British forces of 1780 had maneuvered northward, up the rivers Ashley and Cooper, landed on the sparsely populated Neck, and marched southward to attack the city’s northern defenses on the north side of modern Marion Square. Local officials of 1814 feared that British forces would attempt to replicate the same offensive strategy that had proved successful thirty-four years earlier.

To counter that threat, the Commissioners on Fortifications and engineer John Wilson planned a new line of defensive works located approximately three-quarters of a mile north of the siege lines of 1780. The proposed site encompassed approximately forty acres of agricultural land stretching from the marshes of the Ashley River to the marshes of the Cooper River, roughly defined on the present landscape by Line Street on the south, Sheppard Street on the north, Drake Street on the east, and President Street on the west (with several geographic anomalies at the eastern and western extremities).

On 19 September 1814, Pinckney and the municipal Commissioners on Fortifications met in Charleston with Governor Alston to discuss the proposed defensive works. Alston consented to their plan and authorized the commissioners to invoke the state’s power of eminent domain to confiscate the required acreage belonging to more than a dozen private parties. The governor also issued orders requiring a certain proportion of the state’s rural militia residing beyond the Lowcountry, numbering at least 2,000 men, to assemble and march to Charleston, where they would camp outside the city limits for the duration of the present emergency.[12]

During the third week of September, John Wilson and a team of surveyors traced a zigzag line of fortified entrenchments that occupied all of the ground between present-day Sheppard and Line Streets, which are more than three hundred feet apart. His design followed traditional parameters of military architecture observed since the late seventeenth century, including a ditch or moat (approximately twenty feet wide and six feet deep) in front of a broad earthen rampart surmounted by a narrower earthen parapet, using a layer of rough-hewn “pine poles” as a revetment to secure the tall earthen berms.[13] Wilson’s plan established a center point nearly mid-way between today’s Coming and St. Philip Streets. From this point, the zigzag fortifications unfolded like mirror images, stretching eastward to Meeting Street and westward to a street then called Pinckney Street but now part of Rutledge Avenue. To the east of Meeting Street, Wilson continued the angular entrenchments with less symmetry through the northern blocks of the Village of Hampstead. Similarly, he continued an asymmetrical zigzag line from Rutledge Avenue to Legare Street (now part of Ashley Avenue), then extended a straight line westward to modern President Street. The west end of Wilson’s defensive line terminated with a southward-curling tail now mirrored by the curious bend in Kennedy Street.

At sunrise on Tuesday, September 20th, several companies of Charleston’s militiamen and their enslaved servants broke ground on the emergency fortifications at the center point of Wilson’s lines.[14] Thousands of men continued that work with shovels, spades, and pickaxes during the ensuing weeks and months. A portion of the country militiamen summoned by the governor arrived by Saturday, September 24th and camped near the works.[15] Also in late September, a large group of “free persons of colour,” including 193 men and 47 boys, marched as a group to the lines and volunteered their labor for at least one week.[16] During the final week of October, a total of nearly 2,400 additional militiamen arrived from the interior of South Carolina, part of whom camped near the lines, and part camped outside the village of Mount Pleasant near Haddrell’s Point on the east side of the Cooper River.[17] Around the same time, a group of “about 200 ladies” reportedly gathered to make a public demonstration of their patriotic spirit. After presenting an elegant flag depicting the figure of Fame sounding a trumpet, the ladies reportedly rolled up their sleeves and “labored manfully” on the defensive works.[18]

The original copy of John Wilson’s plan for the fortified lines of 1814 is not extant, but several contemporary copies survive in local archives. Using one’s imagination and a rudimentary understanding of military architecture, it’s possible to transform these two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional models that help us appreciate the work achieved in a relatively short period of time. Several helpful details no doubt survive in resources yet to be discovered. John B. Adger, for example, was just four years old in 1814 when his Irish-born father, first lieutenant of Charleston’s Independent Greens, labored at the lines with other members of his militia company. In a later memoir, Adger reported that “it was the custom for wives, mothers, children to walk up in the afternoons and see the husbands and fathers at work.” He recalled watching men with spades fill wheelbarrows that rolled along wooden planks over a deep ditch to create great mounds of earth. The young Adger stood atop the ramparts with his father and noted that the parapet was “as high as a man’s shoulders, and some ten feet broad at the top and fifteen at bottom.” On the north side of the earthen defenses, he remembered seeing “deep ditches in front and lines of sharpened posts set in the ditches all along, so as to hinder the near approach of the enemy.”[19]

Extant plats depicting the completed fortifications indicate that Charlestonians of 1814 viewed the half-mile long defensive line as a series of discrete works, several of which were built by specific groups of militiamen. To the west of a central lunette or half-moon battery between Coming and St. Philip Streets, plats identify a large, angular structure on the east side of modern Rutledge Avenue as the “’76 Bastion,” evidently named for the ’76 Society of that era. A square battery at the modern intersection of Ashley Avenue and Line Street acquired the name Pinckney Redoubt when General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney visited the site and encouraged the younger members of the Society of the Cincinnati who labored alongside their enslaved servants.[20] Fishburne Battery or Bastion, a pentagonal fortification erected at the southwest corner of Fishburne Street and Ashley Avenue, was named for General William Fishburne, commander of the Lower Division of the state militia. A large “Mechanics Bastion” stood on the west side of Meeting Street, between the present boundaries of Sheppard and Line Streets. At the eastern extremity of the lines, a pentagonal battery near the southwest corner of Cooper and Drake Streets acquired the name Fort Washington. Nearby stood a cluster of “Artillery barracks” erected on the northeast quadrant of Hampstead Mall (in front of the present Palmer Campus of Trident Technical College).[21]

The zigzag line of fortifications raised on Charleston Neck occupied the bulk of the commissioners’ time in 1814, but they also planned works at several strategic sites near the peninsular city, including Plum Island, Cole’s Island, and Kiawah Island. They also created three gun batteries along the east side of East Bay Street, fronting the Cooper River, on Gadsden’s Wharf, Smith’s Wharf, and Fitzsimons’ Wharf.[22] Along the banks of the Ashley River, the commissioners judged that the large expanse of marshland on the west side of the peninsula constituted a reasonable deterrent against enemy landing, but they deemed it necessary to fortify a spot of high ground near the west end of modern Fishburne Street. At a site roughly equivalent with the present Arthur W. Christopher Community Center, John Wilson designed a Martello tower, a tall circular fortification with cannon mounted atop, built of brick and measuring forty-six feet in diameter.[23]

While citizens and slaves toiled on Charleston’s defensive line and the Royal Navy continued to harass American shipping, members of the South Carolina General Assembly convened in Columbia for their customary legislative session. On November 29th, Governor Alston made a speech to the legislature praising the patriotic spirit of the citizens of Charleston, whose industry he described as a credit to the state. The Palmetto City was now protected by robust fortifications, the funding of which had been “furnished partly by voluntary contributions of labor and money from patriotic individuals, and partly by the corporation of the city.” The governor believed that the federal government would eventually repay the costs of such work, but first he recommended “the expediency of relieving the city from the burden of this debt, and including it in the demands which, on a settlement of our war accounts, the state may have against the general government. The preservation of Charleston is an object of too much interest, not merely to those who inhabit it, but to the state generally, to bear any doubt as to the justice of this measure.”[24]

The majority of South Carolina’s legislators concurred with the governor’s sentiment, but the state could not immediately compensate the several property owners dispossessed by the new fortifications. To initiate the legal process of seizure by eminent domain, the General Assembly ratified an act on 16 December 1814 appointing commissioners to assess the value of the lands in the parish of St. Philip “on which fortifications are now erecting for the defence [sic] of Charleston.”[25]

The war with Britain continued into the new year, and the Commissioners on Fortifications published a rather desperate appeal to the people of Charleston on 21 January 1815. The commissioners deemed it “essentially necessary immediately to complete the works of defence [sic] now erecting on Charleston Neck”; to facilitate their “speedy completion,” they pledged to attend daily at the lines, “for the purpose of superintending and delivering out provisions and tools, to such of their patriotic fellow citizens, as will render their services.”[26]

The public response to their appeal was evidently insufficient, so the commissioners published a new plan on January 23rd. They resolved “that the necessity of the times require that this board should call on their fellow-citizens, with their servants and tools, to turn out for one day, in rotation, arranged in five divisions, consisting of the four wards of the City and Charleston Neck, for the purpose of finishing the works of defence [sic], now nearly completed,” and to continue “in daily succession afterwards.”[27] Two weeks later, on 3 February 1815, the commissioners announced that the fortifications on Charleston Neck were “nearly completed,” and thanked white citizens who had “so promptly contributed their personal labors in assisting to rear the same.” More importantly, they advised the public “that after this day their further services will not be required.”[28] Work on the fortifications continued, however, by enslaved laborers hired from local owners. The commissioners reduced their daily wage from forty cents to thirty cents on February 11th, owing to the fact that public authorities had finally procured “a sufficient supply of spades and shovels.”[29]

Rumors of peace trickled into Charleston from various sources during the early days of February 1815. Unofficial news received on February 13th from Savannah indicated that the waring nations had months earlier signed diplomatic articles for a cessation of hostilities. Indisputable proof of the war’s end arrived from New York on the 21st and was published in the Charleston newspapers of February 22nd, indicating that representatives of the two nations had signed a treaty in the Belgian city of Ghent on Christmas Eve, which the Prince Regent of Great Britain ratified several days later.[30]

Completed during a flurry of activity spanning five months, the fortified lines across Charleston Neck were effectively abandoned in the spring of 1815. A summary of city finances published in September of that year reported that the municipal government had expended more than $151,000 on “public works of defence” during the recent emergency.[31] The state legislature settled the ownership of that confiscated property in December by claiming title to the land and empowering the state comptroller-general to issue payments to the individual owners. Thomas Radcliffe Shepheard and his wife, Sophia, for example, sold over thirteen acres of their suburban farm to the state. That parcel encompassed all of the confiscated land between Rutledge Avenue and King Street and constituted the largest single parcel of the fortified lines.[32] Similarly, representatives of the Blake family who owned nearby Newmarket Plantation sold several parcels of land encompassing more than nine acres to the state government, including all of the land now bounded by King, Line, Meeting, and Sheppard Streets, and a similar parcel stretching eastwardly from Meeting Street to Aiken Street.[33]

The state act of December 1815 also empowered commissioners in Charleston to appoint a resident superintendent to maintain the line of fortifications, and “to rent out from year to year, such parts of the land aforesaid, and such of the buildings thereon, as can be so appropriated, without injury to the works.”[34] In the meantime, persons in the habit of traveling in and out of Charleston along the city’s two principal highways—King Street and Meeting Street—grew accustomed to traversing through “the Lines” that formed an unofficial boundary between town and country.

The fortified lines hastily-constructed in 1814 returned to the public spotlight in the summer of 1822, when news of an alleged plot to incite a large-scale insurrection of the enslaved majority rocked the community. Between July 2nd and August 9th, Denmark Vesey—the alleged mastermind of the purported rebellion—and thirty-four alleged co-conspirators were hanged in a series of public executions attended by immense crowds. Newspaper reports and personal accounts describing these executions confirm that all thirty-five of these Black men were hanged just beyond the city limits of urban Charleston, but the precise location varies in the language of the extant sources. Vesey and his alleged co-conspirators were either hanged “on the Lines,” or “at the Lines,” or “near the Lines,” or at a site called “Blake’s land.”[35]

Considering that the State of South Carolina had purchased nine acres of the Blake family’s property covered by the lines of 1814, it seems logical to conclude that the Black men executed in the summer of 1822 met their fate somewhere within that the aforementioned fortified rectangle of Blake lands stretching from King Street to Aiken Street. Considering, also, that King and Meeting Streets formed the principal highways for traffic in and out of Charleston at that time, and the government’s need to accommodate an “immense” crowd of spectators at each of the several executions, we might constrain the potential execution site of 1822 to the block of fortified land bounded by King, Sheppard, Line, and Meeting Streets.[36]

Surgeons eager for dissection practice claimed an unknown number of the men executed in the summer of 1822, per invitation from civil authorities, but one contemporary report confirms that an unknown number of their corpses were buried at or near the place of execution. Two weeks after the final hanging, citizens “residing within the vicinity of the Lines” complained to City Council about “an alarming nuisance occasioned by the slight and offensive manner in which many of the culprits lately executed have been interred.” The city addressed the matter immediately, no doubt throwing quicklime and soil over their shallow graves, but provided no further clues regarding the location of the burials in question.[37] Based on the aforementioned evidence, I suspect that they might have been buried in the state-owned ditch or moat excavated in 1814 in front of the earthen fortifications, which provided the most convenient resting place for the bodies of men hanged “on” the adjacent berms of earth forming “the Lines.”[38]

To assuage fears harbored by Charleston’s white minority in the aftermath of the traumatic Denmark Vesey affair, the South Carolina General Assembly ratified an act in December 1822 to create a paramilitary force to police the unincorporated area north of modern Calhoun Street inhabited by a Black-majority population. To fund the work of this “Municipal Guard,” as it was designated, and to construct a fortified headquarters for the new force, the legislature ordered a set of commissioners to subdivide and sell “the land on which the lines on Charleston Neck are located . . . and apply the proceeds to the erection of suitable buildings, on the site of the tobacco inspection [station, immediately north of Marion Square], for an arsenal, for the deposit of the arms of the state, and a guard house, and for the use of said municipal guard.”[39]

The commissioners appointed in December 1822 advertised in early September 1823 their desire to hire a surveyor to make a copy of John Wilson’s original plat of the 1814 lines and to divide the fortified landscape into lots of various size to be sold at public auction.[40] Shortly thereafter the commissions hired Captain Thaddeus Sobieski, a professional surveyor who had also served as the resident caretaker of the lines since 1815.[41] The plat he created in September 1823, several copies of which survive, divided the fortified landscape of into fifty parcels of various sizes, most of which extended more the three hundred feet between two newly-created streets. Line Street evidently began as a “military road” extending along the southern edge of the defensive lines, while Shepheard Street (now misspelled “Sheppard Street”) marked the northern limit of the fortified ditch or moat.[42]

At a public auction held on 23 October 1823, a handful of wealthy investors purchased the bulk of the fifty lots of the old fortified lines. The robust paper trail of their subsequent sales demonstrate that the initial purchasers and later owners subdivided each of Sobieski’s parcels into hundreds of smaller lots for residential and commercial use.[43] Before the state ceded possession of the fortified property, however, the Commissioners on Fortifications stripped “about 140,000” bricks from the lines and paid laborers to cart them to the construction site of the Municipal Guard House and Arsenal that later became known as the Citadel.[44] In contrast, the purchaser of the Martello tower at the west end of Fishburne Street acquired one half of an acre and a reported cache of 800,000 bricks.[45]

Here in the twenty-first century, visitors and residents of Charleston see nothing on the landscape of Line Street, Sheppard Street, or any of the intervening streets that might invoke images of the panoramic fortifications erected during the autumn of 1814. The modern landscape is ripe for historical interpretation, but there are several caveats that might frustrate such work. Any future commemoration of the history of Line Street and the forgotten fortifications must grapple with two contrasting narratives, each supported by indisputable facts. On the one hand, the lines hastily erected during the darkest days of the War of 1812 embodied the public spirit of the white minority and the strength of the Black majority who shouldered the bulk of the labor. “The fortifications of Charleston Neck,” opined one member of the Charleston Cadet Artillery in late February 1815, would “remain a lasting monument to the patriotism and virtue of the sons of Carolina.”[46] On the other hand, successive episodes of construction, demolition, and improvement between Sheppard and Line Streets over the past two centuries have likely obliterated the bodies of Black men executed and buried at “the Lines” in the racially-divisive summer of 1822. The story behind the genesis of Line Street, in short, reflects the central conundrum of Charleston history with which this community continues to wrestle.

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