For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm.
In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street (the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple, dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats, each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and flowering shrubs. The typical Charlestonian house is a plain two or three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.
Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.
Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, is proud of its cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.
As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. |“No Trouble.”| A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000 negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites. The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes; the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual value. Both statements are very likely true.
White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him; whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.
But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view from which they are regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”
It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself. |The Negro and his Vote.| Only one member (a doctor) was dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others, again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would have said he was a trifle sunburnt.
Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.
The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls; but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to have their names placed on the register.[[45]]