or of so absorbing interest as its military and civil annals, cannot
be entirely overlooked. One crop which is not now cultivated in the
State, but which once enriched the people of the planter city, was
first cultivated by a woman, Eliza Lucas, the accomplished daughter of
Colonel Lucas, Governor of Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands, and
afterward the mother of General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and General
Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina. With seed sent her by her father,
Miss Lucas, in 1741-42, planted the first indigo in South Carolina. In
1748, Parliament passed an act allowing a bounty of sixpence per pound,
and just before the Revolution the export from Charleston had risen to
1,107,660 pounds.
The cultivation of rice was one of the earliest planting experiments
in the State, and though Ramsay, the historian, attributes its
introduction to Governor Thomas Smith and a small bag of seed procured
from Madagascar in 1694, it is certain that rice had been successfully
grown in South Carolina as early as 1691. In 1770, the surplus over
consumption exported from Charleston had risen to 120,000 barrels,
valued at $1,530,000.
As early as 1770, “patches” of cotton were grown in South Carolina, and
year by year thereafter for two decades indigo cultivation declined,
and was finally entirely abandoned.
“In 1784,” says the Hon. W. A. Courtenay, the city’s most
accomplished and enthusiastic historian, “John Teasdale, a merchant
of Charleston, shipped from this city to J. and J. Teasdale,
Liverpool, eight bags of cotton. When the vessel arrived out the
laughable incident occurred of the cotton being seized on the ground
that it could not be grown in America. Upon satisfactory proof, which
had to be furnished, it was released. This cotton shipment was the
first ever made from the United States to a European port!”
Though slavery is commonly supposed to have rendered those living under
its debasing influence inert and slow to enter upon great commercial
enterprises, it is remarkable that Charleston merchants and planters
planned and successfully constructed the earliest great railroad line
in America. Mr. Courtenay says:
“While the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad was being constructed in
1829, under Stephenson’s direction, and Baltimore was reaching out
to the Ohio River, Charleston was projecting a railroad to the head
of navigation on the Savannah River, which when completed was the
longest railroad in the World.”[7]
In the royal grants of land in Carolina the Crown reserved an interest
in all precious and base metals, and some of the grants reserved for
the King a share of the diamonds and precious stones which avarice
rather than common sense suggested might underlie tide-water South
Carolina. Geologists and lawyers laughed at the idea of precious stones
in marshes and sand dunes, though there had been “black diamonds”
there for thousands of years. It was not until after the war between
the States that Dr. St. Julien Ravenel’s discovery of the commercial
value of the immense phosphate deposits brought wealth and prosperity
to many whose needs were the greatest. The fertilizer business then
established is still in successful operation and Charleston continues
to be the largest phosphate shipping port in the world.
[Illustration: PHILADELPHIA STREET (COON ALLEY).
SCENE IN REAR OF ST. PHILIP’S CHURCH.]
Of the war between the States it is not necessary to write at length.
Whether one regards “the firing of the first gun on Fort Sumter as the
first rash act of a wild and fatal delusion,” or as the beginning of
the greatest war in modern times for constitutional liberty and against
the lust for power and territorial domination, no fair man can deny the
heroism against unnumbered odds displayed by the Confederate soldiers.
It would be interesting to quote the opinion of Lord Wolseley as to
the value of the study of the siege of Charleston in its tactical
features as compared with the siege of Sebastopol and other great
naval attacks. All the world wondered at the marvellous success of the
blockade-runners, and the pages of history may be searched in vain for
greater heroism than that displayed by Glassell, Dixon and others who
first proved to the world the value of the torpedo in naval warfare;
but let two sets of figures suffice:
GENERAL SUMMARY FORT SUMTER, FEBRUARY 1, 1865.
Total number of projectiles fired against it 46,053
Total weight in tons of metal thrown (estimate) 3,500
Total number of days under three great bombardments 117
Total number of days under eight minor bombardments 40
Total number of days under fire, steady and desultory 280
Total number of casualties (52 killed, 267 wounded) 319
[Illustration: THE ATTACK ON CHARLESTON BY THE FEDERAL IRONCLAD FLEET,
APRIL 7, 1863.]
Charleston with a white population of 24,000 furnished twenty-three
companies of infantry, eleven of artillery and eight of cavalry to the
Confederate armies.
The comments of a British officer and of two officers who served in
the Federal army as to the extraordinary defence of Charleston are
submitted;--for one born and reared in sight of Fort Sumter, and as a
child carried away from the city to escape the shells from the “Swamp
Angel” on Morris Island, cannot write of his people _sine ira et
studio_.
Col. H. Wemyss Feilden, colonel and chief paymaster (retired list), H.
B. M. Army says:
“We find a large commercial city, at the commencement of a great
war defended by nearly obsolete works and with several unguarded
approaches, rendered impregnable in a short time by the skill and
genius of the general in command, supported by the indomitable valor,
devotion and tenacity of its defenders, and by the unflinching
spirit of all ages and both sexes in the community.”
Quartermaster-General M. C. Meigs, U. S. A., in an adverse report to
Secretary of War Stanton, in August, 1865, upon the petition of various
merchants and wharf owners of Charleston, asking that their warehouses
and wharves in the possession of the government be restored to them,
says:
“Charleston was a hostile fortress. In its defence the merchants
and property owners appear to have aided by all means within their
power. Its defence ceased only when, after a siege almost unexampled
since the invention of artillery, for duration and persistency, the
approach of a powerful army from the Mississippi Valley rendered any
further resistance entirely hopeless. Then the armed Rebel forces
abandoned the town, destroying such stores as they could. There was
no capitulation, no surrender by which any of the extreme rights of
captors were modified or abated in the giving up of an equivalent.
The place was defended to the last extremity, and the whole town is a
conquest, and as such the property of the conquering Government....
The warehouses and wharves used in the contraband trade, in violation
of the laws and proclamations of the United States, have been
used in aid of the Rebellion.... To put an end to this use, to
obtain possession of them, has cost the United States the lives of
many thousand of patriotic citizens sacrificed in the skirmishes,
assaults, battles and bombardments which have made the bloody record
of this unexampled siege. Shells and torpedoes, by land and by water,
have destroyed our citizens.... To restore this property, which
cost the loyal people so much blood, and so much treasure, to the
original disloyal owners would, it seems to me, give a shock to every
earnest and loyal man. Far better give the property to the families
and heirs of the victims of the massacre of Wagner, or of those who
perished upon the monitors sunk by the agents of the Torpedo Bureau
in Charleston Harbor.”
It only remains to say that President Andrew Johnson did not share the
views of Quartermaster-General Meigs and that the property was restored
to the claimants.
Ex-Governor D. H. Chamberlain, formerly an officer in the Union army,
speaking to a representative young Virginian--a great-grandson of Chief
Justice Marshall--in Charleston a few days ago, said:
“When I walk the streets of this city of 65,000 inhabitants, and more
than half of them colored, and when I see the poverty of its material
resources as compared with the large and flourishing business centres
of the North, and when I remember that the population of this city
in 1861 was not over 41,000, of which not over 24,000 were white,
I marvel at the blind confidence and fatuity of this people in
inaugurating the most tremendous war of modern times; but when I walk
along the sea wall of the ‘Battery’ and see in the distance Fort
Sumter and Fort Moultrie and other fortifications which, though often
attacked, were never carried by storm, I begin to understand the
wonderful spirit of this people. Charlestonians held this stronghold
for four years against the most powerful fleet of war vessels ever
seen up to that time on this hemisphere.”
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM MOULTRIE.
FROM A PAINTING BY COL. J. TRUMBULL.]
Disastrous fires have destroyed many of the historic landmarks of the
town, and the most interesting public building still standing is the
Colonial Exchange, built in 1771, at a cost of £41,470. In its basement
Colonel Isaac Hayne and other patriot prisoners were confined, and here
General Moultrie walled up one hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder,
which remained undiscovered during the three years that the British
held the town. It was the scene of a ball and public reception in honor
of General Washington when he visited Charleston after the Revolution,
and was used as the Post Office from 1783 until the construction of the
new granite Post Office, in Italian Renaissance style, during the last
decade.
Of the first St. Philip’s Church, built on the present site, Edmund
Burke said that it “is spacious, and executed in a very handsome
taste, exceeding everything of that kind which we have in America,”
and another author (the biographer of Whitefield) called it “a grand
church resembling one of the new Churches in London.” That building was
constructed in 1723 and was the leading church in the State until its
destruction in the great fire of 1835. The architectural proportions
and beauty of the present St. Philip’s Church,--with its lofty steeple
reaching to a height of nearly two hundred feet, from which shines at
night a beacon light to mariners far away at sea,--“though perhaps
peculiar to themselves, command the instant admiration of every
beholder, professional or otherwise.”
No visitor to Charleston fails to visit St. Michael’s Church, the
finest piece of colonial ecclesiastical architecture in the South, and
which was first opened for divine service in 1761. The story of its
chime of bells attracts the stranger and makes the bells doubly dear
to all born within the shadow of the lofty tower. They never jangled
out of tune, except on the eventful night of August 31, 1886, when the
steeple was swayed by the earthquake. In 1782, Major Traille, of the
Royal Artillery, took possession of the bells as spoils of war and sent
them back to England, but the next year they were repurchased by a Mr.
Rhyner and sent back to Charleston, where they continued to voice the
people’s joy or woe until the war between the States, when they were
sent to Columbia for safe keeping. When General Sherman burned that
city in 1865, two of the bells were stolen and the rest were so injured
as to be useless. Once again the bells were shipped to England, where
they were recast by the successors of the firm which had made them in
1764, from the same patterns, and again returned to Charleston and
replaced in the belfry on March 21, 1867.
The church has been commemorated in the popular lyric of Mrs.
Stansberry, _How he Saved St. Michael’s_, though as a matter of fact
it was the spire of St. Philip’s that was saved from fire by an heroic
negro. Timrod, during the war between the States, refers to the church
in one of his tenderest poems entitled, _Christmas_, and Simms,
when the steeple was made a target for Federal guns, published his
passionate lines beginning:
“Aye, strike with sacrificial aim,
The temple of the living God,
Hurl iron bolt and seething flame
Through aisles which holiest feet have trod!”
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH, CHARLESTON.]
From the “pigeon holes,” the highest point in the tower, patriots of
the Revolution watched the coming and progress of the British fleets
of Parker and Arbuthnot, and almost a century later the war-ships of
Dupont and Dahlgren were sighted from the same aerie long before they
crossed the bar.
Its congregation is so largely composed of the élite of Charleston
society that a local wit had irreverently called the venerable
structure “the Chapel of Ease of the St. Cecilia Society.”
It is claimed that the French Protestant (Huguenot) Church in
Charleston is nearly if not quite coeval in date with the present city.
There is some evidence that the church owes its origin to the colony
of French Protestants sent out to the Province in 1680 by Charles II.
of England. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the consequent
Huguenot emigration to America in 1685 put the church on a solid
foundation, though many of the Huguenots who came to Carolina settled
at Orange Quarter, on the Santee River, at St. John’s, Berkeley, and
possibly in St. James, Goose Creek. In 1687, came Elias Prioleau,
the first recognized and regular pastor of the French Church in
Charleston. Two of his lineal descendants are now in the eldership
of the church. After the fire of 1740, in which the early records of
the church were destroyed, the liturgy of Neufchâtel and Valangin was
adopted and an English translation of it is still in use.
In 1845 the present tasteful Gothic edifice, the fourth upon the same
site, was built, and has been in use ever since, except during the war
between the States.
In 1858, before a baptism of blood and fire had put the courage and
tenacity of Charleston to the supreme test, and twenty-eight years
before the memorable earthquake, James L. Petigru, the head of the
bar of Charleston, and President of the Historical Society of South
Carolina, said in a public speech: “Perhaps the opinion is tinged with
partiality; yet, after making due allowance for such bias, I think I
may say that in the circle of vision from the belfry of St. Michael’s
there has been as much high thought spoken, as much heroic action
taken, as much patient endurance borne as in any equal area of land on
this Continent.”
With such a past, Charleston looks hopefully into the future,
confidently expecting as signal triumphs in the arts of peace as her
sons once achieved against the fleets of France, Spain and England.
[Illustration: SEAL OF CHARLESTON.]
FOOTNOTES:
[7] The crude rules for passenger transportation in “the thirties” read
strangely to the traveller who almost annihilates time and space in the
modern “vestibule train,” at the rate of sixty miles or more an hour.
An early resolution of the South Carolina Railroad Board of Directors
declares that there shall be “in future not over twenty-five passengers
to any car; speed shall not exceed one car and passengers at fifteen
miles per hour; two cars and passengers at twelve miles per hour; three
cars and passengers at ten miles per hour.”
[Illustration]
SAVANNAH
NEVER LAST AND OFTEN FIRST
BY PLEASANT ALEXANDER STOVALL
The city of Savannah is now a centre of railroad and steamship lines.
It has the heaviest commerce of all the Atlantic ports south of
Baltimore. It is the largest naval stores market in the world, and its
cotton and lumber receipts are very considerable. But in spite of its
commercial primacy Savannah preserves a distinct flavor of the olden
time. On the shores of the Savannah River, where the British ships
were burned in the Revolution, a railroad system is cutting slips and
building piers, spending a million dollars in terminal facilities.
The high bluff where the early colonists planted their crane in 1732
to move goods from the ships to the river bank is now walled-in
stone, and the strand is gridironed with steel rails. The powder
magazine near “the Old Fort,” afterwards seized by the patriots of the
Revolution, is the site of flourishing foundries. The filature where
early colonists were taught to spin silk has been dismantled, and long
rows of brick tenements front upon the sandy streets. The tall pines
under which Oglethorpe pitched his tents survived the shock of war,
and succumbed only to the sweeping storms in 1800. To-day this site
is paved with brick and Belgian block, and is the centre of the Bay,
where cotton and wholesale men do congregate. “The publick oven” on
Congress Street stood opposite Tondee’s tavern, where the first liberty
pole was elevated by the patriots, and where a tablet has been placed
in the wall of a thriving grocery store to mark the birth of newer
freedom. “Fort Halifax,” the breastworks of the “Liberty Boys,” is now
covered by the wharves and warehouses of the Ocean Steamship Company,
the busiest spot in all Georgia. Spring Hill redoubt, where Pulaski
died, is lined by the brick walls of the Georgia Central Railway. The
executive mansion of Sir James Wright, the last royal Governor, stood
where the United States has just finished its marble post office,
perhaps the handsomest public building in the country, with the
exception of the Congressional Library.
[Illustration: THE POST OFFICE.]
In spite of all these changes, Savannah has followed the original
lines laid down by Oglethorpe. The lots are still sixty by ninety
feet, flanked front and rear by open streets. The public squares which
marked the city at convenient distances, used by the early settlers
as camp-grounds and corrals in cases of military alarm, are to-day
verdant and fresh with beds of flowers and spraying fountains, and
dotted by historic monuments. “The tint of antiquity” still rests upon
its walls. Now and then the white mulberry, where the silkworm fed
in the eighteenth century, crops out and shows its familiar leaves
along the streets, and the house of General Lachlan McIntosh, where
the Legislature met in 1782, on South Broad Street, still stands,
preserving many of its Colonial lines.
There was a time when Sunbury, the cradle of that splendid secession
of 1776, was a port of entry, and the Altamaha was looked upon as a
rival of the Savannah. Now the forts of Sunbury are overgrown, and the
place is seldom heard of save once a year, when one of “the Critter
companies” of the neighborhood repairs to the historic spot and holds
its annual target contest and barbecue. Frederica was a flourishing
settlement on South Newport River, but after the Spanish War of 1742
sank into decay. Ebenezer, on the Savannah, was the home of the thrifty
Salzburgers, who gave a distinct stamp to the Georgia colony, but
Ebenezer did not long survive the shock of the Revolution, when the
British scandalized these primitive people by quartering their horses
in the old brick church, which stands to-day. Only Savannah, of all
these early settlements, remains, and when one walks through its
beautiful streets and Colonial parks, even now he can easily recall
the conditions of that February morning in 1732, when “the odor of the
jessamine mingled with the balm of the pine,” and the palmetto and
magnolia threw their shade across the sandy bluff.
[Illustration: HOUSE WHERE THE COLONIAL LEGISLATURE ASSEMBLED IN 1782.]
Hon. P. W. Meldrim, Mayor of Savannah, in a tribute to his city in
a recent address, called attention to the fact that the very name
of Savannah’s streets, “State,” “Congress,” “President,” are full
of patriotic suggestions, telling the story of the Revolutionary
struggle. Other avenues bear the historic names of Montgomery, Perry,
and McDonough, while the wards have been labeled Washington, Warren,
Franklin and Greene.
“Every spot is hallowed. Where the Vernon River flows by Beaulieu,
the dashing D’Estaing landed to make his attack with the allied
forces of Savannah. Hard by is Bethesda, ‘House of Mercy,’ where
Jew, Protestant and Roman Catholic united in founding Georgia’s
noblest charity. There it was that Wesley sang his inspired songs and
Whitefield with his eloquence thrilled the world. On the river is
the grove where General Greene lived and died, and Whitney wrought
from his fertile brain the wonderful invention which revolutionized
commerce. Near at hand, almost sunk into oblivion, is the spring made
historic by the daring of Jasper and Newton. There stands Savannah’s
pride, her Academy of Arts and Science. Over there is the home where
Washington was entertained, and across the street are the guns which
he captured at Yorktown. Here, at our very feet, Casimir Pulaski
fell, charging at the head of his legion, while Jasper, rescuing the
colors, yielded up his gallant life.”
[Illustration: HEADQUARTERS OF WASHINGTON DURING A VISIT TO SAVANNAH.]
The real romance of history is the settlement of the colony of Georgia.
Two centuries ago the fertile lands extending from the Savannah to
the Altamaha had attracted the attention of pioneers and public men.
Sir Robert Montgomery had his eye upon this favored tract, as yet
unsettled, and described it as “an amiable land lying along the same
parallel with Palestine.” But it was reserved for the first soldier
and gentleman of his day to found the new colony and perfect a noble
benefaction. Had England exercised the same care over the other
colonies as over Georgia, it is possible that the War of the Revolution
might have been postponed indefinitely. It is worthy of note that
while Virginia and the New England colonies were settled by exiles
who drifted to the barren shores of Jamestown and Plymouth to escape
religious and civil persecution, the Georgia colonists sailed the seas
in the good ship _Ann_ under the fostering care of the mother country,
piloted by statesmen and noblemen, and sought the smiling Savannahs
with all the forms of royal patronage. These people, released from
debtors’ prisons and freed from pecuniary obligations, cleared by a
single act of royal clemency from bankruptcy, departed for Georgia
with ships supplied from the coffers of nobility, while the spiritual
welfare of the people was nurtured by the clergymen of the Established
Church. It was a lofty benefaction, and when these hitherto unfortunate
men felt their fetters fall, and knew that no bailiff awaited them in
Savannah, it was no wonder that, on the morning of the 2d of February,
1733, they gave thanks “for the safe conduct of the colony to its
appointed destination.”