The Flag Replaced on Sumter Part 4

_From the Charleston Mercury of January 19, 1865._

(A month before the evacuation of the city.)

CHARLESTON A SARAGOSSA!

"... The same tenacity and daring which has held Charleston and the Savannah line for four years, can hold Charleston now, if brought to bear upon the emergency. Too long we have been fighting here, around these old walls, to yield them now without a struggle. We say, unhesitatingly, to those in authority, there are brave men here, who are prepared to make of Charleston a second Saragossa. We use no fancy phrase. We mean the exact thing. We mean fight the country inch by inch to her outside lines; and we mean, then, fight it inch by inch to the foot of old St. Michael's walls.... We want no Atlanta, no Savannah business here.... Let Charleston be strictly a military camp.

The opportunity is offered--let the commanding general make a fight here that will ring round the world. We will not fail him. There are men here to do it. We have made names historic before. We can do it now. Let us strip and enter the arena for life or for death. Will he stand by us?"

_From the Charleston Mercury of February 10, 1865._

(A week before the evacuation of the city.)

"Amidst the dark shadows that envelop the destinies of the Confederate States at the present moment, we think--we dream perhaps, perhaps we imagine--that we see a faint streak of light, struggling up across the eastern horizon through the darkness of the night. Is it the early messenger of morn? or is it an aurora of the night? Yet we imagine we see a streak of dawn upon the horizon. A new Yankee Congress comes in on the fourth of March next. What sort of body is it? Wild lunatics.

They come into power flushed with success, and are themselves the very dregs of radicalism. Every one of them are drunken mobocrats and b.l.o.o.d.y Puritans of the deepest dye. What will they not do and say? Can Lincoln control them? Can Seward control them? We think not. In their very violence and brutality lies our hope. Can Europe stand them six months? We think not. Must not Europe see that if they are successful in destroying US, that their own time is not far off when they will be swept from off this continent? Will not this coming Yankee Congress force all the world either to cower before them, or check them by upholding _us_? We think it must. This is a streak of dawn that we imagine we see. Perhaps we are only nodding--and only dream. Still we fancy the thing. Let us stand to our arms, and watch for the morning."

The morning dawns at length.

_From the Charleston Mercury, February 11, 1865._

(The last edition published in the city.)

TO OUR READERS.

"The progress of military events, which has occasioned so much public and private inconvenience and suffering, has not spared the newspaper interest. The interruption of railroad communication between Charleston and the interior, produces a state of affairs which compels us, _temporarily_, to transfer the publication office of the _Mercury_ elsewhere; and to-day's paper will be our last issue, for the present, in the city of Charleston." (The editor then moved his establishment to Cheraw, S.C., directly in the line of General Sherman's advance.)