"This wine," Mr. Nies said, "is listed on our wine card at $6.00 per bottle. It is not the best Madeira that we have, although it is a very fine one. Recently we served a bottle of Thompson's Auction Madeira, of which the year is not recognizable on the label, but which to my knowledge was an old wine forty years ago. This wine brought $25.00 a bottle and was worth it.
"The Peter Domecq Sherry of 1818 does not figure on our wine list as we have but a few bottles left. It is $20.00 a bottle.
"The prices brought to-day by old Madeiras and Sherries do not represent their real values. One has but to look at the compound interest of savings banks to realize that these wines should be selling at four times the price they are; but unfortunately, since the advent of Scotch whisky in the American market, the American palate seems to have deteriorated, and if the wines were listed at the price they ought to bring, we could not sell them. As it is, the demand for the very rare old wines is irregular and infrequent. We keep them principally to preserve our reputation; not for the money there is in it."
CHAPTER XXIX
HISTORY AND ARISTOCRACY
The cool shade of aristocracy....
—Sir W. F. P. Napier.
Just now, when we are being unpleasantly awakened to the fact that our vaunted American melting-pot has not been doing its work; when some of us are perhaps wondering whether the quality of metal produced by the crucible will ever be of the best; it is comforting to reflect that a city whose history, traditions and great names are so completely involved with Americanism in its highest forms, a city we think of as ultra-American, is peculiarly a melting-pot product.
The original Charleston colonists were English and Irish, sent out under Colonel Sayle, in 1669, by the Lords Proprietors, to whom Charles II had granted a tract of land in the New World, embracing the present States of Georgia and North and South Carolina. These colonists touched at Port Royal—where the Marine Barracks now are (and ought not to be)—but settled on the west side of the Ashley River, across from where Charleston stands. It was not until 1680 that they transferred their settlement to the present site of the city, naming the place Charles Town in honor of the King. In 1671 the colony contained 263 men able to bear arms, 69 women and 59 children. In 1674, when New York was taken by the English from the Dutch, a number of the latter moved down to the Carolina colony. French Protestants had, at that time, already begun to arrive, and more came after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. In 1680 Germans came. By 1684 there were four Huguenot settlements in Carolina. In 1696 a Quaker was governor for a short time, and in the same year a body of New Englanders arrived from Dorchester, Massachusetts, establishing a town which they called Dorchester, near the present town of Summerville, a few miles from Charleston. At that time a number of Scottish immigrants had already arrived, though more came in 1715 and 1745, after the defeat of the Highlanders. From 1730 to 1750 new colonists came from Switzerland, Holland and Germany. As early as 1740 there were several Jewish families in Charleston, and some of the oldest and most respected Jewish families in the United States still reside there. Also, when the English drove the Acadians from Canada in 1755, twelve hundred of them immigrated to Carolina. By 1790, then, the city had a population of a little more than 15,000, which was about half the number of inhabitants then contained in the city of New York. In the case of Charleston, however, more than one half her people, at that time, were negroes, slavery having been introduced by Sir John Yeamans, an early British governor. By 1850 the city had about 20,000 white citizens and 23,000 blacks, and by 1880 some 7,500 more, of which additional number two thirds were negroes. The present population is estimated at 65,000, which makes Charleston a place of about the size of Rockford, Illinois, Sioux City, Iowa, or Covington, Kentucky; but as, in the case of Charleston, more than half this number is colored, Charleston is, if the white population only is considered, a place of approximately 30,000 inhabitants, or, roughly speaking, about the size of Poughkeepsie, N. Y., or Colorado Springs, Colorado.
In area, also, Charleston is small, covering less than four square miles. This is due to the position of the city on a peninsula formed by the convergence and confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, which meet at Charleston's beautiful Battery precisely as the Hudson River and the East River meet at the Battery in New York. The shape of Charleston, indeed, greatly resembles that of Manhattan Island, and though her harbor and her rivers are neither so large nor so deep as those of the port of New York, they are altogether adequate to a considerable maritime activity.