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| Sally-Port in 1866. |
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spring blossoms, and the dark swamps were glowing, as with sunlight, with the flowers of the trailing yellow jasmine.
At Charleston the writer was the guest of a friend who had endured the fiery furnace of war through which that city had passed.
His elegant residence was in what was lately the suburbs of the city, and beyond the reach of shells from Morris Island.
In company with one of his sons, who was in the Confederate army, at Charleston, I visited every place of interest in and around that city and harbor.
General Devens, then in command there, kindly gave us the use of the government barge, fully equipped and manned, and in it we visited Castle Pinckney, and Forts Ripley, Johnson, Gregg, Wagner, Sumter, and Moultrie.
We lunched at Fort Wagner, and picked delicate violets from the marsh sod among the sand dunes over the grave of the gallant Colonel Shaw and his dusky fellow-martyrs.1 We rambled over the heaps of Fort Sumter, and made the sketch of the interior seen on page 465; and then we passed over to Fort Moultrie, which I had visited eighteen years before, when it was in perfect order.
Now it was sadly changed.
Its form and dimensions had been altered; and missiles from the National fleet had broken its tasteful sally-port and plowed its parapets and parade with deep furrows.
The writer spent a week in Charleston, making notes and sketches, during which time Easter Sunday occurred, and he worshiped in the venerable St. Michael's Church,2 then decorated with wreaths and festoons of evergreens and the beautiful white flowers of the laurel.
Its ceiling, torn by a message carried by Gillmore's “Swamp angel,” 3 was yet unrepaired, and the Tables of the Law in the chancel recess, demolished by the same agency,4 had not been replaced.
The various buildings in which the Secession conventions were held, were all in ruins.
These, and the tomb of Calhoun, within a few yards of the spot where the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession was signed;5 the statue of William Pitt, in front of the Orphan House; the Headquarters of officers in the city, and the National Arsenal, fronting on Ashley Street, were all objects of great historic interest.
At the latter place was the little six-pounder iron cannon, made rough as oak-bark by rust,
1 See page 205.
2 See page 105, volume I.
3 See page 207.
4 See page 105, volume I.
5 The grave of Calhoun is in St. Philip's church-yard (see page 104, volume I.), just back of the ruins of the South Carolina Institute (see page 19, volume I.), and the Circular church. When the writer was in Charleston, at the time we are considering, he was informed by a general officer that once on returning to the Mills House, after a social party, at about midnight, he heard a screech-owl in the ruined tower of the Circular church, making its unpleasant noise, within the distance of the sound of a man's voice from the remains of the grave of Calhoun, the great apostle of Disunion. In the heart of the city which he and his disciples fondly hoped would be the commercial emporium of a great empire founded on human slavery, “the bats and owls” made “night hideous.” See note 2, page 158, volume I. It may be mentioned, in this connection, as a curious fact, given to the writer by an old resident of Charleston, that not one of the Palmetto Guard, of which Edmund Ruffin (see page 48, volume I.) was a volunteer, who fired on Fort Sumter, and first entered and took possession of it in the name of the Conspirators (see page 880, volume I.), was living at the close of 1865, or six months after the war ceased.
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