Civil War Charleston: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of Secession, Siege & Emancipation Civil War Charleston is a first-timer's flagship self-guided walking tour of the city where the war began. It covers eighteen stops across the Charleston peninsula, from the Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center at Liberty Square, south through Meeting and Chalmers Streets, down to White Point Garden and the Battery at the tip of the peninsula. Along the way you'll get eight audio chapters on the wider war, from the blockade and the H.L. Hunley to Morris Island and the 54th Massachusetts, plus seven chapters of first-hand accounts written by people who lived through it. Everything plays in the app, at whatever pace you set. About This Charleston Walking Tour On Chalmers Street stands Ryan's Mart, where enslaved people were sold. It kept operating after South Carolina seceded and after Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, because the domestic slave trade remained legal under both South Carolina and Confederate law. Enslaved men, women and children could still be bought and sold in the middle of a war fought over their bondage, on a street a short walk from the harbor. This tour covers the transformation of Charleston from a city organized around the defense of slavery to a besieged Confederate stronghold and its subsequent transformation after the system's collapse. Delegates voted the state out of the Union in December 1860 at this hall. The fire and shelling devastated neighborhoods, leaving scars still visible today. You'll learn about the enslaved men impressed to build the harbor forts. You'll discover the events leading to the Confederate evacuation and the arrival of United States troops in February 1865. Three years after that, delegates met in Charleston to write a new state constitution in a world where slavery was abolished and formerly enslaved men were organizing to hold office. The Route This self-guided walking tour of Charleston runs the length of the historic peninsula. Marquee stops include: Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center, Liberty Square — the harbor geography that made Charleston rich and then made it a military problemInstitute Hall, Meeting Street — the building is gone, but this is where the secession convention, moved from Columbia, signed the Ordinance on December 20, 1860Hibernian Hall — headquarters for Stephen A. Douglas's supporters at the 1860 Democratic National Convention, the split that helped break the party apartOld Citadel at Marion Square — the State Arsenal here grew out of the panic that followed the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy crisisSt. Michael's Church — a steeple visible from the harbor, and a shell scar from the Union batteries on Morris IslandOld Slave Mart, Chalmers Street — the wartime slave trade, still legal, still operatingCharleston Work House — the municipal building enslavers paid to confine and punish enslaved people, now gone, reconstructed from its markerO'Connor House — where Confederate authorities held captured Union officers while long-range shells fell on the same neighborhoodCourtenay Square — the Great Fire of December 11 and 12, 1861, driven across the peninsula by high winds while the war was still newNortheastern Railroad Depot, Chapel Street — the depot that burned during the 1865 evacuation; the masonry you see is laterCity Hall — where municipal control changed hands in February 1865White Point Garden and the Battery — the harbor read as a military map of forts, channels, obstructions and naval experiments You'll Learn About… How Robert Smalls used what slavery had taught him about Charleston Harbor, its channels and its signals, from his work aboard the Confederate steamer Planter , and why the harbor became an escape landscape with United States ships visible just beyond Confederate water.Why Confederate forces built a hand-cranked submarine, the H.L. Hunley, and how that decision followed directly from a navy that could not match United States warships ship for ship.How rifled cannon on Morris Island in 1863 put streets that had felt safely behind the harbor forts within range of guns miles away, and what the Swamp Angel battery did to daily life in the city.Who Moses Cohen Mordecai was: a prominent Charleston merchant who did not enter the secession crisis as an immediate disunionist, a fact that complicates the story of a uniformly eager city.What Confederate payrolls record about the enslaved Black men impressed from private enslavers to build and maintain the harbor defenses, including Jacob Stroyer, pulled into that labor system as a teenager.What Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote from the Mills House on the night of April 11, 1861, and what Augustine Thomas Smythe saw at twenty-one through a telescope from the steeple of St. Michael's in the spring of 1864.How Mary Amarinthia Yates Snowden's Charleston property connects to wartime nursing that happened in churches, private homes and temporary wards as often as in formal hospitals. Who It's For This flagship tour guides first-time visitors through Charleston's key Civil War events and locations. You'll get the political crisis, the siege, the labor that built the defenses, the people who freed themselves, and the Reconstruction government that followed, in the places where each of those things happened. Readers of Civil War history will find people and buildings they have not met; anyone new to the subject will leave with the sequence and the stakes clear. Practical Details Eighteen stops spread along the Charleston peninsula, roughly two to three hours of walking if you take it straight through, longer if you stop for Fort Sumter or the Charleston Museum's City Under Siege gallery. Start at the Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center at Liberty Square for the harbor orientation, or begin anywhere: the stops have no required order, and audio for each plays when you arrive. Fifteen more audio chapters cover the wider war and first-hand accounts, and you can listen to those anywhere, including before you go. Take the Tour Download the app to explore the Civil War Charleston self-guided audio tour at your own pace.
