Charleston Harbor

Charleston Harbor opens into the Atlantic where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet, with Morris and Sullivan’s islands sheltering much of its entrance. The inlet covers about twenty square kilometers. Its twelve-foot natural depth was a principal reason Charleston could become a major port. English settlers founded Charles Town in 1670 and moved it to the present peninsula in 1680, and the harbor soon became the colony’s gateway to the Atlantic.

The harbor’s commercial success rested on a violent history. It became the largest North American disembarkation point in the transatlantic slave trade; historians estimate that more than forty percent of enslaved Africans brought to the continent entered through Charleston. In June 1776 a fort of palmetto logs on Sullivan’s Island beat back a British naval attack, and in 1780 the British took the city after a siege. Waterways that linked rivers, islands, coastal traffic and the wider ocean thus acquired strategic meaning in both commerce and war.