On another spring morning—April 12, 1861—Charlestonians lined the seawall and thronged the rooftops at my back, watching the opening shots of the Civil War, as the fort was bombarded from nearby islands. The roar of cannons rattled windows and shook buildings, and the sky flamed with the light of the firebombs. Hard to imagine now, as desultory seagulls scavenge for scraps and the only sound is the futile ringing of a cell phone someone must have dropped here overnight.

From time to time, I experience a faint stab of guilt. I know I should stir myself, take a tour, do some research. Then my thoughts stray to the shrimp and grits at the Hominy Grill. Duty can wait.

Henry James had a similar problem, although in his case temptation took the shape of Lady Baltimore cake ("a most delectable compound"). For the rest, he spent his days much as I do, wandering aimlessly. He visited an old cemetery, sunned himself against the south wall of St. Michael's Church, and strolled along "builded, plastered lanes over the enclosures of which the flowering almond drops its petals into sharp deep bends of shade or of sun." He was attracted by the "whole idle, easy loveliness," but noted, inveterate scold that he was, "a deficiency was clear, which was neither more nor less than the deficiency of life." As for his quest for the Old South, it didn't get much beyond a fleeting encounter with "a small, scared, starved person of color…an elderly mulattress in an improvised wrapper," who held a door open for him, a door through which "I felt I might have looked straight and far back into the past." Unfortunately, before he had time to see what lay there, the old lady slammed the door in his face.

Hedonism runs in Charleston's blood. From its founding in 1670, it has always been worldly and free-spirited. Because of the slave trade, it quickly became enormously wealthy, and its plutocrats—first merchants, then planters—made a fetish of display. Social life revolved around the theater, dancing, good eating, and sex. Visitors found this scandalous, and abolitionists thought it evil. In the buildup to the Civil War, Charleston came to embody all that Yankees despised about the South, and, once the Confederacy had been defeated, the "cradle of secession" was consigned to oblivion. For generations, it remained impoverished and half-forgotten, in permanent mourning for its lost glory. Meanwhile, slums festered and corruption thrived.

As far as the outside world was concerned, the city's only usefulness lay in its port and, after Pearl Harbor, in the Navy Yard that opened in North Charleston, hitherto a minor suburb. By the war's end, the yard employed more than 25,000 and North Charleston had outgrown its older sibling, which became, in part, a sandpit for workers and sailors on the razzle. Chuck Town, as they called it, was a byword for wild living of the kind hymned by the great Bertha "Chippie" Hill in her "Charleston Blues," recorded back in the 1920s: "I'm going back to the fish house, and get me some shrimps / I've got to feed me, baby, two three hungry ol' pimps."