This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[158]
whom they deceived, betrayed, and ruined, let the history of that war declare.
They gloried in the infamy.
The Legislature resolved unanimously, “That this General Assembly learns with pride and pleasure of the successful resistance this day by the troops of this State, acting under orders of the Governor, to an attempt to re-enforce Fort Sumter.”
The organ of the conspirators, speaking in their name, said, exultingly :--“Yesterday, the 9th of January, will be remembered in history.
Powder has been burnt over the decree of our State, timber has been crashed, perhaps blood spilled.
The expulsion of the Star of the West from Charleston harbor yesterday morning, was the opening of the ball of revolution.
We are proud that our harbor has been so honored.
We are more proud that the State of South Carolina, so long, so bitterly, so contemptuously reviled and scoffed at, above all others, should thus proudly have thrown back the scoff of her enemies.
Intrenched upon her soil, she has spoken.
from the mouth of her cannon, and not from the mouths of scurrilous demagogues, fanatics, and scribblers.
Contemned, the sanctity of her waters violated with hostile purpose of re-enforcing enemies in our harbor, she has not hesitated to strike the first blow, full in the face of her insulter.
Let the United States Government bear, or return at its good-will, the blow still tingling about its ears — the fruit of its own bandit temerity.
We would not exchange or recall that blow for millions!
It has wiped out half a century of scorn and outrage.
Again South Carolina may be proud of her historic fame and ancestry, without a blush upon her cheek for her own present honor.
The haughty echo of her cannon has ere this reverberated from Maine to Texas, through every hamlet of the North, and down along the great waters of the Southwest.
The decree has gone forth.
Upon each acre of the peaceful soil of the South, armed men will spring up as the sound breaks upon their ears; and it will be found that every word of our insolent foe has been, indeed, a dragon's tooth sown for their destruction.
And though grisly and traitorous ruffians may cry on the dogs of war, and treacherous politicians may lend their aid in deceptions, South Carolina will stand under her own Palmetto-tree, unterrified by the snarling growls or assaults of the one, undeceived or deterred by the wily machinations of the other.
And if that red seal of blood be still lacking to the parchment of our liberties, and blood they want — blood they shall have — and blood enough to stamp it all in red. For, by the God of our fathers, the soil of South Carolina shall be free!”
1
Four years after the war was so boastfully begun by these South Carolina conspirators, it had made Charleston a ghastly ruin, in which not one of these men remained; laid Columbia, the capital of the State, in ashes; liberated every slave within the borders of the Commonwealth; wholly disorganized society; filled the land with the mourning of the deceived and bereaved people, and caused a large number of those who signed the Ordinance of Secession, and brought the curse of War's desolation upon the innocent inhabitants of most of the Slave-labor States, to become fugitives from their homes, utterly ruined.2 The retribution was terrible!
1 Charleston Mercury, January 10, 1861.
2 A letter written in Charleston just after the National troops took possession of it, in February, 1865, contained the following paragraph:--
“The wharves looked as if they had been deserted for half a century-broken down, dilapidated, grass and moss peeping up between the pavements, where once the busy feet of commerce trode incessantly. The ware-houses near the river; the streets as we enter them; the houses and the stores and the public buildings we look at them and hold our breaths in utter amazement. Every step we take increases our astonishment. No pen, no pencil, no tongue can do justice to the scene. No imagination can conceive of the utter wreck, the universal ruin, the stupendous desolation. Ruin — ruin — ruin — above and below; on the right hand and the left; ruin, ruin, ruin, everywhere and always — staring at us from every paneless window; looking out at us from every shell-torn wall; glaring at us from every battered door and pillar and veranda; crouching beneath our feet on every sidewalk. Not Pompeii, nor Herculaneum, nor Thebes, nor the Nile, have ruins so complete, so saddening, so plaintively eloquent, for they speak to us of an age not ours, and long ago dead, with whose people and life and ideas we have no sympathy whatever. But here, on these shattered wrecks of houses-built in our own style, many of them doing credit to the architecture of our epoch — we read names familiar to us all; telling us of trades and professions and commercial institutions which every modern city reckons up by the hundred: yet dead, dead, dead; as silent as the grave of the Pharaohs, as deserted as the bazars of the merchant princes of Old Tyre.”
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.