The Boys of '61 Part 57

Before the sailors had time to make fast the steamer, myself and friend[91] were up the pier. The band was playing "Hail, Columbia," and the strains floated through the desolate city, awakening wild enthusiasm in the hearts of the colored people, who came rus.h.i.+ng down the gra.s.s-grown streets to welcome us.

When near the upper end of the pier we encountered an old man bending beneath the weight of seventy years,-such years as slavery alone can pile upon the soul. He bowed very low.

"Are you not afraid of us Yankees?"

"No, ma.s.sa, G.o.d bless you. I have prayed many a night for you to come, and now you are here. Bless the Lord! Bless the Lord!"

He kneeled, clasped my hand, and with streaming eyes poured out his thanks to G.o.d.

Let us, before entering upon a narrative of military incidents, look at Charleston as she was at the beginning of the Rebellion, when the great cotton mart of the Atlantic coast, with lines of steams.h.i.+ps to New York and Boston. Then her wharves not only were piled with bales of cotton and tierces of rice, or with goods from the warehouses and manufactories of New England and Great Britain, but, next to New Orleans, she was the most populous city of the South, and, in proportion to the number of inhabitants, the wealthiest. Her banks and insurance offices were as stable as those of Wall Street. She aspired to be the commercial emporium of the South. The newspapers of Charleston taught the people to believe that Secession and non-intercourse with the North would make the city the rival of New York. She first adopted the vagaries of her own son, Calhoun, on the rights of States. She proclaimed cotton king, not of America, but of the world, and in her pride believed that all nations could be brought to do her homage. She was rich and aristocratic, and looked upon the people of the North with contempt.

"The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots," wrote De Bow, "who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans, who settled the North. The former are master races; the latter a slave race, descendants of the Anglo-Saxon serfs."

Through ignorance and vanity such a.s.sertions were accepted as truths. Boys and girls of the common schools of the North could have shown that, in the contests between the Cavaliers and Puritans, the Cavaliers were defeated; that the Jacobites went down before the party which placed William of Orange on the throne.

Charleston called the people of South Carolina into council. The Mercury-that able but wicked advocate of Secession-threw out from its windows this motto: "One voice and millions of strong arms to uphold the honor of South Carolina!" Not the honor of the nation or of the people, but of South Carolina,-the Mephistopheles of the Confederacy, the seducer of States. With honeyed words, and well-timed flattery she detached State after State from the Union.

"Whilst const.i.tuting a portion of the United States," said South Carolina, in her address to the slaveholding States, "it has been your statesmans.h.i.+p which has guided it in its mighty strides to power and expansion. In the field and in the cabinet you have led the way to renown and grandeur."

The ministers of her churches were foremost in abetting the Rebellion. Church and State, merchant and planter, all from high to low of the white population, brought themselves to believe that their influence was world-wide, through King Cotton and his prime minister, African Slavery. Hence the arrogance, fierce intolerance, and mad hate which had their only prototypes in the Rebellion of the Devil and his angels against Beneficent Goodness.

The siege of Charleston was commenced on the 21st of August, 1863, by the opening of the "Swamp-Angel" battery. On the 7th of September Fort Wagner was taken, and other guns were trained upon the city, compelling the evacuation of the lower half. For fourteen months it had been continued; not a furious bombardment, but a slow, steady fire from day to day. About thirteen thousand sh.e.l.ls had been thrown into the town,-nearly a thousand a month.

They were fired at a great elevation, and were plunging shots,-striking houses on the roof and pa.s.sing down from attic to bas.e.m.e.nt, exploding in the chambers, cellars, or in the walls. The effect was a complete riddling of the houses. Brick walls were blown into millions of fragments, roofs were torn to pieces; rafters, beams, braces, scantlings, were splintered into jack-straws. Churches, hotels, stores, dwellings, public buildings, and stables, all were shattered. There were great holes in the ground, where cart-loads of earth had been excavated in a twinkling.

In 1860 the population of the city was 48,509,-26,969 whites, 17,655 slaves, and 3,885 free colored. The first flight from the city was in December, 1861, when Port Royal fell into the hands of Dupont; but when it was found that the opportunity afforded at that time for an advance inland was not improved, most of those who had moved away returned. The attack of Dupont upon Sumter sent some flying again; but not till the messengers of the "Swamp Angel" dropped among them did the inhabitants think seriously of leaving. Some went to Augusta, others to Columbia, others to Cheraw. Many wealthy men bought homes in the country. The upper part of the city was crowded. Men of fortune who had lived in princely style were compelled to put up with one room. Desolation had been coming on apace. The city grew old rapidly, and had become the completest ruin on the continent. There were from ten to fifteen thousand people still remaining in it, two thirds of whom were colored.

When Sherman flanked Orangeburg, Hardee, who commanded the Rebels in Charleston, saw that he must evacuate the place. There was no alternative; he must give up Sumter, Moultrie, and the proud old city to the Yankees. It was bitter as death! A few of the heavy guns were sent off to North Carolina, all the trains which could be run on the railroad were loaded with ammunition and commissary supplies, the guns in the forts were spiked, and the troops withdrawn.

The inhabitants had been a.s.sured that the place should be defended to the last; and in the Courier office we found the following sentence in type, which had been set up not twenty-four hours before the evacuation: "There are no indications that our authorities have the first intention of abandoning Charleston, as I have ascertained from careful inquiry!" Duplicity to the end.

The Rebellion was inaugurated through deception, and had been sustained by an utter disregard of truth.

Friday and Sat.u.r.day were terrible days. Carts, carriages, wagons, horses, mules, all were brought into use. The railroad trains were crowded. Men, women, and children fled, terror-stricken, broken-hearted, humbled in spirit, from their homes. How different from the 12th of April, 1861, when they stood upon the esplanade of the battery, sat upon the house-tops, cl.u.s.tered in the steeples, looking seaward, shouting and waving their handkerchiefs as the clouds of smoke and forked flames rolled up from Sumter!

"G.o.d don't pay at the end of every week, but he pays at last, my Lord Cardinal," said Anne of Austria.

General Hardee remained in the city till Friday night, the 17th instant, when he retired with the army, leaving a detachment of cavalry to destroy what he could not remove. Every building and shed in which cotton had been stored was fired on Sat.u.r.day morning. The ironclads "Palmetto State," "Chicora," and "Charleston" were also given to the flames. They lay at the wharves, and had each large quant.i.ties of powder and sh.e.l.l on board. General Hardee knew that the explosions of the magazines would send a storm of fire upon the city. He knew it would endanger the lives of thousands; but what cared he? Governor McGrath called upon the people to destroy their houses. The newspapers pointed to Moscow as a sublime instance of heroic devotion. Human life, the wailing of infants, the feebleness of old age, weighed nothing with Hampton, Hardee, McGrath, General Lee, or Jeff Davis.

The torch was applied early on the morning of the 18th. The citizens sprang to the fire-engines and succeeded in extinguis.h.i.+ng the flames in several places; but in other parts of the city the fire had its own way, burning till there was nothing more to devour. On the wharf of the Savannah Railroad depot were several hundred bales of cotton and several thousand bushels of rice. On Lucas Street, in a shed, were twelve hundred bales of cotton. There were numerous other sheds all filled. Near by was the Lucas mill, containing thirty thousand bushels of rice, and Walker's warehouse, with a large amount of commissary stores, all of which were licked up by the fire so remorselessly kindled.

At the Northeastern Railroad depot there was an immense amount of cotton which was fired. The depot was full of commissary supplies and ammunition, powder in kegs, sh.e.l.ls, and cartridges. The people rushed in to obtain the supplies. Several hundred men, women, and children were in the building when the flames reached the ammunition and the fearful explosion took place, lifting up the roof and bursting out the walls, and scattering bricks, timbers, tiles, beams, through the air; sh.e.l.ls crashed through the panic-stricken crowd, followed by the shrieks and groans of the mangled victims lying helpless in the flames, burning to cinders in the all-devouring element. Nor was this all. At the wharves were the ironclads, burning, torn, rent, scattered over the water and land,-their sh.e.l.ls and solid shot, iron braces, red-hot iron plates, falling in an infernal shower, firing the wharves, the buildings, and all that could burn.

There was more than this. Two magnificent Blakely guns-one at the battery, the other near the gas-works on Cooper River-were loaded to the muzzle and trains laid to burst them. The concussion shattered all the houses in the immediate vicinity.

The buildings near the Northeastern depot were swept away. All the houses embraced in the area of four squares disappeared. The new bridge leading to James Island was destroyed, the fire eating its way slowly from pier to pier through the day. The citizens did their utmost to stay the flames, but from sunrise to sunset on Sat.u.r.day, all through Sat.u.r.day night, Sunday, and Monday, the fire burned. How fearful this retribution for crime! Abandoned by those who had cajoled and deceived them, who had brought about their calamity, while swearing to defend them to the last, humbled, reduced from affluence to poverty, the people of Charleston were compelled to endure the indescribable agony of those days.

Colonel Bennett, commanding the Twenty-First United States Colored Troops on Morris Island, seeing signs of evacuation on Sat.u.r.day morning, the 18th, hastened up the harbor in boats with his regiment, landing at the South Atlantic wharf.

"In the name of the United States government," was his note to the Mayor, "I demand the surrender of the city of which you are the executive officer. Until further orders, all citizens will remain in their houses."

The mayor, meanwhile, had despatched a deputation to Morris Island with formal intelligence of the evacuation.

"My command," wrote Colonel Bennett, "will render every possible a.s.sistance to your well-disposed citizens in extinguis.h.i.+ng the flames."

The Twenty-First United States Colored Troops was made up of the old Third and Fourth South Carolina regiments, and many of them were formerly slaves in the city of Charleston. They were enlisted at a time when public sentiment was against them, in the winter of 1862-63. I was at Port Royal then, and they were employed in the quartermaster's department. They were sneered at and abused by officers and men belonging to white regiments; but Colonel Bennett continued steadfast in his determination, obtained arms after a long struggle, in which he was seconded by Colonel Littlefield, Inspector-General of colored troops in the department. Colonel Bennett had organized four companies of the Third and Colonel Littlefield four companies of the Fourth. The two commands were united and numbered as the Twenty-First United States Colored Troops. They went to Morris Island in 1863, took part in two or three engagements, and proved themselves good soldiers of the Union. It was their high privilege to be first in the city. The stone which the builders rejected once in the history of the world became the head stone of the corner; and in like manner the poor, despised, rejected African race, which had no rights, against whom the city of Charleston plotted iniquity and inaugurated treason, marched into the city to save it from destruction! Following the Twenty-First was a detachment of the Fifty-Fourth Ma.s.sachusetts.

"Let him lie buried beneath his n.i.g.g.e.rs!" Stung by the insult to the memory of their lamented commander and by the sneer at themselves, will they not now wreak their vengeance on the ill-fated city? It is their hour for retaliation. But they harbor in their hearts no malice or revenge. Conscious of their manhood, they are glad of another opportunity of showing it.

The soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth have proved their prowess on the field of battle; they have met the chivalry of South Carolina face to face, and shown their equality in courage and heroism, and on this ever-memorable day they make manifest to the world their superiority in honor and humanity.

Let the painter picture it. Let the poet rehea.r.s.e it. With the old flag above them, keeping step to freedom's drum-beat, up the gra.s.s-grown streets, past the slave-marts where their families and themselves have been sold in the public shambles, laying aside their arms, working the fire-engines to extinguish the flames, and, in the spirit of the Redeemer of men, saving that which was lost.

"It was the intention of some of our officers to destroy the city," said one of the citizens; "they not only set it on fire, but they double-shotted the guns of the ironclads, and turned them upon the town, but fortunately no one was injured when they exploded."

The lower half of the city was called Gillmore's town by the inhabitants.

We visited the old office of the Mercury, in Broad Street. A messenger sent by the "Swamp Angel" had preceded us, entering the roof, exploding within the chimney, dumping several cart-loads of brickbats and soot into the editorial room, breaking the windows and splintering the doors. It was the room in which Secession had its incubation. The leading rebellious spirits once sat there in their arm-chairs and enthroned King Cotton. They demanded homage to his majesty from all nations. The first sh.e.l.l sent the Mercury up town to a safer locality, but when Sherman began his march into the interior, the Mercury fled into the country to Cheraw, right into his line of advance!

The Courier office in Bay Street had not escaped damage. A sh.e.l.l went down through the floors, ripping up the boards, jarring the plaster from the walls, and exploded in the second story, rattling all the tiles from the roof, bursting out the windows, smas.h.i.+ng the composing-stone, opening the whole building to the winds. Another sh.e.l.l had dashed the sidewalk to pieces and blown a pa.s.sage into the cellar, wide enough to admit a six-horse wagon. Near the Courier office were the Union Bank, Farmers' and Exchange Bank, and Charleston Bank, costly buildings, fitted up with marble mantels, floors of terra-cotta tiles, counters elaborate in carved work, and with gorgeous frescoing on the walls. There, five years ago, the merchants of the city, the planters of the country, the slave-traders, a.s.sembled on exchange, talked treason, and indulged in extravagant day-dreams of the future glory of Charleston.

The rooms were silent now, the oaken doors splintered, the frescoing washed from the walls by the rains which dripped from the shattered roof; the desks were kindling-wood, the highly-wrought cornice-work had dropped to the ground, the tiles were ploughed up, the marble mantles s.h.i.+vered, the beautiful plate-gla.s.s of the windows was in fragments upon the floor. The banks helped on the Rebellion,-contributed their funds to inaugurate it, and invested largely in the State securities to place the State on a war footing. The three banks named held on January 6, 1862, six hundred and ten thousand dollars' worth of the seven per cent State stock, issued under the act of December, 1861.

The entire amount of the State loan of one million eight hundred thousand dollars issued under that act was taken by the banks of the State. Every bank with the exception of the Bank of Camden and the Commercial Bank of Columbia subscribed to the stock. The seven Charleston banks at this early stage of the war had loaned the State permanently eleven hundred and forty-two thousand dollars.[92]

At this period of the war the State had twenty-seven thousand three hundred and sixty-two troops[93] in the field, out of a white population of two hundred and ninety-one thousand, by the census of 1860,-nearly one half of the voting population, so fiercely burned the fires of Secession. But the flames had reached their whitest heat. Even at that time the people had grown weary of the war, and refused to enlist.

"The activity and energy had been already abstracted," writes the chief of the Military Department of the State; "they had stricken at the sovereignty of the State; ignorance, indolence, selfishness, disaffection, and to some extent disappointed ambition, were combined and made unwittingly to aid and abet the enemy, and to become the coadjutors of Lincoln and all the hosts of abolition myrmidons."[94]

Pa.s.sing from the banks to the hotels, we found a like scene of destruction. The doors of the Mills House were open. The windows had lost their glazing and were boarded up. Sixteen shots had struck the building. The rooms where Secession had been rampant in the beginning, where bottles of wine had been drunk over the fall of Sumter, echoed only to our footsteps. The Charleston Hotel, where Governor Pickens had uttered his proud, exultant, defiant words, was pierced in many places. Dining-halls, parlors, and chambers had been visited by messengers from Wagner. I gathered strawberry flowers and dandelions from the gra.s.s-green pavement in front of the hotel, trodden by the drunken mult.i.tude on that night when the flag of the Union was humbled in the dust.

No wild, tumultuous shoutings now, but silence deep, painful, sorrowful. Our own voices only echoed along the corridors and balconies where surged the lunatics of that hour. We pa.s.sed at will along the streets, wanderers in a desolate city. Along the Battery, a beautiful promenade of the city, shaded by magnolias, and fragrant with the bloom of roses and syringas, overlooking the harbor, stood the residences of the "chivalric" men of South Carolina. From their balconies and windows the occupants had watched the first bombardment of Sumter. They had seen with joyful eyes the flames lick up the barracks, and the lowering of the flag of the Union. But now their palatial homes were wrecks, and they were fugitives. Doorless and windowless the houses. The elaborate centre pieces of stucco-work in the drawing-rooms crumbled; the bedrooms filled with bricks, the white marble steps and mahogany bal.u.s.ters shattered; owls and bats might build their nests in the coming spring-time undisturbed in the deserted mansions, the esplanade of the Battery, the pleasure-ground of the Charlestonians, their delight and pride, was now merely a huge embankment of earth,-a magazine of shot and sh.e.l.l.

The churches-where slavery had been preached as a missionary inst.i.tution, where Secession had been prayed for, where Te Deums had been sung over the fall of Sumter and hosannas shouted for the great victory of Mana.s.sas-were, like the houses, wrecks. The pavements were strewn with the gla.s.s shattered from the windows of old St. Michael's, the pride and reverence of Charleston; and St. Philip's, where wors.h.i.+pped the rich men, where the great apostle of Secession and devotee of slavery, Calhoun, lies in his narrow cell, resembled an ancient ruin. His grave, marked by a white marble slab, was unharmed, but the bones of his fellow-sleepers had been disturbed by the sh.e.l.ls. The yard was overrun with weeds and briers. Bombs had torn through the church. Pigeons had free access. Buzzards might roost there undisturbed.

In 1861 the heart of the city was burned out by a great fire, which swept from the Cooper River to the Ashley. How it ignited no one has told. The colored people are fully imbued with the belief that it was sent of the Lord. No attempt had been made to rebuild the waste. All the energy of the people had been given to prosecuting the war. There had been no sound of trowel, hammer, or saw, except upon the ironclads.

The blackened area was overgrown with fire-weeds. Lean and hungry curs barked at us from the tenantless houses. Cats which once purred by pleasant firesides ran from their old haunts at our approach. The rats had deserted the wharves and moved up town with the people. The buzzards, which once picked up the garbage of the markets, had disappeared. A solitary rook cawed to us, perched on the vane of the court-house steeple. Spiders were spinning their webs in the counting-houses.

It was an indescribable scene of desolation,-of roofless houses, cannon-battered walls, crumbling ruins, upheaved pavement, and gra.s.s-grown streets; silent to all sounds of business, voiceless only to a few haggard men and women wandering amid the ruins, reflecting upon a jubilant past, a disappointed present, and a hopeless future!

"Her merchants were the great men of the earth; for by their sorceries were all nations deceived. And in her was found the blood of the prophets and of the saints."

Charleston was one of the great slave-marts of the South. She was the boldest advocate for the reopening of the slave-trade. Her statesmen legislated for it; her ministers of the Gospel upheld it as the best means for Christianizing Africa and for the ultimate benefit of the whole human race. Being thus sustained, the slave-traders set up their auction-block in no out-of-the-way place. A score of men opened offices and dealt in the bodies and souls of men. Among them were T. Ryan & Son, M. M. McBride, J. E. Bowers, J. B. Oaks, J. B. Baker, Wilbur & Son, on State and Chalmers Streets. Twenty paces distant from Baker's was a building bearing the sign, "Theological Library, Protestant Episcopal Church." Standing by Baker's door, and looking up Chalmers Street to King Street, I read another sign, "Sunday-School Depository." Also, "Hibernian Hall," the building in which the ordinance of Secession was signed. In another building on the opposite corner was the Registry of Deeds. Near by was the guard-house with its grated windows, its iron bars being an appropriate design of double-edged swords and spears. Thousands of slaves had been incarcerated there for no crime whatever, except for being out after nine o'clock, or for meeting in some secret chamber to tell G.o.d their wrongs, with no white man present. They disobeyed the law by not listening to the bell of old St. Michael's, which at half past eight in the evening, in its high and venerable tower, opened its trembling lips and shouted, "Get you home! Get you home!" Always that; always of command; always of arrogance, superiority, and caste; never of love, good-will, and fellows.h.i.+p. On Sunday morning it said, "Come and sit in your old-fas.h.i.+oned, velvet-cus.h.i.+oned pews, you rich ones! Go up stairs, you n.i.g.g.e.rs!"

The guard-house doors were wide open. The jailer had lost his occupation. The last slave had been immured within its walls, and St. Michael's curfew was to be sweetest music thenceforth and forever. It shall ring the glad chimes of freedom,-freedom to come, to go, or to tarry by the way; freedom from sad partings of wife and husband, father and son, mother and child.

The brokers in flesh and blood took good care to be well b.u.t.tressed. They set up their market in a reputable quarter, with St. Michael's and the guard-house, the Registry of Deeds and the Sunday-School Depository, the Court-House and the Theological Library around them to make their calling respectable.