Charleston's war story begins where the land itself begins — on a peninsula, where two rivers meet the Atlantic and the harbor runs deep enough to matter. In 1776, a half-finished fort on Sullivan's Island held against a British fleet because palmetto logs absorb cannonballs rather than shattering under them; South Carolina has called itself the Palmetto State ever since. Four years later the British took the city anyway, converting the Old Exchange Building's basement into a military prison. The Revolution settled, Charleston grew rich on cotton and enslaved labor, and the tensions that wealth produced pushed South Carolina to become the first state to secede in 1860. The following year, Confederate batteries opened fire on the unfinished federal fort sitting on an artificial island in the harbor — and the Civil War began where the harbor that made Charleston powerful had always made confrontation inevitable.
