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 rushing down the grass-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, massa, God 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 God.
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 steamships 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 assertions 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 constituting a portion of the United States," said South Carolina, in her address to the slaveholding States, "it has been your statesmanship 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."