American Adventures Part 27

In only one instance did the letters of introduction we sent out produce a response of the kind one would not be surprised at receiving in some rushing city of the North: a telephone call. A lady, not a native Charlestonian, but one who has lived actively about the world, rang us up, bade us welcome, and invited us to dinner.

But she was a very modern sort of lady, as witness not only her use of the telephone--an instrument which seems in Charleston almost an anachronism; as, for that matter, the automobile does, too--but her dinner hour, which was eight o'clock. Very few Charleston families dine at night. Dinner invitations are usually for three, or perhaps half-past three or four, in the afternoon, and there is a light supper in the evening. I judge that this custom holds also in some other cities of the region, for I remember calling at the office of a large investment company in Wilmington, North Carolina, to find it wearing, at three in the afternoon, the deserted look of a New York office between twelve and one o'clock. Every one had gone home to dinner. Mr. W.D. Howells, in his charming essay on Charleston, makes mention of this matter:

"The place," he says, "has its own laws and usages, and does not trouble itself to conform to those of other aristocracies. In London the best society dines at eight o'clock, and in Madrid at nine, but in Charleston it dines at four.... It makes morning calls as well as afternoon calls, but as the summer approaches the midday heat must invite rather to the airy leisure of the verandas, and the cool quiescence of interiors darkened against the fly in the morning and the mosquito at night-fall."

The household fly is a year-round resident of Charleston, by grace of a climate which permits--barely permits, at its coldest--the use of the open surrey as a public vehicle in all seasons. Sometimes, during a winter cold-snap, when a ride in a surrey is not a pleasant thing to contemplate, when residents of old mansions have shut themselves into a room or two heated by grate fires, then the fly seems to have disappeared, but let the cold abate a little and out he comes again like some rogue who, after brief and spurious penance, resumes the evil of his ways.

The stranger going to a humble Charleston house will find on the gate a coiled spring at the end of which hangs a bell. By touching the spring and causing the bell to jingle he makes his presence known. The larger houses have upon their gates bell-pulls or b.u.t.tons which cause bells to ring within. This is true of all houses which have front gardens. The garden gate const.i.tutes, by custom, a barrier comparable in a degree with the front door of a Northern house; a usage arising, doubtless, out of the fact that almost all important Charleston houses have not only gardens, but first and second story galleries, and that in hot weather these galleries become, as it were, exterior rooms, in which no small part of the family life goes on. Many Charleston houses have their gardens to the rear, and themselves abut upon the sidewalk. Calling at such houses, you ring at what seems to be an ordinary front door, but when the door is opened you find yourself entering not upon a hall, but upon an exterior gallery running to the full depth of the house, down which you walk to the actual house door. In still other houses--and this is true of some of the most notable mansions of the city, including the Pringle, Huger, and Rhett houses--admittance is by a street door of the normal sort, opening upon a hall, and the galleries and gardens are at the side or back, the position of the galleries in relation to the house depending upon what point of the compa.s.s the house faces, the desirable thing being to get the breezes which are prevalently from the southwest and the westward.

Charleston is very definitely two things: It is old, and it is a city.

There is the story of a young lady who asked a stranger if he did not consider it a unique town.

He agreed that it was, and inquired whether she knew the derivation of the word "unique."

When she replied negatively he informed her that the word came from the Latin _unus_, meaning "one," and _equus_, meaning "a horse"; otherwise "a one-horse town."

This tale, however, is a libel, for despite the general superst.i.tion of chambers of commerce to the contrary, the estate of cityhood is not necessarily a matter of population nor yet of commerce. That is one of the things which, if we were unaware of it before, we may learn from Charleston. Charleston is not great in population; it is not very great, as seaports go, in trade. Were cities able to talk with one another as men can, and as foolishly as men often do, I have no doubt that many a hustling middle-western city would patronize Charleston, precisely as a parvenue might patronize a professor of astronomy; nevertheless, Charleston has a stronger, deeper-rooted city ent.i.ty than all the cities of the Middle West rolled into one. This is no exaggeration. Where modern American cities strive to be like one another, Charleston strives to be like nothing whatsoever. She does not have to strive to _be_ something. She _is_ something. She understands what most other American cities do not understand, and what, in view of our almost unrestricted immigration laws, it seems the National Government cannot be made to understand: namely, that mere numbers do not count for everything; that there is the matter of quality of population to be considered.

Therefore, though Charleston's white population is no greater than that of many a place which would own itself frankly a small town, Charleston knows that by reason of the character of its population it is a great city. And that is precisely the case. Charleston people are city people _par excellence_. They have the virtues of city people, the vices of city people, and the civilization and sophistication of those who reside in the most aristocratic capitals. For that is another thing that Charleston is; it is unqualifiedly the aristocratic capital of the United States; the last stronghold of a unified American upper cla.s.s; the last remaining American city in which Madeira and Port and _n.o.blesse oblige_ are fully and widely understood, and are employed according to the best traditions.

I have been told of a lady who remarked that Charleston was "the biggest little place" she ever saw. I say the same. The littleness of the place, it is sometimes pointed out, is expressed by the "vast cousinship" which const.i.tutes Charleston society, but it is to my mind expressed much better in the way bicyclists leave their machines leaning against the curb at the busiest parts of main shopping streets. Its bigness, upon the other hand, is expressed by the homes from which some of those bicyclists come, by the cultivation which exists in those homes, and has existed there for generations, by the amenities of life as they are comprehended and observed, by the wealth of the city's tradition and the richness of its background. Nor is that background a mere arras of recollection. It exists everywhere in the wood and brick and stone of ancient and beautiful buildings, in iron grilles and balconies absolutely unrivaled in any other American city, and equaled only in European cities most famous for their artistry in wrought iron. It exists also in venerable inst.i.tutions--the first orphanage established in the United States; the William Enston Home; the Public Library, one of the first and now one of the best libraries in the country; the art museum, the St. Cecilia Society, and various old clubs. More intimately it exists within innumerable old homes, which are treasure-houses of fine old English and early American furniture and of portraits--portraits by Sir Joshua, by Stuart, Copley, Trumbull, and most of the other portrait painters who painted from the time the Colonies began to become civilized to the time of the Civil War--among them S.F.B. Morse, who, I believe it is not generally known, made a considerable reputation as a portrait painter, in Charleston, before he made himself a world figure by inventing the telegraph.

Even without seeing these private treasures the visitor to Charleston will see enough to convince him that Charleston is indeed "unique"--though not in the sense implied in the story--that it is the most intimately beautiful city upon the American continent.

To call Charleston "unique," and immediately thereafter to liken it to other places may seem paradoxical. These likenesses are, however, evanescent. It is not that Charleston is actually like other places, but that here in a church building, there in an old tile roof, wrought iron gate, or narrow cobbled street, the visitor will find himself delicately reminded of Old World towns and cities. Mr. Howells, for example, found on the East Battery a faint suggestion of Venetian palaces, and in the doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legare Street, I was struck, also, with a Venetian suggestion so strange and subtle that I could not quite account for it. At night some of the old narrow streets, between Meeting Street and Bay, made me think of streets in the old part of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine; or again I would stop before an ancient brick house which was Flemish, or which--in the case of houses diagonally opposite St. Philip's Church--exampled the rude architecture of an old French village, stucco walls colored and chipped, red tile roof and all. The busy part of King Street, on a Sat.u.r.day night when the fleet was in, made me think of Havana, and the bluejackets seemed to me, for the moment, to be American sailors in a foreign port; and once, on the same evening's walk, when I chanced to look to the westward across Marion Square, I found myself transported to the central _place_ of a Belgian city, with a slope-shouldered church across the way masquerading as a _hotel de ville_, and the sidewalk lights at either side figuring in my imagination as those of pleasant terrace cafes. So it was always.

The very hotel in which we stayed--the Charleston--is like no other hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis. Still, it is not like the Southern. It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city of France--large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and, best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a _remise_, but is here a garden. If I mistake not, carriages and coaches did in earlier times drive through the arched entrance, now the main doorway, and into this courtyard, where pa.s.sengers alighted and baggage was taken down. The Planter's Hotel, now a ruin, opposite the Huguenot Church, antedates all others in the city, and used to be the fashionable gathering place for wealthy Carolinians and their families who came to Charleston annually for the racing season.

The fact that Charleston has a rather important art museum and that its library is one of the four oldest town libraries in the country, no less than the fact that the city was, in its day, a great racing center, contribute to an understanding of the spirit of the place. The present Charleston Library is not the first public library started in the city.

Not by any means! For it was founded as late as 1748, and the original public library of Charleston was the first one of the kind in the country, having been started about the beginning of the 18th century.

Old records of this library still exist, showing that citizens voted so many skins to its support. Probably the most valuable possession of the present library are its files of Charleston newspapers, dating from 1732 to the present time, including three files covering the War of 1812, and two covering the Civil War. These files are consulted by persons from all over the United States, for historical material. The library has recently moved into a good modern building. In the old building there was a separate entrance at the back for ladies, and it is only lately that ladies have been allowed full membership in the Library Society, and have entered by the front door. The former custom, I suppose, represented certain old-school sentiments as to "woman's place" such as I find expressed in "Reminiscences of Charleston," by Charles Fraser, published in 1854. Declares Mr. Fraser:

The ambition for literary distinction is now very prevalent with the s.e.x. But without any disposition to undervalue their claims, whenever I hear of a female traveler clambering the Alps, or describing the cla.s.sic grounds of Greece and Italy, publishing her musings in the holy land, or revealing the mysteries of the harem, I cannot but think that for every success obtained some appropriate duty has been neglected.

I except the poetess, for hers are the effusions of the heart and the imagination, prompted by nature and uttered because they are irrepressible. Many females travel for the purpose of writing and publishing books--whilst Mrs. Heman's, Mrs. Osgood's, and Mrs.

Sigourney's volumes may be regarded as grateful offerings to the muse in return for her inspiration.

It is hard not to be irritated, even now, with the man who wrote that, especially in view of the fact that the two most interesting books to come out of the Carolinas of recent years are both by women: one of them being "Charleston--the Place and the People," by Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, a volume any chapter of which is worth the whole of Mr.

Fraser's "Reminiscences," and the other "A Woman Rice-Planter," by "Patience Pennington," otherwise Mrs. John Julius Pringle (nee Alston), who lives on her plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina.

The Carolina Jockey Club subscribed regularly to the support of the library, and now that that club is no more, its chief memorial may be said to rest there. This club was probably the first racing club in the country, and it is interesting to note that the old cement pillars from the Washington Race Course at Charleston were taken, when that course was abandoned, and set up at the Belmont Park course, near New York.

The turf history of Carolina began (according to the "South Carolina Gazette," dated February 1, 1734) in that same year, on the first Tuesday in February. One of the prizes was a saddle and bridle valued at 20. The riders were white men and the course was a green at Charleston Neck, near where the lower depot of the South Carolina Railroad now stands. In a "History of the Turf in South Carolina," which I found in the library, I learned that Mr. Daniel Ravenel bred fine horses on his plantation, Wantoot, in St. John's Parish, as early as 1761, that Mr.

Frank Huger had imported an Arabian horse, and that many other gentlemen were importing British running horses, and were engaged in breeding. The book refers to the old York Course, later called the New Market Course.

A long search did not, however, enable me to establish the date on which the Jockey Club was founded. It was clearly a going inst.i.tution in 1792, for under date of Wednesday, February 15, in that year, I found the record of a race for the Jockey Club Purse--"four mile-heats--weight for age--won by Mr. Lynch's _Foxhunter_, after a well contested race of four heats, beating Mr. Sumter's _Ugly_, who won the first heat; Col.

Washington's _Rosetta_, who won the second heat; Capt. Alston's _Betsy Baker_," etc., etc.

The Civil War practically ended the Jockey Club, though a feeble effort was, for a time, made to carry it on. In 1900 the club properties and the funds remaining in the club treasury were transferred as an endowment to the Charleston Library Society. The proceeds from this endowment add to the library's income by about two thousand dollars annually. Other items of interest in connection with the Carolina Jockey Club are that Episcopal Church conventions used to be held in Charleston during the racing season, so that the attending parsons might take in the races; that the Jockey Club Ball used to be the great ball of the Charleston season, as the second St. Cecilia Ball became later and now is; that the Charleston Club, a most delightful club, founded in 1852, was an outgrowth of the Jockey Club; and that the Jockey Club's old Sherries, Ports and Madeiras went to New York where they were purchased by Delmonico--among them a Calderon de la Barca Madeira of 1848, and a Peter Domecq Sherry of 1818.

Mr. S.A. Nies, one of the old employees of Delmonico's, tells me that the Calderon de la Barca of the above mentioned year is all gone, but that Delmonico's still has a few bottles of the same wine of the vintage of 1851.

"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 princ.i.p.ally 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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.

The Charleston Chamber of Commerce (which, like everything else in Charleston dates from long ago, having been founded in 1748) quotes President Taft as calling this port the most convenient one to Panama--a statement which the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce is in position to dispute. The fact remains, however, that Charleston's position on the map justifies the Chamber of Commerce's alliterative designation of the place as "The Plumb-line Port to Panama." This is so true that if Charleston should one day be shaken loose from its moorings by an earthquake--something not unknown there--and should fall due south upon the map, it would choke up the mouth of the Ca.n.a.l, were not Cuba interposed, to catch the debris.

Before the Civil War, Charleston was the greatest cotton shipping port of the country, and it still handles large amounts of cotton and rice.

Until a few years ago South Carolina was the chief rice producing State in the Union, and history records that the first rice planted in the Carolinas, if not in the country, was secured and sown by an early governor of Carolina, Thomas Smith, who died in 1694. It may be noted in pa.s.sing that this Thomas Smith bore the t.i.tle "Landgrave," the Lords Proprietors, in their plan of government for the colony--which, by the way, was drawn up by the philosopher Locke--having provided for a colonial n.o.bility with t.i.tles. The t.i.tles "Baron" and "Landgrave" were hereditary in several Charleston families, and const.i.tute, so far as I know, the only purely American t.i.tles of n.o.bility that ever existed.

Descendants of the old Landgraves still reside in Charleston, and in at least one instance continue to use the word "Landgrave" in connection with the family name.

The prosperity of Charleston since the Civil War has depended more, perhaps, than on any other single product, upon the trade in phosphate, large deposits of which underlie this region.

The real wonder of Charleston, the importance of the place among American cities, cannot, however, be said to have resulted primarily from commerce (though her commerce is growing), or from greatness of population (though Charleston is the metropolis of the Carolinas), but is involved with matters of history, tradition and beauty. The mantle of greatness was a.s.sumed by this city in colonial times, and has never been laid aside. Among the most distinguished early Americans were many Charlestonians, and in not a few instances the old blood still endures there, and even the old names: such names as Washington, Pinckney, Bull, Pringle, Rutledge, Middleton, Drayton, Alston, Huger, Aga.s.siz, Ravenel, Izard, Gadsden, Rhett, Calhoun, Read, De Saussure, Lamar and Brawley, to mention but a few.

Charleston's early history is rich in pirate stories of the most thrilling moving-picture variety. Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet and other disciples of the Jolly Roger preyed upon Charleston shipping. Bonnet once held a Mr. Samuel Wragg of Charleston prisoner aboard his ship threatening to send his head to the city unless the unfortunate man should be ransomed--the demand being for medicines of various kinds.

Colonel Rhett, of Charleston, captured Bonnet and his ship after a savage fight, but Bonnet soon after escaped from the city in woman's clothing. Still later he was retaken, hanged, as he deserved to be, and buried along with forty of his band at a point now covered by the Battery Garden, that exquisite little park at the tip of the city, which is the favorite promenade of Charlestonians. In another fight which occurred just off Charleston bar, a crew of citizens under Governor Robert Johnson defeated the pirate Richard Worley, who was killed in the action, and captured his ship, which, when the hatches were opened proved to be full of prisoners, thirty-six of them women. Even as late as the period of the War of 1812--a war which did not affect Charleston save in the way of destroying her shipping and causing poverty and distress--a case of brutal piracy is recorded. The daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia by name, was married to Governor Joseph Alston. After her father's trial for high treason, when he was disgraced and broken, she tried to comfort him, for the two were peculiarly devoted. Intending to visit him she set sail from Charleston for New York in a ship which was never heard from again. Somewhere I have read a description of the distraught father's long vigils at New York, where he would stand gazing out to sea long after all hope had been abandoned by others. Mrs. St.

Julien Ravenel tells us in her charming book, that thirty years later an old sailor, dying in a village of the North Carolina coast, confessed that he had been one of a pirate crew which had captured the ship and compelled the pa.s.sengers to walk the plank. This story is also given by Charles Gayarre, who says the pirate chief was none other than Dominick You, who fought under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and is buried in that city. The husband and father of Mrs. Alston were spared the ghastly tale, Mrs. Ravenel says, since both were already in their graves when the sailor's deathbed confession solved the mystery.

In the Revolution, Charleston played an important part. Men of Charleston were, of course, among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who gave us the immortal maxim: "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" who was on Washington's staff, was later Amba.s.sador to France and president-general of the Sons of the Cincinnati, was a Charlestonian of the Charlestonians, and lies buried in St. Michael's. Such Revolutionary names as Marion, Laurens, William Washington, Greene, Hampton, Moultrie and Sumter are a.s.sociated with the place, and two of these are reechoed in the names of those famous forts in Charleston harbor on which attention was fixed at the outbreak of the Civil War: Moultrie and Sumter--the latter, target for the first shot fired in the conflict.

Nearly thirty years before the Civil War, Charleston had distinguished herself in the arts of peace by producing the first locomotive tried in the United States, and by constructing the first consecutive hundred miles of railroad ever built in the world, and now, with the War, she distinguished herself by initiating other mechanical devices of very different character--a semi-submersible torpedo boat and the first submarine to torpedo a hostile war vessel. True, David Bushnell of Connecticut did construct a crude sort of submarine during the Revolutionary War, and succeeded in getting under a British ship with the machine, but he was unable to fasten his charge of powder and his effort consequently failed. Robert Fulton also experimented with submarines, or "plunging boats" as he called them, and was encouraged for a time by Napoleon I. The little _David_ of the Confederate navy is sometimes referred to as the first submarine but the _David_ was not actually an underwater boat, but a torpedo boat which could run awash, with her funnels and upper works slightly out of water. She was a cigar-shaped vessel thirty-three feet long, built of wood, propelled by steam, and carrying her torpedo on a pole, forward. Dr. St. Julien Ravenel of Charleston and Captain Theodore Stoney devised the craft, and she was built by funds subscribed by Charleston merchants. In command of Lieutenant W.T. Gla.s.sell, C.S.N., and with three other men aboard, she torpedoed the United States ship _New Ironsides_, flagship of the fleet blockading Charleston. The _New Ironsides_ was crippled, but not lost.

After this United States vessels blockading Charleston protected themselves with booms. This resulted in the construction of an actual undersea torpedo boat, the _Hunley_. This extraordinary vessel has been spoken of as having had the appearance of a huge iron coffin, as well as the attributes of one, for she proved a death-trap for successive crews on three trial trips. As there were no electric motors or gasoline engines in those days, she was run by hand, eight men crowded together turning a crank-shaft which operated her propeller. After repeated sinkings, she was raised, manned by new men, and sent forth again.

Finally, in Charleston harbor she succeeded in destroying the United States man-o'-war _Housatonic_, but at the same time went down, herself, drowning or suffocating all on board. A memorial drinking fountain on the Battery, at the foot of Meeting Street, commemorates "the men of the Confederate Army and Navy, first in marine warfare to employ torpedo boats--1863-1865." On this memorial are given the names of sixteen men who perished in torpedo attacks on the blockading fleet, among them Horace L. Hunley, set down as inventor of the submarine boat. The names of fourteen others who were lost are unknown.