In the afternoon, the General commanding the post was waiting with carriages for the party, at the wharf, when Admiral Dahlgren set us ashore. The wheels cut deep into the sand, throwing it into our faces and filling the carriage with it, till we began to realize what it meant to have taken up the pavements to get stone for the fortifications.

“Shall we go first to the statue of Calhoun?” asked the General. “It is scarcely necessary—here is his monument,” said some one (in imitation of the old eulogium), pointing around the destroyed parts of the city. Later in the ride we did pass an old statue to William Pitt, which the English-loving cavaliers of Carolina had erected in the old Colonial days. During the Revolutionary war, a British ball broke off one of its arms. When we entered the city it was found that the other was also gone.

A foreigner, who visited Charleston in May, 1861, spoke of these streets as “looking like Paris in the revolution—crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets; the battle blood running through their veins; that hot oxygen, which is called ‘the flush of victory,’ on the cheek; restaurants full; reveling in bar rooms, club rooms crowded, orgies and carousings in taverns or private houses, in tap rooms, down narrow alleys, in the broad highways.” This is the anniversary of that mad era; but the streets look widely different. There are crowds of armed men in the streets, but they move under the strictest discipline and their color is black. No battle blood mantles the faces of the haggard and listless Charlestonians one meets—it is rather blood born of low diet and water gruel. For the flush of victory we have utter despondency. The restaurants are closed and the shutters are up; the occupants of the club rooms are dead, or in prison, or in exile; there is still carousing in taverns, but it is only by the flushed and spendthrift Yankee officers who are willing to pay seventy-five cents for a cobbler.

Of the leaders of those days, scarcely one remains to receive the curses which, even in the midst of their hatred of the Yankees, the people pour out upon the men who converted their prosperity into desolation. Then they were singing—

But Beauregard is a prisoner, given leave, by “Old Abe’s” parole, to humbly enter his home at New Orleans, from which the loving wife, whom he deserted for secession, has gone out forever. Huger is dead. Barnwell Rhett is in exile, and the very journal by which he fed and nurtured the germs of the Rebellion, has passed absolutely out of existence—no new editor daring to revive so ill-omened a thing as the Charleston Mercury.^[12] Governor Pickens, who announced in one of his early proclamations that he was born insensible to fear, has lived to learn his mistake, and has vanished into the dim unknown of “the interior.” Governor Aiken, who, (like that political eunuch, Alexander H. Stephens,) weakly yielded his convictions and eased his conscience by blockade running, instead of fighting, has, for some unknown reason, been arrested and sent to Washington. Governor Manning, Porcher Miles, Senator Chesnut, Barnwell, have all vanished into thin air before the Ithuriel touch—nay, rather before the mere approach of negro bayonets. The merchants, too, whom Southern independence was to make the cotton factors of the world, have disappeared. Their direct line of steamers to Liverpool failed to get beyond the blockading fleet, and long before the politicians had given it up, these men were hopelessly ruined. Trenholm, indeed, pushed a precarious but lucrative trade in blockade running, and succeeded better in managing his own funds than he did those of the Rebel Treasury Department; but he is now an absconding member of the Jeff. Davis Cabinet, and will be fortunate if he escape arrest. Rose and Minor are gone.

One name, of all that were so prominent in Charleston four years ago, should never be taken on loyal lips save with reverent regard—that of Mr. Petigru. He remained faithful to the last; but his eyes were not permitted to see the old flag waving again, and his wife is to-day in Charleston, living on Government rations! She has stated her destitution frankly, however, to General Gillmore, commanding the Department, and some small part of the nation’s debt to her husband will yet, it is hoped, be paid in the tenderest care for herself.

“There are twenty thousand people here in Charleston,” said the haughty representative of an ancient Carolinian name, “and only six families among them all!” Judging from what one sees on the streets, one could very readily believe the paradox which, in Carolina lips, becomes no paradox at all. There are plenty of resident Irish on the streets; the poorer class of natives, too, begin to venture out; but, in the course of the whole afternoon’s driving about the city, I did not see a single one whom I should have supposed to belong to a leading family. My companion had spent the greater part of his life in Charleston, and, in his own language, knew everybody in the town; but he failed to see one whom he recognized as having ever held any position in politics or society.

The extent of the damage by the bombardment has, I imagine, been generally overrated at the North. The lower part of the city was certainly not an eligible location for a quiet residence; but it is an error to suppose that most of the houses, or any considerable number of them, have been destroyed. The shells generally failed to explode, and the marks on the houses are rather scars than serious breaches. Roofs are injured, walls are weakened, windows destroyed and floors more or less ripped up; but still the houses stand, and can, with comparatively little outlay, be repaired. The General’s headquarters are established in the midst of the bombarded district; but the elegant house which he occupies shows no mark whatever. Most of the other officers who have taken houses are in the same quarter, and I observe that they have the same passion, as at Wilmington, for getting the very best establishments in a place.

The General drove us through the Arsenal grounds, and past those of the Military Academy, where, of old, the martial spirit of South Carolina had been fostered. The drives and walks had been bordered with spherical case, round shot and shell; and here and there, at the corners, little ornamental effects were produced by the erection of small pillars, made of our long rifle projectiles, flanked by a few broken bayonets. It was thus the Charlestonians amused themselves during the progress of the bombardment.

Passing through the shabby suburbs, which would hardly comport with the dignity of a first-class Northern village, we came out upon the track where, of yore, all the beauty and fashion of Charleston was wont to congregate—the Race Course. Of late years it has been used for a different purpose. Here, without shelter, without clothing, and with insufficient food, were confined the Yankee prisoners; and in a little inclosure, back of the judges’ stand, may be seen their uncounted graves. Sympathizing hands have cleared away the weeds, and placed over the entrance an inscription that must bring shame to the cheek of every Southern man who passes: “The Martyrs of the Race Course.” Near it was an elegant cemetery, carefully tended, glorious with superb live-oaks, and weeping with the long, pendent trails of the silvery Spanish moss; but into this consecrated ground no Yankee’s body could be borne. Negro soldiers were strolling through it as we passed, and some were reading from showy tombstones, to the dusky groups around them, the virtues of the—masters from whom they had run away to enlist!

Occasional vehicles were seen on the road, bringing in black and white refugees. The country is in such confusion that many seek the safe shelter of the cities, solely from the blind instinct that where there is force there must be protection. Such wagons and such horses were surely never seen. Each rivaled the other in corners, in age, in protuberance, and shakiness, and general disposition to tumble down and dissolve. They all bring in saddening stories of destitution in the country. Still I am inclined to think that these stories are exaggerated. There is little evidence of actual suffering in the country; and in the cities none who want have any scruples in calling upon the hireling minions of the tyrannical Washington Government for rations. Next winter is the dead point of danger. There is a smaller breadth of cereals sown in the South this year than in any year since 1861, and by fall the stock on hand is likely to be exhausted. Now the suffering is only individual; then it promises to be too nearly general.

On the other hand, the reports from the North-west, or mountain region of the State, indicate little prospect of suffering. “I tell you,” said a South Carolinian, from Greenville, “the South could have continued the war for ten years, if it had had your Northern gift of perseverance. We were neither exhausted of men nor of provisions; it was only that the flame of enthusiasm had burnt out. I have myself traveled, within the past month, through sections of South Carolina, from Greenville to Columbia, and thence north-east and north-west, so as to know accurately the condition of the crops in one-half the State. There is no trouble about starvation. The people are not suffering, except in such isolated cases as you will always find, and there is a larger breadth of grains planted than ever before. With reasonable care there ought to be no starvation this winter.”

There was a little party in the evening, in the fine old mansion of a noted Charleston banker, but there were few South Carolinians there, excepting the house servants who had remained to wait on the new occupants. Admiral Dahlgren, Major-General Saxton, two or three Brigadiers and Brevet Brigadiers, and their wives, made up the bulk of the company; and the talk was of the army and navy and the policy of the Government. A gentleman was introduced as the editor of the Charleston Courier, and I was not a little surprised to find that redoubtable Rebel personage greeting me with the warmth of an old acquaintance. He turned out to be a former attaché of a leading New York paper, who had often reported to me in Washington, when I had been in temporary charge of its bureau there.

Persons writing from here in the spring of 1861, said there was no feature of the feeling among the leaders more marked than their scarcely disguised hostility to the freedom of the press. I had been reading over some of those letters, of four years ago, in the morning; and it sounded curiously, like a continuation of the old strain, to hear the editor’s lamentations over the impossibility of making a newspaper where you could express no opinions, and couldn’t always even print the news. “Here, yesterday, for example, was a reconstruction meeting. The call for it was sent to me. I published that, and then sent phonographers to make a full report of the proceedings. There was a big row; the whites ordered out the negroes; then the latter got re-enforced, and came back to maintain their ground, whereupon the whites left. The speeches on both sides were racy; there was a good deal of excitement. I had a splendid report of the whole thing, and it was capital news. I had it all in type, when an order came to make no allusion whatever to the meeting. This morning everybody thinks the Courier is behind the times, because it didn’t know anything about the reconstruction meeting!”

After the party, the Dominie told me of his explorations among his old friends in Charleston.

I ought, perhaps, before this, to have explained that my genial room mate, whom I have been rather irreverently terming the Dominie, is Rev. Dr. Fuller, of Baltimore, now a noted Baptist clergyman, formerly a leading South Carolina lawyer and planter. He still owns large plantations on the sea islands, and, down to the date of the emancipation proclamation, had on them between two hundred and two hundred and fifty slaves, who came to him by inheritance, and whom, under the laws of South Carolina, he was unable either to educate or emancipate. Governor Bradford said to him once: “Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation idea has been an expensive one to you, Doctor. It must have cost you over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” “Yes, I presume it did; but then, Governor, it took over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of iron off my conscience!” So great had been the change since he held his public discussion with President Wayland, on the rightfulness of, and Scriptural warrant for, slavery!

All the Doctor’s connections were with the South, and nearly all his relations, who have not been killed, are living here. It was his nephew who held Fort Sumter to the last; a near relative of his laid out the fortifications at Fort Fisher; another was the Rebel engineer at Norfolk. Last night he found a granddaughter, of perhaps the most prominent member of the first Congress, living on Government rations! Another, equally destitute, bears a historic name, and is the granddaughter of one of Washington’s most confidential friends and intimate advisers in the Revolutionary war.

It has been naturally supposed that the bitterest drop in all the bitter cup of humiliation for these haughty South Carolinians, must be the necessity of accepting alms from the Government they had been seeking to overthrow. But the ingenious high priestesses of secession regard the matter in no such light. The Dominie found a number of them living solely on Government rations. He hastened to offer them assistance. Their Northern relatives had already repeatedly volunteered similar offers, but they refused them all, and persisted in living on the bacon and hard bread issued by the United States Commissary. They explained that they preferred to make “the Washington Government” support them. It had robbed them of all they had, and now the very least it could do was to pay their expenses.^[13] Every penny of cost to which they put it was so much got back from the fortunes of which it had robbed them, by waging this wicked war for their subjugation! Doesn’t somebody think it a shame that these repentant South Carolinians should be treated with so little magnanimity as the Government is displaying; and that Northern Abolitionists should quit watching them critically, and “mind their own business?” Already, a few of the South Carolinians talk thus; and in a few months, if freedom of expression is allowed them, we shall see much of the old vituperation of the Government and of the North.