Picture Charles Towne here, the original English settlement that would become Charleston, close to where you now walk. The city was founded in 1670 on Albemarle Point, across the Ashley River from where you stand, under a charter granted by King Charles II to eight Lords Proprietors. Ten years later, in 1680, the settlement was moved to the more defensible peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers — the location of the modern city.
The settlers who came to Carolina were a mixed group: English adventurers, Barbadian planters, dissenting religious communities, and African workers both free and enslaved. The Barbadian connection is particularly important. The planters who came from Barbados brought with them an already-established slave society and the legal codes to support it.
Within decades, Carolina had a Black majority — enslaved people outnumbered free colonists — and a rice economy that made it one of the wealthiest colonies in British North America. The original walled city that developed on this peninsula was small by later standards — a few dozen blocks — but within it every element of what Charleston would become was already present: religious diversity, extreme wealth, extreme inequality, beautiful architecture built on the proceeds of forced labor. The city you are walking through today is the direct descendant of what began here in 1670.