Boston, Jamestown and Charleston – All Started in the 17C and All Different

By Temple Ligon
October 18, 2013

Friday last week I lectured on the history of the streets of Boston, and I took aim at one particular building, architect H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church (1877) on Copley Square. Trinity Church was the second building on a schedule of 10.

The inspiration to cover these buildings came from a PBS program last summer, “!0 Buildings That Changed America,” where the one-hour television show spent about six minutes per building. In my take on the same buildings, we spend 60 minutes on each building.

Already having discussed Thomas Jefferson’s Capitol (1788) in Richmond, the first building on the chronological schedule, and having just finished Trinity Church, our next lecture will be on Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (1891) in St. Louis. Following Sullivan’s Wainwright will be Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago (1910), Albert Kahn’s Highland Park Ford Plant (1910) in Detroit, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center (1956) in Edina, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958) in New York City, Eero Saarinen’s Dulles Airport Terminal (1962) near Washington, Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House (1964) in Philadelphia, and Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall for the Performing Arts (2003) in Los Angeles.

The lectures are with the Wren Institute for Urban Research, and our venue is the Capital City Club on the top floor overlooking the corner of Main and Gervais. The lectures are always on the second Friday of the month at six o’clock in the evening, lasting for one hour. During each lecture we imbibe accordingly, that is, we drink a theme libation. When the subject is New York City, we have Manhattans; Paris, Champagne; Michelangelo, Tuscan red wine, because that’s probably what he had; and on it goes every month as it has since February 2000. When the subject is not an individual work of architecture or the life’s work of one architect, we usually study urban design and the history of cities, such as the recent talk on Boston.  

In our coverage of the beginnings in Boston, I compared three 17C American cities: Boston (1630), Jamestown (1607) and Charleston (1670), just to see how we South Carolinians fit in.

Boston began on 11 ships coming across the North Atlantic from England in 1630. The Puritan leader of the 1,000 onboard was John Winthrop who first brought his followers to Salem, Massachusetts, then to Charlestown, and finally to the Shawmut Peninsula, which today is downtown Boston.  The final move was due to bad water in Charlestown, while the water on the Shawmut Peninsula was invitingly close to fresh clean stream water, according to the sole occupant and owner of the peninsula, Rev. William Blaxton.

Today’s Boston sits on maybe three-fourths landfill, real estate created from filling in water sites. Back Bay, for instance, is all landfill. A map of the Shawmut Peninsula in the mid-17C looks nothing like the shorelines today. Valuable real estate has been created at every opportune landfill site.

Blaxton bought the entire Shawmut Peninsula from the Indians, and he sold all but six acres to Winthrop’s group. Within about five years after his sale to the Puritans, Blaxton pulled out entirely for Rhode Island, where full religious tolerance was more the order of the day. Blaxton learned the Puritans and their rules of community conduct could be hard to take: no dancing, no alcohol, no theater, no fun.

Albeit Puritan and peculiarly only part-free, Boston did all right. By 1640 the population was 1,200, and by 1740, 17,000.

Back in the home country, England, the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell began to take over following the outbreak of civil war in 1642, and they fully succeeded at the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. With the success of the Puritans in England, there was little sense in escaping to America by these people for religious freedom. The immigrants’ late 17C growth in Boston was then due more to economic opportunity than the Puritans’ play for protection.

The Puritans kept control in England until King Charles II restored the throne in 1660.  

Charleston began in 1670 under Charles II, and life in Charleston showed it. In 1735 Charleston was the home of the first opera and the first ballet performed in America.

In Jamestown, which began in 1607 with 104 men and boys – about half of whom listed their occupation as “gentleman” – never succeeded and certainly never heard opera and never saw a ballet. It was dreadful drudgery laced with Indian uprisings and deadly diseases and failed farming. After not even a full year since the 1607 start, Jamestown was down from the 104 who first landed to only 38 colonists in January 1608. Once the colony of Virginia had any momentum at all, around 1699, the capital of Virginia moved from Jamestown to Williamsburg, and Jamestown was for the most part demolished and made a farm.

Lotteries on the streets of London kept the colony financially alive after a 1609 stock issue underperformed.

About 20 African farmers, men who understood how crops grew, were sold in Jamestown in 1619, and almost adequate numbers of young women were brought onto the island the same year. And that same strategic year democracy had a start in the House of Burgesses. Someone even claimed a profit in 1620, but by 1625 the whole thing was deemed a disappointment and thereby a royal colony, entirely under the control of King Charles I.

Again, it all shut down in 1699 and all was moved to Williamsburg, the new capital.  

The eight petitioners who successfully asked King Charles II for the charter to found Carolina in 1663 became the lords proprietors, and the hardest working one in the group was Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the Earl of Shaftsbury. Cooper wanted to avoid what happened in Jamestown, and he wasn’t too pleased with the lack of freedoms in Boston. To give the new colony’s government some form, Cooper engaged philosopher John Locke; and while this was Locke’s first real job in government structuring, his medical education is what really bonded him with Cooper. In fact, Cooper credited Locke with saving his life. We early 21C types can call John Locke something like the Father of Free-flowing Capitalism.

In 1665 Charles II issued a second charter, this one covering a whole lot more territory, one of the big differences among the beginnings at Boston and Jamestown and the vision for Carolina. The scope of Carolina, as identified in the 1665 Carolina Grant, began with the southern border of Virginia and roughly the site of Daytona Beach and ran west to the Pacific Ocean. That meant all of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California and parts of Mexico, Oklahoma, and Florida fit inside Carolina – probably the world’s greatest land play considering current values. Charleston, as the first city in Carolina, began as capital overseeing 850,000 square miles, and today South Carolina is 31,113 square miles. Well, we had a start, anyway.

Having seen the start-up problems with Jamestown and Boston, the Carolina developers wanted to move their far grander land grab into the hands of regular settlers, family types who would likely grow their families in Carolina. Carolina was not under the control of religious extremists, like the Puritans in Boston, and Carolina was not to be overrun early on with impractical Daddy’s boys like Jamestown.

Beginning around 1665, about the same time the charter was expanded, usually six lords proprietors would gather every Tuesday morning at #25 Brichin Lane in London, near the Royal Exchange, and handle inquiries about what to expect in Carolina. The address became the Carolina Coffee House, and today the bar there is named #25 Birchin Lane.

By 1669, when Cooper and Locke had completed the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 15 promotional tracts were put together and printed as handouts at the Carolina Coffee House and elsewhere. About one-third of them were in French, targeting the Huguenots. The neighborhood later had an aggregation of the same concept – plenty of places to learn about where one might want to live in English colonies in the New World.

There was the Caribbean Coffee House, the Georgia Coffee House, the Virginia Coffee House, the New York Coffee House, the New England Coffee House, and the Pennsylvania Coffee House, where in the late 18C Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin would check for mail and then take off for the Carolina Coffee House. He said the Charleston crowd had the best-looking waitresses and the best food and beverage service.

The PR program worked. Word got out. In 1680 45 Huguenots arrived in Charleston.

King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which essentially meant a repeat of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 could be expected most any day. With death looming, the Huguenots left for parts far afield but far ahead of France in religious freedom. Over the next decade maybe 5,000 moved to what is today Berlin due to the Edict of Potsdam, something of an ideas copy of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Charleston took in 1,500 Huguenots during the same decade.

But it wasn’t just the Huguenots. Carolina would officially recognize any church with at least seven members and would protect anyone who believed in God or a god. Even though the Church of England was the only tax-supported church in Carolina, the religious opportunities in Carolina were the most free and the most varied anywhere in America other than Rhode Island, where Blaxton found refuge after his few years with the Puritans.

As in Potsdam, the ideas behind the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina took hold, but the document was never fully accepted by the Carolina colonists and never ratified. Still, it was a whole lot more than what was on the record in Boston or Jamestown.

And for that reason and the ideas and freedoms generated and promoted, South Carolina had the largest French population as a percentage of its total among the 13 original colonies.

All three cities – Boston, Jamestown and Charleston – began in the 17C, but there’s a 23-year gap between the start in Jamestown and the beginning in Boston, and then Charleston came along 40 years later than Boston. Still, until the United States Constitution was ratified, and until we had a president, a congress, a supreme court and a capital overseeing all American cities, Charleston offered the most freedom. And although Boston offered the most in education and commerce, then and now, we have to identify Jamestown as the city that stands out the most. It started first. It had time on its side. It failed. It’s been gone 314 years.

 

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