Antiques.

This city [Charleston] is the oldest I have yet seen in America....The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other of the American towns....It is in this respect a far more aristocratic...city than any I have yet seen in America, inasmuch as every house seems built to the owner's particular taste; and in one street you seem to be in an old English town, and in another in some continental city of France or Italy. This variety is extremely pleasing to the eye.

Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863)

Charleston, South Carolina, prospered as a center of the British Empire because it was a crossroads of transatlantic trade. A brisk commerce in rice, indigo, and sea island cotton was supplemented by deerskins and naval stores from the pine forests of the low country. On the eve of the American Revolution, Charleston was the only large urban center south of Philadelphia. Many of the original British settlers came to the city from the West Indies. New England ship captains, selling their goods in the southern colonies, often settled permanently in Charleston. Huguenots immigrated from France and Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula. Scots poured in after the union of England and Scotland in 1707, and there were small enclaves of Swiss, Germans, and Welsh.

In the seventeenth century rice was grown on dry land, but in the next century it was chiefly grown in freshwater inland swamps or in lowland areas next to tidal rivers, where the ebb and flow irrigated the fields. Great fortunes were amassed by the owners of these vast rice plantations, which required the labor of large numbers of slaves and considerable capital to maintain the necessary dikes and floodgates.

The aggressive mores of the British West ...