CHARLESTON AND THE WAR.
The railroad from Savannah to Charleston, one hundred and four miles in
length, running through a country of rice-plantations, was struck and
smashed by Sherman in his march _from_ the sea. As it never was a paying
road before the war, I could see no prospect of its being soon repaired.
The highway of the ocean supplies its place. There was little travel and
less business between the two cities, two or three small steamers a week
being sufficient to accommodate all. Going on board one of these
inferior boats at three o’clock one afternoon, at Savannah, I awoke the
next morning in Charleston harbor.
A warm, soft, misty morning it was, the pale dawn breaking through rifts
in the light clouds overhead, a vapory horizon of dim sea all around.
What is that great bulk away on our left, drifting past us? That is the
thing known as Fort Sumter: it does not float from its rock so easily:
it is we who are drifting past it. We have just left Fort Moultrie on
our right; the low shores on which it crouches lie off there still
visible, like banks of heavier mist. That obscure phenomenon ahead
yonder looms too big for a hencoop, and turns out to be Fort Ripley. The
dawn brightens, the mist clears, and we see, far on our right, Castle
Pinckney; and on our left a gloomy line of pine forests, which we are
told is James Island.
This is historic ground we are traversing,—or rather historic water. How
the heart stirs with the memories it calls up! What is that at anchor
yonder? A monitor! A man on its low flat deck walks almost level with
the water. Two noticeable objects follow after us: one is a
high-breasted, proud-beaked New York steamer; the other, the wonderful
light of dawn dancing upon the waves.
Before us all the while, rising and expanding as we approach, its
wharves and shipping, its warehouses and church steeples, gradually
taking shape, on its low peninsula thrust out between the two rivers, is
the haughty and defiant little city that inaugurated treason, that led
the Rebellion, that kindled the fire it took the nation’s blood to
quench. And is it indeed you, city of Charleston, lying there so quiet,
harmless, half asleep, in the peaceful morning light? Where now are the
joy-intoxicated multitudes who thronged your batteries and piers and
house-tops, to see the flag of the Union hauled down from yonder
shattered little fortress? Have you forgotten the frantic cheers of that
frantic hour? Once more the old flag floats there! How do you like the
looks of it, city of Charleston?
[Illustration]
I gave my travelling-bag to a black boy on the wharf, who took it on his
head and led the way through the just awakened streets to the Mills
House.
The appearance of the city in the early morning atmosphere, was
prepossessing. It is a well built, light, and airy city. It lacks the
broad streets, the public squares, and the forest of trees, which give
to Savannah its charm; but it strikes one as a more attractive place for
a residence. You are not at all oppressed with a sense of the lowness of
the situation; and yet it is far less elevated than Savannah, the flat
and narrow peninsula on which it is built rising but a few feet above
high water.
Charleston did not strike me as a very cleanly town, and I doubt if it
ever was such. Its scavengers are the turkey buzzards. About the
slaughter-pens on the outskirts of the city, at the markets, and
wherever garbage abounds, these black, melancholy birds, properly
vultures, congregate in numbers. There is a law against killing them,
and they are very tame. In contrast with these obscenities are the
gardens of the suburban residences, green in midwinter with
semi-tropical shrubs and trees.
Here centred the fashion and aristocracy of South Carolina, before the
war. Charleston was the watering-place where the rich cotton and rice
planters, who lived upon their estates in winter, came to lounge away
the summer season, thus inverting the Northern custom. It has still many
fine residences, built in a variety of styles; but, since those recent
days of its pride and prosperity, it has been wofully battered and
desolated.
The great fire of 1861 swept diagonally across the city from river to
river. A broad belt of ruin divides what remains. One eighth of the
entire city was burned, comprising much of its fairest and wealthiest
quarter. No effort had yet been made to rebuild it. The proud city lies
humbled in its ashes, too poor to rise again without the helping hand of
Northern Capital.
The origin of this stupendous fire still remains a mystery. It is looked
upon as one of the disasters of the war, although it cannot be shown
that it had any connection with the war. When Eternal Justice decrees
the punishment of a people, it sends not War alone, but also its sister
terrors, Famine, Pestilence, and Fire.
The ruins of Charleston are the most picturesque of any I saw in the
South. The gardens and broken walls of many of its fine residences
remain to attest their former elegance. Broad, semicircular flights of
marble steps, leading up once to proud doorways, now conduct you, over
their cracked and calcined slabs, to the level of high foundations swept
of everything but the crushed fragments of their former superstructures,
with here and there a broken pillar, and here and there a windowless
wall. Above the monotonous gloom of the ordinary ruins rise the
churches,—the stone tower and roofless walls of the Catholic Cathedral,
deserted and solitary, a roost for buzzards; the burnt-out shell of the
Circular Church, interesting by moonlight, with its dismantled columns
still standing, like those of an antique temple; and others scarcely
less noticeable.
There are additional ruins scattered throughout the lower part of the
city, a legacy of the Federal bombardment. The Scotch Church, a large
structure, with two towers and a row of front pillars, was rendered
untenantable by ugly breaches in its roof and walls, that have not yet
been repaired. The old Custom-House and Post-Office building stands in
an exceedingly dilapidated condition, full of holes. Many other public
and private buildings suffered no less. Some were quite demolished;
while others have been patched up. After all, it would seem that the
derisive laughter with which the Charlestonians, according to
contemporaneous accounts in their newspapers, received the Yankee
shells, must have been of a forced or hysterical nature. Yet I found
those who still maintained that the bombardment did not amount to much.
A member of the city fire department said to me:—
[Illustration: LEAVING CHARLESTON ON THE CITY BEING BOMBARDED.]
“But few fires were set by shells. There were a good many fires, but
they were mostly set by mischief-makers. The object was to get us
firemen down in shelling range. There was a spite against us, because we
were exempt from military duty.”
The fright of the inhabitants, however, was generally frankly admitted.
The greatest panic occurred immediately after the occupation of Morris
Island by General Gillmore. “The first shells set the whole town in
commotion. It looked like everybody was skedaddling. Some loaded up
their goods, and left nothing but their empty houses. Others just packed
up a few things in trunks and boxes, and abandoned the rest. The poor
people and negroes took what they could carry on their backs or heads,
or in their arms, and put for dear life. Some women put on all their
dresses, to save them. For a while the streets were crowded with
runaways,—hurrying, hustling, driving,—on horseback, in wagons, and on
foot,—white folks, dogs, and niggers. But when it was found the shells
only fell down town, the people got over their scare; and many who went
away came back again. Every once in a while, however, the Yankees would
appear to mount a new gun, or get a new gunner; and the shells would
fall higher up. That would start the skedaddling once more. One shell
would be enough to depopulate a whole neighborhood.”
A Northern man, who was in Charleston during the war, told me that he
was lying sick in a house which was struck by a shell early during the
bombardment. “A darkey that was nursing me took fright and ran away, and
left me in about as unpleasant a condition as I was ever in. I couldn’t
stir from my bed, and there was much more danger that I might die from
neglect, than from Gillmore’s shells. Finally a friend found me out, and
removed me to another house a few streets above. It was nine months
before the shells reached us there.”
The shelling began in July, 1863, and was kept up pretty regularly until
the surrender of the city, on the 18th of February, 1865. This last
event occurred just four years after the inauguration of Jefferson Davis
as President of the Confederate States. How did the people of Charleston
keep that last glorious anniversary?
Sherman’s northward marching army having flanked the city, its
evacuation was not unexpected; but when it came, confusion and dismay
came with it. The Rebel troops, departing, adhered to their usual custom
of leaving ruin behind them. They fired the upper part of the city,
burning an immense quantity of cotton, with railroad buildings and
military stores. While the half-famished poor were rushing early in the
morning to secure a little of the Confederate rice in one of the
warehouses, two hundred kegs of powder blew up, killing and mutilating a
large number of those unfortunate people. Here also it devolved upon the
Union troops to save the city from the fires set by its own friends.
Of the sixty-five thousand inhabitants which the city contained at the
beginning of the secession war, only about ten thousand remained at the
time of the occupation by our troops. Those belonged mostly to the
poorer classes, who could not get away. Many people rushed in from the
suburbs, got caught inside the intrenchments, and could not get out
again. Others rushed out panic-stricken from the burning city, and when
they wished to return, found that they could not. Charleston, from the
moment of its occupation, was a sealed city. Families were divided.
Husbands shut within the line of fortifications drawn across the neck of
the peninsula, could not hear from their families in the country; and
wives in the country could not get news from their husbands. “It was two
months before I could learn whether my husband was dead or alive,” said
a lady, who took refuge in the interior. And some who remained in
Charleston, told me it was a month before they heard of the burning of
Columbia; that they could not even learn which way Sherman’s army had
gone.