Charleston's Version of a Town Crier

From CCPL

The people of Charleston in 1776 were no strangers to the pomp and circumstance surrounding the public proclamation of official government documents. From the earliest days of the colony, Charlestonians had routinely heard government officials read aloud the text of newly-ratified laws and important occasional proclamations. This was an ancient practice inherited from Europe, the vestige of an era in which the vast majority of the population was illiterate and public access to written documents was limited. In Latin, the act of reading or “publishing” documents aloud was called publication by viva voce—literally by “the living voice.” In early modern England, this act was called publication “by beat of drum”—a reference to the fact that a drummer was traditionally used to summon the populace to bend their ears to the publication of important information.

In colonial-era Charleston, the provost marshal of South Carolina (later the sheriff of Charleston District) routinely paraded through the streets of the town with a drummer and stopped at multiple landmarks to read aloud the text of laws and proclamations. If you have in mind a quaint old image of a man walking through the streets ringing a hand bell and shouting “Hear ye, hear ye,” I implore you to banish those thoughts and replace them with the images of a white man and an enslaved drummer parading through the town with a profusion of pomp and a bit of circumstance.

On more important occasions in colonial Charleston, such as the publication of royal declarations of war, the colony’s civil and military leaders assembled on the streets to enact a similar but grander series of public readings. For these “state” occasions, the secretary of the province usually read aloud from the official document, line by line, while the clerk of His Majesty’s Council, standing next to the secretary, repeated each phrase in a much louder voice—probably with the aid of a “speaking trumpet” or megaphone. This was the practice employed in 1740, 1744, 1756, and 1762, for example, when the townsfolk of Charleston gathered to hear the text of the king’s declarations of war against France and Spain. Furthermore, the provost marshal of South Carolina also attended the public readings of these royal declarations, on which occasions he unsheathed the ceremonial sword of state, held it aloft before the assembled multitudes, and brandished it three times to the sound of great cheers from the crowd.