The Refugees in Market Street, 1793

The legal foundation of Market Street, created in 1788, dissolved in 1793 when the City of Charleston scrambled to address a refugee crisis that shocked the community. Few in the Palmetto City today recall how a revolutionary struggle for civil rights in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola sparked a bloody insurrection that forced thousands of French-speaking migrants to seek asylum here and in other port cities of the United States.

The disappearance of Charleston’s municipal records from the late eighteenth century, which I’ve discussed in previous programs, has obscured this important episode for more than two centuries. While a number of authors in recent generations have drawn attention to the sprawling history of French refugees pouring into North America during the 1790s, the smaller story of the events in Market Street remains unnoticed. I stumbled into a few relevant clues many years ago, but I’ve long struggled with the question of how to frame the narrative. On the one hand, the erasure of Market Street in 1793 forms a significant chapter in the long history of Charleston. On the other hand, the topic forms a small but interesting sidenote in the epic, melancholy saga of the nation we now call Haiti. The following story represents my best efforts to blend these intersecting streams of history into a coherent narrative tailored for the people of modern Charleston. Let’s begin where we left off in the previous episode, with the state of the city’s public markets around the year 1790. 

The new Beef Market that opened in Market Street in 1789 did not supersede the older marketplaces at the east ends of Tradd and Queen Streets, but it did relieve some of the daily congestion surrounding those shrinking waterfront sites. As I mentioned earlier, a state law ratified in 1787 permitted, for the first time, the erection of robust, permanent structures on the east side of East Bay Street. From that time into the 1790s, new commercial and residential structures began appearing along the city’s waterfront in place of wooden wharves dotted with low warehouses. The proliferation of new buildings constructed on recently-filled mudflats began narrowing access to the public markets from which the inhabitants had purchased their daily provisions since the beginning of the eighteenth century. 

In the spring of 1791, for example, William Crafts, new owner of the wharf immediately north of the Lower Market at the east end of Tradd Street, began raising the level of his expanding wharf. That topographic change initiated an ongoing deluge of rainwater pouring down from Crafts’ Wharf onto the marketplace, damaging the wooden structure and flooding the public space. Mr. Crafts also contested the physical placement of the Lower Market, obliging the city government in 1792 to solicit bids for “the removal of the [Lower] Market at the east end of Tradd-street, a few feet, so as to place the same on the land belonging to the city.”[1]

Similarly, at the east end of Queen Street, Samuel Prioleau began developing a substantial wharf in the 1770s on the south side of the Fish Market, a site now called Prioleau Street. Immediately after the American Revolution, Mr. Prioleau started developing another wharf on the north side of Queen Street that further constricted access to the public marketplace. That work was maturing rapidly in the spring of 1791, when President George Washington arrived by boat and landed at Prioleau’s Wharf to begin a week-long residency in Charleston. Washington stepped ashore on the morning of May 2nd in the shadow of the old Fish Market, and later visited the city’s first Orphan House in Ellery Street, near the new Beef Market.

The Prioleau family of late eighteenth-century Charleston descended from French Huguenots who fled Europe a century earlier in the wake of Catholic persecution of Protestants, instigated by King Louis XIV. Here in South Carolina, the Prioleaus and scores of other French Huguenot families found a burgeoning colonial society that upheld the official English discrimination against Catholics of all nations and restricted trade between the Port of Charleston and various French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean Sea (see Episode #142). The tradition of Anglo-American prejudice against Catholic France began to fade in the spring of 1778, however, when King Louis XVI sided with rebel colonists and sent money, ships, arms, and soldiers to support the War for American Independence from Britain. From that moment onward, Charleston merchants set aside their entrenched animosity towards Catholics and opened channels of trade and communication with their French neighbors in the Americas. 

The principal French territory in the Caribbean Sea was a small colony occupying the western half of the island of Hispaniola. Christopher Columbus claimed the territory in 1492, and subsequent Spanish colonists identified it as Isla Española de Santo Domingo. The seventeenth-century French buccaneers who usurped the western part of the island called their possession Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti), while Spanish colonists occupying the eastern half of the island continued to use the name Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic). English-speaking Charlestonians of the eighteenth century identified the French portion as “St. Domingo,” a name that appears frequently in local newspapers published after the American Revolution. 

By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue was one of the richest colonies in the world and a jewel in the crown of the French monarchy. As in South Carolina and the British and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, the white settlers of Saint-Domingue exploited the labor of unfree Africans to generate extreme wealth for a small minority of the island’s population. Its total area is slightly smaller than the State of South Carolina, but in 1790 the western half of Hispaniola hosted roughly double the population of the mainland state (roughly 500,000 vs. 250,000), and counted four times as many enslaved people as South Carolina. Numbering approximately 450,000 people, most of whom were born in Africa, the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue outnumbered the free whites by a ratio of ten to one. Tens of thousands of formerly-enslaved people and the descendants of ex-slaves, known as gens de couleur libres, augmented the colony’s population and complicated its trade relations with the conservative white minority of South Carolina.

During the post-war era of the 1780s, Charleston merchants like Joseph Vesey, a former Caribbean ship captain, imported sugar, coffee, fruit, and other goods directly from Saint-Domingue.[2] That trade continued after the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789, which quickly spread from Paris to the rest of the nation and its territories overseas. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by the French National Assembly just six weeks after the fall of the Bastille, was an important landmark in the history of modern democracy, but the document did not specify whether the rights of free citizens extended to women, to non-white persons, or to enslaved people. That legal ambiguity, which offended some idealists in France, aroused stronger emotions in Saint-Domingue, where the imperfect language of the Declaration stoked pre-existing tension within a highly-stratified society.

The white minority of Saint-Domingue differentiated between less-affluent laborers and artisans, known as petit blancs, who embraced the revolutionary spirit of political equality, and the smaller population of wealthy plantation owners, known as grand blancs, who clung to the traditional reins of power, wealth, and prestige. While the enslaved majority continued to yearn for personal liberty, free persons of color resented their exclusion from the benefits of citizenship, as promised by the nation’s revolutionary rhetoric. Their frustration erupted in a bloody but limited revolt in Saint-Domingue in October 1790, pitting free black men against white colonists who crushed the uprising and executed its leaders. News of that brutal suppression inspired the French National Assembly in Paris in May 1791 to extend full rights of citizenship to free persons of color born to free parents. This limited and conditional enfranchisement, combined with false rumors of a general emancipation circulating among the enslaved majority, sparked a chaotic, large-scale insurrection in August 1791 that marked the beginning of a bloody twelve-year conflict now called the Haitian Revolution. 

Back in Paris, the racial violence enveloping Saint-Domingue convinced the French National Assembly to adopt a new law on 4 April 1792 that extended the rights of citizenship to all free men of color, regardless of their parent’s previous condition. The French government then dispatched a pair of commissaries and 6,000 soldiers to pacify the political unrest in Saint-Domingue and to enforce the extension of civil rights to the gens de couleur.

Their efforts to quell the ongoing violence were complicated in May 1793, when a fleet of French warships and a man asserting his right to the governorship of Saint-Domingue arrived at the northern port city of Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien). There he rallied the conservative grand blancs who sought to preserve the status quo and suppress the rights of the gens de couleur. While the more liberal commissaries, empowered by the National Assembly, dismissed their opponents’ conservative pretentions, the enslaved majority remained on the sidelines, eager to hear news of their own emancipation. The tense situation came to a head on June 20th with sporadic, violent clashes in the city that provoked a radical change of tactics. On 21 June 1793, the government commissaries issued a proclamation in Cap-Français granting freedom to all slaves who agreed to fight for the French Republic and, ostensibly, the rights of man. Limited skirmishes in the port city suddenly exploded into an orgy of violence, now called the Battle of Cap-Français, that prompted most, but not all of the white inhabitants to run for their lives toward the harbor. Hundreds of civilians suffered violent deaths as they dashed through the streets to the waterfront, where they scrambled aboard boats and canoes that carried them to scores of merchant vessels resting at anchor. Escorted northward by French warships, the motley armada sailed for a variety of ports in the neutral United States, including Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.[3]

South Carolinians first learned of the destruction of Cap-Français on July 2nd, when an American merchant vessel entered the port of Georgetown in distress. Captain Redfield of the brigantine Sally had intended to dock at Charleston, but contrary winds and a “want of provisions” obliged him to shelter within the state’s northernmost port. His principal cargo consisted of sixty-six miserable passengers, “about one half of whom” were black, and all were “destitute of cloathing.” The French-speaking refugees reported that unspecified “insurgents” had entered the port of Cap-Français and “murdered all the inhabitants they could find—those only escaped, who fortunately threw themselves into the water, and were picked up by vessels in the harbor. The insurgents immediately set fire to the town, and when this brig sailed it had been burning [for] three days. About 150 sail of vessels were in port at the time, and all sailed together.”[4]

Another merchant vessel carrying refugees from Cap-Français arrived in Charleston on July 9th, and its American captain confirmed, with horrid details, “the compleat annihilation of that once beautiful and opulent city, by fire and sword.” Captain Cartwright of Nantucket reported that the colony’s rival political factions had clashed in the port city in mid-June, before his arrival. Citizens fleeing the chaos informed him that the white leaders of the pro-civil-rights faction “headed the army of the people of color, and commenced an attack on the inhabitants of the town on the 21st.” He anchored before a scene of “dreadful carnage” the following day and watched in horror as “the town was totally consumed by fire.” “Such of the inhabitants as survived,” said Cartwright, “repaired on board of the vessels in the harbor, in a very destitute and miserable condition,” but “being almost destitute of water,” he was obliged to ignore pleas from “a great number of the inhabitants, to bring them to the continent.”[5]

In response to this distressing news, a number of affluent white men in Charleston, including “some of the most respectable characters of South Carolina,” proposed the formation of a new organization to address the refugee crisis at hand. The resulting “Benevolent Society” coalesced before July 9th, when the local press announced their intention to assist “foreigners of every description who may come to this country. The immediate object is our French brethren; but, it is not proposed to be limited to any country; it is to embrace the human kind.” A full roster of the society’s members does not survive, but the officers named in subsequent newspaper reports included the most prominent men in Charleston at that moment. Its chairman, for example, was John Huger, Intendant of City Council and a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants. Captain Joseph Vesey, a veteran merchant with strong connections to the Caribbean, served as its treasurer and cashier. 

The Benevolent Society’s first act was to dispatch a vessel to Georgetown to bring the initial group of refugees to Charleston. Here the affluent benefactors prepared lodgings and gathered “all the necessaries of life” to “soothe the sharpness of their deplorable fate.” As news of the chaotic collapse of Cap-Français spread throughout the community that July, Charlestonians braced for the arrival of more refugees in a similar state of need. Officers of the society broadcast appeals for charitable donations from across the state and went door-to-door in urban Charleston soliciting cash, clothing, and supplies “for the relief of unfortunate persons who have arrived, or may arrive in this state.”[6]

Of the thousands of French-speaking refugees who fled from Saint-Domingue to the United States during the summer of 1793, the exact number who came to Charleston is unclear. Contemporary evidence suggests that the initial number was between 400 and 500 people, of whom white women and children formed the majority. Petit blancs—laborers, shopkeepers, and artisans—formed an unknown proportion of the white male refugees, as did wealthy planters or grand blancs who were dispossessed of their valuable plantations and chattel slaves. Some of the rich families obliged to abandon luxurious homes in Saint-Domingue escaped with a few domestic servants who remained enslaved in Charleston, at least initially.[7]

The immigrant population of late summer 1793 also included an unknown number of French-speaking free persons of color, whose presence in Charleston unsettled local authorities. Most of the white survivors who entered various Atlantic ports of the United States at that time blamed the bloody sack of Cap-Français on the gens de couleur, and the ruling class of South Carolina excluded such persons from any form of assistance.[8] In fact, on 16 October 1793, Governor William Moultrie issued a proclamation ordering the immediate expulsion of all free persons of color who had entered the state from Saint-Domingue within the preceding twelve months.[9]

Through the assistance of the Benevolent Society in the late summer of 1793, the white, Catholic, French-speaking strangers from Saint-Domingue and their domestic servants found shelter within a variety of venues scattered across the environs of Charleston. An unknown number of local homeowners, for example, welcomed individuals and families into their abodes. Shopkeepers and the proprietors of boarding houses and rental tenements likely created free space for penniless refugees. Governor Moultrie also “ordered the public buildings on Sullivan’s Island [that is, the Pest House and warehouses associated with quarantine protocol] to be prepared for the reception of the unfortunate fugitives [who] escaped from the massacre at Cape Francois.”[10] Moultrie’s plan did not provide a long-term solution, however, as the public facilities on Sullivan’s Island were required to quarantine a number of other immigrants who arrived during the ensuing months.

Despite the generous assistance afforded by the private citizens of Charleston, an unknown number of refugees remained unhoused or unsettled by the middle of August 1793. To address this emergency as expeditiously and economically as possible, Intendant John Huger and the members of City Council resolved to sacrifice the recently-constructed Beef Market in Market Street. The city had opened the structure in 1789 on a broad strip of land donated to the municipal government one year earlier. The 1788 agreement between the city and several property owners to create Market Street included a reversion clause stipulating that the land would revert to the donors if the city ceased to use it as a public marketplace. With full knowledge of the consequences of their actions, city officials vacated the new Beef Market and all of Market Street to shelter a large group of strangers in need. 

On Monday, 19 August 1793, Charleston’s City Gazette printed a brief notice of the municipal government’s intention “to fit up the New Market for the reception of distressed persons, from Cape Francois.” Carpenters and bricklayers were invited to submit bids for the proposed work by the following Wednesday, giving the artisans just two days’ notice to survey the structure in question, draft plans, and compile estimates of the costs. “In the mean time,” continued the notice, “further information may be obtained by applying to” any one of four distinguished gentlemen, members of City Council. The following Saturday, before the project commenced, the city published another notice, in both French and English, advising “such of the distressed inhabitants of St. Domingo, who have taken shelter in this city, and who are either carpenters or bricklayers,” that they would “find immediate employment by attending at the new market in Meeting-street, on Monday morning, at half past nine o’clock.”[11]

No records survive to elucidate the scope and nature of the conversion of the Beef Market into a dormitory in the autumn of 1793, but we can use our imaginations to visualize the scene. As I described in the previous episode, the brick structure in question was comprised of three modules, including a two-story central block, thirty-three feet square, flanked to the east and west by a pair of one-story wings, each measuring twenty-six feet wide and eighty-three feet long. Carpenters likely filled the structure’s numerous brick archways with wooden panels and installed a functional window in each bay. A series of transverse partitions might have divided the broad interior space into petit apartments, which were perhaps furnished like military barracks, with bunk beds and small brick hearths or cast-iron stoves for cooking and heating. 

The paucity of extant city records from this era obscures the total cost of this conversion project, but a few surviving notes illuminate an important facet of the story. Annual reports of the debits and credits of Charleston’s municipal government during the 1790s suggest that City Council did not shoulder the bulk of the expense. At some point during the autumn of 1793, the city “lent” to the Benevolent Society the sum of £225 sterling (nearly $1,000 U.S. dollars at that time) to complete the housing project, evidently augmenting funds donated to the society by the citizens of Charleston. For several years afterwards, the city treasurer recorded that same amount as a balance due from the Benevolent Society “for fitting up the New Market for the reception of the unhappy sufferers from St. Domingo, in 1793.”[12]

Anyone who’s visited Charleston during the past two centuries knows that Market Street and its iconic sheds form one of the most popular pedestrian thoroughfares in the city. So what happened after the city government sacrificed the site in the late summer of 1793? What became of the refugees from Saint-Domingue? How and when did Market Street reappear on the urban landscape? In the next episode, we’ll explore the city’s efforts to compensate for the loss of Market Street by expanding the existing waterfront markets in the late 1790s and negotiating for the resumption of its 1788 market plan at the dawn of the nineteenth century.