Chapter VII: Introduction: By W. P. Trent (5)

At the theatre in Williamsburg, built about 1716, the first professional comedies and tragedies in America were played by Charles Stagg, who was assisted by actors and musicians from England. He died in 1735, and, for several years after, the building, which stood on what is known as the Tucker lot, was used for amateur theatricals, in which the students of the college figured as the actors. About 1745 the building was surrendered to the city for a city hall. In 1751, “The New Theatre” near the Capitol was built by a company of comedians from New York, and in 1752, the Hallam Company, professional players from the theatre in Goodmanfields, near London, made their appearance in Williamsburg. This was a great event in the Colonial life. It was at this time that Lewis Hallam made his début, at the age of twelve, on the boards. This prince of the theatre, who for a long period had no rival in America, having on this occasion but a single sentence to recite, broke down in the middle, and rushed in tears from the stage.

In 1771, the celebrated Miss Hallam visited Williamsburg. She had “starred” it in Maryland, where all the swains of that Colony had paid her tribute in poetry and where Peale had painted her portrait. An extract from a letter of Colonel Hudson Muse, of Virginia, will recall the glory of her début at “The New Theatre” in Williamsburg.

“In a few days after I got to Virginia I set out to Williamsburg
where I was detained for eleven days, though I spent the time very
agreeably at the plays every night, and really must join Mr. Ennalls
and Mr. Bassett in thinking Miss Hallam superfine. But must confess
her luster was much sullied by the number of beauties that appeared
at that court. The house was crowded every night, and the gentlemen
who have generally attended that place agree there was treble the
number of fine ladyes that was ever seen in town before.--For my
part I think it would be impossible for a man to have fixed upon a
partner for life, the choice was too general to have fixed on one.”

The public buildings in Williamsburg appear to have been the best in British America at the time of their erection. Weld, in his _Travels_, says that “the town in 1795 contained about 1200 people, and the society in it is thought to be more extensive and more genteel at the same time than any place of its size in America.” The city was then the residence of the Rev. James Madison, President of the College, who was the first to teach political economy at any American college; of George Wythe, the teacher of both Marshall and Jefferson, and the first American professor of law; of Charles Bellimi, the first American professor of modern languages; of John Blair, Associate Justice of the United States; of Peter Pelham, the musician, to whose solemn strains on the organ the great Washington had often lent a willing ear as he sat in the old brick church on Sundays; and of many other persons of refinement and cultivation.

Williamsburg was the residence in 1841 of John Tyler, when he was called to the Presidential chair by the death of Harrison.

In 1861, it shared in all the excitement of the approaching Civil War. The college contributed all its students and professors to the Southern army, as the old city contributed all its able-bodied citizens. During the war its churches and the college were occupied as hospitals by the armies on both sides. Through the city passed the army of Johnston, on its withdrawal from Yorktown; and within its streets burst the shells of the Federals in the bloody battle of Williamsburg in 1862. Then came the great army of McClellan--and so the scenes of direful war changed and shifted, the place being sometimes in possession of the Confederates and sometimes in possession of the Federals.

Peace came at last, and the war-worn city took up again the burden of its destiny. The college, which had been burned by the Federal troops, was rebuilt on the old walls, after the old Confederate soldiers returned to their homes. In 1881, the centennial of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis awakened new life. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ran its cars through the place for the first time, as it transferred the multitudes to Yorktown, thirteen miles away. In 1888, the college, which had been closed for several years, assumed new energies under the patronage of the State Legislature. Then, in 1893, the bicentennial year of the college charter, Congress, by an appropriation of money, made amends in some measure for the injuries inflicted by war. Since that time, the place has greatly improved. The “Ancient Capital” has its face toward the future, while proudly conscious of the past. It is often visited by travellers from Europe, and from the North, who never fail to take away with them kind impressions of the neighborhood, and who love to repeat in letters to newspapers and other periodicals the interesting stories of its ancient and modern history.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The tombstone of his daughter, Lucy Burwell, wife of Hon. Lewis Burwell, describes him as “the valiant Capt. Robert Higginson, one of the first commanders that subdued the country of Virginia from the power of the heathen.”

[6] One of these papers, styled “Nathaniel Bacon, Esq., his Manifesto concerning the present troubles in Virginia,” has words which ring out very much like the celebrated language of Patrick Henry--“If this be treason, make the most of it.” Bacon said: “If virtue be a sin, if piety be guilt, if all the principles of morality and goodness be perverted, we must confess that those who are now called ‘Rebels,’ may be in danger of this high imputation; but if there be, as sure there is, a just God to appeal to, if to plead the cause of the oppressed, if sincerely to aim at his Majesty’s honor and the public good without any reservation or by-interest, if to stand in the gap after so much blood of our dear brethren bought and sold, if after the loss of a great part of his Majesty’s Colony deserted and dispeopled, freely with our lives and estates to endeavor to save the remainder--be treason, God Almighty judge and let the guilty die.”

WILMINGTON

“THE FREE TOWN ON THE CAPE FEAR”

BY JOSEPH BLOUNT CHESHIRE

North Carolina might be called the State without a city--_civitas sine urbe_. It has never had a capital or a metropolis, except arbitrarily and in name only. It has been a rural State, a State of planters and farmers. Its eminent lawyers, and even its physicians and merchants, have often been also its eminent farmers. The first president of the State Agricultural Society was the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court.

The physical conditions of a country predetermine the lines of its development. North Carolina’s interminable length of dangerous coast-line repelled the earliest attempt at English settlement. Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition of 1585, coasting along its inhospitable sands, divined their true character, and marked down upon the first map that ominous name--_Promontorium Tremendum_--Cape Fear. And in spite of all improvements in navigation they have remained a menace and a terror. Hatteras and Cape Lookout and Cape Fear warned off commerce and settlement.

The eloquent words of the late Mr. George Davis, of Wilmington, applied to Cape Fear, are descriptive of the general character of the North Carolina coast:

“Looking then to the Cape for the idea and reason of its name, we
find that it is the southernmost point of Smith’s Island, a naked,
bleak elbow of sand jutting far out into the ocean. Immediately in
its front are the Frying Pan Shoals, pushing out still farther,
twenty miles to sea. Together they stand for warning and for woe;
and together they catch the long majestic roll of the Atlantic as
it sweeps through a thousand miles of grandeur and power from the
Arctic towards the Gulf. It is the play-ground of billows and of
tempests, the kingdom of silence and awe, disturbed by no sound but
the sea-gull’s shriek and the breakers’ roar. Its whole aspect is
suggestive, not of repose and beauty, but of desolation and terror.
Imagination cannot adorn it. Romance cannot hallow it. Local pride
cannot soften it. There it stands to-day, bleak and threatening and
pitiless, as it stood three hundred years ago, when Grenville and
White came near unto death upon its sands. And there it will stand,
bleak and threatening and pitiless, until the earth and the sea shall
give up their dead. And as its nature, so its name, is now, always
has been, and always will be, the ‘Cape of Fear.’”

But the broad sounds and rivers and fertile lands which lay behind these barriers of sand and storm invited immigration, and soon after the middle of the seventeenth century settlers began to pour in by different routes. From Virginia they crowded across into the northern and eastern sections. The Swiss and the Palatines came into the Neuse, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the Highland Scotch were swarming up the Cape Fear, while the Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania spread over the country on both sides of the Yadkin, and westward to the Catawba, where they were mingled with the Germans, who also came mostly by way of Pennsylvania. Coming into the country by different routes, separated from each other by the unsettled wilderness, finding no centre of power or of influence within the Province to draw them together, each of these sections lived in a measure to itself, and communicated with the outside world through those routes of travel by which each had first entered the country. The Albemarle section traded with Virginia, Cape Fear with Barbadoes and Charleston. The Scotch-Irish of the Piedmont country were better acquainted with their brethren in Pennsylvania, and in nearer sympathy with them, than with the Scotch on the upper Cape Fear and lower Yadkin. The little settlement of Maryland Churchmen in Rowan kept up communication with their kinsfolk in St. Mary’s County at the mouth of the Potomac, and their Lutheran neighbors sent back to Hanover for teachers and ministers, and had their services in the German tongue until well on in the nineteenth century.

Not only was there no metropolis--for the first fifty years there were no towns. The Palatines and Swiss at the confluence of the Neuse and the Trent laid out the little town of Newbern, and the Moravians, soon after 1750, began their town of Salem, but nowhere else in the Province was a town made the basis of the settlement. The Anglo-Saxon self-reliance and freedom never showed itself more self-reliant and free than in the unconscious daring which spread over thousands of square miles of savage wilderness with never a centre of strength or of succor provided against a time of danger.

FORMERLY THE RESIDENCE OF GOVERNOR DUDLEY.]

Fifty years after the beginning of its permanent settlements, its first town, Bath, had only a dozen small houses, and its second, Newbern, was just founded. Edenton dates from 1716; Beaufort from 1723; Brunswick from 1725, though not incorporated until 1745; and Wilmington from 1730 or 1735. At the end of one hundred years of settlement, North Carolina had only these six villages, and it is doubtful if the most populous had as many as six hundred inhabitants, though there was a population of over fifty thousand in the Province.

Bath, incorporated in 1705, was never more than the inconsiderable village which it is to-day. The first town to become of any importance was Edenton, looking southward from a gentle elevation at the head of a beautiful little bay on the north side of the upper end of Albemarle Sound. Over against this bay the broad mouths of the Chowan and the Roanoke brought her the trade of the back country, and down the sound and across the shifting bars at Ocracoke and New Inlet a little fleet of schooners and brigs began to carry on trade coastwise and with the West Indies, and presently across the ocean.

The facetious Colonel William Byrd of Westover visited Edenton in 1728, and tells us that its forty or fifty houses were mostly small and poor, and that only the better sort had brick chimneys. He says that the Court-House looked like a tobacco barn, and that it was, as he supposed, the only “metropolis” in the world which had no house of worship of any kind, and no religious teacher or minister. This may have been true as to the corporate limits of the town, but we know that a church had been built at “Queen Anne’s Creek,” the former name of the point where Edenton stands, twenty-five years earlier; and a few years after Colonel Byrd’s visit the church still standing was begun, and after many years was completed in such fashion that to-day St. Paul’s Church, Edenton, remains the most admirable example we have of our Colonial architecture, and a stately and becoming temple of Christian worship. About the same time the present Court-House was also built. It fronts upon an open square, sloping gently down to the margin of the bay, so that the judge, sitting on the bench and looking through the front windows, enjoys a beautiful view of the waters across the sound towards Plymouth. This has not always been conducive to the despatch of business. A very able and learned judge from the up-country, upon his first holding court in Edenton, is said to have stopped the eloquent counsel in the midst of his speech, and to have declared that it would be impossible for him to attend to his argument until it could be explained to him how two vessels, which he saw out in the bay, could be sailing in exactly opposite directions on the same wind.

Edenton never became a very large town. The sloops and schooners and brigs which carried the wheat and corn and pork and lumber to the Northern or West Indian markets, could very often run up the deep creeks and inlets almost to the farmers barn, or to the lumberman’s camp in the swamp; and a few merchants were enough to do the limited business of a purely agricultural community. But from 1722 to 1743 the Assembly met here, with few exceptions, and the General Court was held here, so that it was the first settled seat of government. And even after the growth of the Province to the southward demanded a more central location for the government, Edenton still grew and prospered, and became a place of wealth and importance, and the centre of a society as cultivated and refined as could be found anywhere in the country. It was a port of entry, though the official title of the collector was Collector of the Port of Roanoke; and thither, in 1769, came James Iredell, a lad of seventeen, as deputy under his kinsman, Henry Eustace McCulloh. He afterwards became an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and had a county of North Carolina named in his honor. He was one of the most truly admirable characters in our history, and his correspondence is our richest mine of information concerning the social life of his times, as well as the most instructive view we have had left us of the civil and political history of the State during its sub-revolutionary period. He has left us a bright and pleasing picture of the old times in Edenton, when Samuel Johnston, Joseph Hewes, Charles Johnson and Hugh Williamson were its leading men, and, with the other notables of that region,--Blounts, Skinners, Hoskinses and others,--made up a society whose traditions remain and give to Edenton a distinction which time has not entirely destroyed. After it had long ceased to be the seat of government it retained to a considerable extent its prestige in all the northern section of the State, commercially and socially.

Newbern, laid out by Colonel Thomas Pollock on his own lands about the time of the coming of De Graffenreid, was not incorporated until 1723. In 1738, Governor Gabriel Johnston called the Assembly to meet there, and in 1746 the Assembly designated it as the seat of government. With a few exceptions the subsequent sessions of the Assembly were held there during the continuance of the royal authority. Tryon, the first of the royal governors who wholly abandoned residence in the country, built his famous “Palace” there, in which he and his wife _sat_ while receiving their company, with an assumption of royal state which offended the pride of the Colonial gentry, who did not lack a sense of their own dignity.

Into the Cape Fear River adventurers from New England had come as early as 1661, and had begun the raising of cattle on the abundant natural pasturage of the country. They soon abandoned the enterprise, driven off, it is said, by the Indians, whose children they had sent to be sold for slaves in New England.

In 1665, Sir John Yeamans, a wealthy planter of Barbadoes, brought in a colony from that island, and began a settlement at “Old Town,” eight miles below the site of Wilmington. This was also abandoned after a few years, Yeamans going back to Barbadoes, and the settlers going either north to the Albemarle section, or south to the new city Charleston, at the confluence of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers.

At the end of the proprietary period the whole of what was known as Clarendon County had only about five hundred white inhabitants. In spite of its noble river and fertile lowlands it had a bad name. Two attempts to settle it had failed, as we have seen; and, added to the terrors of the coast, which its very name, Cape Fear, advertised, the lower river had been for years the refuge and rendezvous of bands of pirates. As early as 1684 they are known to have resorted to these remote and solitary waters, and early in the eighteenth century it was the headquarters of that nefarious band among whom Stead Bonnet and Teach, or Black Beard, were leaders, who with unparalleled insolence lay off the harbor at Charleston and sent a deputation into the city to hector the very Governor and Council, and to demand and obtain certain medical supplies which they needed. This insolence, however, proved their ruin: Governor Johnston and Colonel Rhett attacked Bonnet and his party in their Cape Fear retreats, and carried off all whom they did not kill, to be tried and hanged at Charleston; at about the same time Teach and his crew were attacked and killed or hanged by an expedition from Virginia under officers of the royal navy, so that the Cape Fear was permanently freed from these pests.

The settlers from the Albemarle and the Neuse now began to press down toward the fertile bottoms along the northeast branch of the Cape Fear, while about the same time a movement from South Carolina brought a number of its distinguished men into the same region from the opposite direction. The names Moseley, Lillington, Swann, Porter, Ashe, Harnett, Rowan and others, first prominent in the Albemarle settlements, became the leading names in the southern section; while the Moore brothers, descendants of Sir John Yeamans, and already distinguished in the Province of South Carolina, led a number of their best families to seek a new home and to extend the culture of rice into this region.

The town of Brunswick, in the new county of New Hanover, was laid out by Maurice Moore in 1725 or thereabouts, though not incorporated until 1745. It was intended for the county town, and affords even now in its ruins many evidences of the wealth and culture of its inhabitants. All about it are remains of Colonial plantations and residences of whose owners we have in most cases very insufficient knowledge, but who must have been people of wealth, culture and taste. The most notable Colonial residence now remaining in North Carolina is the mansion known as “Orton,” built by Roger Moore before 1734, a mile or so above Brunswick, though part of the building is of more recent date. The new Church of St. Philip was solemnly dedicated Tuesday in Whitsun-week, 1768, by the Rev. John Barnett and the Rev. John Wills, with a special service approved by Governor Tryon, who declared this to be “the King’s Chapel.” Its dimensions were seventy-five feet by fifty-five; and its walls, nearly three feet thick, and still standing almost untouched by time, though for the better part of a century roofless and abandoned, indicate the dignified character of the original building. The size and workmanship of the gravestones in the churchyard, no less than the names and inscriptions thereon, attest the wealth and intelligence of the worshippers. The King sent over a communion service of massive silver, which some have supposed to be the service now the property of Christ Church, Newbern, transferred to Newbern when Governor Tryon built his “Palace” there, and made Christ Church the “King’s Chapel” of the Province. St. Philip’s, though dedicated in 1768, had been begun more than twenty years earlier, and had probably resounded to the strains of that remarkable “Thanksgiving Hymn” composed by Governor Arthur Dobbs upon the capture of Quebec by Wolfe in 1759.

But the glory of old Brunswick was transient, and its life was absorbed by the new settlement fifteen miles higher up the river. In 1739, the Assembly passed an act by which it was provided that the county offices of New Hanover, and the office of the Collector and Officer of the Port of Brunswick, should thereafter be established at the “village called Newton,” at the confluence of the two branches of the Cape Fear River; and this village was incorporated as a town by the name of Wilmington, in honor of Spencer Compton, Baron Wilmington, the friend and patron of Governor Gabriel Johnston. Its more favorable situation attracted the increasing trade which came down the two branches of the river, and afforded greater security against the severe storms as well as the privateers which now and then threatened vessels lying in the roadstead at Brunswick, while its more healthful climate made it a more desirable place of residence. The wealth and influence of Brunswick for a while prevailed, and it fought hard to retain its superiority, but it fought in vain. For some years before the beginning of the Revolution Wilmington was securely established as the chief town of the Cape Fear section, and in a manner the heir-apparent to the culture and influence of Brunswick.

In itself, Wilmington was an inconsiderable place until some time after the Revolution. But it was the centre of a most cultivated, high-spirited and intelligent population, and, as it were, the stage upon which all the eminent men of the country around performed their parts. It was at once the head and the heart of the Cape Fear section. Its history is not the history of the dwellers within its corporate limits alone. The owner of a house and lot in the town could vote for its member of the Assembly, though he left his house vacant and lived in the country; and the qualification of its representative was not residence in the town, but the ownership of town property. So it came about that many of the most prominent characters in its history, those who were actors in its most stirring scenes, and who are identified with its memories and traditions, never resided within its limits. There were wealthy and intelligent and public-spirited townsmen,--James Innes, Louis and Moses John de Rosset, William and George Hooper, Archibald Maclean, Eagles, Quince, Lloyd, Davis, Hogg, Campbell and others; but the greater number of its most eminent names are those of men living in the country around,--Ashe, Waddell, Moore, Burgwin, Harnett, Lillington, Moseley and Swann. One of its notable citizens was Colonel James Innes, who, having been an officer in the North Carolina contingent sent to aid Admiral Vernon’s ill-fated expedition against Carthagena, afterwards commanded the joint forces of Virginia and North Carolina against the French in 1754. Another distinguished man of this section, Major Hugh Waddell, commanded the North Carolina troops sent to Virginia in the second French war.

It was in the dissensions preceding the Revolution that Wilmington first assumed the position of leadership in the Province. She had no single man superior to Iredell or Johnston of Edenton, but there were in Wilmington, and residing in the country around, a larger number of men than could be found in any other portion of the Province of like commanding character and eminent ability.

Wilmington may fairly claim the first place among all the towns of America for resistance to the Stamp Act. Governor Tryon, in his despatches, tells us how Colonel Ashe, with the militia of New Hanover County, came openly to the Governor’s house in Brunswick and compelled William Houston, the stamp master, who had gone to the Governor for protection, to go with them to Wilmington, and before the Mayor, Moses John de Rosset, and the City Council, in the Court-House, to resign his office and to take an oath that he would not receive the stamps. He also says that upon the arrival of the sloop of war _Diligence_ at Brunswick with the stamps, they were not landed, as there was no person to receive them. But he neglects to give the true reason, which was that the men of New Hanover, under Colonel Waddell, assembled at Brunswick and notified the commander of the _Diligence_ that they would not allow the stamps to be landed. A few weeks later, when Captain Lobb, of the _Viper_, had seized two vessels in the harbor for the want of proper papers bearing the required stamps, the men of Wilmington, this time under the lead of Moore, Harnett, Lillington, Lloyd and Ashe, in defiance of two armed vessels, the _Viper_ and the _Diligence_, compelled the surrender of the vessels which had been seized, to the great disgust of the Governor. All these actions were open and undisguised, the people of the country assembling in arms under their chosen leaders, and compelling both the civil and the naval authorities to yield to their demands.

The same prompt and intrepid spirit showed itself throughout the whole struggle, which was just beginning in 1765. Nine years later this little community, hardly to be called a town, raised eight hundred pounds in a very short time in response to the appeal in behalf of Boston; and sent to that city a ship-load of supplies. Its Committee of Safety, whose minutes have been preserved from 1774 to 1776, when its function was superseded by the organization of the State under its Constitution, kept a very vigilant watch, and enforced most faithfully the recommendations of the Continental Congress. One day they are providing powder, preventing the importation of negroes, and compelling the reshipment of those brought in; and the next day they are ordering the discontinuance of public balls, and requesting ladies not to allow them in their private houses, as being contrary “to the spirit of the 8th Article of the Association of the Continental Congress.” Their courage and address interposed a constant obstacle between Governor Martin in Fort Johnston and his party friends among the inhabitants; and when they found that that fortification, in the Governor’s possession, was a menace to the cause of American independence, they encouraged and endorsed its destruction. Inspired by their sympathy, Colonel John Ashe in July, 1775, resigned his office of Colonel under the Provincial government, accepted an election as Colonel by the people, marched with the militia to the fort and burned and demolished it.

From 1773, the name of William Hooper becomes prominent in Wilmington. The son of a Boston clergyman, he had come to Wilmington and begun the practice of law some years before. At his first appearance in public affairs he took his place alongside of Samuel Johnston, James Iredell, Cornelius Harnett and John Ashe, as a leader of public sentiment. In the proceedings of the Continental Congress during the Revolution and in the fateful struggle for Federal union which followed, he was second to none in integrity of character, in brilliancy of talents and in the utility of his public services rendered to the State and to the country. About the same time Archibald Maclean removed to Wilmington from Brunswick, and was a fiery and caustic champion of liberty and of constitutional government.

Wilmington suffered much during the Revolution. For almost the whole of the year 1781 it was occupied by the British under the command of Major Craig, a cruel and implacable enemy, and was the centre of active enterprises, mostly carried on by means of the worst class of Tories, extending as far as Chatham and Orange, and marked by circumstances of rapine and atrocity. The brutal David Fanning, who captured Governor Burke and all his suite at Hillsboro in August of this year, was one of Craig’s favorite instruments. The most distinguished inhabitants, and even women and children, as in the case of Mrs. Hooper, were treated with inexcusable cruelty. Wilmington has few monuments, but the house still stands where Cornwallis had his headquarters when passing through towards Yorktown; and Cornelius Harnett’s house, the Harnett whom Josiah Quincy called the Samuel Adams of North Carolina, was standing near by the north boundary of the city only a few years ago.

After those stormy and bitter days Wilmington saw many years of prosperity and peace. There had been a distinctly literary element here in Colonial days. The first American drama, _The Prince of Parthia_, by Thomas Godfrey, was written here in 1759, and was years afterwards produced on the stage by a company of local amateurs. Its author lies buried in St. James’s churchyard. When peace had brought again plenty and prosperity, and when commerce began to change the provincial town into a bustling mart of trade, social refinement and intellectual culture revived, and under changed conditions democratic institutions the Cape Fear section asserted again its old pre-eminence.

During the war between the States, Wilmington was specially noted as the centre of the important intercourse between the Confederate States and foreign countries by means of the “blockade-runners.” A hundred steamers are said to have been engaged in this traffic between Wilmington and the West Indies, and for many miles north and south of the inlets into the Cape Fear, the beach is still marked by the wrecks of those run ashore to escape the blockading squadron. Some of them, however, ran almost with the regularity of mail-boats, and one steamer is said to have made over fifty successful trips. By these vessels supplies of all kinds and munitions of war were brought in, and large fortunes made by the owners and commanders of the successful steamers. The State of North Carolina owned one of the most fortunate and famous of these, the _Advance_, which eluded capture and continued year after year to bring in shoes, blankets and clothing for the North Carolina soldiers in the Confederate army, and cotton-cards for the women at home, until a few months before Lee’s surrender. Even on her last fatal voyage she had skilfully slipped between the blockading vessels under cover of the darkness, and before day dawned she was well below the horizon on her way to Nassau. But, unhappily, she had been obliged to take in at Wilmington a quantity of coal mined in Chatham County, and not suitable for her use, and a thick trail of smoke settling down over the quiet sea betrayed her. The blockading steamers gave chase and ran her down by her trail, the inferior quality of her coal making it impossible for her to attain her proper speed.

Wilmington is still the largest town and the most important port of entry in the State. Its population, like that of the State at large, has been but little diluted by foreign immigration. It retains its traditions of culture, of hospitality, of loyalty to the Anglo-Saxon heritage of freedom and independence, and is as ready now as ever it was in the past to resist the aggressions of power.

CHARLESTON

BY YATES SNOWDEN

“In Pompeii, the tourist, looking from blank wall to dusty floor,
wonders what there is to see in that little hall, but a native goes
down upon his hands and knees; with a few brisk passes of his hand
the sand is brushed away, and a Numidian lion glares forth from the
tesselated pavement.”--VIRGINIUS DABNEY’S _Don Miff_.

Forty-five years before the English colonization of Virginia, fifty-two before the Dutch settlement of New York and fifty-eight before the Puritans landed at Massachusetts Bay, Captain Jean Ribaut, of Dieppe, commanding the first Huguenot emigration to North America, on the 1st of May, 1562, entered the beautiful harbor of Port Royal, South Carolina.

In his journal, as translated in one of Hakluyt’s black-letter tracts, he describes the country as “full of hauens Riuers and Ilands of such fruitfulness as cannot with tongue be expressed ... the fairest, fruitfullest, and pleasantest of al the world.”

Internal dissensions weakened the infant Huguenot colonies, and they were finally utterly destroyed by the Spanish bigot, Menendez. Though in after years the Huguenot was to be an important element in the peopling of the colony, the crafty Spaniard forever prevented the domination of the Fleur-de-Lis on the South Carolina coast, and made the way clear for the Lion of St. George.

In 1670, one hundred and eighteen years later, the first permanent settlement of the Province was made by the English under Governor William Sayle, at Albemarle Point, on the western bank of the Kiawah (Ashley) River, three miles from the present site of Charleston. This expedition had also headed for Port Royal, but the Cacique of Kiawah, a friendly Indian, advised that the land farther up the coast was better to plant, and the colonists acted more wisely than they knew, for a few years later, in 1686, the Spaniards utterly destroyed the Scotch colony established at Port Royal by Lord Cardross.

On August 17, 1669, the frigate _Carolina_, the _Port Royall_ and the sloop _Albermarle_ were at anchor in the Downs with ninety-three passengers all aboard and ready for sea. A few days later they sailed for Kinsale, Ireland, and thence for Barbadoes, which they reached in October. A West Indian gale wrecked the _Albermarle_ on the Barbadian coast and another vessel was procured, and on the voyage to Carolina, their objective point, the _Port Royall_ was wrecked on one of the Bahamas. The ship _Carolina_, badly battered, eventually reached Bermuda, where a sloop was engaged to assist the expedition to its destination. En route from Barbadoes they passed through dreadful hurricanes, and the Barbadian sloop did not reach Ashley River until a month after the arrival of the two other vessels. It will be seen that it was through storm and stress the English made the first settlement of Carolina, and that of the three ships that left England with the emigrants, the _Carolina_ was the only one to reach these shores.

Sir John Yeamans, who had taken charge of the expedition when it left Barbadoes, withdrew from its management when it reached Bermuda, and inserted the name of Colonel Wm. Sayle as Governor in the blank commission which he had from the Lords Proprietors. A contemporary writer describes this, the first Governor of South Carolina, as “of Bermuda, a Puritan and Non-Conformist, whose religious bigotry, advanced age and failing health promised badly for the discharge of the task before him.” Governor Sayle died within the year and the colonists selected Joseph West as his successor. When the news of Sayle’s death reached England, the Lords Proprietors again appointed Sir John Yeamans Governor, in which position he served most unsatisfactorily to the Proprietors until his death in 1674.

The settlers of Charles Town had not been two years on the western bank of the Ashley before they recognized the unfitness of its location, and settlements were soon made on the peninsula called Oyster Point, two miles away, and in sight of the sea. These settlements increased, and in 1680 the public offices were removed to the present site of Charleston.

In spite of religious dissensions between Churchmen and Dissenters and the opposition to law and order natural to the many adventurers and _enfans perdus_ who flocked to Carolina as to other colonies, and despite wars with the Indians in 1712 and 1715, commerce and population rapidly increased. In 1680, when the new town became the seat of government, there were as many as sixteen vessels discharging and loading cargo at one time.

A--Granville bastion.
B--Craven ”
C--Carteret ”
D--Colleton ”
E--Ashley ”
F--Blake’s ”
G--Half Moon.
H--Draw-bridge _in the line_.
I--Johnsons _covered half moon_.
K--Draw-bridge _in half moon_.
L--Palisades.
M--Lt.-Col. Rhetts bridge.
N--Kea L. Smiths bridge.
O--Ministers house.
P--English Church.
Q--French ”
R--Independent Church.
S--Ana-Baptist ”
T--Quaker Meeting House.
V--Court of Guard.
W--First rice patch _in Carolina_.
1--Pasquero and Garrets house.
2--Landsacks house.
3--Jno. Crofskeys house.
4--Cheveliers house.
5--Geo. Logan house.
6--Poinsett house.
7--Elicott house.
8--Starling house.
9--M. Boone house.
10--Tradds house.
11--Nat. Law house.
12--Landgrave Smith house.
13--Col. Rhetts house.
14--Ben Skenking house.
15--Sindery house.
]

John Locke, who had written the _Fundamental Constitutions_ for the colony, was a Socinian, but doubtless by instruction from seven of the Lords Proprietors,--Lord Shaftesbury, the eighth, was a Deist,--the philosopher declared that the Church of England was “the only true and Orthodox and the national religion of the King’s Dominions.”

Not until 1680 are there any authentic records of any church in Charleston, but there appears to have been a rapid growth in grace as well as population, for in 1704 there were five places of public worship, St. Philip’s (Episcopal) Church, the Huguenot Church, the First Baptist Church, the White Meeting House (Presbyterian and Congregational), and the Quaker Meeting House.

General Edward McCrady, the State’s latest and ablest historian, writing of the period of 1715, says of the colony:

“In this small community of less than 6,000 there were Churchmen
from England and Barbadoes, Independents from England, Old and New,
Baptists from Maine, and Huguenots from France and Switzerland,
all zealous of their peculiar religious tenets, and many, if not
most, with tenacity of bigotry and fanaticism. Carolina was a
Church of England Province under its charter, and the Fundamental
Constitutions, while offering the greatest religious freedom,
provided only that God was acknowledged and publicly and solemnly
worshipped, still provided for the establishment and maintenance of
that Church.”

In 1706, the Spaniards, who had always been a menace to the infant colony, made their first and last attack on Charleston, and, one hundred and ninety-three years later, when it was rumored that Cervera and his fleet would menace the South Carolina coast and storm Charleston, the old story of their futile effort was read with intense interest. It was in Havana that Monsieur Le Feboure, the captain of a French frigate, planned and organized the memorable attack. His fleet of four armed sloops stopped at St. Augustine for reinforcements and supplies, and on August 25th “five separate smokers appeared on Sullivan’s Island as a signal to the town that that number of ships was observed on the Coast.” Yellow fever was then raging in Charleston, but Lieutenant-Colonel Rhett, commanding the militia, ordered a general alarm by drum-beat, and sent messengers to Governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson, who was at his plantation, Silk Hope, on Cooper River, and to the militia companies in the neighboring parishes, calling them to the relief of the town.

On Tuesday morning the allied fleet crossed the bar, and the next day Le Feboure sent Governor Johnson a demand for the surrender of the town within an hour. The Governor replied that “it needed not a quarter of an hour or a minute’s time to give an answer to the demand ... that he valued not any force Le Feboure had; and bid him go about his business.” In addition to the fortifications ashore Governor Johnson relied for defence upon three ships, a brigantine, two sloops and a fire-ship, which he had manned and equipped with Colonel Rhett as vice-admiral. The Governor’s spirited reply to Le Feboure’s demand probably unnerved the Spaniards and French, who did not attempt to attack the town, but ravaged a part of the mainland and one of the islands of the landlocked harbor, where they met stout resistance from the militia. On Saturday, Rhett with his improvised fleet drove the four invading war-ships from the harbor to the open sea, and would have destroyed them, as he did the ships of Stede Bonnet, the pirate, twelve years later, but for a threatening storm.

Nothing more having been heard of the allied fleet, the country militia was discharged. Then the news came that a French war-ship, commanded by Captain Pacquereau, had appeared in Sewee Bay with two hundred men. He had come to join Le Feboure, but was unaware of his commander’s failure. On September 2d, Captain Fenwicke and his militiamen met the French landing party, killed fourteen and captured fifty prisoners. Colonel Rhett demanded and received the surrender of Pacquereau’s ship, with ninety men aboard. Charleston had two hundred and thirty French and Spanish prisoners, but whether or not they died of yellow fever, Hewatt, the only historian of the time, does not say, and unfortunately Charleston could not boast of a newspaper until twenty-six years later. The failure of this first of three attempts to take Charleston by naval force proved that “the sinews of war are the sinews of valiant men,” for its defenders were weakened by yellow fever and had neither full ranks nor strong fortifications. Doyle, the English historian, says:

“The settlers who held Charlestown against the allied forces of France and Spain were partners in the glory of Stanhope and Marlborough, heirs to the glory of Drake and Raleigh.”

Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts visited Charleston in 1773, with a view to sounding the leaders of public opinion and seeing if the colony was ripe for rebellion. He was surprised at the material prosperity, wealth and hospitality of the people. He says, in his published diary: “This town makes a beautiful appearance as you come up to it and in many respects a magnificent one. I can only say in general that in grandeur, splendor of buildings, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping and indeed everything, it far surpasses all I ever saw, or ever expect to see in America.” He was entertained at the elegant residence of Miles Brewton and records a remarkable conversation which would seem to have forecasted the results of the war between the States eighty-eight years later. The same house stands to-day, the finest survival of colonial architecture to be found among the residences in the city.

He attended a concert of the St. Cecilia Society, where he saw upwards of two hundred and fifty ladies, and he notes, with evident wonder, that three members of the permanent band were employed at a salary of five hundred guineas a year, and another musician was occasionally employed at fifty guineas a month. His description of the St. Cecilia concert is brief, but the longest that has ever appeared in print.

This society, one hundred and thirty-five years old, the oldest “dancing club” on the continent, is in active operation to-day, though the musical feature has long since disappeared. Now, as in Quincy’s time, admission to one of its three annual entertainments cannot be bought for any sum, but gives a gentleman the open sesame to the most exclusive social circle in the United States. Some, even of those who are connected with it and others whose qualifications for membership are indisputable, regard this ancient society as an anachronism, but Charleston has many anachronisms. The South Carolina law which declares the marriage tie indissoluble for any cause is perhaps regarded as an anachronism, not only in Chicago, but in every city and State in the Union, and the unwritten law which prohibits and has, so far, prevented the publication of any report of a St. Cecilia ball in the public prints would doubtless excite derisive laughter from every “Society Reporter” in this country except those of Charleston. The invitation list of the St. Cecilia Society is the Almanach de Gotha of Charleston society. Once the name of a lady is entered upon it, that name is never taken off unless the lady dies or marries out of the charmed circle, or out of the city.

Isolated from other English colonies by a wide region of forest, the Charlestonians, with Spaniards to the south and Indians to the west of them, and with Cape Hatteras as a menace to commerce with the North Atlantic seaboard, were compelled from the first to think and act for themselves. In 1698, they made the first attempt to form a public library; in 1735, they organized the “Friendly Society,” their first insurance company; and as early as 1774 a Chamber of Commerce was established in Charleston. They made in 1764 the second attempt in the colonies to provide for the care of the insane.

At the opening of the war of the Revolution Charleston was one of the three leading seaports of the country. Apart from its strategic value and as a base of supplies, the British government doubtless desired especially to punish the rebels of one of the most favored colonies, which by bounties on indigo and otherwise had been most generously treated by the mother country. There were many Charlestonians who were loyal to the King and who fought for England during the Revolution, sundering family ties, and, some of them, self-exiled like Bull and Moultrie, eventually dying in London. The presence of these loyal adherents of the King only served to heighten the intensity of those who were anxious to unite the colonies, and, as a consequence, as far back as 1765, South Carolina took the first steps toward a continental union before the measure had been agreed upon by any colony south of New England. “Massachusetts,” says Bancroft, “sounded the trumpet, but to South Carolina is it owing that it was attended to. Had it not been for South Carolina, no congress would then have happened.” The first independent constitution in any of the colonies was that of South Carolina, formulated in Charleston in March, 1776, though the Colony had had a virtually independent government from the 6th of July, 1774.

FROM A PAINTING BY J. A. OERTEL.]

“On the 11th of January, 1775,” says Simms, “the first Revolutionary provincial Congress met and laid the foundation for the more regular meeting of the convention of March, 1776, by which the first constitution of South Carolina was formed.”

On June 28, 1776, Charleston was besieged by a British fleet under Sir Peter Parker, as well as by a land army, under Sir Henry Clinton, and the first great victory of the Revolution was won by the gallant General Moultrie. The military student will tell you that Sir Peter Parker could easily have run his great fleet past the palmetto fort on Sullivan’s Island, and that he met disaster and defeat by following a military rule of that day,--never to leave an enemy in a fortified post behind you. It is interesting to know that the twenty-four pounder, the largest ball in use at the battle of Fort Moultrie, was the smallest in use during the siege of Charleston in the war between the States.

The devoted city was again besieged in 1779 by the British under General Augustine Provost, and was again successfully defended.

The third siege by the British was successful and the city was surrendered on the 12th of May, 1780, after a siege of four months and heavy bombardment. It was held by the British under military rule until evacuated by them December 14, 1782. General William Moultrie in his _Memoirs_ thus describes the reoccupation of the city by the American forces:

“I cannot forget that happy day when we marched into Charlestown with
the American troops; it was a proud day to me, and I felt myself much
elated at seeing the balconies, the doors and windows crowded with
the patriotic fair, the aged citizens and others congratulating us on
our return home, saying, ‘God bless you gentlemen! You are welcome
home gentlemen!’ Both citizens and soldiers shed mutual tears of joy.”

The Duke La Rochefoucault-Liancourt, who visited the United States in 1796, after the Revolution, when the people had in great measure recovered from its effects, was as extravagant in his praise of the people of Charleston as Josiah Quincy had been. The enthusiastic Frenchman wrote:

“I cannot close this long article on South Carolina without
mentioning with deserved praise the kind reception I experienced
in Charleston. This is a duty which I owe to the inhabitants of
all the parts of America which I have traversed, but especially
to this place. In no town of the United States does a foreigner
experience more benevolence or find more entertaining society than
in Charleston.... They keep a greater number of servants than those
of Philadelphia. From the hour of four in the afternoon, they rarely
think of aught but pleasure and amusement.... Many of the inhabitants
of South Carolina having been in Europe, have in consequence acquired
a greater knowledge of our manners and a stronger partiality to them
than the people of the Northern States. Consequently the European
modes of life are here more prevalent. The women here are more lovely
than in the North. They are interesting and agreeable but not quite
so handsome as those of Philadelphia. They have a greater share
in the commerce of society without retaining for this the loss of
modesty and delicate propriety in their behavior.”

Time does not appear to have changed the character of the people or their social amenities, for, in 1836, an Englishman, the Honorable Charles Augustus Murray, writes:

“A gentleman must be very difficult to please if he does not find
Charleston society agreeable; there is something warm, frank and
courteous in the manner of a real Carolinian; he is not studiously,
but naturally polite; and though his character may not be remarkable
for that persevering industry and close attention to minutiæ in
business which are so remarkable in the New England merchants, he is
far from deficient in sagacity, courage or enterprise.”

One characteristic of the Charleston women which still abides with them is noted by Mr. Murray, who says:

“They are pretty, agreeable and intelligent, and in one respect have
an advantage over most of their Northern sisters--(if the judge is
to be a person accustomed to English society)--I mean as regards
voice; they have not that particular intonation which I have remarked
elsewhere, and which must have struck every stranger who has visited
the other Atlantic cities.”

There was little of the Puritanical element in the thriving capital of South Carolina. Many of its citizens had frequented, in their college days, the pit of Drury Lane or Covent Garden, others who had come as adventurers had found the fortunes they sought, and an important element of the population was that strain of Huguenot blood from which Calvinism had not eradicated the _joie de vivre_ inherent in the Frenchman.

William Dunlap, the first and most painstaking of the historians of the American stage, states that the first dramatic performance ever given in America was in Williamsburg, Va., where a theatre was opened on September 5, 1752, and this date was generally accepted as correct, and the centennial of the introduction of the drama in America was celebrated with all the honors at Castle Garden, New York, a hundred years later.

Later investigators claim that New York was treated to a performance by professionals in September, 1732, and that Addison’s _Cato_ was rendered in Philadelphia by a regular company as early as 1749. The South Carolina _Gazette_ for January 18, 1734, has the following advertisement:

“On Friday, the 24th instant, in the Court Room, will be attempted a
tragedy called ‘The Orphan or the Unhappy Marriage.’ Tickets will be
delivered out on Tuesday next, at Mr Shepheard’s at 40s each.”

That this was probably a success is proved by its repetition on the Charleston boards on January 28th, and again February 4th, with the addition of “A new pantomime entertainment in grotesque characters called ‘The Adventures of Harlequin and Scaremouch, with the Burgo-Master Trick’d.’”

No city on the continent had a higher standard of scholarship a few decades before and after the Revolution of 1776.

Many of its leading citizens had been educated at the English universities, and brought and established here the literary tastes and pursuits which had been contracted in those then greatest seats of learning in the world. South Carolina headed all the colonies in the list of the London Inns of Court, and up to the time of the Revolution had forty-five representatives out of the one hundred and fourteen American students of the “lawless science of the law.”

Among other Carolina youth who were sent to England to complete their education were Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward, Thomas Lynch, Jr. (three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), John and Hugh Rutledge, C. C. Pinckney, Thomas Pinckney, W. H. Drayton, Christopher Gadsden, Henry Laurens, John Laurens, Gabriel Manigault, William Wragg and John Foucheraud Grimké. All of these gentlemen, except one, William Wragg, were military and civil leaders in the Revolution.