Names, Not Numbers

Abstract

H WAVING been born in Charleston, South Carolina, in I922, I have had a sense of history from the beginning of my life. The names of places and persons were redolent of Carolina history. I lived on Tradd Street and attended Crafts School. I often played on a block bounded by Ashley, Wentworth, Rutledge, and Beaufrain streets. Sailing in Charleston Harbor, one was surrounded by Fort Johnson, Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and Fort Sumter. At school Miss Washington Greene Pringle was a teacher, better known to us as Washy. Our sixth-grade history teacher often promised to read from historical novels if we did our work quickly and well. She read Rafael Sabatini's The Carolinians and Herbert Ravenel Sass's Look Back to Glory, and later I read for my own enjoyment Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. At the Charleston Boys High School I won the DAR prize for an essay on Francis Marion. Thus was I corrupted. The Episcopal church with its Book of Common Prayer and its hymns was a great influence. Most of my childhood friends were members of one or another of the many Episcopal churches in Charleston. George W. Williams, who has written a fine history of St. Michael's Church and is a well-known Shakespeare scholar, was instrumental in forming the Dalcho Historical Society, for which I wrote my first professional effort, Church and State in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (I 9 5 9). At the College of Charleston I majored in history and English, studying the former under the direction of J. Harold Easterby, who was teacher, advisor, and friend. With the growing involvement of the United States in the war in Europe, I decided to study physics and higher mathematics, which was a fortunate decision inasmuch as I was the only male student at my college who could qualify when the United States Air Force announced its program in meteorology. In March I943 I entered the service and studied for six months at the University of North Carolina and for nine months at the University of Chicago, where in June I944 I received my certificate from the Institute of Meteorology as well as my commission as a second lieutenant in the air force. This meteorological training helped me to conceptualize eighteenth-century trade patterns. The Bermuda High pressure system dominated the Carolina climate and dictated the ocean paths in the age of sail. The opening pages of my Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (i 969) reflect this conceptualization. The sense of history was so embedded in my makeup that when I had a choice of air bases I chose first the Walterboro Air Force Base in South Carolina, just forty-five miles from Charleston in the center of Colleton