Thomas Tudor Tucker, a remarkable man with a most audacious plan ... and it worked. Photos provided by the author. It is amazing how one thing can lead to another — sometimes. There is a sign along those lines, posted just outside the Charleston Library Society on King Street. It says: “A child who reads becomes an adult who thinks.” Inside that building there are many treasures, but perhaps none finer than the history books that describe how the young America of 1776 was able to read a certain news item spreading up the East Coast from way down South. It was all about how a powerful British military force arriving in a fleet of seven British battleships, with the aim of capturing Charleston, had been defeated by Col. William Moultrie at his unfinished palmetto fort on Sullivan’s Island that prevented them from entering the harbor and forced them to retreat back out to sea at nightfall, mashed-up and empty-handed. Recall, of course, the other part of the news, less well known at the time, that Col. William “Danger” Thomson built other fortifications of palmetto logs and sand and dug a pair lines of entrenchments in the dunes and myrtles overlooking the inlet; these 780 men stopped the Brits from invading by land and taking advantage of the open side of Moultrie’s defenses.