America's most carefully preserved antebellum city — where Charleston's Battery (the high sea wall promenade at the tip of the peninsula where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet the Atlantic) faces Fort Sumter (the island fort where the first shots of the American Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861), Rainbow Row (13 pastel-painted Georgian townhouses on East Bay Street, c. 1740s) is the most-photographed row of houses in the American South, the cobblestone streets of the French Quarter were laid by enslaved people from West Africa whose labour built every building in the city, and Charleston is the only city in North America where the urban fabric of a major pre-Civil War slave trading economy is still substantially intact — a fact the city has only in recent decades begun to publicly acknowledge and interpret
Charleston (150,000 city; 800,000 metro) is the second-largest city in South Carolina and the oldest city in the state — a port city on a peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers whose antebellum streetscape (preserved by both poverty and deliberate historic conservation) is one of the most intact examples of 18th- and 19th-century American urban architecture anywhere in the country. The Charleston Historic District is one of the largest in the USA.
Charleston (originally Charles Town, named for King Charles II of England) was founded in 1670 and rapidly became the wealthiest city in colonial British North America — a wealth built almost entirely on enslaved African labour and the cultivation of rice, indigo, and cotton. By the early 18th century, Charleston was the primary port of entry for the transatlantic slave trade in North America: approximately 40% of all enslaved Africans brought to North America arrived through Charleston, making it the largest point of entry for the forced African diaspora on the continent. Fort Sumter, in Cha…