Charleston Speed Limit

Charleston Speed Limitⁱ

i Charleston Speed Limit

Adult humans generally walk at a rate of approximately three miles per hour. Horses generally walk in the range of four to five miles per hour; trot and pace in the range of five to ten miles per hour; canter above ten miles per hour, and gallop above twenty miles per hour. In 1753, for example, Thomas Hasell of Charleston advertised a stray horse that, according to one observer, “paces about 5 or 6 miles an hour.” A number of other contemporary newspaper advertisements echo that rate of travel, which is, in fact, pretty average. Richard Butler of Ashley River, on the other hand, advertised in 1744 for the return of an energetic stray horse that he said “paces about 10 miles an hour.” Daniel Huger’s thoroughbred horse, Skim, won a local race in 1764 by running a two-mile heat in four minutes and forty seconds, traveling at an exhilarating average of nearly twenty-six miles per hour.

Charleston’s first speed limit imposed a fine on anyone traveling “faster than a moderate trot or pace,” but not everyone was capable of paying such a fine. More than half of the local population was composed of enslaved people of African descent, some of whom rode and drove horses as part of their normal duties. They didn’t have access to cash to pay speeding fines, so the provincial legislature had to amend the law. A revised version adopted in the spring of 1757 specified that any “Negro or other slave” riding or driving too fast in Charleston would be “whipped at the discretion of any Justice of the Peace or the said Commissioners [of the Streets] or any two of them not exceeding forty stripes and the master or owner of such Negro or other slave so offending shall be obliged to pay the charge of such whipping.”[7]

The speed limit enacted in 1750 and the punishments prescribed in 1757 remained in force in urban Charleston through the American Revolution and into the spring of 1783. That April, the state-appointed Commissioners of the Streets published a brief synopsis of the law, reminding urbanites “that no white person shall ride on horseback or in a carriage in the streets faster than a moderate trot or pace. Penalty three dollars—Negroes offending shall be publickly [sic] whipped not exceeding 40 lashes, and the owners made liable to the expence of the whipping.”[9] The act of incorporating the City of Charleston in August 1783 transferred the duties of the Commissioners of the Streets to the new City Council, and the city wardens crafted their first street ordinance in June of 1784. At that time, City Council merely repeated the wording of the colonial-era statute prohibiting riding or driving within the corporate limits of Charleston “faster than a moderate trot or pace.”