From Confederate battle flags sprouting out of cemeteries, to a State Historic Preserve dedicated to the plantation house where Stonewall Jackson uttered his final words (“Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees”), to the solemn faces of Southern generals staring down from the walls of a roadside memorabilia retailer, the ghosts of the Civil War have been eerily ubiquitous ever since we left D.C. four days ago.
Northerners often see the Civil War as the first event in the history of the American South, as though nine million people had suddenly appeared on unsettled lands in 1861 and promptly seceded from the Union. Visiting Charleston was a reminder how much older than that the South actually is.
The story the old buildings told was, surprisingly enough, one of unprecedented tolerance. High above the pastel-colored townhouses and storefronts stood the grandiose spires of some of the country’s oldest churches.
There was the high-walled, Gothic Unitarian Church, the oldest one in the South, which was built in 1772—not only before Unitarian Universalism was an official religion, but before America was an official country (the church was re-chartered as Unitarian in 1839, just 14 years after the Unitarian movement formally coalesced in the North). There was the pink cone of St. Philips Episcopal Church rising from its columned base, and the graveyard around back where South Carolina Declaration of Independence signatory Charles Pinckney is buried. There were the interwoven, shingled domes of the Circular Congregationalist Church, which was originally built by French Huguenots, among others, in the 1680s—Charleston, as it turns out, was one of the only places where these people weren’t being strung up as heretics. We had been told that Charleston was also home to the fourth-oldest Jewish synagogue in America, though we never ended up seeing it. But we did walk past the meeting place of former Hebrew Orphan Society, a Jewish mission set up to feed, clothe, and educate poor children and widowed women.
Cemeteries were almost as ubiquitous as churches in Charleston, and they were usually just as aesthetically elaborate and diverse. There were cemeteries with fresh-cut lawns and ones overgrown with flowers, portioned with narrow, brick walkways and canopied by fistfuls of Spanish moss dangling from gnarled, flesh-colored trees. The headstones ran the gamut: some looked like arrowheads, some like wood stoves, some like obelisks. The biggest ones looked like altars, with columns running up the edges, carved with names that I recognized from nearby street signs.
It seems strange to describe a place in the Deep South as diverse or tolerant. The rice plantations several miles inland are a highly visible reminder of the racial persecution that took place here at about the same time the Unitarians, Huguenots and Jews were setting up shop downtown. But the eclectic cityscape of Charleston at least reminded us that New England does not own a monopoly on colonial history, and that the Heritage of the American South is not as monolithic as the Confederate Souvenir Shops and secessionist zealots might lead us to believe.
Posted from the Lake Aire RV Park and Campground, Hollywood, South Carolina.
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