Supplemental Information: Hurricane of 1752
Excerpt from: Hurricanes: Ohio Weather Library. South Carolina’s Great Hurricane of 1752
http://www.hurricanes.owlinc.org/
During the evening of September 14, 1752, the outer edges of a fairly small but vigorous
hurricane began hitting Charleston, South Carolina. Strong northeast winds blew all that night
but began to increase in strength rapidly beginning at about 4:00 a.m. of the 15th. At 9:00 that
morning, the storm surge barreled in, and in just two hours every ship in the harbor except one
had been driven ashore. All wharves and bridges together with all buildings on them were
destroyed. Water rose ten feet above high tide and inundated parts of the city carrying wrecks
of houses, boats and many other articles with it. Many people would have drowned had not the
wind suddenly switched to east-southeast, south and southwest at 11:10 causing the water to
fall 5 feet in 10 minutes. As it was, a number of people did drown, though the exact number
cannot be ascertained.
Destruction was widespread throughout Charleston and the area around the city. Many of the
plantations in that area lost entire stands of their finest trees with just one plantation owner
alone estimating his tree loss at about $50,000. Chimneys were downed; two story houses
were reduced to one story or were demolished. Houses with slate and tile roofs had their
roofing torn off, but those houses right on the bay were entirely unroofed. Water ran two feet
deep in some streets after the storm.
Excerpts from: Hurricane Season in the Colonies. Harvard Business Review: 6/20/2005 by
Matthew Mulcahy http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4862.html
“Hurricane season overlapped with the actual harvest season for rice. As Henry Laurens [a
wealthy South Carolina planter and merchant] indicated, the storms routinely flooded rice
fields, often ruining the year's crop. "Ye violence of the rain and wind" accompanying a 1724
hurricane resulted in flooding that "damnified some of the Indian corn and rice" in South
Carolina. Henry Laurens reported, "The ripe Crops of Rice have suffer'd very much all along the
Sea Coast" from a 1769 hurricane. "Rotten rice, ded Hogs, Calves poultry, rats & Insects, are
enough to make a well man sick," one Georgia overseer wrote following a hurricane in the early
nineteenth century. The Charleston merchant John Guerard noted that what little rice survived
the September 1752 hurricanes proved almost worthless. "A great deal pounding away to
powder," Guerard wrote of the rice, "wch is a natural consequence by its being so long weather
beaten & lying in the water wch to be sure softened the grain and causes it to moulder away
under the force of the Pestle."7”
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“In addition, hurricanes routinely claimed the lives of African slaves whose labor generated the
wealth of the colonies. Many slaves died during the storms, crushed beneath falling buildings or
drowned in rising floodwaters. Others perished in the weeks following the storms due to a lack
of adequate food and shelter or to disease associated with such shortages. Following the 1772
hurricane in the Leeward Islands, a British military officer reported to London that "we are in
sad distress for want of Negro provision." An October 1780 hurricane in Jamaica claimed the
lives of hundreds of slaves in the western parishes of Hanover and Westmoreland. The Kingston
Gazette reported that two hundred slaves died on the Blue Castle plantation when a boiling
house in which they sought shelter collapsed. One planter stated that a "very considerable
quantity of provisions" was destroyed during the storm, and combined with sickness linked to
those shortages, "he . . . lost eight valuable slaves." There are no exact statistics of the number of
slaves who perished during hurricanes, but it is clear that the storms, and their lingering
effects, often killed dozens of slaves, sometimes hundreds, and occasionally thousands of slaves
on plantations throughout the Greater Caribbean.9”
“Hurricanes also affected rice production in South Carolina. The 1724 storm contributed to a
drop in exports of over one and a half million pounds of rice (from roughly 8.6 million to 7
million pounds). The impact from two successive hurricanes in the fall of 1752 was particularly
severe. The number of barrels of rice shipped from the colony dropped from over 82,000
barrels in 1752 to just over 37,000 barrels in 1753. Production jumped up again to 93,000
barrels in 1754.12”
“The loss of valuable crops to hurricanes often had important short-term consequences for the
supply and price of sugar and rice in the British Atlantic marketplace, depending on the extent
of damage to individual colonies and the number of colonies struck during any given year. "I
think there never was a fairer Chance for a good Price for our Sugars all this year," wrote Dr.
Walter Tullideph, a Scottish planter in Antigua, following a destructive hurricane in 1751. This
was especially true, he continued, "if Jamaica should have suffered much in the Storm," further
reducing sugar supplies. Tullideph's instinct proved correct: London prices jumped as news of
the hurricane spread and ships from the colonies arrived less than full. South Carolina planters
"talk[ed] in a high Strain" of getting eighty shillings per hundredweight of rice after the 1752
hurricane destroyed that year's crop, and prices in Charlton rose to some of their highest levels
in the eighteenth century.14”
“The potential disruption from a hurricane and its effects on prices meant that correspondents
in England anxiously awaited word from the colonies each fall. The London sugar market
fluctuated widely upon news of a hurricane in the Leeward Islands or Jamaica (the largest
producers of muscovado sugar), often producing a sudden rise of between two and ten shillings
per hundredweight, and timely information could mean significant profits for merchants selling
sugar to metropolitan grocers and refiners. The same was true for the rice market (much of
which was reexported). John Guerard wrote of one merchant house that received early news of
the 1752 South Carolina storm and immediately sent out a rider to London, ahead of the regular
post. The rider beat the post by three hours, and the merchants purchased 1,800 barrels of rice
for export to Europe at a low price before news of the storm sent prices skyrocketing.
Conversely, another merchant house sold off sugars they had stored, hoping to make some
profit before a fleet loaded with sugar from the Leewards arrived in the London market. The
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ships docked in March 1745, bringing news of a major hurricane in Jamaica. Sugar prices, in
turn, surged upward ....15”
7. Governor Nicholson to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 Aug. 1724, CSPC, 214; Laurens to Henry Bright & Co., 21 Sept.
1769, Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 6, p. 140; Roswell King, quoted in Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe," 138;
John Guerard to William Jolliffe, 29 Dec. 1752, Guerard Letterbook, SCHS; Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit, 241–42.
9. D. Walsh to James Scott, 18 Sept. 1772, in Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History,
Geography, Topography and Antiquities of the British West Indies, ed. Vere Langford Oliver (London, 1910), vol. 2,
pp. 322–23; Kingston Gazette, in John Fowler, General Account of the Calamities Occasioned by the Late Tremendous
Hurricanes and Earthquakes in the West-India Islands (London, 1781), 17; Petition of John Archer, Assembly
Minutes, 12 Nov. 1782, Journal of the Assembly of Jamaica (Jamaica, 1802), vol. 7, p. 493.
10. Gov. Sir Jonathan Atkins to Sec. Sir Joseph Williamson, 13 Oct. 1675, CSPC, 294–95; James Knight, "The Natural,
Morall, and Political History of Jamaica," vol. 1, p. 198, Additional Manuscripts 12418, British Library; David
Ludlum, Early American Hurricanes, 1492–1870 (Boston, 1963), 43–44; South Carolina Gazette, 19 Sept. 1752;
Guerard to Thomas Rock, 12 Dec. 1752, Guerard Letterbook, SCHS; Minutes of the Vestry of St. Michaels, 30 Mar.
1781, Barbados Archives, Black Rock; Weekly Jamaica Courant, 12 Sept. 1722, in Colonial Office Records [hereafter
CO] 137/14/175–77.
11. Export figures are from John McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of
Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies (New York, 1989), 905–19; Governor Trelawny to the Duke of
Newcastle, 4 Nov. 1744, CO 137/57/229. The account of sugar imported to England is found in Proceedings of the
Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica on the Sugar and Slave Trade (St. Jago de Vega, 1792), Appendix I. These
numbers show a decline of over 300,000 cwt., but they are aggregate figures for all the colonies and thus fail to
capture the impact of Jamaica and Barbados specifically. For Barbados rum exports, see "Account of Rum Exported
from the Port of Bridgetown, Dec. 1784," CO 28/60/181.
12. Historical Statistics of the United States, from Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), vol. 2, 1192; see
also R. C. Nash, "Trade and Business in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina: The Career of John Guerard, Merchant
and Planter," South Carolina Historical Magazine 96 (1995): 6–29.
14. Quoted in Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 439. On London sugar prices in response to the event, see Richard
Pares, "The London Sugar Market, 1740–1769," Economic History Review 9 (1956): 254–70, esp. 266; John Guerard
to Thomas Rock, 6 Nov. 1752, Guerard Letterbook, SCHS. For rice prices, see Peter Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream:
Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry,1670–1920 (New York, 1989), 106.
15. John Guerard to Thomas Rock, 3 Feb. 1753, Guerard Letterbook, SCHS; Pares, "The London Sugar Market,
1740–1769," 264.
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Excerpts from Common Place vol 3 no4 July 2003 Special Issue Early Cities of the Americas Mean
Streets Mannered Streets: Charleston by David S. Shields http://www.common-place.org/vol03/no-04/charleston/
The lack of paving on Charleston’s streets during the eighteenth century was one of the more
remarkable characteristics of the cityscape. Timothy Ford, when moving from Philadelphia to
Charleston late in the century, found the quiet of the city uncanny. The usual sound of urban
America–the rattle of carriage wheels on paving stones and cobbles–was missing. Pelatiah
Webster in 1765 wrote, "The streets of this city run N. and S. and E. and W., intersecting each
other at right angles; they are not paved except the footways within the post, abt 6 feet wide,
which are paved with brick in the principle streets." Captain Martin, caricaturing Charleston in
a contemporary verse, noted,
Houses built on barren land
No lamps or lights, but streets of sand
Pleasant walks if you can find ’em
Scandalous tongues, if any mind ’em.
Why didn’t Charleston pave its streets until 1800? Because sand could be cleaned easily and it
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drained water quickly. Charleston is cursed with water. Paving slows its evacuation. The
downside to unpaved streets? When sand was saturated, vehicles with narrow wheels would
mire. Carters forced Charleston’s newly impaneled municipal government in the wake of
Revolution to pave the streets that served commerce.
Sand streets drained easily and cleaned up easily. Commissioners using labor from the jails
(often drunken sailors rounded up from one of two notorious alehouses in the city) scoured the
streets periodically. In addition to regular flooding from rains and freak tides, the city
experienced numbers of disasters requiring the clearing of the public ways: hurricanes in 1700,
1713, 1728, 1752, and 1804; major fires in 1740, 1776, and 1796. The damage done at these
times could be extraordinary.
The South Carolina Gazette, September 13, 1752, "The hurricane of 1752":
All the wharfs and bridges were ruined, and every house, store, &c. upon them, beaten down,
and carried away (with all the goods, &c. therein), as were also many houses in the town; and
abundance of roofs, chimneys, &c almost all the tiled or slated houses, were uncovered; and
great quantities of merchandize, &c in the stores on the Bay-street, damaged, by their doors
being burst open: The town was likewise overflowed, the tide or sea having rose upwards of
Ten feet above the high-water mark at spring tides, and nothing was now to be seen but ruins
of houses, canows, wreck of pittaguas and boats, masts, yards, incredible quantities of all sorts
of timber, barrels, staves, shingles, household and other goods, floating and drive, with great
violence, thro the streets, and round about the town.
The Greatest Street in the City: Bay Street, which ran above the Cooper River wall, was the
commercial heart of the city. Shortly before the 1752 hurricane, Governor Glen made an
estimate of the wealth of Carolina for White Hall. In it he detailed only one street in the colony,
The Bay. He supplied a full register of its properties including occupations of the tenants and
rental values of every building. There were one hundred lots. Forty-nine were designated
"merchants," six were taverns, two lodgings, one dram shop. There were seventeen vacant lots.
Three properties were occupied by widows, one of whom was designated a "lady." A barber, a
milliner, a dancing school, a druggist, two goldsmiths, a physician, three attorneys, the customs
collectors’ clerk, two ship carpenters, a blacksmith, and a bricklayer made up the rest of the
street. There were two warehouses. Four properties were simply designed by the owners’
names. The annual rental revenue was estimated to be £32,624, with the eastern half of the
street (the portion that now makes up Rainbow Row) valued substantially higher on average
than the western half of the street. Merchants accounted for £21,450 of the rent on The Bay.
Governor Glen did not include any calculation of the value of the wharves and dock projecting
waterward from The Bay. These were crowded with one-story crane houses maintained by the
merchants, also privies, used by everyone. In the dead center of The Bay was Half Moon
Battery, surmounted by the custom’s office, the most public place in town, where visiting ships
presented documentation, where pirates were hung, where official proclamations from London
and from the Carolina legislature were posted.
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