page_title: Charleston, South Carolina
section_title: Colonial era (1670–1786)
hierarchical_section_title: Charleston, South Carolina / History / Colonial era (1670–1786)
caption_attribution_description: A 1733 map of Charleston, South Carolina; map is an inset from a larger map of North America.
context_page_description: Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The city is the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North Charleston–Summerville Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina's coastline and is located on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers. Charleston had an estimated population of 137,566 in 2019. The estimated population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, was 802,122 residents as of July 1, 2019, the third-largest in the state and the 74th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States.
  Charleston was founded in 1670 as Charles Town, honoring King Charles II of England. Its initial location at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River was abandoned in 1680 for its present site, which became the fifth-largest city in North America within ten years.
context_section_description: After Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, he granted the chartered Province of Carolina to eight of his loyal friends, known as the Lords Proprietors, on March 24, 1663. It took seven years before the group arranged for settlement expeditions. In 1670, Governor William Sayle brought over several shiploads of settlers from Bermuda, which lies due east of Charleston although closer to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Barbados in the eastern Caribbean. These settlers established Charles Town at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River a few miles northwest of the present-day city center. Charles Town became English-speaking America's first comprehensively planned town with governance, settlement, and development to follow a visionary plan known as the Grand Model prepared for the Lords Proprietors by John Locke. Because the Carolina's Fundamental Constitutions was never ratified, however, Charles Town was never incorporated during the colonial period. The British Crown did not approve the one attempt to do so in the 1720s. Instead, local ordinances were passed by the provincial government, with day-to-day administration handled by the wardens and vestries of St Philip's and St Michael's Anglican parishes.
  At the time of contact, the area was inhabited by the Cusabo Indians. The settlers declared war on them in October 1671. The Charlestonians initially allied with the Westo, a slaving northern tribe that had grown powerful trading for guns with the colonists in Virginia. The Westo had made enemies of nearly every other tribe in the region, however, and the English turned on them in 1679. Destroying the Westo by 1680, the settlers were able to use their improved relations with the Cusabo and other tribes to trade, recapture runaway slaves, and engage in slaving raids of Spanish-allied areas.
  The Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the Lords Proprietors, proclaimed that it would soon become a "great port towne". Instead, the initial settlement quickly dwindled away and disappeared while another village—established by the settlers on Oyster Point at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers around 1672—thrived; this settlement formally replaced the original Charles Town in 1680. (The original site is now commemorated as Charles Towne Landing.) Not only was this location more defensible, but it also offered access to a fine natural harbor, which accommodated trade with the West Indies. The new town was the 5th-largest in North America by 1690. On Carolina's southern coast, transportation between the early communities by river and sea was so convenient that Charleston was the only court needed until the late 1750s, but difficulty in transport and communications with the north meant its settlers were effectively independent of Charles Town as late as the governorship of Philip Ludwell; even then, the north was controlled through an appointed deputy governor. On December 7, 1710, the Lords Proprietors decided to separate the Province of North Carolina from Charles Town's government, although they continued to own and control both regions.
  A smallpox outbreak hit in 1698, followed by an earthquake in February 1699, whose ensuing fire destroyed about a third of the town. During rebuilding, a yellow fever outbreak killed about 15% of the remaining inhabitants. Charles Town suffered between 5 and 8 major yellow fever outbreaks over the first half of the 18th century. It developed a deserved reputation as one of the least healthy locations in British North America for whites, although mistaken observations over the period led some doctors to think that blacks had a natural immunity to the disease. Both black and white locals appear to have developed a general immunity to the disease by 1750, with future outbreaks (lasting until 1871) tending to kill only new arrivals, prompting its local name as "stranger's fever". Malaria – locally known as "country fever" since yellow fever was largely confined to Charles Town and the coast – was endemic. Although it did not have the high fatalities of yellow fever, it
caption: Herman Moll's 1733 Town and Harbour of Charles Town in South Carolina, showing the town's defensive walls.
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