CHAPTER LXXI.

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?

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:—

“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.