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| The Palmetto.1 |
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harbor should “never be surrendered to any power on earth.”
Such was the language of a “leading statesman” of South Carolina, whom the people were required to venerate as an oracle of wisdom.
Rhett gave the key-note.
Men went out at once, as missionaries of treason, all over South Carolina, and motley crowds of men, women, and children — Caucasian and African — listened, in excited groups, at cross-roads, court-houses, and other usual gathering-places.
The burden of every speech was the wrongs suffered by South Carolina, in the Union; her right and her duty to leave it; her power to “defy the world in arms;” and the glory that would illumine her whole domain in that near future, when her independence of the thralls of the “detested Constitution” should be secured.
“Statesmen,” released from service in the Legislature, joined in this missionary work.
To the slaveholders one said, in a speech in Charleston:--“Three thousand millions of property is involved in this question, and if you say at the ballot-box that South Carolina shall not secede, you put into the sacrifice three thousand millions of your property . . . . The Union
is a dead carcass, stinking in the nostrils of the South. . . . Ay, my friends, a few weeks more, and you will see floating from the fortifications the ensign that now bears the Palmetto, the emblem of a Southern Confederacy.”
The Charleston Mercury, conducted, as we have observed, by a son of R. B. Rhett, called upon all natives of South Carolina in the Army or Navy of the United States to throw up their commissions, and join in the revolt.
“The mother looks to her sons,” said this fiery organ of treason, “to protect her from outrage. . . . She is sick of the Union--disgusted with it, upon any terms within the range of the widest possibility.”
The call was responded to by the resignations of many commissions held by South Carolinians; and the conspirators, unable to comprehend a supreme love for the Union, boasted that not a son of that State would prove loyal to the old flag.2 They were amazed when patriots like Commodore Shubrick refused to do the bidding of traitors.
1 the tree of the palm family, known as the Cabbage Palmetto, grows near the shores of South Carolina and Georgia, in great perfection. It is confined to the neighborhood of salt water. Its timber is very valuable in all submarine constructions. Its unexpanded young leaves form a most delicious vegetable for the table. Its perfect leaves are used in the manufacture of hats, mats, baskets, &c. The foliage forms a broad tuft at the upper part of the stem. It is the chief figure on the seal of South Carolina, and has ever been an emblem of the State.
2 One of those who abandoned the flag was Lieutenant J. R. Hamilton, of the Navy, who, on the 14th of January, 1861, issued a circular letter from Fort Moultrie to his fellow-officers in that branch of the service, calling upon them to follow his example. It was a characteristic production. After talking much of “honor,” he thus counseled his friends to engage in plundering the Government:--“What the South most asks of you now is, to bring with you every ship and man you can, that we may use them against the oppressors of our liberties, and the enemies of our aggravated but united people.” At that time, thirty-six naval officers, born in Slave-labor States, had resigned.
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