Mediaboss Marketing

Editors note: This is the 16th installment in a serialized history of Charleston to commemorate the citys 350th anniversary.

When the grand Exchange opened at the foot of Broad Street in 1771, locals saw great potential in Charles Towns new centerpiece.

The Palladian-style building was an architectural marvel, locals thought, perhaps even finer than Bostons Faneuil Hall. It would serve as custom house, meeting space, perhaps even a market. But by 1774 it was, at least in part, a tea warehouse.

Of course, the British had made it about tea.

After great outcry from the colonies, Parliament had repealed most of the Townshend Acts but didnt lift the tax on tea and basically gave the East India Company a monopoly on business in the colonies. The intent was to prove Britain had the authority to tax colonists, which was exactly what Christopher Gadsden had feared.

On Dec. 2, 1773, the London sailed into Charles Town harbor carrying a load of the controversial tea. Gadsden quickly dispatched his Liberty Boys into the streets, distributing leaflets that asked locals to attend an important meeting the next day at the Exchange.

If they allowed the tea to land, and the tax on it to be collected, it would set an unfortunate precedent and Gadsden wanted to get the sense of the people, as Walter Fraser Jr. wrote in Charleston! Charleston!

The planters, including Charles Pinckney, and the artisans, represented by Gadsden, favored a boycott on all British goods. But local merchants, including Miles Brewton, set up a local chamber of commerce to oppose the boycott. Profits were at stake. Charles Town was hopelessly divided.

The standoff continued throughout the month, but local attitudes shifted slightly after the incident in Boston. On Dec. 16, colonists there raided an East India ship, tossing more than 300 crates of tea into the citys harbor. Within two weeks, the captain of the London heard rumors that a Charles Town mob, inspired by Bostons tea party, was coming to burn his boat.

Local British officials locked the tea in the basement of the Exchange, and the threat of violence was averted. But the damage to British relations had been done, evident in the Royal Navys blockade of Boston Harbor.

By September 1774, five influential Charles Town residents John Rutledge, Edward Rutledge, Henry Middleton, Thomas Lynch and Gadsden had traveled to Philadelphia as the colonys representatives to the First Continental Congress. Before it was over, Middleton would be appointed its seond president.

The colonies were just as divided as Charles Town. Some wanted independence from Britain while others called for reconciliation. After two months of debate, the delegates agreed to a boycott of all British goods ... unless the king repealed the tax. He didnt.

The Congress also suggested each colony form its own militia, because war was no longer out of the question. The first battles, at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, followed just six months later.

Charles Town received news of the battles on May 8, 1775. Gadsdens Liberty Boys were ready to fight, but as Robert Rosen wrote in A Short History of Charleston, (m)ost of the merchants, planters, and substantial citizens of Charles Town were for strong measures short of war.

That seemed increasingly unlikely. By summers end, rumors in Charles Town held that Carolinas royal governor would arm loyalists to keep the colony in line. So that November, William Henry Drayton the Liberty Boys leader while Gadsden attended the Second Continental Congress scuttled several ships at the harbors mouth to keep the Royal Navy out.

As the crews worked, Draytons ship was fired on by two British warships lurking just offshore. They were, Fraser notes, the first shots of the Revolution in Carolina.

Fear of a pending British bombardment overwhelmed the city, and Charles Town spent months shoring up its defenses. Slaves, who comprised more than half of the citys population of 11,000-plus, did much of the work. Some of them were organized into a makeshift fire department, with orders to extinguish any fire sparked by a surprise attack.

Many residents chose to simply flee, and Charles Town was eerily quiet as the spring of 1776 dawned. Henry Laurens wrote to his son that, I am sitting in a House stripped of its furniture & in danger of being knocked down ... by Cannon Ball.

Laurens and Charles Town would wait several tense months for the coming attack.

See more here:
Hicks: A tea party, a continental congress and the beginning of a Revolution - Charleston Post Courier