Marion Square

The crenellated building of the Old Citadel stands at the north edge of the lawn; it is now a hotel, and once belonged to the military college. The open field in front of it was left undeveloped, paths were laid across it, and the center was again set aside for a parade ground of red clay. The square was later named for a general of the American Revolution, although he had no connection with this place.

The broad lawn in the center of Marion Square is preserved as a parade ground. As early as eighteen thirty-three, the city council handed this land over to officers of the local militia on one condition: there must forever remain a place here for drill formations and a public promenade. Farmers' markets, festivals, and city ceremonies are now held on the lawn, but the old condition remains in force.

The townspeople made especially literal use of their right to this space in the spring of eighteen sixty-five. It was then called Citadel Green—the parade ground in front of The Citadel military college. On February eighteenth, the Confederates left Charleston, federal soldiers occupied the college, and the freedom proclaimed for the enslaved residents two years earlier finally became an enforceable fact.

A month later, Black elders from the Zion and Bethel Methodist congregations organized a procession of freed people here. Permission was granted about a day before the gathering. On March twenty-first, thousands of men, women, and children came to the parade ground. Mounted marshals and the 21st United States Colored Infantry—Black soldiers of the federal army—led the way. About eighteen hundred schoolchildren followed them. Almost none of these children had attended school before, and not a single one had taken part in a public procession.

The townspeople also displayed what they now intended to make their living from. Fishermen, carpenters, masons, coopers, bakers, barbers, and blacksmiths carried their tools. Then came a wagon with an auction block. A man with a bell portrayed a slave trader; he himself had previously been bought and sold several times. Two women and a child on the block had in fact passed through auctions in Charleston. They were followed by sixty men tied together with one rope, like groups of people once driven from here to be sold. Every one of them had at some time been sold.

Behind the wagon came a hearse bearing the inscription “Slavery Is Dead,” while fifty women portrayed a funeral procession. The procession traveled along the central streets and returned to Citadel Green. Before it, people in the city had voiced fears that such a large gathering of freed people would end in disorder. The participants dispersed peacefully after returning. From January first of the following year, Black residents began observing Emancipation Day in Charleston every year, and this parade ground remained for a long time one of the main gathering places.

The name Marion Square came later. In the fall of eighteen eighty-two, Mayor William Courtney sought to have the neglected parade ground cleared and placed under the joint management of the city and the militia. The committee decided that the public park needed a historical name acceptable to the townspeople and proposed the name of Francis Marion.

Marion was a brigadier general during the American Revolution. After the British captured Charleston in seventeen eighty, he assembled small detachments of militiamen and attacked British supply and communications lines in the lowlands of South Carolina. He had no connection to this square, and the committee report did not explain the reason for the choice in greater detail. On October tenth, the city council approved the name, and the appointed commissioners removed the old structures, laid out paths, and left a new parade ground of red clay in the center.

The crenellated building of the Old Citadel on the north side is now occupied by a hotel. In eighteen sixty-five, federal soldiers were stationed in it, and people with the auction wagon and hearse gathered on the open field in front of it. The field remained open.