The South Carolina state flag
Why is South Carolina called the Palmetto State? The palmetto tree shows up on the state flag, on the state seal, and it is also, no surprise, the state tree. A nice tree, as trees go, the palmetto grows to around fifty feet, has an extremely resilient trunk that can withstand hurricane winds, its leaves are favorites at Palm Sunday celebrations, and they look great on South Carolinian beaches. But why does it rate so with the South Carolinians? Surprisingly, the answer reveals not only its importance to South Carolina but to the entire American nation as well.
In the spring of 1776 South Carolina was one of thirteen British colonies fighting for their independence. The British army had been holed up in Boston all winter, and now British General Henry Clinton brought his campaign against the southern colonies in order to establish a secure base for his operations. He chose the important port city of Charleston, South Carolina, as his first and most crucial point of attack.
In March Colonel William Moultrie, second-in-command of defense at Charleston, was assigned the responsibility of overseeing the construction of Fort Sullivan on Sullivan’s Island for the defense of Charleston harbor. With no stones available, Moultrie ordered double walls to be made of palmetto logs with sand filling the fifteen-foot gap in between the parallel walls.
Sir Peter Parker’s Attack against Fort Moultrie
By the time the British arrived, only the south and east walls had been completed. When Major General Charles Lee inspected the fort, he condemned it, warning Moultrie the guns of the British warships would knock his fort down around his ears. Moultrie, a fiery Scot, replied that he would defend her then from the rubble. Governor John Rutledge overruled Lee, and Moultrie continued to prepare both his men and the fort for battle. Preparations included raising a flag designed by Moultrie: on a field of dark blue, a white crescent in the upper left corner and the single word “liberty” across the bottom. It was the first flag flown in the South that represented the colonies’ united stand against tyranny.
The morning of June 28, 1776, Commodore Peter Parker of the Royal Navy, which had gone undefeated for many years, led ten warships into battle array below the tip of Sullivan’s Island. Three hundred cannon, as well as British sharpshooters poised in the ships’ masts, began to unload on Fort Sullivan at precisely 11:00—and kept it up all day long. Moultrie later wrote in his memoirs that it was “one continual blaze and roar; and clouds of smoke curling over . . . for hours together.”
Despite such a bombardment, the fort held. Instead of splintering or shattering as traditional walls might have done, Moultrie’s soft palmetto-log walls, reinforced by the sand, absorbed the force of the cannonballs like a sponge. With steely patience and precision Moultrie returned fire with his thirty cannon, using red-hot cannonballs to ignite the wooden decks of the ship.
In the middle of the battle, a British cannonball ripped through the mast bearing Moultrie’s flag, and the banner fell to the ground. Without hesitation, Sergeant William Jasper ran outside the fort, directly into the barrage of bullets and cannonballs, yelling, “We cannot fight without a flag!” He secured the flag to the fort’s walls once again and returned to the fight.
By nightfall an injured Parker had had enough. Three of his ships had run aground, the rest were severely damaged, and British casualties amounted to 220 compared to the defenders’ thirty-seven. When their ships had been repaired, the fleet sailed for New York, and Clinton abandoned all thought of a southern campaign.
Fort Moultrie today
Moultrie, on the other hand, became a national hero overnight, as did the flag-retrieving Jasper, and the fort itself was renamed Fort Moultrie. Many of the colonists who had remained loyal to the crown now declared themselves for the Revolution. The timing of the victory could not have been better: less than a week later a confident Continental Congress voted to declare formal independence from Britain.
The rest of the country might have forgotten the hardy palmetto but not South Carolina. In 1777 the state included the tree in her state seal, and when South Carolina seceded from the union almost a century later in 1861, officials added the image of a palmetto to Moultrie’s battle flag to create the sovereign state’s new banner, recalling the victorious defense the tree had provided at the birth of another Republic. That same flag flies for the state of South Carolina today.
