UNDER ST. MICHAEL'S CHIMES
And where St. Michael's chimes
The fragrant hours exquisitely tell,
Making the world one loveliness, like a true poet's rhymes.
--RICHARD WATSON GILDER.
It has been said--by Mrs. T.P. O'Connor, I think--that whereas
twenty-five letters of introduction for New York may produce one
invitation to dinner, one letter of introduction for Charleston will
produce twenty-five dinner invitations. If this be an exaggeration it
is, at least, exaggeration in the right direction; that is, along the
lines of truth. For though Charleston's famed "exclusiveness" is very
real, making letters of introduction very necessary to strangers
desiring to see something of the city's social life, such letters
produce, in Charleston, as Mrs. O'Connor suggests, results definite and
delightful.
Immediately upon our arrival, my companion and I sent out several
letters we had brought with us, and presently calling cards began to
arrive for us at the hotel. Also there came courteous little notes,
delivered in most cases by hand, according to the old Charleston
custom--a custom surviving pleasantly from times when there were no
postal arrangements, but plenty of slaves to run errands. Even to this
day, I am told, invitations to Charleston's famous St. Cecilia balls are
delivered by hand.
One of the notes we received revealed to us a characteristic custom of
the city. It contained an invitation to occupy places in the pew of a
distinguished family, at St. Michael's Church, on the approaching Sunday
morning. In order to realize the significance of such an invitation one
must understand that St. Michael's is to Charleston, socially, what St.
George's, Hanover Square, is to London. A beautiful old building,
surrounded by a historic burial ground and surmounted by a delicate
white spire containing fine chimes, it strongly suggests the
architectural touch of Sir Christopher Wren; but it is not by Wren, for
he died a number of years before 1752, when the cornerstone of St.
Michael's was laid. When the British left Charleston--or Charles Town,
as the name of the place stands in the early records--after occupying it
during the Revolutionary War, they took with them, to the horror of the
city, the bells of St. Michael's, and the church books. The silver,
however, was saved, having been concealed on a plantation some miles
from Charleston. Later the bells were returned.
Pre-Revolutionary Charleston was divided into two parishes: St.
Michael's below Broad Street, and St. Philip's above. Under governmental
regulation citizens were not allowed to hold pews in both churches
unless they owned houses in both parishes. St. Michael's, being nearer
the battery, in which region are the finest old houses, had, perhaps,
the wealthier congregation, but St. Philip's is, to my mind, the more
beautiful church of the two, largely because of the open space before
it, and the graceful outward bend of Church Street in deference to the
projecting portico.
When the Civil War broke out St. Philip's bells were melted and made
into cannon, but those of St. Michael's were left in place until
cannonballs from the blockading fleet struck the church, when they were
taken down and sent, together with the silver plate, to Columbia, South
Carolina, for safe-keeping. But Columbia was, as matters turned out, the
worst place to which they could have been sent. The silver was looted by
troops under Sherman, and the bells were destroyed when the city was
burned. The fragments were, however, collected and sent to England,
whence the bells originally came, and there they were recast. Their
music--perhaps the most characteristic of all the city's characteristic
sounds--has been called "the voice of Charleston." Of the silver only a
few fragments have been returned. One piece was found in a pawn shop in
New York, and another in a small town in Ohio. _Mais que voulez-vous?
C'est la guerre!_
In mentioning Charleston churches one becomes involved in a large
matter. In 1801, when St. Mary's, the first Roman Catholic church in the
city, was erected, there were already eighteen churches in existence,
among them the present Huguenot Church, at the corner of Church and
Queen Streets, which, though a very old building, is nevertheless the
second Huguenot Church to occupy the same site, the first, built in
1687, having been destroyed in the great conflagration of 1796, which
very nearly destroyed St. Philip's, as well. A number of the old
Huguenot families long ago became Episcopalians, and the descendants of
many of the early French settlers of Charleston, buried in the Huguenot
churchyard, are now parishioners of St. Michael's and St. Philip's. The
Huguenot Church in Charleston is the only church of this denomination in
America; its liturgy is translated from the French, and services are
held in French on the third Sunday of November, January and March. A
Unitarian Church was established in 1817, as an offshoot of the Scotch
Presbyterian Church, the old White Meeting House of which (built 1685,
used by the British as a granary, during the Revolution, and torn down
1806) gave Meeting Street its name. Early in the history of the
Unitarian Church, the home of which was a former Presbyterian Church
building, in Archdale Street, Dr. Samuel Gilman, a young minister from
Gloucester, Massachusetts, became its pastor. This was the same Dr.
Gilman who wrote "Fair Harvard."
* * * * *
In only one instance did the letters of introduction we sent out produce
a response of the kind one would not be surprised at receiving in some
rushing city of the North: a telephone call. A lady, not a native
Charlestonian, but one who has lived actively about the world, rang us
up, bade us welcome, and invited us to dinner.
But she was a very modern sort of lady, as witness not only her use of
the telephone--an instrument which seems in Charleston almost an
anachronism; as, for that matter, the automobile does, too--but her
dinner hour, which was eight o'clock. Very few Charleston families dine
at night. Dinner invitations are usually for three, or perhaps half-past
three or four, in the afternoon, and there is a light supper in the
evening. I judge that this custom holds also in some other cities of the
region, for I remember calling at the office of a large investment
company in Wilmington, North Carolina, to find it wearing, at three in
the afternoon, the deserted look of a New York office between twelve and
one o'clock. Every one had gone home to dinner. Mr. W.D. Howells, in his
charming essay on Charleston, makes mention of this matter:
"The place," he says, "has its own laws and usages, and does not trouble
itself to conform to those of other aristocracies. In London the best
society dines at eight o'clock, and in Madrid at nine, but in Charleston
it dines at four.... It makes morning calls as well as afternoon calls,
but as the summer approaches the midday heat must invite rather to the
airy leisure of the verandas, and the cool quiescence of interiors
darkened against the fly in the morning and the mosquito at
night-fall."
The household fly is a year-round resident of Charleston, by grace of a
climate which permits--barely permits, at its coldest--the use of the
open surrey as a public vehicle in all seasons. Sometimes, during a
winter cold-snap, when a ride in a surrey is not a pleasant thing to
contemplate, when residents of old mansions have shut themselves into a
room or two heated by grate fires, then the fly seems to have
disappeared, but let the cold abate a little and out he comes again like
some rogue who, after brief and spurious penance, resumes the evil of
his ways.
The stranger going to a humble Charleston house will find on the gate a
coiled spring at the end of which hangs a bell. By touching the spring
and causing the bell to jingle he makes his presence known. The larger
houses have upon their gates bell-pulls or buttons which cause bells to
ring within. This is true of all houses which have front gardens. The
garden gate constitutes, by custom, a barrier comparable in a degree
with the front door of a Northern house; a usage arising, doubtless, out
of the fact that almost all important Charleston houses have not only
gardens, but first and second story galleries, and that in hot weather
these galleries become, as it were, exterior rooms, in which no small
part of the family life goes on. Many Charleston houses have their
gardens to the rear, and themselves abut upon the sidewalk. Calling at
such houses, you ring at what seems to be an ordinary front door, but
when the door is opened you find yourself entering not upon a hall, but
upon an exterior gallery running to the full depth of the house, down
which you walk to the actual house door. In still other houses--and this
is true of some of the most notable mansions of the city, including the
Pringle, Huger, and Rhett houses--admittance is by a street door of the
normal sort, opening upon a hall, and the galleries and gardens are at
the side or back, the position of the galleries in relation to the house
depending upon what point of the compass the house faces, the desirable
thing being to get the breezes which are prevalently from the southwest
and the westward.
* * * * *
Charleston is very definitely two things: It is old, and it is a city.
There is the story of a young lady who asked a stranger if he did not
consider it a unique town.
He agreed that it was, and inquired whether she knew the derivation of
the word "unique."
When she replied negatively he informed her that the word came from the
Latin _unus_, meaning "one," and _equus_, meaning "a horse"; otherwise
"a one-horse town."
This tale, however, is a libel, for despite the general superstition of
chambers of commerce to the contrary, the estate of cityhood is not
necessarily a matter of population nor yet of commerce. That is one of
the things which, if we were unaware of it before, we may learn from
Charleston. Charleston is not great in population; it is not very great,
as seaports go, in trade. Were cities able to talk with one another as
men can, and as foolishly as men often do, I have no doubt that many a
hustling middle-western city would patronize Charleston, precisely as a
parvenue might patronize a professor of astronomy; nevertheless,
Charleston has a stronger, deeper-rooted city entity than all the cities
of the Middle West rolled into one. This is no exaggeration. Where
modern American cities strive to be like one another, Charleston strives
to be like nothing whatsoever. She does not have to strive to _be_
something. She _is_ something. She understands what most other American
cities do not understand, and what, in view of our almost unrestricted
immigration laws, it seems the National Government cannot be made to
understand: namely, that mere numbers do not count for everything; that
there is the matter of quality of population to be considered.
Therefore, though Charleston's white population is no greater than that
of many a place which would own itself frankly a small town, Charleston
knows that by reason of the character of its population it is a great
city. And that is precisely the case. Charleston people are city people
_par excellence_. They have the virtues of city people, the vices of
city people, and the civilization and sophistication of those who reside
in the most aristocratic capitals. For that is another thing that
Charleston is; it is unqualifiedly the aristocratic capital of the
United States; the last stronghold of a unified American upper class;
the last remaining American city in which Madeira and Port and
_noblesse oblige_ are fully and widely understood, and are employed
according to the best traditions.
I have been told of a lady who remarked that Charleston was "the biggest
little place" she ever saw. I say the same. The littleness of the place,
it is sometimes pointed out, is expressed by the "vast cousinship" which
constitutes Charleston society, but it is to my mind expressed much
better in the way bicyclists leave their machines leaning against the
curb at the busiest parts of main shopping streets. Its bigness, upon
the other hand, is expressed by the homes from which some of those
bicyclists come, by the cultivation which exists in those homes, and has
existed there for generations, by the amenities of life as they are
comprehended and observed, by the wealth of the city's tradition and the
richness of its background. Nor is that background a mere arras of
recollection. It exists everywhere in the wood and brick and stone of
ancient and beautiful buildings, in iron grilles and balconies
absolutely unrivaled in any other American city, and equaled only in
European cities most famous for their artistry in wrought iron. It
exists also in venerable institutions--the first orphanage established
in the United States; the William Enston Home; the Public Library, one
of the first and now one of the best libraries in the country; the art
museum, the St. Cecilia Society, and various old clubs. More intimately
it exists within innumerable old homes, which are treasure-houses of
fine old English and early American furniture and of
portraits--portraits by Sir Joshua, by Stuart, Copley, Trumbull, and
most of the other portrait painters who painted from the time the
Colonies began to become civilized to the time of the Civil War--among
them S.F.B. Morse, who, I believe it is not generally known, made a
considerable reputation as a portrait painter, in Charleston, before he
made himself a world figure by inventing the telegraph.
Even without seeing these private treasures the visitor to Charleston
will see enough to convince him that Charleston is indeed
"unique"--though not in the sense implied in the story--that it is the
most intimately beautiful city upon the American continent.
To call Charleston "unique," and immediately thereafter to liken it to
other places may seem paradoxical. These likenesses are, however,
evanescent. It is not that Charleston is actually like other places, but
that here in a church building, there in an old tile roof, wrought iron
gate, or narrow cobbled street, the visitor will find himself delicately
reminded of Old World towns and cities. Mr. Howells, for example, found
on the East Battery a faint suggestion of Venetian palaces, and in the
doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legaré Street, I was struck,
also, with a Venetian suggestion so strange and subtle that I could not
quite account for it. At night some of the old narrow streets, between
Meeting Street and Bay, made me think of streets in the old part of
Paris, on the left bank of the Seine; or again I would stop before an
ancient brick house which was Flemish, or which--in the case of houses
diagonally opposite St. Philip's Church--exampled the rude architecture
of an old French village, stucco walls colored and chipped, red tile
roof and all. The busy part of King Street, on a Saturday night when the
fleet was in, made me think of Havana, and the bluejackets seemed to me,
for the moment, to be American sailors in a foreign port; and once, on
the same evening's walk, when I chanced to look to the westward across
Marion Square, I found myself transported to the central _place_ of a
Belgian city, with a slope-shouldered church across the way masquerading
as a _hôtel de ville_, and the sidewalk lights at either side figuring
in my imagination as those of pleasant terrace cafés. So it was always.
The very hotel in which we stayed--the Charleston--is like no other
hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which
caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis. Still, it is not
like the Southern. It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city
of France--large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and,
best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a
_remise_, but is here a garden. If I mistake not, carriages and coaches
did in earlier times drive through the arched entrance, now the main
doorway, and into this courtyard, where passengers alighted and baggage
was taken down. The Planter's Hotel, now a ruin, opposite the Huguenot
Church, antedates all others in the city, and used to be the fashionable
gathering place for wealthy Carolinians and their families who came to
Charleston annually for the racing season.
The fact that Charleston has a rather important art museum and that its
library is one of the four oldest town libraries in the country, no less
than the fact that the city was, in its day, a great racing center,
contribute to an understanding of the spirit of the place. The present
Charleston Library is not the first public library started in the city.
Not by any means! For it was founded as late as 1748, and the original
public library of Charleston was the first one of the kind in the
country, having been started about the beginning of the 18th century.
Old records of this library still exist, showing that citizens voted so
many skins to its support. Probably the most valuable possession of the
present library are its files of Charleston newspapers, dating from 1732
to the present time, including three files covering the War of 1812, and
two covering the Civil War. These files are consulted by persons from
all over the United States, for historical material. The library has
recently moved into a good modern building. In the old building there
was a separate entrance at the back for ladies, and it is only lately
that ladies have been allowed full membership in the Library Society,
and have entered by the front door. The former custom, I suppose,
represented certain old-school sentiments as to "woman's place" such as
I find expressed in "Reminiscences of Charleston," by Charles Fraser,
published in 1854. Declares Mr. Fraser:
The ambition for literary distinction is now very prevalent with
the sex. But without any disposition to undervalue their claims,
whenever I hear of a female traveler clambering the Alps, or
describing the classic grounds of Greece and Italy, publishing her
musings in the holy land, or revealing the mysteries of the harem,
I cannot but think that for every success obtained some appropriate
duty has been neglected.
I except the poetess, for hers are the effusions of the heart and
the imagination, prompted by nature and uttered because they are
irrepressible. Many females travel for the purpose of writing and
publishing books--whilst Mrs. Heman's, Mrs. Osgood's, and Mrs.
Sigourney's volumes may be regarded as grateful offerings to the
muse in return for her inspiration.
It is hard not to be irritated, even now, with the man who wrote that,
especially in view of the fact that the two most interesting books to
come out of the Carolinas of recent years are both by women: one of them
being "Charleston--the Place and the People," by Mrs. St. Julien
Ravenel, a volume any chapter of which is worth the whole of Mr.
Fraser's "Reminiscences," and the other "A Woman Rice-Planter," by
"Patience Pennington," otherwise Mrs. John Julius Pringle (née Alston),
who lives on her plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina.
The Carolina Jockey Club subscribed regularly to the support of the
library, and now that that club is no more, its chief memorial may be
said to rest there. This club was probably the first racing club in the
country, and it is interesting to note that the old cement pillars from
the Washington Race Course at Charleston were taken, when that course
was abandoned, and set up at the Belmont Park course, near New York.
The turf history of Carolina began (according to the "South Carolina
Gazette," dated February 1, 1734) in that same year, on the first
Tuesday in February. One of the prizes was a saddle and bridle valued at
£20. The riders were white men and the course was a green at Charleston
Neck, near where the lower depot of the South Carolina Railroad now
stands. In a "History of the Turf in South Carolina," which I found in
the library, I learned that Mr. Daniel Ravenel bred fine horses on his
plantation, Wantoot, in St. John's Parish, as early as 1761, that Mr.
Frank Huger had imported an Arabian horse, and that many other gentlemen
were importing British running horses, and were engaged in breeding. The
book refers to the old York Course, later called the New Market Course.
A long search did not, however, enable me to establish the date on which
the Jockey Club was founded. It was clearly a going institution in 1792,
for under date of Wednesday, February 15, in that year, I found the
record of a race for the Jockey Club Purse--"four mile-heats--weight for
age--won by Mr. Lynch's _Foxhunter_, after a well contested race of four
heats, beating Mr. Sumter's _Ugly_, who won the first heat; Col.
Washington's _Rosetta_, who won the second heat; Capt. Alston's _Betsy
Baker_," etc., etc.
The Civil War practically ended the Jockey Club, though a feeble effort
was, for a time, made to carry it on. In 1900 the club properties and
the funds remaining in the club treasury were transferred as an
endowment to the Charleston Library Society. The proceeds from this
endowment add to the library's income by about two thousand dollars
annually. Other items of interest in connection with the Carolina Jockey
Club are that Episcopal Church conventions used to be held in Charleston
during the racing season, so that the attending parsons might take in
the races; that the Jockey Club Ball used to be the great ball of the
Charleston season, as the second St. Cecilia Ball became later and now
is; that the Charleston Club, a most delightful club, founded in 1852,
was an outgrowth of the Jockey Club; and that the Jockey Club's old
Sherries, Ports and Madeiras went to New York where they were purchased
by Delmonico--among them a Calderon de la Barca Madeira of 1848, and a
Peter Domecq Sherry of 1818.
Mr. S.A. Nies, one of the old employees of Delmonico's, tells me that
the Calderon de la Barca of the above mentioned year is all gone, but
that Delmonico's still has a few bottles of the same wine of the vintage
of 1851.
"This wine," Mr. Nies said, "is listed on our wine card at $6.00 per
bottle. It is not the best Madeira that we have, although it is a very
fine one. Recently we served a bottle of Thompson's Auction Madeira, of
which the year is not recognizable on the label, but which to my
knowledge was an old wine forty years ago. This wine brought $25.00 a
bottle and was worth it.
"The Peter Domecq Sherry of 1818 does not figure on our wine list as we
have but a few bottles left. It is $20.00 a bottle.
"The prices brought to-day by old Madeiras and Sherries do not represent
their real values. One has but to look at the compound interest of
savings banks to realize that these wines should be selling at four
times the price they are; but unfortunately, since the advent of Scotch
whisky in the American market, the American palate seems to have
deteriorated, and if the wines were listed at the price they ought to
bring, we could not sell them. As it is, the demand for the very rare
old wines is irregular and infrequent. We keep them principally to
preserve our reputation; not for the money there is in it."