By: Mollie Bowman

Despite living in Charleston for almost four years now and having visited many times prior to moving here, I had never walked through the doors of the Charleston Museum. Recently, I decided to finally cross through the doors and learn more about the history of Charleston. The museum was––unsurprisingly––filled with many interesting artifacts from throughout history. 

While walking through the Lowcountry History Hall, I came into contact with many items from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These pieces ranged from works of ornate pottery, to pistols, to Native American artifacts, and to items that were connected to the institution of slavery in Charleston. While I have lived in South Carolina for most of my life and therefore feel that I understand the state’s history quite well, it was truthfully rather strange and surreal to see many of these physical items. I have learned so much about their context and have been fully aware of many of the artifacts I saw, yet actually seeing these items added a new layer of recognition on my part of the true reality of the history I have been taught about.

What really caught my attention while in the museum and what I have continued to think about since visiting was the display of “slave badges.” I had previously seen photos of similar badges, but seeing them in person was rather shocking. I think it is important to preserve and display these items because they really embody and display the horrific reality of the lives of enslaved persons in Charleston, as well as how many lives and stories were both lost and subjected to this horrifying reality. Something I did not know about these badges was that they were unique to the city of Charleston which displays just how ingrained slavery was here during this period. It was just pretty overwhelmingly horrific to look at the many literal tags (though few in comparison to how many there really were) that people were forced to wear, and I think it is important to expose that reality to our contemporary society. 

Alongside these slave badges was another badge called the “free badge,” which any free black people in Charleston were forced to wear. If it was not visible, they would be faced with charges or a sentence of hard labor. This badge was similarly grim, as its being made at all clearly displays that “freedom” was clearly not free. This badge displays the liberty cap and pole that we have discussed in class and was only utilized in Charleston from 1783 to 1789, making it really relevant to the period we are studying. This badge was not something that I was aware of––unlike the slave badges––but that seems quite telling not only of their limited use time-wise but perhaps of their limited use in general. 

These badges as a whole really struck me because, as mentioned earlier, they add a stronger sense of physical, concreteness to the realities I have learned about through my life. It is crucial to see artifacts like this because they force us to think about the horrors of history and expose us to the realities of the not-so-far gone past.