“In This City of the Dead”: Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery and Middle-Class Aspiration

Abstract

Like many other cities in the antebellum United States, Charleston, South Carolina, faced the challenge of managing longstanding, overfilled, urban burial spaces in an area with a large population and high mortality rates. Although Charleston would seem to have been an ideal candidate for an early rural cemetery, Magnolia Cemetery was not opened outside the city until almost twenty years after Mount Auburn’s founding. In Charleston, the modernizing impulse illustrated by calls for cemetery reform came in to conflict with the city’s dominant upper class. The establishment of Magnolia Cemetery was undertaken by middle-class Charlestonians who hoped to use burial to create an alternative social hierarchy that existed parallel to Charleston’s rigid slaveholding aristocracy.