A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  In 1776, defending Charleston was of no small import. Not only was it America’s fourth-largest city, but it was also the gateway to South Carolina, the British Crown’s richest North American possession. Not surprisingly, in the wake of their rude ejection from Boston early that spring, Great Britain’s military leaders turned their attention south.

  On June 2, 1776, British warships gathered off Sullivan’s Island. From on board his flagship HMS Bristol, Sir Peter Parker commanded a flotilla of twenty warships and troop transports. Nearly 3,000 redcoats and Royal Marines accompanied the expedition under the command of Sir Henry Clinton. In all, it was a formidable expeditionary force, defied only by a half-completed fort on Sullivan’s Island commanded by Colonel William Moultrie.

  Moultrie was a forty-six-year-old native of Charleston. He served ably in the colony’s 1761 expedition against the Cherokees, earning military experience that served him well in the coming years. Although a moderate, he supported revolution and was elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774. Later, in 1775, he was commissioned as a colonel in the Second South Carolina Regiment and, at the outbreak of the Revolution, was the second-in- command of Charleston’s defenses. Fortifying Sullivan’s Island was Moultrie’s responsibility.

  Moultrie’s assignment proved a formidable task. Constructing a fort was the first logical defensive step. The stone necessary for a fort, however, was a scarce commodity on Sullivan’s Island. Undeterred, the resourceful Moultrie made do with the resources on hand— namely, palmetto trees and sand. Using palmetto logs, he built two parallel walls sixteen feet apart and filled the gap with sand. By the time the British fleet appeared, only the south and east walls were complete, leaving what was christened Fort Sullivan little more than an L-shaped fortification with a paltry twenty-six cannons.

  Two days later, Major General Charles Lee, appointed by George Washington to command the Continental Army’s Southern Department, arrived on the scene. Surveying the British warships gathered offshore and the incomplete status of the fort, Lee ordered Fort Sullivan abandoned. But South Carolina’s governor, John Rutledge, was determined to defend Charleston. He overruled Lee and ordered Moultrie to stand by his post.

  Moultrie needed little further encouragement, and now committed to the defense of the island, the 425 men under his command redoubled their efforts. With pick and shovel, they labored under the watchful eye of such officers as Francis Marion, who would later gain renown as the fabled “Swamp Fox,” and Thomas Sumter, who, for his part, would later lend his name to another famous fort. Another group, under the command of William Thomson, threw up makeshift fortifications on the northeastern side of the island to face the narrow strait of water that separated it from nearby Long Island.

  Undeterred, Clinton landed his redcoats on Long Island, whence they hoped to ford the strait between the two islands and flank the colonists’ defenses from the northeast. In the meantime, Sir Parker dispatched three of his warships, including the twenty-eight-gun HMS Acteon, on a flanking run around Sullivan Island’s western side. Once behind the island, the ships could fire into the unprotected rear of the fort.

  There is an old military proverb, however, that declares that few military plans survive their first contact with the enemy. That axiom certainly proved true when the British launched their attack on June 28. Acteon and the other British ships ran aground in the treacherous shallow water when they attempted to slip around to Fort Sullivan’s rear. Two of His Majesty’s ships managed to free themselves and escape to open water; Acteon, however, was abandoned and partially scuttled by its embarrassed skipper.

  As the Royal Navy’s attack floundered, the British assault from Long Island failed as well. Foiled by shoulder-deep water, treacherous tides, and Thomson’s steady marksmen behind their own makeshift fortifications, the redcoats beat a waterlogged retreat. The pair of repulses left Parker with little choice but to slug it out directly with Moutrie’s gunners inside Fort Sullivan.

  For ten hours, the Royal Navy’s guns barked and flashed, hurling shell after shell over the white-capped surf to smash into Moultrie’s fort. The fort’s palmetto-log walls, however, proved remarkably resilient. In fact, some cannonballs simply bounced off the spongy palmetto logs. Even when hit more forcefully, the logs simply absorbed the impact without shattering into deadly splinters.

  Nevertheless, the British gunfire took its toll. At one point, a shell knocked down the garrison’s flagpole. The colony’s flag—a blue banner sporting a white crescent—fluttered ignominiously to the ground. In Charleston, where the city’s citizens watched the battle through telescopes and spyglasses, a collective groan met the sight. Groans soon turned to cheers, however, when Sergeant William Jasper sprang into action.

  “Colonel, don’t let us fight without our flag!” Jasper reportedly shouted. Clambering to the fort’s rude ramparts, he jumped outside the fort’s walls and, under heavy British fire, cut the flag from its fallen pole. He then climbed back inside the fort, fastened the banner to an artillerist’s sponge-staff, and planted the makeshift flagpole defiantly back atop the fort.

  Suitably inspired, Moultrie’s outnumbered gunners continued to trade shots with the ships offshore. As the afternoon wore on, their gunfire began to take its toll on the fort’s attackers. An American cannonball crashed into Bristol, wounding Lord William Campbell, the colony’s ousted royal governor, with a jagged splinter in his side from which he never recovered. Another splinter slashed across the back of Parker’s breeches, exposing his backside to an amused crew.

  By 9:30 that evening, the wounded Parker had had enough. Leaning on a pair of sailors for support, he ordered his crews to cease firing and, shortly before midnight, slipped away into the Atlantic darkness. Behind him, he left Charleston safe and Acteon ablaze, abandoned to the victorious colonists. British military historian Sir John Fortescue admitted ruefully that the defense of Charleston was an accomplishment on which the rebels “might justly plume themselves on their success.”

  Observing the scene from Charleston, the more poetic of the colonial observers claimed that the smoke rising from the burning Acteon looked like a giant palmetto palm. Such symbolism soon worked its way onto South Carolina’s flag, where a palmetto tree joined the white crescent to represent the Carolinians’ defiance.

  Unfortunately, Charleston did not fare as well four years later when the British returned. After a two-month siege, the city, along with Fort Moultrie, fell to British control, under which it remained until the end of the Revolution. The fall of Charleston in 1780 gave all the more reason to remember the happier outcome of its earlier fight for freedom.

  The brave Sergeant Jasper fared equally poorly. In 1779, his regiment joined a combined band of Continental, French, and free Haitian forces that tried unsuccessfully to recapture Savannah from the British. In one of the final assaults on the fortified defenses, Jasper went to the aid of his regiment’s fallen banner. That time, however, he paid for his heroism with his life.

  Generations later, an outpouring of design suggestions for South Carolina’s state quarter reflected the love that later generations of South Carolinians shared with Jasper for their native state. Winnowing the slate of suggestions to five, South Carolina submitted the semifinalists to the Citizens Commemorative Coin Advisory Committee and the Fine Arts Commission. The committee and commission, in turn, narrowed these five semifinalist design concepts down to three choices for Governor Jim Hodges’s consideration.

  In the end, Governor Hodges selected the design that graces the quarters today. At its launch ceremony on May 26, 2000, he declared, “These state emblems symbolize what is best about South Carolina. The Palmetto tree represents our strength. The song of the Carolina wren symbolizes the hospitality of our people. And the Yellow Jes-samine flower is part of the vast natural beauty of our state.”

  9

  NEW HAMPSHIRE

  Rock . . . and Roll

  In the whole of the 50 State Quarters® Program, it is difficult to
find a more bitter piece of irony than New Hampshire’s decision to depict the fabled Old Man of the Mountain on the reverse of its state quarter. Within three years of the Granite State’s commemoration of the distinctive rock formation on its coin in 2000, the Old Man was little more than a pile of granite rubble.

  Its ultimate fate aside, it is difficult to fault New Hampshire’s choice for its state quarter. A surveying crew, working the mountainous region of Franconia Notch, discovered what was soon christened the “Old Man of the Mountain” on Mount Cannon in 1805. In doing so, they became the first—other than the region’s Native Americans, of course—to marvel at its craggy visage.

  Upon scaling Mount Cannon, the surveyors were able to inspect the formation even more closely. They determined that it consisted of five separate ledges of Conway red granite, approximately forty feet high and twenty feet wide, formed in such a way to create the appearance of a man’s face if viewed from the side. Geographers would later surmise that the layers of granite were formed by the melting and subsequent movement of an ice sheet that covered the Franconia Mountains at the end of its last glacial period, a time they dated as 2,000 to 10,000 years earlier.

  Famed New Hampshire son Daniel Webster offered a more poetic and philosophical explanation of the remarkable rock formation. Reflecting on the Old Man of the Mountain, Webster offered a signature piece of prose. “Men,” he said, “hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”

  In 1905, 100 years after the rock formation’s discovery, a sharp-eyed clergyman named Guy Roberts recognized that trouble loomed for the Old Man. The Old Man’s forehead, it seemed, was slipping down and toward the valley below. After several years of puzzling over the problem, a series of turnbuckles—large cable devices used in quarries to secure rocks—were installed in 1916 to stabilize the formation. Initially, the tactic proved very successful, and years passed without any measurable movement being detected.

  Meanwhile, New Hampshire established Franconia Notch as a state park in 1928 and, in 1945, elected to make the Old Man of the Mountain the official state emblem. Within a decade, however, the state realized that its emblem was deteriorating and that, in particular, a crack at the top of the head was widening. In 1958, repair work and preventative maintenance on the Old Man included the installation of four new turnbuckles, the waterproofing of the crack, and the digging of a drainage ditch to divert water away from the top of the formation.

  In 1960, not only did annual inspections of the Old Man of the Mountain begin, but Niels F. F. Nielsen, Jr., an employee of the state’s highway department, became the Old Man’s official caretaker. In later years his son, David, assumed that role, and between the two of them, they maintained a careful watch on the Old Man’s rocky profile, repairing and securing it as necessary, often going over the edge of the formation in carefully rigged boatswain’s chairs. The elder Nielsen paid his last visit to the Old Man in 1989; he passed away in 2001. Quite appropriately, Nielsen’s son, David, and his wife, Deborah, managed to bury some of Nielsen’s ashes in the Old Man’s left eye.

  By then, no doubt to Nielsen’s satisfaction, the Old Man to whom he had devoted so many years of work was already gracing the reverse of roughly 1.169 billion quarters around the country. New Hampshire’s Commemorative Quarter Committee—convened by Governor Jeanne Shaheen and consisting of representatives of the state’s Department of Cultural Affairs, art educators, numismatists, historical society members, politicians, and private citizens—had selected a design concept for the state quarter following a statewide contest for the same.

  The winning quarter design provided a left profile of the Old Man; the state motto, “Live Free or Die”; and a collection of nine stars, signifying that New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. It trumped such other iconic images of New Hampshire as a colonial-era meeting house and a covered bridge.

  “The New Hampshire quarter is a fitting tribute to our state’s beauty and history,” Governor Shaheen said at the quarter’s launch ceremony on August 7, 2000. “The Old Man of the Mountain is one of New Hampshire’s most recognized and beloved images. Our state motto, ‘Live Free or Die,’ epitomizes our state’s proud tradition of freedom and independence. The New Hampshire quarter will give the rest of the nation a sense of New Hampshire’s natural beauty, its rich history, and the character of our people.”

  Less than three years later, however, disaster struck. On the morning of May 3, 2003, a pair of state park employees looked up to misty Mount Cannon and realized that the iconic rock formation had collapsed.

  “The Old Man of the Mountain, the enduring symbol of the state of New Hampshire, is no more,” said the New Hampshire Division of Parks and Recreation. “The weather has been extremely harsh in Franconia Notch over the last few days. High winds, fog, and heavy rain, along with freezing temperatures overnight, may all have contributed to the collapse, although no official cause can be determined until a full inspection of the site takes place.”

  In the end, therefore, the motto “Live Free or Die” may prove to be more enduring than the massive chunk of granite that formed the Old Man. For that phrase, the residents of New Hampshire can thank General John Stark, a native son and one of Washington’s most capable officers. Stark fought at such early battles as Bunker Hill and Trenton. Later, in 1777, he led the successful defense of Benning-ton, Vermont, an important engagement that denied the British much-needed supplies and helped contribute to their defeat at Saratoga latter that summer.

  Stark survived the Revolution to become one of the Continental Army’s last surviving generals. In 1809, approaching the age of seventy-nine and too old to travel, he sent a stirring toast to his old comrades gathering to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Bennington: “Live free or die,” Stark declared. “Death is not the worst of evils.”

  Stark’s words became part of New Hampshire’s historic lore, and in 1945, New Hampshire adopted them as the state motto. In 1969, the state emblazoned the motto on its license plates. But even such noble rhetoric can prove vulnerable—as an ensuing legal battle demonstrated.

  In the winter of 1974 to 1975, a Jehovah’s Witness, George Maynard, was arrested three times—and even jailed—for repeatedly concealing the phrase on his own license plate. “I refuse to be coerced by the State into advertising a slogan which I find morally, ethically, religiously and politically abhorrent,” he stated.

  Appealing to the local federal district court, Maynard argued that, ironically, New Hampshire was violating his First Amendment right to free speech. The district court agreed, which sparked New Hampshire to appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  In Washington, D.C., a six-justice majority of the Court agreed, holding that New Hampshire could not constitutionally require an individual such as Maynard to participate in the dissemination of an ideological message by displaying it on his private property. “The First Amendment protects the right of individuals to hold a point of view different from the majority and to refuse to foster, in the way New Hampshire commands, an idea they find morally objectionable,” the majority wrote.

  And so, in the end, New Hampshire’s state quarter leaves us with a simple moral: Even granite rock can be rolled by the weather, and even a Revolutionary War hero can be foiled by a majority of the Supreme Court.

  10

  VIRGINIA

  The Other Three Ships

  In the pantheon of historic sailing ships, the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria roll readily off the tongues of American school children. Three other ships—specifically, the Discovery, Susan Constant, and Godspeed— deserve similar respect, but they will have to settle for being featured on the reverse of Virginia’s state quarter. That coin honors them for delivering the first colonists to Jamestown, a colonial settlement whose quadri
centennial Virginia celebrated in 2007.

  It is entirely fitting to commemorate Jamestown on currency. At its heart, the colony was simply a calculated commercial endeavor. As historian David Price noted pithily in his book Love and Hate in Jamestown:John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation, “English America was a corporation before it was a country.” In 1606, the British Crown granted letters of patent to The Society of Adventurers to establish a pair of settlements in North America. The society formed two joint stock companies—the Virginia Company of Plymouth and the Virginia Company of London—and sold shares in their companies at approximately $2,750 per share at modern exchange rates. The Society of Adventurers was, in short, venture capitalism in the truest sense of the phrase.

  Eager to recoup such investments, the Virginia Company of London cobbled together an expedition of 105 settlers. According to a contemporary account, some of those men seemed to be the stuff of a successful colony. The group included a mason, several laborers, carpenters, bricklayers, a fisherman, a pair of surgeons, a preacher, a barber, and even a drummer. Several soldiers joined them as well, among them Captain John Smith, a lowly farmer’s son who had carved out hard-won experience fighting in the Netherlands against the Spanish and later as a mercenary battling the Turks in Hungary. Smith was a competent and energetic officer, well-equipped because of his experiences on Europe’s distant battlefields for the challenges and rigors of a new frontier.

  Far too many of the colonists, however, simply listed their occupation as “gentleman.” They were idle dandies who, in the words of one contemporary chronicler, “daily vexed their fathers’ hearts at home.” Shockingly unprepared for life on a distant frontier and hostile shore, their hearts burned with the delusional hope of discovering gold for the easy taking on North America’s shores. For leadership, these men looked initially to Edward-Maria Wingfield, a well-born lawyer, military officer, and charter member of the Virginia Company, for leadership. Despite that pedigree, Wingfield lasted less than a year in the New World. Nevertheless, he would count himself as among the fortunate ones. He lived to see England once again. The vast majority of the men who sailed with him would not.