Richmond--save on that memorable occasion in the spring of 1907 when a
feeble trail of aging men--all that remained of a great gray
army--limped down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. The
Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that is the reason why
the Southerner so quickly takes the stranger within his gates to the
cemetery. It is his apologies for thirty or forty years lost in the
march of progress. And it is an apology that no man of breadth or
generosity can refuse to accept.
* * * * *
Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon her great hills and
shooting the tendrils of her growth in every direction. For she is
growing, rapidly and handsomely. Her new buildings--her wonderful
cathedral, her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying out by
the Lee statue--what self-respecting southern town does not have a Lee
statue--all bespeak the quality of her growth. But her new buildings
cannot easily surpass the old. It was rare good judgment in an American
town for her to refrain from tearing down or even "modernizing" that
Greek temple that stands atop of Schokoe hill and which generations have
known as the Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made absolutely
necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion have not robbed the older
portion of the building of one whit of its charm.
It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to stand beside one
another. In other days Virginia was proud of her capital, it was with no
small pride that she thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be
chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw it take its
stormy place among the nations of the world. In these days Virginia may
still be proud of her capital town--it is still a seat of government
quite worthy of a state of pride and of traditions.
8
WHERE ROMANCE AND COURTESY DO NOT FORGET
"You are not going to write your book and leave out Charleston?" said
the Man who Makes Magazines.
We hesitated at acknowledging the truth. In some way or other Charleston
had escaped us upon our travels. The Magazine Maker read our answer
before we could gain strength to make it.
"Well, you can't afford to miss that town," he said conclusively. "It's
great stuff."
"Great stuff?" we ventured.
"If you are looking into the personality of American cities you must
include Charleston. She has more personality than any of the other old
Colonial towns--save Boston. She's personality personified, old age
glorified, charm and sweetness magnified--the flavor of the past hangs
in every one of her old houses and her narrow streets. You cannot pass
by Charleston."
After that we went over to a railroad ticket office in Fifth avenue and
purchased a round-trip ticket to the metropolis of South Carolina. And a
week later we were on a southbound train, running like mad across the
Jersey meadows. Five days in Charleston! It seemed almost sacrilege.
Five miserable days in the town which the Maker of Magazines averred
fairly oozed personality. But five days were better than no days at
all--and Charleston must be included in this book.
The greater part of one day--crossing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the
up-stretched head of little Delaware, Maryland--finally the Old
Dominion and the real South. A day spent behind the glass of the car
window--the brisk and busy Jersey towns, the Delaware easily crossed;
Philadelphia, with her great outspreading of suburbs; Wilmington; a
short cut through the basements of Baltimore; the afternoon light dying
on the superb dome of the Washington Capitol--after that the Potomac.
Then a few evening hours through Virginia, the southern accent growing
more pronounced, the very air softer, the negroes more prevalent, the
porter of our car continually more deferential, more polite. After that
a few hours of oblivion, even in the clattering Pullman which, after the
fashion of all these tremendously safe new steel cars, was a bit chilly
and a bit noisy.
In the morning a low and unkempt land, the railroad trestling its way
over morass and swamp and bayou on long timber structures and many times
threading sluggish yellow southern rivers by larger bridges. Between
these a sandy mainland--thick forests of pine with increasing numbers of
live-oaks holding soft moss aloft--at last the outskirts of a town.
Other folk might gather their luggage together, the vision of a distant
place with its white spires, the soft gray fog that tells of the
proximity of the open sea blowing in upon them, held us at the window
pane. A river showed itself in the distance to the one side of the
train, with mast-heads dominating its shores; another, lined with
factories stretched upon the other side. After these, the streets of the
town, a trolley car stalled impatient to let our train pass--low streets
and mean streets of an unmistakable negro quarter, the broad shed of a
sizable railroad station showing at the right.
"Charleston, sah," said the porter. Remember now that he had been a
haughty creature in New York and Philadelphia, ebon dignity in Baltimore
and in Washington. Now he was docility itself, a courtesy hardly to be
measured by the mere expectation of gratuity.
The first glimpse of Charleston a rough paved street--our hotel 'bus
finding itself with almost dangerous celerity in front of trolley cars.
That unimportant way led into another broad highway of the town and
seemingly entitled to distinction.
"Meeting street," said our driver. "And I can tell you that Charleston
is right proud of it, sir," he added.
Charleston has good cause to be proud of its main highway, with the
lovely old houses along it rising out of blooming gardens, like fine
ladies from their ball gowns; at its upper end the big open square and
the adjacent Citadel--pouring out its gray-uniformed boys to drill just
as their daddies and their grand-daddies drilled there before them--the
charms of St. Michael's, and the never-to-be-forgotten Battery at the
foot of the street.
We sped down it and drew up at a snow-white hotel which in its
immaculate coat might have sprung up yesterday, were it not for the
stately row of great pillars, three stories in height, with which it
faced the street. They do not build hotels that way nowadays--more's the
pity. For when the Charleston Hotel was builded it entered a
distinguished brotherhood--the Tremont in Boston, the Astor and the St.
Nicholas in New York, Willard's in Washington, the Monongahela at
Pittsburgh, and the St. Charles in New Orleans were among its
contemporaries. It was worthy to be ranked with the best of these--a
hotel at which the great planters of the Carolinas and of Georgia could
feel that the best had been created for them within the very heart of
their favorite city.
We pushed our way into the heart of the generous office of the hotel,
thronged with the folk who had crowded into Charleston--followers of
the races, just then holding sway upon the outskirts of the town,
tourists from the North, Carolinans who will never lose the habit of
going to Charleston as long as Charleston exists. In due time a brisk
and bustling hotel clerk--he was an importation, plainly, none of your
courteous, ease-taking Southerners--had placed us in a room big enough
for the holding of a reception. From the shutters of the room we could
look down into Meeting street--into the charred remnants of a store that
had been burned long before and the débris never removed. When we threw
up the window sash we could thrust our heads out and see, a little way
down the street, the most distinctive and the most revered of all
Charleston's landmarks--the belfried spire of St. Michael's. As we
leaned from that window the bells of St. Michael's spoke the
quarter-hour, just as they have been speaking quarter-hours close upon a
century and a half.
We had been given the first taste of the potent charm of a most
distinctive southern town.
* * * * *
"... The most appealing, the most lovely, the most wistful town in
America; whose visible sadness and distinction seem almost to speak
audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet waves that ripple round her
southern front, speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning and breathe
not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle,
old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling
mellow-tinted plaster; King's Port the retrospective, King's Port the
belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the
marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks veiled in gray moss,
brooding with memories. Were she my city how I should love her...."
So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to know so well. You can
read Charleston in _Lady Baltimore_ each time he speaks of "King's
Port" and read correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance
of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old traditions and
old affections. In no other city of the land might he have laid such a
story. For no other city of the land bears the memory of tragedy so
plaintively, so uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat
peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at the very gateway
of South Carolina. Like a scarred man, Charleston will bear the visible
traces of her great disaster until the end of her days. And each of
them, like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more potent in her
charm.
Up one street and down another--fascinating pathways, every blessed one
of them. Meeting and King and Queen and Legare and Calhoun and
Tradd--with their high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the
sidewalks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hospitality,
inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a southern garden can
bloom--with jessamine and narcissus and oleander and japonica. Galleries
give to these fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her
sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. She calls them
piazzas, with the accent strong upon the "pi."
The gardens themselves are more than a little English, speaking clearly
something of the old-time English spirit of the town, which has its most
visible other expression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its
older public buildings and churches. And some of the older folk, defying
the Charleston convention of four o'clock dinner, will take tea in the
softness of the late afternoon. Local tradition still relates how, in
other days, a certain distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing
neither garden nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table and
chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take his tea of a late
afternoon. And the Charleston of that other day walked upon the far side
of the street rather than disturb the gentleman!
Nor is all that spirit quite gone in the Charleston of today. The older
negroes will touch their hats, if not remove them, when you glance at
them. They will step into the gutter when you pass them upon the narrow
sidewalks of the narrow streets. They came of a generation that made
more than the small distinction of separate schools and separate places
in the railroad cars between white and black. But they are rapidly
disappearing from the streets of the old city. Those younger negroes who
drive the clumsy two-wheeled carts in town and out over the rough-paved
streets have learned no good manners. And when the burly negresses who
amble up the sidewalks balancing huge trays of crabs or fresh fruits or
baked stuffs smile at you, theirs is the smile of insolence. Fifty years
of the Fifteenth Amendment have done their work--any older resident of
Charleston will tell you that, and thank God for the inborn courtesy
that keeps him from profanity with the telling.
But if oncoming years have worked great changes in the manner of the
race which continues to be of numerical importance in the seaport city,
it will take more than one or two or three or even four generations to
work great changes in the manners of the well-born white-skinned folk
who have ruled Charleston through the years by wit, diplomacy, the keen
force of intellect more than even the force of arms. And, as the city
now runs its course, it will take far more years for her to change her
outward guise.
For Charleston does not change easily. She continues to be a city of
yellow and of white. Other southern towns may claim distinction because
of their red-walled brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds
of Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have
grown up and over the old walls--exquisite bits of masonry, every one of
them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and
full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from
a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said,
stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the
rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses
through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston
does not parade herself. The closed windows of her houses seem to close
jealously against the Present as if they sought to hold within their
great rooms the Past and all of the glories that were of it.
Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most
famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they
might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town.
Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of
cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once
red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is
another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such
picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston
an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches
and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and
the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian.
Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of
France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon
her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some
corner of the Old World.
Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can
appreciate these negroes is in their street calls--if he has not been up
too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the
brigades of itinerant merchants are on their ways through the narrow
streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and
the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the
finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their
way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck,
lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies--the list runs to great
length.
You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last
precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that
something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it
comes musically to your ears:
"Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw."
And from another direction comes a slowly modulated:
"Waw cwab. WAW Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b."
A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these.
"She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is
a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors,
female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to
sleep in Charleston--well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To
dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes
rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an
opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day,
quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early
morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is
quite gone--unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants:
"Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat--monkey _meat_." And that old relic
of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes
and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char--coal.
Char--coal."
If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of
the delectable mixture of cocoanut and molasses candy which is to the
younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake
is to the older.
* * * * *
The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly
asserting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town,
the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of
Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets
and demanded the obeisance of the port--gladly rendered her. She has
stood to her corner through sunshine and through storm--through the glad
busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing those
upstart northern towns--New York and Boston--through the bitterness of
two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four
cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has
ever known--through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the
Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when
she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet
bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a
resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her
lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it
has been a stilled Charleston.
For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not
spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the
Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth
century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within
their belfry before the Revolution broke out--broke out at Charleston
just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last
time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his
"perquisite" and had shipped them back to England. An indignant American
town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New
York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance
such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a
speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people
of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal
procession--the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The
first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy
years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her
children--at the quarters of the hours.
After those seventy years more war--ugly guns that are remembered with a
shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious,
hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair
and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the
danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men
in the town--all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines--but
they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state--to Columbia,
the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea
marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men
in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the
South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army,
completely destroyed them.
When peace came again Charleston--bruised and battered and bleeding
Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal--gave first
thought to her bells--a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was
a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are
a conservative nation--to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still
had the molds in which the chime was first cast--a hundred years before.
Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them
came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones
unchanged. The town had regained its voice.
If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because
they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself
is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two
sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have
ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in
Charleston in the days of her glories--Pringles and Pinckneys;
Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina--Rutledge and
Ravenel and Rhett--the names within that silent place read like the
roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the
moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things; in
the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead--narcissus,
oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning
that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird--the
famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south--sang to us from his perch in a
magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson
river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.
The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone within the
little paths of her high-walled churchyard. Within the sturdy church, in
the serenity of her sanctuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so
many years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you might say;
in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk underneath where sat the old
time "clark" to read the responses and the notices; even the stately
pew, set aside from all the others, in which General Washington sat on
the occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina town, is the
fullness of her charm. If you are given imagination, you can see the
brown and white church filled as in the old days with the planters and
their families--generation after generation of them, coming first to the
church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font at the door and then,
years later, being carried out of that center aisle for the final time.
You can see the congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set
and determined. You can see one memorable congregation, as it hears the
crash of a Federal shell against the heavy tower, and then listen to the
gentle rector finishing the implication of the Litany before he
dismisses his little flock.
Dear old St. Michael's! The years--the sunny years and the tragic
years--set lightly upon her. When war and storm have wrecked her, it has
been her children and her children's children who have arisen to help
wipe away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, the great
wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, one hundred and eighty-five
feet above the street was sent hurtling down to the ground. They will
show you the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly replaced.
But within a year worse than cyclone was upon St. Michael's--the
memorable earthquake which sank the great tower eight inches deeper into
the earth. And only last year another of the fearful summer storms that
come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful damage upon the old
church. Yet St. Michael's has been patiently repaired each time; she
still towers above these disasters--as her quaint weather-vane towers
above the town, itself.
* * * * *
[Illustration: St. Michael's churchyard, Charleston--a veritable roster
of the Colonial Elect]