Charleston Blood and Power: The Families Who Made a Southern City

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina voted to leave the Union. The delegates gathered in Charleston's Institute Hall, surrounded by many of the names that had dominated the city for generations. Middleton. Drayton. Pinckney. Rutledge. Manigault. Rhett. They were not simply politicians. They were families whose influence had shaped Charleston for nearly two centuries.Charleston: Blood and Power is the story of those families and the city they built.From the founding of Charles Town in 1670 through the colonial rice empire, the American Revolution, the age of slavery, secession, Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, preservation, tourism, and the modern era, this book follows the bloodlines that stood at the center of Charleston's history.Drawing on diaries, letters, government records, family papers, contemporary newspapers, and the work of leading historians, Donald Elton traces the rise of a remarkably interconnected elite whose wealth rested on land, trade, politics, and family alliances. Their names appeared repeatedly in the legislature, the courts, the military, the churches, and the great houses that still define Charleston today.Yet this is not simply a story of privilege. It is also the story of the people whose labor made that wealth possible, the enslaved Africans who transformed the lowcountry into one of the richest regions in North America, the free Black community that emerged despite immense obstacles, the immigrants who reshaped the city, and the generations who struggled over what Charleston's past should mean.Readers will encounter:The Goose Creek Men and the creation of colonial South CarolinaThe rice kingdom and the fortunes it producedThe Revolution and the founding generationDenmark Vesey and the fears of a slave societySecession and Charleston's role in the coming of the Civil WarReconstruction, Redemption, and the remaking of powerThe earthquake of 1886 and the city's long declineThe preservation movement that saved historic CharlestonThe Charleston Renaissance, tourism, and modern reinventionThe surviving families, institutions, and legacies that remain visible todayPart political history, part family saga, and part biography of one of America's most fascinating cities, Charleston: Blood and Power offers a sweeping account of how a small group of interconnected families helped shape the history of Charleston and, through it, the history of the American South. Read more