Passing 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 grass-green pavement in front of the hotel, trodden by the drunken multitude 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 passed 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 balusters 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 shell.
The churches—where slavery had been preached as a missionary institution, 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 Manassas—were, like the houses, wrecks. The pavements were strewn with the glass shattered from the windows of old St. Michael's, the pride and reverence of Charleston; and St. Philip's, where worshipped 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 shells. 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 grass-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 God 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 fellowship. On Sunday morning it said, "Come and sit in your old-fashioned, velvet-cushioned pews, you rich ones! Go up stairs, you niggers!"
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 buttressed. 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.