Charleston, South Carolina Map 1832 Siege Plan - Charleston, Ashley River, Cooper River

James Yeager engraved this plan of the Siege of Charleston for John Marshall's Atlas to Marshall's Life of Washington, published in Philadelphia in 1832, decades after the Revolutionary War battle it depicts. Marshall, who served in the Culpeper Minute Men before his long career as a politician, ambassador and ultimately Chief Justice of the United States, was asked by Washington's nephew Bushrod Washington to write the official biography of Washington's life, a work published across America, England and France for decades. Marshall's own father Thomas had been a close friend of Washington's dating back to the French and Indian War, giving the biography, and the battle atlas that accompanied it, a personal as well as historical authority. The map documents the 1780 siege that ended in one of the most significant American defeats of the Revolutionary War, when British forces captured Charleston and much of the Continental Army's southern garrison.

Charleston, the map's central subject, sits on its namesake harbor at the heart of South Carolina's Low Country, a strategic Atlantic port that made it a prime target for the British southern campaign of 1780. The plan marks the positions of both the British and American armies during the siege, giving readers a battlefield-level view of how the city's defenses were arranged and ultimately overwhelmed. Columbia, established as South Carolina's capital only after the war in 1786, and Camden, site of another major Revolutionary War defeat for American forces later in 1780, both anchor the wider South Carolina interior beyond Charleston's coastal setting. Some marginal soiling and color offsetting are visible on this example, typical of surviving copies of an atlas map printed for a still-general audience rather than a specialist military readership.

This siege plan makes a fitting gift for a South Carolina family with Revolutionary War-era roots, or for a Charleston transplant drawn to the pivotal battle that shaped their city's history. Its origin in Marshall's biography of Washington gives it a documentary weight beyond a simple decorative battle map, tying it directly to one of the earliest and most authoritative American accounts of the Revolution. It's available unframed, in the full range of sizes from a compact print through to a large-format piece for a study or office wall.