For four long years the unconquerable Sumter had battled with the
powerful Federal navy, and for two hundred and eighty days the iron had
hailed steadily upon her. Her defense during the Great Rebellion of
1776-1783 had been glorious, but these tired men in gray had far excelled
that record of bravery. In the first war the heaviest cannon used was a
twenty-four pounder; in this, the lightest was a twenty-four pounder, and
the heaviest went far into the hundreds. When her walls were battered
down her garrison burrowed in the sand, and they kept back the great
ironclads that would have done harm to the cradle of secession.
But at last the day came when men saw that the end was near, and General
Beauregard issued orders for the evacuation of the city.
Grant and Thomas and Sherman had each in his own way saved the Union.
General Lee, whom Europe was comparing with Napoleon for generalship, and
Gustavus Adolphus for religion, could not with a few thousands any longer
beat back the multitude of his enemies. So Charleston knew that she had
striven and lost.
Colonel Masters, sitting in his office on the evening of that fateful
seventeenth of February, 1865, was taking up the foundations of his soul
and repairing each worn and battered stone. His eyes were fixed with a
look of infinite sadness on the battle flag of the Confederacy, and his
thoughts were on the Great Cause. It was not the question of surrender or
not surrender that had made his eyes fade so during the last two years
of woe just passed; nor was it any sharp animosity against the Federal
government or the Stars and Stripes. These were both parts of him, the
first and greater part, and only because they symbolized the things he
loved had he dethroned them in his heart. Neither had he forgotten how,
beneath the great eagle, he had led the Palmetto boys at Churubusco, nor
how long men had called him the beloved president of the New England
Society. Nor had he been turned aside by any love for slavery, which he
had considered, since first he left fair Sudbury and looked last upon the
Wayside Inn, as both morally and economically injurious. Nevertheless he
loved the Great Cause.
Men’s hearts had grown bitter in that struggle, but with it all he had
been calm, and he had been one of the few who had seen beneath the waves
the deep current of the ocean that was bearing both North and South to a
common danger. He knew how the hearts of men had been changed, and how
soldiers who had come South at first, being reproached, would reply: “We
came to save the Union; damn the niggers!” But the government and some
of the people, grown bitter from suffering loss, would not array black
against white, and back the African with Union bayonets. Long ago, led
by the foresight of the departed Petigru, he had seen the danger to the
white race of a Union victory. Ah, Petigru! On whose grave was written
the words: “Unawed by opinion; unseduced by flattery; undismayed by
disaster!” He could see him now, swinging his green bag full of books, on
his way to the courtroom. And now, just as clearly, he knew that above
all things else the North and South must be one; that the bickering jars
of discord must be stopped forever; that white, hand in hand with white,
might look upon the impending danger without malice and without reproach.
So he asked himself that night: “What is a man’s part?”
He had loved the Union and he had loved the Confederacy, and he had loved
them both because they had both loved liberty, for the basal passions of
each soul are made as distinct as the shades of the blackjack leaves
when the autumn of their lives has come, and in some hearts, as often as
may be seen on one gum tree, the colors vary widely—half the leaves are
of a bright, yellow color, and half a dark purple—but the branch that
bears the yellow and the limb that lifts the purple are but parts of the
trunk of life.
But more than either Confederacy or Union, he loved his race; and as he
sat there looking into the shadowy faces of the coming years, he saw a
new thing in history; as he saw it he shuddered, and the cold sweat stood
out in beads on his brow.
A mulatto people! Good God, it must not be so! “They have saved the
Union; now they must help us save the race.”
Then, as though there were a ring in the words that might mean something
to coming generations, he repeated softly: “We saved the Union, now save
the race.”
So, his heart still bursting with bitter sadness, he walked out in the
cool air toward the Battery. It was the night Fort Sumter was to be
evacuated, and he could see the lights of the transports bearing the
heavy-hearted garrison to the mainland. Surely the end had come at last.
Then he looked toward the west. Was the sun rising again as though he
would come back to watch what men would do that night? Then why was that
glow, deep, red, sullen in the land of the sunset, and this full ten
o’clock in the night? Then suddenly, as if a poisoned arrow had pierced
his bosom, his heart quivered with pain.
“Camellia!”
The great flames were leaping upward toward the sky. The marble Artemis
would lift her snowy white arms to hide her face from the sight. The
little wet violets at her feet would droop in prayer. The olive tree by
the window, the little orange grove of which Mrs. Corbin was so proud,
the well appointed premises filled with slaves and buildings, all of
these were gone forever. And the black faces of slaves were peering in
terror from the darkness. Camellia-on-the-Ashley had perished as the
horse of the Indian is slain when his master dies.
Then to the right and west there was another glow, but that he knew well.
It was the bridge of the Charleston and Savannah Railway over the Ashley.
And lo, in the very harbor itself a bright light began to glow! The
gunboats were burning!
Then he turned, sick at heart, and walked back through the deserted
city, back to the office; this sad-hearted man whose dearest friend had
perished in the blowing up of the _Housatonic_.
“Ah, McArthur, I loved you,” the old man said, as the tears sprang to his
eyes.
Then, ringing weirdly through the streets, he heard a cry:
“We slew them, we conquered them! Brave men! Five hundred thousand men
died in five minutes. Hurrah!”
The voice was familiar and the man who spoke was coming toward him, his
long hair streaming in the wind. He came nearer.
“Ah! friend, have you heard the news? They have killed every man in the
South. We showed them how to cut off their necks, a million at a time.
Then said I, ‘Behold victory on a white horse, and his rider is black!’”
It was Sam Tillett, who had borne the flag when General Anderson
surrendered Sumter.
“Poor fellow,” said the colonel sadly, passing him by. “A raving
lunatic.” And in the darkness the man ran on, shouting:
“Victory! Victory! We have slain! We have slain! Behold victory on a
white horse, and his rider is black—black—black!”
“And yet,” the colonel added, “it is as he says.”
Then the editor went back to the office and sat long and lonely in the
darkness. Automatically, he took a sheet of writing paper and wrote the
heading for to-morrow’s editorial:
A MAN’S PART.
And all night long he sat and thought, only somehow the charge at
Churubusco would come back, and the violets of Sudbury, and a face that
he had long ago told himself that he must never think of again, but
which had a way of coming in moments like this, like the scent of roses
from some far-off garden of joy. Once he was on the point of laying down
the pen and giving all up forever, but when he saw the headlines of his
editorial he began again to ponder. The face came back, the face he
loved, and smiled at him from behind the Stars and Bars.
And somehow he could not think of her, or her home, but his heart went
back to the old days and the Union he loved. After all, was it not one
land, one race, one history, one hope? So his eyes brightened and he
wrote a line beneath the caption:
WE MUST BE ONE.
Then the faces of five million slaves, dark, passionate, yet humble; five
million black men and women who loved their masters and constituted a
laboring class free from crime, penury and jealousy. “They have served us
well,” he said. “New England brought them here, we bought them here, and
God sought them here.”
He wrote a second sentence:
WE MUST BE FAIR.
Then the faces of the men at Bunker Hill and Lexington and Yorktown
and King’s Mountain; those who wrote the Mecklenburg Declaration of
Independence, and those who, two years later, wrote the declaration of
the American nation, the faces of the myriads of the men of the great
white race, and with them, one whom he knew had loved him once by the
golden rice fields of Ashley, and he wrote another line:
WE MUST BE WHITE.
“These three things,” said he, “constitute what I want to say to my
people.”
His heart was full, and his pen moved swiftly over the paper. He told
the people of how they had once loved the Union, how there was not one
who would read his words but whose father would have died for the Stars
and Stripes. Then he spoke in tender words of their long struggle for
independence, and how it could be won only in the Union. He led them
gently to the Stars and Bars, and let them kiss it as they laid it away
forever, and bade them try in the future as they had in the past to play
a masterful part in the greater nation. Then he broached the Great Cause,
and closed, saying:
“They are here and we are here and God is here. Only one thing is clear,
and that is that we must love mercy and do justice and walk humbly before
our God. The darker the clouds grow, the more we are persuaded that the
two races must separate, that the negro may grow to complete manhood,
that the white may be saved from mulattodom. This is the great war. In
the unity of the white race is our hope.”
There were many men and women, worn with care and gray with sorrow, who
would read those words to-morrow, and then, with closed eyes, bow their
heads in thought; and there were many men and women with the weight of
the great defeat upon their shoulders, who, in stubborn courage and
infinite pain, would restore the long-lowered symbol of the Union to
their hearts and homes. Then the colonel took the Stars and Bars that
hung above his desk and kissed it and threw it into the fire, and from a
drawer underneath a mass of rubbish drew forth the great eagle over whose
breast was the American eagis, and over whose young waved the Stars and
Stripes. The snows of the North were upon her neck, and the fire of the
South flashed in her eye, and he hung it again above his desk and said:
“My country—my flag—my all!”
There was a hurried trampling of feet on the stairway, and looking up he
saw a squad of men in blue entering his office.
“Hello, here he is!” said the leader, advancing. “Is this here where the
damned rebel sheet is bein’ published?” He held in his hand a copy of the
_Chronicle_.
“This is the office of the _Charleston Chronicle_, sir.” The colonel’s
control was complete.
“Well, who are you?”
“I am Charles W. Masters, the editor.”
“Editor of the worst sheet of infamy and rebellion in the cradle of it
all. Damn you, we have come in here to publish a Union paper! Here, read
this.”
The editorial the colonel had written had fallen to the floor and floated
to the fire, where one corner began to crumple in the heat.
The colonel read the order:
OFFICE PROVOST MARSHAL, GENERAL D. S.,
Charleston, S. C., Feb. 20, 1865.
SPECIAL ORDER NO. 1.
The _Charleston Chronicle_ office is hereby taken possession of
by the military authority of the United States. All materials
and property of said newspaper of every kind will be turned
over immediately to Messrs. Gen. Whipple and J. W. Jackson, who
are hereby authorized to issue a loyal Union paper. They will
report to Lieut.-Col. Woodford, Provost Marshal Gen. D. S., for
all property taken possession of by them under this order. They
will keep possession of this building now used for the paper.
By command of Maj. Gen. Q. A. Gilmore,
Lieut.-Col. 127th N. Y. Volunteers,
Provost Marshal, Gen. D. S.
“Get out, old man! You may thank your stars we don’t set the niggers on
you.”
And as the lonely man walked down the long-trodden steps he seemed to
see below him on the stairway one who had welcomed him at Camellia long
years ago. Her eyes looked up to his as of yore, and the same sweet smile
parted her lips. But now her arms were outstretched to him, and she
seemed to be trying to tell him something that made her bosom heave and
her eyes fill with tears.