Wharves & East Bay St.

Some recent historians have stated that Gadsden’s wharf received some, or most, or perhaps all of the African captives who began arriving in Charleston in 1783, but I would respectfully challenge that assertion. Having searched through the robust collection of extant Charleston newspapers from that four-year window of legal importation, mid-1783 to mid-1787, I have yet to find a single notice of a slave ship landing at Gadsden’s Wharf. In fact, Christopher Gadsden informed the public in August 1783 that he was in need of materials to repair his wharf, which had sustained damages during the British siege and occupation of Charleston, 1780–1782. Then, in September 1783, a large fire consumed one or more of the valuable store houses on Gadsden’s Wharf, and in the summer of 1784, he admitted he had difficulty in securing a loan to repair the damages. In short, the preponderance of the evidence seems to indicate that Gadsden’s Wharf was not involved in the landing or selling of incoming Africans prior to or immediately after the American Revolution

 From CCPL:  The Genesis of East Bay Street: Charleston’s First Wharf, 1680–1696

East Bay St. was the water's edge and was considered the "wharf" of Charleston.

East Bay Street is one of Charleston’s most scenic and popular thoroughfares, home to numerous shops, restaurants, and historic buildings that contribute greatly to the city’s charm. Running parallel to the Cooper River waterfront, East Bay Street was for three centuries the main artery for the traffic of goods and people moving between the town and the commercial wharves that once projected into the river. Most of that maritime infrastructure is now gone, however, and a swath of firm real estate averaging one-eighth of a mile wide separates the historic street from the water’s edge. This volume of accumulated earth and human construction obscures the street’s distant past, but physical evidence of its humble origins survive just beneath the surface. 

. . .  Charleston’s original waterfront was not a deep-water wharf. Large sailing vessels never docked alongside it to load and unload cargo because the site’s shallow hydrography did not allow such a practice. All of the land immediately to the east of the wharf we now call East Bay Street was once a sloping mudflat at low tide and mostly underwater at high tide. Like other intertidal mudflats along the rivers of coastal South Carolina, this quayside land was probably covered by a verdant blanket of cordgrass or spartina (now called Sporobolus alterniflorous). The perimeter of modern Charleston protrudes much farther into the rivers than it did three centuries ago, but the indigenous cordgrass still thrives along the tidal fringes of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers.[3] 

Charleston’s original wharf was, therefore, simply a long, narrow bank along the edge of the high-water mark and adjacent to a tidal mudflat of the Cooper River. So how did the town’s early settlers transport cargo across the muddy landscape between ship and shore? Prior to early years of the eighteenth century, when investors began building wooden piers extending eastward into the river, Charlestonians employed traditional practices familiar to mariners around the world. Small sailing vessels and row boats, especially the canoes, periaugers, and small schooners carrying goods from nearby plantations, could anchor close to the wharf at high tide and then rest among the cordgrass at low tide. A human chain of salty crewmen could then stand in the pluff mud and hand the cargo up to the wharf. 

This simple practice was not appropriate for larger sailing vessels, however, which needed to anchor in waters at least three or four fathoms (18–24 feet) deep. During Charleston’s early years, such depths were found approximately 600 to 1,000 feet to the east of the wharf we now call East Bay Street. To bridge the distance between these points, mariners used a variety of smaller watercraft to ferry cargo between ship and shore. Descriptions of this logistical practice are lacking among the sparse paper records of early South Carolina, but it was an ancient phenomenon common to port communities around the world. Shallow-draft, flat-bottomed barges, generically called “lighters” in England, would float alongside larger vessels to receive cargo, ballast, or passengers, and then row to shore to unload at (or at least close to) the wharf. The use of lighters must have been such a common practice in early Charleston that it did not merit description in written records, although extant government documents include information about the use of lighters to transport ballast around the harbor in the early eighteenth century.[4]

The transformation of Charleston’s first wharf into the thoroughfare we call East Bay Street was a slow process of both human engineering and natural accretion. This work formally began in the late 1690s, but conversations about the need to “shore up,” “wharf-in,” or otherwise protect the waterfront face of the town’s wharf commenced in the late 1680s. Not surprisingly, the earliest-known discussions of this topic followed in the wake of a hurricane. In August 1686, a Spanish invasion force moving northward from St. Augustine raided homes and plantations across Port Royal, Edisto, and Wadmalaw Islands, but the sudden appearance of a destructive hurricane forced the invaders to retreat back to Florida.[5] The same storm that saved Charleston from attack in 1686 apparently caused a tidal storm surge that also damaged the capital’s earthen wharf. Waterfront erosion was probably not a new phenomenon at this location, but the damage resulting from the hurricane of 1686 was sufficient to warrant an appeal to the Lords Proprietors— the English investors who owned the entire colony. 

From CCPL -- Gadsden's Wharf

Gadsden’s Wharf is a site on the east side of the Charleston peninsula, along the Cooper River waterfront. More specifically, the historic boundaries of Gadsden’s Wharf included all of the waterfront property between Calhoun Street (on the north) and Laurens Street (on the south). If you’ve ever visited the South Carolina Aquarium, for example, that building is located a few feet north of Gadsden’s Wharf. The Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center at Liberty Square, next door to the aquarium, stands on the northeastern corner of Gadsden’s Wharf. Three hundred years ago, this entire area was a brackish marsh that was washed by the daily tides.

In 1696, Isaac Mazyck received a grant for 90 acres of land on the Cooper River, including the site in question. In 1720, Mazyck sold approximately 63 of these acres to Thomas Gadsden, who in turn sold it to Captain George Anson in 1727. Nearly thirty years later, in 1758, Anson’s attorney sold a large swath of this property to an enterprising young merchant named Christopher Gadsden (son of Thomas). At that time, Christopher Gadsden’s property included fifteen acres of high land and approximately twenty-nine acres of marsh. The high land encompassed all the property between what is now Calhoun and Laurens Streets, from the lobby of the present Gaillard Center eastward to modern Washington Street. Gadsden’s purchase may have also included a house, perhaps built by George Anson, located at what is now the northeast corner of East Bay Street and Vernon Street. Whether it was built before 1758 or after, a house at this location served as the principal residence for Christopher Gadsden’s family well into the early nineteenth century. The real estate to the east, between the house and the Cooper River, was low, marshy land that wasn’t good for much of anything. I’m sure the family had a stunning view of the harbor at sunrise, though.

As a merchant, Christopher Gadsden dealt mostly in the import-export trade, and assisting planters with the task of shipping their rice, indigo, and other commodities to markets abroad. Like most of his contemporaries in that business, he rented space on one of Charleston’s several wharves. Staring in the 1680s with just one wharf on the Cooper River waterfront, Charleston’s maritime trade slowly expanded over the years. By the mid-1760s, there were a dozen wharves projecting from East Bay Street into the river, located to the south and to the north of Broad Street. Merchants like Christopher Gadsden sacrificed a portion of their profits to rental fees paid for wharfage, as it was called. By the end of 1766, Gadsden was determined to maximize his profits by building his own wharf, on his own property, just beyond the northern boundary of the town. To transform this vacant landscape into something more valuable and useful, Captain Gadsden (as he was known in the 1760s) would have to invest a lot of time, money, and resources. And that’s exactly what he began doing in early 1767.

The construction of what became known as Gadsden’s Wharf is documented in a number of newspaper advertisements published between January 1767 and the spring of 1774. In some of the advertisements, Captain Gadsden requested the delivery of construction materials to his waterfront site. Over the years, for example, he advertised to purchase a total 3,650 pine piles (twenty to forty feet long), 1,100 cords of pine logs (four feet long), and 64,000 bushels of oyster shells. Gadsden drove the long pine piles into the mud to outline the frame of his planned wharf, dumped the cords of wood on the marsh within his frame, and then used the oyster shells to build causeways so carts could roll from the high land, across the marsh, to the new wharf.\

In other advertisements, Gadsden informed the maritime community that his wharf was ready to receive ships. By early December 1767, for example, he said the southern end of his wharf could accommodate one ship at a time. A week later, it was ready to receive two at a time. By February 1768, Gadsden bragged that three ships could anchor next to his unfinished wharf at the same time. In mid-October 1770, he announced that “near four hundred feet front” of his unfinished wharf was “now fit for business.” In January 1774, Gadsden stated that the framing of the entire wharf, 840 feet long, was now complete, but it would probably take until the end of the year to finish backfilling the marsh. After eight years of dirty work, Gadsden’s Wharf was completed just a few months before the beginning of the American Revolution.

As I mentioned in last week’s program about the closing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, South Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in October 1774 voted with their fellow patriots to adopt a set of resolutions against British oppression. Among the “Articles of Association” was a pledge to cease importing Negroes after 1 December 1774. On that date, the port of Charleston closed a long chapter of importing African captives, having received approximately 90,000 people since 1670. During the last years of this era, while Christopher Gadsden was building his wharf, 1767 through 1774, the newspapers of Charleston regularly provided information about the arrival and sale of every incoming cargo of Africans. I’ve read through all of those advertisements, and found no evidence of any slave ships docking at Gadsden’s Wharf. It’s important to remember that Gadsden’s Wharf was at that time outside of town, and not quite finished. All of the merchants who handled the sales of “new Negroes,” as they were commonly called, had offices along East Bay Street, south of what is now Cumberland Street. In fact, East Bay Street terminated at Pinckney Street, a good distance south of Gadsden’s property. The idea of landing and selling entire cargoes of newly-imported Africans at Gadsden’s Wharf was simply impractical at that time.

Charleston merchants resumed the importation of African captives in the second half of 1783. As I mentioned in last week’s program, our state legislature voted in the spring of 1787 to close this trade, in an effort to prevent a debt crisis in post-war South Carolina. During that four-year period, approximately 10,000 enslaved people arrived in Charleston for sale. (For evidence of the numbers of vessels and enslaved people arriving in Charleston and other ports, explore the database at http://slavevoyages.org). According to the newspapers of that era, dozens of sales of “new Negroes” were held at more than eight locations in the heart of urban Charleston, south of Market Street, including Bedon’s Alley, Daniel Bourdeaux’s yard on East Bay Street, Mr. Manigault’s lot at the corner of Church and Amen (now Cumberland) Streets, Eveleigh’s Wharf, Motte’s Wharf, Prioleau’s Wharf, Scott’s Wharf, and “near the Exchange” (probably on the building’s shady north side). Some advertisements from this era did not mention a specific location, indicating that some slave merchants, like Nathaniel Russell and the Penman brothers (James and Edward), assumed that customers already knew where to find their offices along East Bay Street.