By Mallory Maples!
On Friday, I decided to visit the Charleston Museum off of Meeting Street. I pass by this place every day on my commute to school, so I’d been wanting to go for a while; getting assigned to do this blog post only gave me a reason to visit sooner! I “dragged” my boyfriend along, but since he’s a nerd like me, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and made a date out of it. (Not pictured was the thirty-minute-long game of checkers we played in the kid’s exhibit.)
The first thing that stood out to me was the fact that this is the country’s first museum! It was founded in 1773, which is right within the time period we’re studying and just before the Revolutionary War began. I love museums, so the fact that my city has the oldest one in the country is super cool to me. This museum, and some of its artifacts, have been in the Charleston Area two hundred-something years and seen both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. It’s tough to even fathom that time span, and even tougher to conceptualize that some of the pottery, tobacco pipes, and weaponry I viewed were actually touched and used by people from a different time.
I spent a lot of time checking out the weapons. I’m typically a blade girl, but there were so many old firearms that I couldn’t help but marvel at such works of destruction. I’ve always thought that conflict runs as deep in the human psyche as love does, and looking at Revolutionary-era weapons just reinforced this sentiment. No matter the time, people will always make things to defend themselves, to hunt prey, or just to cause pain.
The old artillery (pictured above!) caught my attention most of all. The largest piece, at the far left of the closest row, was 320 pounds. Talk about haunting. I can hardly imagine what kind of havoc it could wreak; that thing could tear chunks out of the side of a battlement or send a platoon of soldiers scattering like bowling pins… And it probably did! Standing a foot away from it, at rest, was humbling.
Today we think of war as technological, full of counterintelligence, surveillance equipment, and high-stealth aerial bombing runs. Horrible, and much more destructive thanks to technological advances. The American Revolution was a different type of war; in some ways, it was more brutal. People were getting limbs blown off by massive balls of iron and getting stabbed with bayonets, all for a chance to live outside the rule of an oppressive mother-state, on sovereign soil. Preserving mementos from the actual war, the war that earned America her independence from Great Britain, is important because it is, though a chilling one, a reminder of our country’s roots.
Those pieces of artillery were found throughout the Lowcountry area, on the Charleston peninsula as well as Folly and James Islands. They’re local pieces of history! It would stand to reason they’d be preserved. Charleston sustained constant traffic during the war thanks to its prominent status as a port city, indicating that not only was it an important waypoint in maneuvering American forces, but a prime target for our British foes to assail. During the Revolutionary War, Charleston was a city that experienced many people passing through, and saw a lot of America’s war for freedom.