Historic Towns of the Southern States

The triad of volumes dealing with the older American Historic Towns along or near the eastern coast is now complete. The three volumes, like the chapters of which they are composed, have their inevitable limitations. While neither in historical value nor in literary quality has it proved practicable to secure a uniformity of standard, editor and contributors have done the best they could, and they now feel assured that the series has proved its right to exist. It is quickening interest in our historic towns, bringing to light important facts, picturing for the patriotic reader who may not be free to make personal visits the places he would visit if he could, and making clear to him many things he would not be likely to learn in the towns themselves, however long a stay he might be free to make.

Like the preceding issues, this volume has a patriotic and educational purpose, but it goes forth also on an irenic mission. The editor’s father, dead almost a quarter of a century, lived in a little border town where in war times love and hate alike were hot. An avowed and fearless Unionist, he was also a true and faithful pacificator. As Mr. Rule has said of Louisville, James B. R. Powell “occupied a position similar to that of Tennyson’s sweet little heroine, Annie, who, sitting between Enoch and Philip, with a hand of each in her own, would weep,

In planning and in shaping this volume, the editor hopes that he is proving himself worthy of an honored father, whose name he would connect in this way with the work and with the series.

His special acknowledgments are due to his wife, Gertrude Wilson Powell, for discriminating and invaluable assistance at every stage, and to Professor W. P. Trent, who, in addition to the preparation of a comprehensive Introduction, has ever been ready with such counsel [Pg v]and suggestions as enhance in many ways the value of the volume.

[Pg ix]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg xix]

INTRODUCTION

By W. P. TRENT

Probably the first feeling of the reader who glances over the table of contents of this volume will be one of surprise at the number of Southern towns of historical importance that the editor has seen fit and been able to include. Neither from our study of American history nor from our study of geography have we been led to look upon the Southern States as a region characterized by urban development. Those of us who took the pains to examine the statistics of the census of 1890 remember that the South stood far behind the other sections in this respect. We remember, too, to have seen in our histories the thickly settled New England township contrasted with the large, sparsely settled Southern county. In literature the South has figured as a region of plantations and manor houses inhabited by [Pg xx]cavaliers and chatelaines and old family slaves, possessors of all the feudal virtues, or else as the home of a curious race, presumably Caucasian, known as “crackers,” and of equally curious mountaineers known as “moonshiners.” An exception is made, of course, in favor of New Orleans, the home of the Creole and the carnival; of Charleston, the home of secession; of Richmond, the home of the Confederate government; and of St. Augustine, the home of hotels; but on the whole it is probable that the average American of other sections, unless he be a drummer or a valetudinarian tourist, rarely thinks of the South from the point of view of its towns, historic or unhistoric.

For this state of affairs no one is to blame. The great growth of municipalities in the North, East and West—the colossal development of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, of Boston and Baltimore and a dozen other great cities—has naturally cast in the shade the urban status of a section that contains no city of three hundred thousand inhabitants. It is true that much is heard of the New South with its commercial future; but probably the pushing Atlanta is almost the only Southern city that has in the last few decades impressed [Pg xxi]itself to any marked degree upon the nation’s consciousness.

Nor is it surprising that it is only since the Civil War that the urban development of the South has begun to be of importance even to close students of the past and present of the section. From the time of the earliest settlements to the present day agriculture has been the dominant industry. Virginia tobacco, Carolina indigo and rice, far Southern and Southwestern cotton—these staples have meant more to the South than manufacturing or commerce. She developed seaports, which gradually lost their relative standing among the ports of the country and administrative and distributing centers; but there was no crowding of operatives into manufacturing towns, no haste on the part of country-bred youths to leave their native fields for the shops and warehouses and offices of the city. The gentleman’s son looked forward in most cases to being a planter; the small farmer’s son grew up in an environment that did not stimulate ambition. Cotton was king, and his court was bound to be a rural one.

It is not to be supposed, however, that during the period from 1820 to 1860, which [Pg xxii]witnessed the amazing growth of manufacturing and commercial centers in the North and East and the still more wonderful rural and urban development of the West, the South was entirely content with the spread of her cotton-fields and oblivious to the stagnation or the slow growth of her towns. Her country-gentleman class was doubtless content with this state of affairs, and her politicians actually boasted of it, being put on the defensive in all respects on account of the attacks made upon slavery; but the leading inhabitants of the towns regretted the backwardness of their section and devised various schemes for remedying it, while the merchant class openly complained of the fact that young men were taught to look down upon every pursuit other than planting. This is but to say that the people of the South were not so different at bottom from their hopeful, energetic fellow citizens of other sections as has sometimes been imagined. They were Americans tied down to one occupation and rendered unprogressive by the hampering influences of a belated institution.

This fact does not appear on the surface; indeed it becomes apparent only to the careful student of sources of which the Southern historian [Pg xxiii]has not yet made full use. These sources are the local newspapers and the fairly numerous magazines—particularly the financial and commercial De Bow’s Review published at New Orleans. The Southern historian, like his brothers of the North and East until recently, has laid disproportionate stress upon the colonial history of his section or else upon its political history, and thus has failed to bring out the interesting struggle between the old and the new economic orders of things that took place in the South down to the time of the Civil War. Hence it is that in the present volume we find in many chapters the gap between the surrender at Yorktown and the firing upon Sumter covered by only a few paragraphs. Some of the towns had a most interesting history during these years,—as we may judge from Dr. Petrie’s chapter on Montgomery,—but it has not yet been written.

When it is, we shall get abundant evidence of a heroic if, on the whole, unsuccessful struggle for urban development. Charleston in particular made a most gallant fight to recover the importance as a port which she had lost through the rivalry of Baltimore and New Orleans. Her leading citizens, some of whom [Pg xxiv]labored for the cause of public education and of literary and scientific development with an earnestness that should not be forgotten in spite of the paucity of results, saw clearly that something must be done to enhance the city’s wealth and growth if the State herself, or, indeed, the section, was to maintain an important place in the union of rapidly developing commonwealths. They saw, furthermore, what this something must be. The cotton of the South and the agricultural and other products of the great West must be drawn away from Northern ports to ships lying in the harbor of Charleston. The distance to be traversed and the mountain barriers made all thought of a canal similar to the one that had brought fortune to New York out of the question, and the hopes of enterprising citizens centered on the newly invented railway. As early as 1831 the first steam locomotive used successfully on rails in this country was put on its tracks at Charleston by the South Carolina Railroad Company, and, as Mr. Snowden tells us in his chapter, the longest railway in the world was at one time contained within the borders of what is not familiarly known as a progressive State. It was but a short time before ambitious plans [Pg xxv]were set on foot to connect Charleston with Cincinnati and the West.

The full story of these plans—of the faithful labor expended upon them, and of their ultimate failure, through no fault of the unselfish promoters—belongs to another place; but a few words upon the subject may be pardoned here on account of the light that will be thrown upon the difficulties encountered by every ante-bellum Southern city in its efforts at progress. The first steps taken by the friends of the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad Company were comparatively easy. Charters were obtained from several States, enthusiastic conventions of promoters were held, engineers were put into the field to decide between competing routes, and popular subscriptions to the stock were opened in most of the towns and villages. By November, 1836, South Carolina alone had subscribed for nearly $2,775,000 of the $4,000,000 needed to start the enterprise. Within a few days this latter amount was made up, and everything looked bright. But Governor McDuffie in his annual message pointed out unforeseen obstacles. Kentucky had subscribed only $200,000, and yet claimed six directors out of twenty-four; [Pg xxvi]Ohio had subscribed almost nothing. Why should South Carolina cover Kentucky with railroads? Why, again, should the promoters of the enterprise wish for banking privileges when the whole country was crowded with banks already? He urged the legislature to withhold the desired subscription of $1,000,000 until the success of the road was more fully assured. His advice was not followed, but we may learn two important facts from his remarks: first, that the South suffered from the crude financial methods and the fever for speculation that afflicted the rest of the country. Second, that State jealousy was a rock upon which any great Southern scheme was liable to split. The theory of States-rights united the Southern commonwealths politically against the other sections, but in internal matters it was a disintegrating agent of great potency.

The promoters of the road were not discouraged, however, by Governor McDuffie’s pessimism. They organized their bank, purchased the road which already connected Charleston and Augusta, known as “The Charleston and Hamburg,” began a branch to connect the State capital, Columbia, with this road, and commenced to realize on the popular [Pg xxvii]subscriptions to the stock. But they had not counted on the panic of 1837 and the continuing financial depression, in the midst of which their bank was forced to suspend, nor had they expected to lose by death their efficient president, Robert Y. Hayne, Webster’s famous opponent. The great interstate scheme soon shrank to state proportions; and by 1842 people were congratulating themselves that they had at least a gratifying extent of railway mileage within the borders of South Carolina itself. This seems a small return for a large outlay of energy, yet after a careful study of the complicated history of the road it can scarcely be said that General Hayne and his associates made as bad a compromise with their magnificent dreams as the majority of our more recent railway promoters have done. Certainly the way in which the public responded to their efforts spoke well for the energy and the civic intelligence of a people of planters. The effects of the panic and of Western indifference could hardly have been foreseen; the banking attachment was natural enough in an era of wild banking to which the lessons of experience were wanting; and, finally, the method of securing capital by instalments of subscription, [Pg xxviii]crude as it may seem, was almost the only available one among a people whose capital was in the main locked up in land and negroes. We are warranted, therefore, in concluding, from these early efforts to connect Charleston with the West, and from later railroad enterprises of other Southern cities that cannot be treated here, that the failure of the ante-bellum South to show a marked urban development was due not to the backwardness and inertia of its influential citizens, but rather to unfavorable economic conditions that could not be speedily overcome.

The student of Southern history will reach this conclusion by following other lines of investigation. It is a well-known fact that in the decade before the Civil War annual commercial conventions were held in the leading Southern cities. These conventions tended also to become political in character and furnished an opportunity for the exploitation of some rather extreme propositions, such, for example, as that looking to the reopening of the foreign slave-trade. They serve to illustrate the important part played by the ante-bellum towns in developing and intensifying the movement toward secession; but it is more to the point here to [Pg xxix]observe that they were preceded by a series of conventions more strictly commercial in character—gatherings that did all they could to stir up the people of the South to the need of urban development and to open their eyes to the fact that their section was yearly falling behind in wealth and political power.[1]

This first series seems to have begun with a gathering in Augusta, Georgia, in October, 1837, the object of the meeting being to allow merchants the opportunity to discuss projects for developing a direct trade between the South and Europe. As the only speeches that caused comment were made by two “Colonels” and a “General,” it is easy to perceive that even in such a convention the commercial classes were overshadowed. The delegates met twice, however, the next year, and afterwards at Charleston and Macon, the presence of delegates from all the Southern States being solicited and in part obtained. These meetings did what they could to arouse the South to commercial activity, on one [Pg xxx]occasion viewing “with deep regret the neglect of all commercial pursuits” that had thitherto prevailed among the youth of the section. That their efforts were no more successful than those of the contemporary railway promoters proves only that the failure of urban development in the South was due not to the supineness of the entire population but to the presence of an institution during the existence of which agriculture was bound to be the paramount industry. It is interesting to notice that these efforts toward urban development were contemporaneous with and in answer to the agitation of the early abolitionists; that they practically ceased during the movement for territorial aggrandizement in Texas and the Far West; and that they began in full force when it became apparent that the South had gained less of the new territory than she thought she would. So true is it that all Southern history has a political background!

It is not, however, desirable that the present Introduction should degenerate into a dry historical essay devoted to certain obscure points in the economic history of the South, although it does seem important that the reader should realize that the citizens of [Pg xxxi]Southern towns between the years 1800 and 1860 were not altogether lacking in enterprise and foresight. Yet the period mentioned is so interesting in many ways that it is hard to leave it. It would be pleasant to sketch briefly the efforts made to develop literary centers—especially at Richmond and Charleston: the establishment at the former place of the Southern Literary Messenger, forever connected with the fame of Poe; at the latter, of the earlier and the later Southern Review and of Russell’s Magazine, connected, respectively, with the names of Hugh S. Legaré, William Gilmore Simms and the ill-fated Henry Timrod, whose genuine poetical genius is slowly being recognized. It would be interesting, too, to discuss the political influence wielded by such newspapers as the Richmond Enquirer and the Charleston Mercury. A topic no less important is the effect of the classical culture undoubtedly possessed to a considerable degree by the leading citizens of the older towns upon the problem, only now being solved by the New South, of affording every child a free and sound education. A discussion of this topic would naturally lead one to inquire into the status of the lower and [Pg xxxii]middle classes in the ante-bellum Southern towns, and this would necessarily carry us very far afield. Perhaps the best way to break the train of these suggestions and reflections is to ask the reader whether he would ever have thought it possible for a German immigrant to become a day-laborer in a Southern town, to save enough money in six years to build an important bridge and wharf, to found a town of his own which soon became a flourishing cotton market and actually, as its leading personage, to enter into quasi-diplomatic relations with the government of Hamburg, Germany! Yet all this actually happened in the “unprogressive” ante-bellum South. The man’s name was Henry Schultz; the town in which he made his fortune, and, sad to relate, subsequently lost it, was Augusta, Georgia; the town he founded was Hamburg, South Carolina, which it must be confessed has not become a metropolis and is chiefly known in connection with certain important riots.[2]

[Pg xxxiii]

Next to the large number of towns worthy to be included in the volume, perhaps the most striking feature is the fact that nearly every town described has experienced the vicissitudes of war. No walls of long standing or traces of them may be pointed out to the curious visitor of to-day, but battlefields there are, and in more than one instance stories may be told of long-sustained sieges and heroic defences. The Sunny South ought naturally to be a land of languorous peace, but over no other section have the clouds of war rolled so heavily. Its oldest town, St. Augustine, was born of war. Baltimore and Washington suffered during the War of 1812, and the latter was seriously threatened during the War for the Union. Frederick Town lives in our memories along with Stonewall Jackson and Barbara Fritchie. Before Richmond Lee foiled the troops of McClellan, and the gallant capital, after four years filled with high hopes and reckless gayety and solemn mourning, surrendered when the same undaunted Lee had but a few thousand starving veterans to oppose to the splendid and puissant hosts of Grant. The ghosts of long-dead cavaliers must have shivered when the streets of Williamsburg echoed to the tramp of [Pg xxxiv]soldiers from Puritan New England. The name of Wilmington brings to mind the daring exploits of the blockade-runners; that of Charleston recalls the heroic defence of Fort Moultrie, the occupation by the British, the threatened bloodshed of the Nullification crisis, the capture of Sumter and the magnificent resistance offered the Federal arms throughout the Civil War. Like Charleston, Savannah can tell of encounters with Spaniards and British undergone gloriously by her sons, although she doubtless does not yet relish having been Sherman’s Christmas gift to the nation. Mobile and New Orleans are forever associated with the illustrious name of Farragut, and the latter can boast of being the scene of the most splendid victory in our annals, that won by Jackson and his backwoodsmen over the picked troops of Wellington. As for the great siege of Vicksburg that set the seal upon Grant’s fame, or for the battle of Nashville that gave almost equal renown to Thomas, men will not forget them even when Tolstoy’s dreams of universal peace have become a blessed reality.

But peace hath her victories no less renowned than war, as these chapters all tell us in [Pg xxxv]language as convincing if not so noble as that of Milton. The history of the brave and successful efforts made by the South to recover from the losses of the war and from the still more disastrous effects of the worst-devised legislation ever inflicted upon a conquered people cannot yet be fully written, but when it is, the part played by the Southern towns will surely be paramount. Population and business have greatly increased in the urban centers; the cause of truly public education has been fostered to a remarkable extent; political prejudices have waned; respect for human life has increased; and, finally, a true national spirit has been developed. Much remains to be done in the way of municipal improvements,—for example in the founding of public libraries,—but the history of the past thirty-five years warrants us in believing that the citizens of the Southern towns will be able to work out their own salvation. The outlook for the rural districts, where the commission merchant has his liens and mortgages, where ignorance and lack of thrift foster political unrest, where race hatred is partly extenuated by its causes and wholly discredited by its results, is less hopeful but still by no means hopeless.

[Pg xxxvi]

The present volume, however, deals with what has been rather than with what is or will be, and, as has been already remarked, mainly with what took place before even our great-grandfathers were born. To some of us the history of our fathers’ times is more interesting than the story of what remoter ancestors did, even though the costumes and the furniture of the former are by no means so picturesque as those of the latter. But tot homines, tot sententiæ. To Colonial Dames, and Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and readers of the Colonial and Revolutionary romances that are in such vogue, many pages of this book ought to prove both interesting and instructive. Nor are devotees of the modern wholly unprovided for, and the special student finds matter for reflection. He can speculate, for example, upon how far the South’s comparative freedom from French and Indian attacks rendered early urban development less urgent. He can notice how few great Southern statesmen and generals were of the urban type. He can contrast Charleston and New Orleans, in their relations with their outlying districts, as a miniature London and a miniature Paris, respectively. He can wonder [Pg xxxvii]whether any subtly psychological cause was at work to prevent the various writers dwelling upon slavery, duelling and other features of the past that are not especially relished by the present, yet assuredly had much to do with making Southern towns as picturesque and interesting as occasional travelers used to find them and as the investigator finds them to-day. Yet, if what is omitted reminds the student of the immense opportunity for original and important research that lies before the rising generation of Southern historical scholars, neither he nor the general reader should forget the gratitude due to the editor, the various writers and the publishers of this volume for first giving the public in an attractive form adequate proof of the interest and charm attaching to the towns of the ante-bellum South. In more than one important series of books relating to our national history the South is but scantily represented, but such a reproach cannot attach to this series of American Historic Towns. For weal or woe the South is now an integral part of the nation, and the attractive and inspiring, no less than the warning features of its history, should be a portion of the intellectual inheritance of every American.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The later series of conventions is well described by Mr. Edward Ingle in his interesting and valuable volume, based mainly upon magazine and newspaper research, entitled Southern Sidelights (pp. 220-261). Mr. Ingle pays but slight attention to the earlier series, which seems nowhere to have been fully described.

[2] Schultz was a party for years to a very important case known as “John W. Yarborough and others vs. The Bank of the State of Georgia,” etc., for documents relating to which I am indebted to William K. Miller, Esq., of the Augusta bar. The interesting career of the man became known to me some years since through researches undertaken in the early volumes of the Edgefield (S. C.) Advertiser.

[Pg 1]

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE SOUTHERN STATES

For many a year after the weary passengers of the Ark and the Dove had disembarked at St. Mary’s, there to make the first settlement under the proprietary government of the Lords Baltimore, the rivers of Maryland ran, like Mr. George Alfred Townsend’s Rappahannock,

The Chesapeake and its almost numberless tributaries made every plantation accessible to shipping, and so precluded that concentration [Pg 2]of trade and population at points of vantage which is the essential condition of municipal growth. As Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, wrote, in 1678:

When Lord Baltimore offered to the Lords of Trade this explanation of the dearth of municipal life in Maryland, he emphasized precisely those facts which have distinguished the political development of the South from that of the North, and unwittingly explained the late appearance upon the map of America of the city which now perpetuates his family name.

Boston had lived and grown for nearly a century, New Amsterdam had been New York one half that time, and a whole generation of Philadelphians had passed away before the future metropolis of the South came into being. A half-century passed, and the Revolution found the town upon the Patapsco about the size of Salem or Providence; in another half-century it had become the third city in the United States. The pre-eminence which Baltimore thus attained was many years ago termed “an unsolved problem in the philosophy of cities.” Now, when one views this phenomenon in a longer perspective, it is possible, perhaps, to discern more clearly some of the elements which combined to give rise to it. Certainly, late years have brought to light much which one is enabled to add to the story of historic Baltimore that the fathers have handed down.

As Lord Baltimore’s letter to the Lords of Trade indicates, the economic disadvantage of the absence of town life in Maryland was appreciated by the Government of the Colony at a very early period in its history. It was not due to the lack of desire or of effort upon the part of the Proprietaries that in Maryland [Pg 4]“towns there were none.” For, first by proclamations, then by Acts of Assembly, towns were “erected” in a great number of places situated upon the water and selected, apparently, with little reference to any previous exhibition of a tendency to municipal growth, and with equally little reference to any expressions of desire upon the part of the inhabitants. That the success of this policy was hardly proportionate to the efforts made in its behalf is indicated by the statement made at a later time, that “the settlers, and now the Government call town any place where as many houses are as are individuals required to make a riot, that is twenty, as fixed by the Riot Act.” Indeed, these “fiat” towns were in nearly every case total failures. Harvy-town, Herrington and many similar creations have passed into oblivion, and now only serve as institutional fossils for the political palæontologist. As Jefferson said of Virginia, “there are other places at which the laws have said there shall be towns: but nature has said there shall not.”

Among these shadow-towns of early Maryland were some of particular interest to the history of Baltimore. The settlement upon [Pg 5]the Patapsco was not the first in Maryland to bear the proprietary name.

The first Baltimore seems to have been a point of land in St. Mary’s County, spoken of only once in the early records, and never again mentioned. A more important predecessor of the Baltimore of to-day was Baltimore upon the Bush, a small river emptying into the head of Chesapeake Bay, not far south of the Susquehanna. “The town-land on Bush River” is mentioned as early as 1669, and, some years later, it was made the seat of the court and court-house of Baltimore County. Though the court-house [Pg 6]was removed before long to Joppa, upon the Gunpowder, farther to the south, many of the eighteenth-century maps of Maryland show Baltimore as still upon the Bush. Of the history of this early settlement no details have been preserved; only lately has its site been determined.

Meanwhile, in the course of this general “towning,” the Patapsco had not been neglected. In the town acts were included provisions for towns upon Humphreys Creek, and upon Whetstone Point in that river. Of the actual existence of any corporate life at these points there is, however, no record; and it is probable that King George’s accession found the Patapsco watering the same broad plantations as of yore. But a new era in the town history of Maryland was dawning. Governmental stimulation was being supplanted by private enterprise. Certain progressive individuals conceived the idea of erecting a town upon a point of land which runs out into the main stream of the Patapsco and to-day is included within the limits of Baltimore city. At that time, this land was the property of a Mr. John Moale, and was known as Moale’s Point; but if it is Baltimore now, Mr. Moale was [Pg 7]resolved that it should not be Baltimore then, and taking his seat in the Assembly, to which he was a delegate, he prevented the location of the town upon his property. Tradition has censured this worthy for preferring the excavation of iron ore to the development of a municipality, but colonial experience in town lots had doubtless been such as to yield him ample justification for his determination.

“The rejected of Mr. John Moale” was not, however, to wander far, for slightly to the north lay property belonging to Charles and Daniel Carroll, sons of the former agent of the Lord Proprietary. Here the Patapsco formed a basin, a safe harbor for vessels of light draft; and near by a stream, known to this day as Jones’s Falls, after the name of an early settler, running from the hills near by, through lowland and marsh, poured a muddy torrent into the river. In 1709, was passed an act “for erecting a town on the north side of Patapsco in Baltimore County and for laying out into lots sixty acres of land in and about the place where one John Fleming now lives.”[3]

The owners of the land, the Carrolls, were more complaisant than Mr. John Moale: they readily parted with sixty acres of land at the rate of forty shillings per acre, payable in tobacco at one penny per pound. The town was then surveyed and laid out into lots, after the most approved “boomer” fashion of to-day. To secure an estate in fee simple, “takers-up” of lots were required to erect thereon, within eighteen months, a building covering at least four hundred square feet: failure to comply with this condition laid the lots open for other takers-up.

Baltimore’s boom seems to have started well, for after Mr. Carroll, as former owner, had selected the first lot, no less than fifteen other persons invested the same year. This success was so much appreciated that two years later another town was established, consisting of two acres laid out into twenty lots, just east of the Falls, “where Edward Fell keeps store.” Communication between the new town, known as Jones or Jonastown, and Baltimore was soon improved by a bridge across the Falls, and a few years later the two towns were by Act of Assembly formally made into one.[Pg 9]

A third distinct element in the early growth [Pg 10]of Baltimore was a settlement somewhat farther to the east, known as Fell’s Point. In 1730, Mr. William Fell, a Lancastrian Quaker, purchased a tract of land known as Copus’s Harbor and erected thereon a mansion. A little to the south, a point jutting out into the Patapsco offered wharfage facilities to vessels of large draft that were denied entrance to the shallow basin of Baltimore town. This fact was soon appreciated, and at a later time Edward Fell, who was the son of William, and an officer in the Provincial army, laid out Fell’s Point into lots, thereby reaping a fortune magnificent for those times.

During the first half of the eighteenth century little of note happened in Baltimore. Within a few years, however, some of the most important influences in its later development began to make themselves felt. In Northern Maryland, particularly near the Pennsylvania border, settlement was going on rapidly, and denser settlement meant the extension of commercial intercourse. In 1736, communication was established between the settlement on the Conewago—Hanover, in Pennsylvania—and the Patapsco. Seven years later, the people of York, also, “have [Pg 11]opened a road to Patapsco. Some trading gentlemen there are desirous of opening a trade to York and the country adjacent.” “In October, 1751, no less than sixty waggons loaded with flaxseed, came down to Baltimore from the back country.”

Baltimore, though vigorous in action, was as yet but mean in appearance. In the rooms of the Maryland Historical Society hangs a sketch of the town, drawn in 1752, by John Moale, the son of him that would have none of towns or town lots. Rude in perspective as this youthful effort is, it is treasured as one of the oldest and most interesting of the city’s heirlooms. Twenty-five houses—four of them built of brick—and two hundred inhabitants were then to be found in Baltimore. Upon the hill we see perched the first of four St. Paul’s churches successively erected upon the same lot, though not all upon the same site. At anchor in the harbor are the brig Philip and Charles and the sloop The Baltimore. The merchant navy of Baltimore was still small: the large vessels of foreign trade still waited at Whetstone Point to receive their freight, transported in large lighters from the plantation landings on both branches of the river.

More flattering than this early artistic attempt is Governor Sharpe’s description of Baltimore, two years later, as having

The requisite “gentlemen of fortune” were not long lacking. One soon appeared in the person of Dr. John Stevenson, who, in 1754, came from Ireland, accompanied by his brother, Dr. Henry Stevenson, a man also noteworthy among the founders of Baltimore. Dr. John Stevenson turned his attention to commerce, and began the systematic development of Baltimore’s foreign trade. He contracted for large quantities of wheat, which he shipped to Scotland with such profitable results that general attention was attracted to the development of a more extended commerce.

These words were written many years later: to quote them here is to take a long glance ahead. When Dr. Stevenson came to Baltimore, the clouds of war were lowering over the colonies. Governor Sharpe of Maryland exerted himself to the utmost to co-operate with General Braddock in the conquest of the Ohio for England, but fell out with the Lower House of the Provincial Assembly. The war was never popular in Maryland, although large sums were finally appropriated for the defence of the Province. When the news of Braddock’s defeat reached Baltimore, the alarm was intense. Tradition relates that upon one occasion such terrifying reports of the proximity of the Indian allies of France were brought to Baltimore that the women and children were put aboard ships, while the masculine portion of the inhabitants prepared to withstand the attack of the savages. But the attack never [Pg 15]came; instead, many settlers in Western Maryland and Western Pennsylvania hurried back to the East, impressed with the necessity of closer settlement for defensive purposes. This powerful incentive to unity was one that had never been felt by the early colonists of Maryland, who, unlike their brethren in the North, for the most part dwelt in peace with the natives.

During the war, several companies of royal troops were quartered in Baltimore. Among the officers in command, Captain Samuel Gardner, of his Majesty’s Forty-seventh Regiment, was engaged in recruiting for his Majesty’s service. His recruiting sergeant displayed such great zeal in the pursuit of his duty that strenuous opposition was aroused among the gentry of Baltimore, who found their indentured servants disappearing one day, to appear the next in his Majesty’s uniform. Upon one occasion, Mr. Charles Ridgely and others rescued—or recaptured—six recruits, claiming that they were indentured servants, which proved, Captain Gardner said, “not to be the truth as to all of them.” The irate Captain appealed to the civil authorities, with a long story about a conspiracy of “some of the [Pg 16]better sort at the Church in the Forest [St. Thomas’s]—to raise a body of about two hundred men, and take all my Recruits from me.” The plan of the conspirators, if such existed, never materialized, but Captain Gardner received cold comfort from Mr. Bordley, the Attorney-General. “He put a case,” laments Captain Gardner to Governor Sharpe, “not very much to the Honour of the Recruiting Service—Suppose a man steals a horse, etc.”

While the French and Indian War was in progress, Baltimore received a large addition to its population. When the “French Neutrals” were removed from Acadia by the British Government, many came to Baltimore, and were hospitably quartered in the mansion of Mr. Edward Fottrell, which stood upon the square now covered by the stately court-house recently completed. When the Abbé Robin visited Baltimore during the Revolutionary War, these unfortunate people and their descendants filled about one quarter of the town, a quarter mean and poor in appearance. They still spoke their native dialect, and treasured the altar vessels given them, with his parting benediction, by their old curé, M. Le Clerc, who had been the loving guardian of their souls.

[Pg 18]Though they began in great poverty, this portion of Baltimore’s population by industry and thrift rose to a high place in the life of the city. Many of the seafaring men who later played so important a part in the commercial development of Baltimore were the descendants of this sturdy fisherfolk of Acadia.

Between the French and Indian War and the Revolution Baltimore grew apace. Marshes were drained and a market-house was erected. In 1768, Baltimore became the county-seat, and a court-house was built upon the site where now the Battle Monument commemorates the defence of the city in 1814. “The Town” and “the Point” vied with each other, and those with an eye to the future bought lots in both places. Many mansions were erected, among them Mount Clare, the residence of Charles Carroll, Barrister. Dr. Henry Stevenson, brother of the “Romulus of America,” built a house on the York road near the Falls, which was called “Stevenson’s Folly” because of the contrast between its elegance and the simplicity of the surrounding dwellings. It deserved a better name, for later it was transformed into a hospital for inoculation against [Pg 19]the smallpox. Here the Rev. Jonathan Boucher brought “Jacky” Custis, to be “given the smallpox,” and we find recorded in Washington’s correspondence an account of Dr. Stevenson’s charges of “2 pistoles and 25 s. for board.” At the close of the century, the venerable doctor was one of the founders of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland. When he came to Baltimore, the youth of the town already enjoyed the instruction of one schoolmaster, and there was demand for another.

Of Baltimore in this pre-Revolutionary period, [Pg 20]a few odd, disconnected facts have been handed down. The tax upon bachelors—levied to raise supplies for his Majesty’s service—cannot have been very productive, as only thirteen “taxables” are reported. The commercial activity of the community was stimulated every October and May by a fair, when residents and visitors were free from arrest, except for felony and breach of the peace. Among other police regulations, fines were laid upon those whose chimneys blazed out at the top, or who neglected to keep ladders. Baltimore began to look like a busy, thriving town, enjoying life to the utmost.

And if our ancestors lived well, they endeavored to die well—at least with regard to the comfort of the guests at their funerals. One bill for funeral expenses, besides yards upon yards of crape, tiffany, broadcloth, shalloon and linen, several pairs of black gloves and other necessary attire, includes these items:

47¹⁄₂ lbs. loaf sugar
14 doz. eggs
10 oz. nutmegs
1¹⁄₂ lbs. allspice
20⁵⁄₈ gall. white wine
12 bottles red wine
10³⁄₈ gallons rum [!]

The first recognition of Baltimore’s existence by the Proprietary appears to have been in connection with an inquiry as to the possibility of making the growth of the town a source of additional income. Cecilius Calvert, the secretary of Frederick, the sixth Lord Baltimore, writes to Governor Sharpe that in Philadelphia William Penn has reserved property that brings him “much income now” and will produce to his heirs “immense revenue.” Sharpe replies that Baltimore town is built upon land patented to private persons, and embraces the opportunity to moderate the extravagant reports of Baltimore’s size that had reached the ears of the Proprietary, by adding that it “is almost as much inferiour to Philad^a as Dover is to London.” However, the twenty-five houses and two hundred people of 1752 had become, in 1764, two hundred families, and the town “is increasing.”

Such was Baltimore town when the citizens met together in town meeting to adopt a non-importation agreement, and to propose, upon the last day of May, 1774, the assembling of a general congress of delegates from all the colonies. The suffering of Boston under the Port Bill awoke deep sympathy, and in August of [Pg 22]this year the sloop America sailed from Baltimore Harbor carrying three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye flour, two barrels of pork and twenty-one barrels of bread, “for the relief of our brethren, the distressed inhabitants of your town.”

Though never the scene of actual hostilities, Baltimore lacked neither employment nor excitement. Early in 1776, a demonstration was made against the town, which had hitherto been entirely defenceless, by a British sloop of war and some smaller vessels. Fortifications were hastily erected upon Whetstone Point, where Fort McHenry later was to check the entrance of another British fleet; vessels were sunk in the channel, and the ship Defense was hurriedly fitted out and put under the command of Captain James Nicholson. The British commander did not risk an action, but stood off down Chesapeake Bay, leaving behind a valuable prize that he had shortly before captured. “Such was the ardor of the militia,” wrote Samuel Purviance, Secretary of the Committee of Safety of Baltimore town, “that not a man w^d stay in Comm^ee room with me but Mr. Harrison.” Captain Nicholson was complimented as having “first [Pg 23]had the honor of displaying the Continental colors to a British man-of-war without a return.”

Upon Baltimore, formerly Market, Street, between Sharp and Liberty, a tablet commemorates the site of “Congress Hall” a [Pg 24]“three story and attic” brick building, which, in 1776, belonged to one Jacob Fite, and was at that time one of the most imposing buildings in the town. Hither the Congress of the United States adjourned in 1776,—when the British approached the Delaware,—and remained several weeks, during which period Washington was made a virtual dictator. A few squares to the east was the Fountain Inn, which entertained Washington and many other statesmen and soldiers who came to Baltimore, or passed through the town on their way north and south. Among these visitors was the Duc de Lauzun, whose legion lay encamped around the knoll where later, in 1806, was commenced the erection of the Roman Catholic Cathedral. Upon Bond Street, Fell’s Point, there was standing, not many years ago, an old farmhouse belonging to a German named Boos, near which Lafayette’s troops were encamped, and at which they obtained milk for their syllabub, and other products of the dairy and the garden.

When Lafayette passed through Baltimore en route for Yorktown, a ball was given in his honor; his melancholy demeanor upon this joyous occasion, explained by the Marquis as [Pg 25]due to his concern at the sufferings of his ill-clad soldiers, awoke such sympathy that next morning “the ball-room was turned into a clothing manufactory. Fathers and husbands furnished the materials; daughters and wives plied the needle at their grateful task.” “My campaign,” said the General upon his return, “began with a personal obligation to the citizens of Baltimore, at the end of it I find myself bound to them by a new tie of everlasting gratitude.” When, forty-three years later, Baltimore again welcomed Lafayette, one of the most touching incidents of his visit was his especial inquiry for Mr. and Mrs. David Poe,—grandparents of Edgar Allan Poe,—the one of whom had advanced Lafayette money from his private funds, and the other had herself cut out five hundred garments for his ragged troops. Mrs. Poe, with feeble body but unclouded mind, was yet alive to welcome the General, but her husband had preceded his venerable friend to the rest which comes after toil.

Another foreigner well known in Baltimore was Pulaski, who completed here the organization of the legion in command of which he fell at Savannah. In the library of the Maryland [Pg 26]Historical Society hang the now faded folds of

Besides welcoming those from elsewhere, Baltimore gave to the war the best and bravest of her own. To aid Smallwood and Williams, Baltimore sent General Mordecai Gist, who as Major commanded the Maryland troops that covered the American retreat at Long Island. Another was John Eager Howard, who at Cowpens seized the critical moment, and turned the fortune of the day. At Guilford and at Eutaw Colonel Howard was equally conspicuous, and when peace came Maryland honored him by thrice electing him to the national Senate. “He deserves,” said General Greene, “a statue of gold, no less than Roman and Grecian heroes.” A third was Captain Samuel Smith, who held Fort Mifflin, the “Mud Fort on the Schuylkill,” for seven weeks, against powerful land and sea forces of the British, who were seeking to open the communication between Philadelphia and [Pg 27]the Atlantic. It was largely due to the energy of General Smith that, in the second war with Great Britain, Baltimore escaped the fate of the national Capital. And with these officers went hundreds of lesser rank, to join New Englanders and fellow-Southerners in the common cause of Independence.

When the cry “Cornwallis is taken!” announced the final success of Washington and Lafayette, Baltimore’s exultation was unbounded. In the evening, we are told, there was a “Feau d’ Joy”: “the Town and Fell’s Point were elegantly illuminated; what few houses that were not, had their windows broke.” Upon the Point, Mr. Fell, “a gentleman of princely [Pg 28]fortune,” nephew of the first Edward, gave a “genteel Ball and Entertainment,” where, Lieutenant Reeves tells us, “we danced and spent the night until three o’clock in the morning of the 23rd as agreeably as one could wish; as the ladies were very agreeable and the whole company seemed to be carryed away beyond themselves on this happy occasion.”

Many years ago, one of the most distinguished of Baltimore’s sons, the Hon. John P. Kennedy, himself a scholar and an orator of the old régime, gave, in an informal lecture, some of his reminiscences of Baltimore town as it was at the end of the eighteenth century. Though often quoted, the quaint and charming spirit of the author makes his description yet as fresh and sparkling as his conversation ever used to be, and it is never too late to give in his own words some of his early memoirs of Baltimore town:

“It was a treat to see this little Baltimore town just at the termination of the War of Independence, so conceited, bustling and debonair, growing up like a saucy, chubby boy, with his dumpling cheeks and short, grinning face, fat and mischievous, and bursting incontinently out of his clothes in spite of all the allowance of tucks and broad salvages. Market Street had shot, like [Pg 29]a Nuremberg Snake out of its toy box, as far as Congress Hall, with its line of low-browed, hip-roofed wooden houses, in a disorderly array, standing forward and back, after the manner of a regiment of militia, with many an interval between the files. Some of these structures were painted blue and white, and some yellow; and here and there sprang up a more magnificent mansion of brick, with windows like a multiplication table and great wastes of wall between the stories, with occasional court-yards before them; and reverential locust-trees, under whose shade bevies of truant schoolboys, ragged little negroes and grotesque chimney-sweeps ‘skied coppers’ and disported themselves at marbles.

“In the days I speak of, Baltimore was fast emerging from the village state into a thriving commercial town. Lots were not yet sold by the foot,—except perhaps in the denser marts of business,—rather by the acre. It was in the rus-in-urbe category. That fury for levelling had not yet possessed the souls of City Councils. We had our seven hills then, which have been rounded off since, and that locality which is now described as lying between the two parallels of North Charles Street and Calvert Street presented a steep and barren hillside, broken by rugged cliffs and deep ravines, washed out by the storms of winter into chasms which were threaded by paths of toilsome and difficult ascent. On the summit of one of these cliffs stood the old church of St. Paul’s [the second], some fifty paces or more to the eastward of the present church [the third], and surrounded by a brick wall that bounded on the present lines of Charles and Lexington Streets. This old building, ample and stately, looked abroad over half the [Pg 30]town. It had a belfry tower, detached from the main structure, and keeping watch over a graveyard full of tombstones, remarkable to the observation of the boys and girls, who were drawn to it by the irresistible charm of the popular belief that it was haunted, and by the quantity of cherubim that seemed to be continually crying about the death’s-head and cross-bones at the doleful and comical epitaphs below them—images long since vanished, without a trace left, devoured by the voracious genius of brick and mortar.

“... I have a long score of pleasant recollections of the friendships, the popular renowns, the household charms, the bonhomie, the free confidences and the personal accomplishments of the day.... In the train of these goodly groups come the gallants who upheld the chivalry of the age, cavaliers of the old school, full of starch and powder: most of them the iron gentlemen of the Revolution, with leather faces—old campaigners, renowned for long stories: not long enough absent from the camp to lose their military brusquerie and dare-devil swagger; proper roystering blades, who had not long ago got out of harness and begun to affect the elegancies of civil life. Who but they! jolly fellows, fiery and loud, with stern glance of the eye and brisk turn of the head, and swash-buckler strut of defiance, like game-cocks, all in three-cornered cocked hats and powdered hair and cues, and light-colored coats with narrow capes and marvellous long backs, with the pockets on each hip, and small-clothes that hardly reached the knee, with striped stockings, with great buckles in their shoes, and their long steel watch-chains that hung conceitedly half-way to the knee, with seals in the shape of a sounding-board to a pulpit; and they walked with such a stir, striking their canes so hard upon the pavement as to make the little town ring again.

ST. PAUL’S CHURCH.
FROM AN OLD COPPER PRINT.

[Pg 32]I defy all modern coxcombry to produce anything equal to it—there was such a relish of peace about it, and particularly when one of these weather-beaten gallants accosted a lady in the street with a bow that required a whole side pavement to make it in, with the scrape of his foot, and his cane thrust with a flourish under his left arm till it projected behind along with his cue, like the palisades of a chevaux-de-frise; and nothing could be more piquant than the lady as she reciprocated the salutation with a curtsey that seemed to carry her into the earth, with her chin bridled to her breast, and such a volume of dignity.”

The “rus-in-urbe” life of Baltimore was nearly ended; with the close of the Revolutionary War began a new period in its history. Soon streets were paved and lighted, better bridges built, and a watch was established. Commerce sprang up with renewed vigor. The tobacco trade found other markets than the mother country; the West Indies bought flour, Spain and Portugal, wheat. By 1790, Baltimore skippers had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and cast anchor in the harbors of the Isle de France. The year 1793 brought another foreign addition to the already polyglot population of Baltimore. The revolution in San Domingo drove fifteen hundred of the [Pg 33]inhabitants to Maryland, to develop a great trucking and garden trade, with Baltimore as its centre. The Baltimore clippers, too, with their jauntily raked masts, showed their heels to the craft of the rest of the world, and the reign of Baltimore’s merchant princes began.

Previous to this time, all large payments of money were made in bags of heavy coin: in 1790 a bank was organized. Several papers were now published, and a circulating library was established by Mr. Murphy. A series of medical lectures was preparing the way for the University of Maryland, and education in general was receiving more attention. Population increased continually, and in 1796, the change from town to full municipal life was made legal by the incorporation of Baltimore city.

Now, also, began again the improvement of internal communication. For many years the white-topped Conestoga wagons had rumbled down to Baltimore from west and north; and from time to time efforts had been made to improve the main roads. In 1805, the main routes converging in Baltimore were turnpiked. Western Maryland was now becoming thickly settled, many thriving towns had [Pg 34]sprung up, and in a few years the “National Road” joined Cumberland, on the Potomac, with the Ohio River. The connection between Cumberland and Baltimore was completed by means of a curious tax on the banks of Maryland. Thus the line of communication between Baltimore and Wheeling was continuous, over one of the best roads in the world. This and six other turnpikes were as seven great rivers, bearing their precious freight of grain, tobacco, dairy products and whiskey to Baltimore for foreign shipment; and in spite of overtrading and the resulting period of depression, such was Baltimore’s progress that in 1825 Jared Sparks could say, “Among all the cities of America, or of the Old World, in modern or ancient times, there is no record of any one which has sprung up so quickly to so high a degree of importance as Baltimore.” At this time the population of Baltimore was five times as great as it had been thirty years before, and commerce had increased proportionately. The causes of this remarkable progress were enumerated by Sparks as the advantages of Baltimore’s local situation, the swift sailing-vessels, the San Domingan trade, the two great staples, [Pg 35]tobacco and flour, “for which the demand is always sure, and the supply unfailing,” and lastly, the energetic spirit of the people.

During all this period the city improved in appearance as well as in size. Especially characteristic of the new Baltimore was “Belvidere,” the residence of Colonel John Eager Howard. Belvidere was completed in 1794, and only a few years ago was dismantled by the ruthless hand of the city surveyor, to make way for the progress of the ever-expanding city by the extension of North Calvert Street. From Belvidere, which at the beginning of the century was a half-mile from Baltimore, one could look down, as from some mediæval [Pg 36]castle, upon the bustling town below. In the view from Belvidere, we are told,

Here, as at many of the country-seats near Baltimore, a lavish hospitality brought strangers from America and from Europe into pleasant association with the leading Marylanders of the day. A little to the south of Belvidere, in what was then the woodland of “Howard’s Park,” there soon rose the grandly simple column of the Washington Monument.

If Maryland escaped actual invasion during the Revolutionary War, she bore the brunt of the second contest with England. After the British had sailed up the Patuxent, laying waste the manor houses and wide plantations along its banks, after they had burned the national Capitol and routed a body of American militia, they proceeded to attack Baltimore by land and sea. The story is told that some faint hearts came forward with a proposition [Pg 37]to compound for the safety of the city with a heavy ransom, when Colonel Howard replied, “I have as much property at stake as most people, and I have four sons in the field; but sooner would I see my sons weltering in their blood, and my property reduced to ashes, than so far disgrace the country.”

It was such spirit as this that checked the land attack at North Point, and that held out in Fort McHenry during the anxious night of September 12th. When day broke upon Fort McHenry, the flag was still there. And in the gray dawn, Francis Scott Key, detained upon the Minden in an effort to secure the release of a captive friend, wrote upon the back of a letter the thoughts which were passing through his mind. Printed a little later, and first sung in a restaurant near the Holliday Street Theatre, the song of The Star Spangled Banner was caught up in intense enthusiasm, till now, following the flag it celebrates, it is sung in every portion of the globe.

No less important with respect to the final outcome of the war than the repulse of the British at North Point and at Fort McHenry, was the offensive warfare carried on by the privateers of Baltimore,—the clippers turned [Pg 38]fighters. The log-books of these illusive craft make interesting reading. “Chased by a frigate: outsailed her,” is the entry that seems to occur most frequently, and thrilling accounts of hairbreadth escapes are numerous. The English Channel was a favorite hunting-ground of the privateers, and many a British vessel was taken or burnt outside of and in view of her own port. The amount of property taken or destroyed in this way was enormous, and the moral effect of American success exceeded the material.

With the return of peace, overtrading led to a commercial crisis. In 1818, the Baltimore branch of the Bank of the United States became insolvent, and the darkest period in the history of the city ensued. But in less than ten years the shock had been so far forgotten that Baltimore was again seeking to develop commercial connection with the West. “The enterprising citizens of Baltimore,” we are told, “perceiving that in consequence of steam navigation on the western waters, and the exertions of other States they were losing the trade of the West, began seriously to consider of some mode of recovering it.” The means adopted were twofold: the Chesapeake and [Pg 39]Ohio Canal, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The amount of money which Maryland and, relatively to a greater extent, Baltimore invested in these schemes has perhaps been more than subsequent events have justified; but the effect of the idea of internal improvement cannot be overestimated.

That the troublous times of the war between the States should bear upon Baltimore with especial affliction was but the natural result of her geographical situation. In the more southerly cities, popular sentiment was usually nearly unanimous; in Baltimore, the combination in municipal life of the foreign with the native Southern element involved the existence of two ideas, two ways of looking at things. When, therefore, the great question had to be decided, the citizens of Baltimore, ever characterized by an excessive political activity, immediately divided into two camps, in which were often ranged in deadly opposition those who before had been bound by common ties of Church, of State and of kindred; while beneath and between the better elements of both parties, the turbulent mob, well schooled in political lawlessness, eagerly embraced every opportunity for riot and disorder.

The most serious cause of difference was not the question of slavery, for Baltimore was, it has been said, “the paradise of the free colored population.” In 1789, Samuel Chase, Luther Martin, Dr. George Buchanan, and in fact most of the leading men of that day, formed one of the earliest of American abolition societies; and to the same cause, in later times, Charles Carroll of Carrollton lent his influence and William Pinkney his eloquence.

The most powerful stimulus to secession lay in the policy of Lincoln’s administration. While the attack upon the Sixth Massachusetts was the work of the mob, the passage through Maryland of the Northern troops made sympathy with the South temporarily predominant. The excitement subsided; the city, like the State, was held for the Union, but the military policy of the national Government inaugurated a period of bitter oppression to those whose hearts were across the Potomac. Newspapers were suppressed, all exhibitions of sympathy with the Southern cause were rudely brought to an end, and the personal liberty of the individual was destroyed by the suspension of the habeas corpus—a suspension which henceforth estranged the executive and [Pg 41]the judicial heads of the nation. Yet in spite of this military policy, or, more properly, because of it, the Union sentiment increased, and in 1864, in the city where four years before each of his three opponents had been nominated for the Presidency, the Union-Republican convention chose as its candidate for a second term the President, Abraham Lincoln.

With the development of the policy of internal improvement began the modern city. In spite of financial crises, periods of bitter political disturbance and the shock of the Civil War, the expansion begun by the uniting of Baltimore town first with Jonas town and then with Fell’s Point, has been continued over the neighboring hillsides to the north, east, and west, until the hamlet of two hundred inhabitants has now become the city of more than half a million souls. With this numerical increase has come a proportionate commercial development; the advantageous situation of “the northernmost southern and the westernmost eastern city” is as potent a factor in its life to-day as it was of old. In the higher things, also, that enrich the life of a great city, progress has been no less constant. The [Pg 42]schoolmaster, to whom, in 1752, “encouragement” was offered by advertisement in the Maryland Gazette, has been succeeded by a thorough system of public education, while the ideas that found expression in the “Stevenson’s Folly,” and the “Murphy’s Circulating Library” of a century ago, have subsequently inspired the foundations of McDonogh, Shepard, Watson, White, Wilson, Peabody, Hopkins and Pratt.

Of all the institutions, charitable or educational, with which Baltimore has been blessed, none have brought her more honor than the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Founded upon the bequest of one of Maryland’s sons, who had amassed his great wealth in the city he loved so well, the University was fortunate in the selection as its President of Daniel C. Gilman, a man with extraordinary genius for educational organization. Fortunate, also, was the bringing together, at the start, of a faculty of eminent specialists: the first were Gildersleeve, Sylvester, Remsen, Rowland, Martin and Morris. These men, and their successors, have fostered a spirit of intellectual advance which has made the importance of the University in the educational [Pg 43]history of this country assume a proportion simply incalculable.

Across the city, upon a site open and commanding, stands the Hospital, with its ever-growing Medical School, and its Training School for Nurses. Equally successful in its first choice of leaders, and in the character of those who follow them, the Hospital has been far more fortunate than the University in the financial stability of its endowment.

Between the two, and lying almost at the base of the Washington Monument, is the Peabody Institute, with its magnificent library. Farther downtown is that of the Maryland Historical Society, and these, with the Congressional Library in Washington, only forty miles away, afford every advantage for study and research; while the more popular demands of Baltimore’s readers are met by the great Free Circulating Library endowed by the late Enoch Pratt.

In the solution of the problems that arise from the organization of modern society Baltimore has done pioneer work. It was a Baltimore lawyer, Hon. John V. L. McMahon, who drew up for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad the charter which “formed a model for the organization of all future railroad corporations.” It was in Baltimore that a municipality first “secured a valuable revenue from street-railway corporations, and applied it to the purposes of public parks.”

The ploughman and the fisherman that, upon the Great Seal of Maryland, support the shield of the Lords Proprietary may be considered as typical of the influences which have combined to further the growth of the city of [Pg 45]Baltimore; while to the happy result that has crowned their joint endeavors may be applied the words of the motto that surrounds the whole:

FOOTNOTES:

[3] John Fleming was a tenant of the Carrolls. This homestead is supposed to have been located near the point where now Lombard Street intersects the east side of South Charles Street.

Neither of the North nor of the South, of the Old nor of the New, the fair State of Maryland possesses a thousand charms that are all her own, as she clasps the blue, river-fringed Chesapeake to her breast, and stretches out her lovely leagues of hill and vale, of field and forest and rocky glen, from where the sun rises out of the ocean beyond her “East’n Sho’” to where he sets behind the mountain ramparts of her western frontier. And of Maryland surely the heart lies in the quaint old city on the Severn, where the days are longer, the nights stiller, the sunshine more full of peace, and the moonlight more fraught with mystery than any place else in the world. To saunter through the streets of “Y^e Ancient City” of Annapolis is to take a University Extension course [Pg 48]in American history; to gaze upon her old houses is to behold the finest type of colonial architecture; while to read her annals is to be fired with the truest patriotism and to mingle in the best society of the picturesque days of long ago.

From our New World point of view, Annapolis is very old, dating back to 1608, when Captain John Smith, exploring the Chesapeake Bay, sailed up the Severn in search of favorable sites for settlements. She is fortunate in the figures that stand on her threshold, for next after the gallant Captain come the noble Calverts—George, Cecilius, Leonard, than whom were never lordlier men. To Cecilius, pledges made to his father were redeemed when, in 1632, Charles I. made him vast grants of lands beyond the Atlantic, in return for which all that [Pg 49]was asked was allegiance to the English Crown; one fifth of all gold and silver to be discovered in the new domain, and an annual offering, to be made at Windsor Castle on Easter Tuesday, of two Indian arrow-heads. The charter thus given was the freest ever bestowed upon any colony, and in return Lord Baltimore named his new possessions in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, whose bigotry and arrogance had so much to do with the loss of her husband’s crown and life, and which—so strange are the relations of cause and effect—formed one of the broad foundation stones on which the modern superstructure of civil and religious freedom rests. [Pg 50]Ark and the Dove, set sail from Cowes, under command of Leonard Calvert, brother of the Lord Proprietary, and having on board a goodly company of gentlemen—adventurers. It was but the common sight of the putting out to sea of two insignificant boats to those who watched them from the shore that autumn day; but it stands out as marking a great era in the history of human progress. The pious and catholic Cecilius Calvert, carrying out the designs of his great father, had decreed that all men living under his protection should be free to serve God according to the dictates of their own consciences,—a decree so far in advance of their times as to place the names of the Calverts forever in the foremost rank of the world’s greatest and wisest men.

On November 30, 1633, two little ships, the After many adventures, on the 25th of March, the Feast of the Annunciation, the colonists landed. A precious early chronicle tells us that

The early relations between the new comers and the aborigines seem to have been of the most friendly character, and the Relation of the Successful Beginning of the Lord Baltimore’s Plantation in Maryland, from which we have just quoted, is full of the praises of the climate, the soil, the flora and fauna, and the general goodliness of the land. An Eden it must have been in its primeval loveliness!

As ever in Eden, there were serpents. The world was not yet worthy of the lofty ideas of the founder of the Terra Mariæ. The first Provincial Assembly, which met in 1637-38, had many grave questions to discuss, and these grew only graver as the political situation in England became more complicated—the power of the King waning while that of the Puritans waxed.

In 1642, the Churchmen in Virginia passed a Conventicle Act, which bore so heavily upon the non-conforming Puritans that, in 1648, Governor Stone sent an invitation to the persecuted men to come and enjoy the liberties which, in the next year, were to go upon our Statute Books, and to be their glory forever, [Pg 52]as the Toleration Act. In 1649, therefore, ten families crossed the Potomac, and on Severn-side built a few huts, to which they gave the name of Providence.

Affairs were moving rapidly. The King had laid down his life. It was declared treason to own allegiance to his exiled son. The shoe was now decidedly on the Puritan foot, and without loss of time they proceeded to re-read the Act of Toleration, and to make out a case for everybody but Church of England men and Romanists, who were now proscribed. This act of bigotry and ingratitude makes the darkest spot on the escutcheon of the Palatinate, nor is there much that is pleasant to read in the jealousies, bickerings and aggressions of the next few years. A county was formed in 1650, and named in honor of the gentle Anne Arundel, wife of Lord Baltimore. A treaty of peace between the white men and the red was signed in 1652, and the name of the village was changed to “The Town at Proctors.” These things are about all we need to know until, the Revolution of 1688 having been accomplished, Maryland became a royal province, and the first royal governor, Sir Lionel Copley, came over. In 1694 the seat [Pg 53]of government was removed from the original seat, St. Mary’s, to the place which, after bearing three or four names, finally settled upon that of Annapolis, a mongrel title, assumed in honor of the then heiress to the Crown.

There is but one rational way of beginning a sketch of the old town, and that is to look first, as did the wise-hearted early Annapolitans, at the Church, the State House, and the School, and to picture them as they stand on smooth green lawns, high on the little peninsula, almost encircled by the silver marriage-ring of the Severn and its estuaries.

The Church (for although the praise of God arises from many altars, the interest naturally centres in the eldest born) is a long, low structure, giving an odd impression of some seaworthy craft cast adrift upon the green tideless sea of its spacious Circle. It was named, we fancy, for various Annes: the mother of the Virgin, the Lady Anne Arundel, and the Queen-to-be. St. Anne’s it has ever been, bearing the name through three baptisms of fire, in one of which, it is said, the bell, Queen Anne’s own gift, rung its own knell in a most weird and pathetic manner. Once upon a time its yard was the village burying-ground, [Pg 54]but its early tenants have all been disturbed in their rest, and only one or two box-tombs remain, on which the sparrows, which have built themselves nests in the ivy on the walls, hop and chirp contentedly. The only relic still possessed by St. Anne’s is the Communion Plate, which bears the arms of William III. and the date, 1695. It, too, was a gift from that “great Anne whom three realms obeyed,” who seems to have had a special fondness for sending like mementoes to the infant colonies. The first clergyman, Dr. Bray, sent out to care for the souls of the Annapolitans, received ten thousand pounds of tobacco as his stipend—this, of course, after the Church of England was made the Established Church. Seats were reserved in the sacred edifice for the Governor and members of the legislative bodies; and in addition their attendance was made compulsory. The first missionary meeting of which we hear in America was held in St. Anne’s, when a pious annual five-and-twenty pounds was voted to be applied to the conversion, not of the heathen Susquehannoghs, as one might have expected, but of the Quakers of Pennsylvania!

Not far from the Church stands the first free [Pg 56]school on the continent, once King William’s School, and under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but, for many a long and useful year, St. John’s College. Its principal building, McDowell Hall, was built in 1744, for a royal governor, and is flanked by dignified houses standing well back upon the green campus, a picture of ivy-clad repose that is very pleasing. A part of a gift of books sent by the good King William is still cherished in the library, and on the roll of students are many of the brightest names the State can boast. On the campus stands a very old tulip-tree. Tradition says that under its shadow the treaty with the Susquehannoghs was signed in 1652, and it is certain that it must have been of great age even then. A fire burned away part of its trunk years ago, but the hole was boarded up, a friendly ivy has done its best to hide the scars, and the brave old tree yields its toll of blossoms to each passing June, and bids fair to do so when the grandsons of the youngest lad now playing beneath its branches shall come to visit this lost monarch of a vanished forest. Here were pitched the tents of the French troops which came to aid us in our hour of peril, and here were camps again during our second struggle with England, and during the Civil War. Nor did all leave when the order to strike tents came.

If Annapolis is the heart of Maryland—its cor cordium lies in the State House standing in the great green circle which overlooks the city, the river and the bay. Like the Church, it is now nearing its third outward and visible form, fire having destroyed the two earlier structures. The corner-stone of the present edifice was laid in 1772, and it was designed in the best spirit of the style we call colonial. Ample spaces of English patterned brick divide its rather small windows, a simple pillared portico guards its doorway, and it is covered by a curious but very agreeable dome. Under its roof the various executive, legal and legislative branches of the State government find lodging. Its rotunda is decorated with the most elaborate stucco work, and throughout the old pile are many, many memorials of days gone by: none [Pg 59]of them more interesting than the Great Seal, brought over by Governor Stone in 1648, and which is, substantially, the coat-of-arms of the Calverts. From the dome and the portico fine views can be obtained. There is a dignity and consequence about the building which not even the noisiest session of the Legislature can wholly dissipate; in a word, the old State House is the pride and glory of the commonwealth.

We have not even touched upon the gallant part played by the citizens of the town and the colony in the Revolution; but at last the war was over, Washington had bidden adieu to his troops in New York, and had come hither to lay in the hands of the Congress of the States, in session in the chamber in which the Treaty of Peace was to be signed a year later, his commission as Commander-in-chief of the armies. That he had been nominated to that high office by a Marylander, Thomas Johnson, who had, in 1777, become the first Governor of the State, added not a little to the interest of a scene described by every pen that writes of the times. The simplicity, manliness, pathos and true dignity of the event have never been better portrayed than in the vast painting [Pg 60]which adorns the historic room. Portraits of our four signers, Paca, Stone, Chase, and Carroll of Carrollton, are also seen here, as well as those of other men who fought with pen or sword to make us free.

An odd little building, with flagged floors, huge bolts, and most ponderous keys, still stands on the Circle, and serves as our Treasury. It was once the home of the House of Burgesses, and is perhaps the only building left to us from the seventeenth century. And there are statues here of Chief Justice Taney, and of Baron DeKalb, who fell at the head of his Marylanders in the battle of Camden; but, more distinctly than these, we see the figures of Washington and Lafayette and all that goodly fellowship, and it is they [Pg 61]who will walk the State House green when the bronzes are dust.

Wandering through the leafy streets, with ever a glimpse of bright water, or a white sail shining between the trees, one notes the Old World flavor of their names; Cornhill, Hanover, Prince George (of Denmark), King George (the First), Duke of Gloucester—in honor, this, of the pathetic little royal child whose early death broke the heart of William of Orange, and left Queen Anne a childless woman. And the houses that border the streets, sometimes set close to the pavement, sometimes half hidden by trees, are worthy of them, and of the air of unspeakable contentment and aloofness from the cares of this world [Pg 62]which is characteristic of the place. Here is one built by the Proprietary Governor, Ogle, spacious and elegant, in whose garden are yet some bits of the box-bordering of a forgotten labyrinth, and here is one whose carved doorway arrests every eye.

The Paca homestead has wings that are little houses of themselves, joined to the house proper by long, low corridors; and opposite to it, in the delightful little Iglehart house, there is a panelled room where ghosts might walk. The façade of the Brice mansion, built of English brick, as is many another in the town, with long corridors and [Pg 63]transverse wings, is said to be two hundred feet long; while within, the drawing-room situated in the old fashion at the back of the house that it might overlook the garden, is yet the delight and despair of architects, so noble are its proportions, and so fine the carved work of its cornice and chimney-piece. The fame of the latter is, indeed, international. On the State House Circle the Randall or Bordley house, built in 1740, stands in a proud seclusion of magnolias and ivy-hung trees, and behind a tiny paddock where a pretty Jersey cow sometimes grazes. Not far away the Lloyd or Chase house lifts its walls in a haughty consciousness of being the finest specimen of its class in America. It not only boasts of mahogany doors with wrought-silver latches, carved shutters and cornices, noble drawing-rooms and chambers, a vast hall with a curious, double-flight of stairs, but has also a carved breakfast-room which is ideal.

On Hanover Street is the stone mansion of Anthony Stewart, the merchant whose brig, the Peggy Stewart, came into harbor one October day in 1764, laden with the repudiated tea. So incensed were the stout-hearted Annapolitans that, to escape their ire, poor [Pg 64]Anthony, with his own hands, set fire to the ill-starred brig, his wife, the Peggy for whom the boat was named, watching from her chamber window the sacrificial flames mounting from the water’s edge.

We keep a Peggy Stewart Day, now, in Maryland, and some of us like to remember that Peggy, too, was once the mistress of a breakfast-room which was ideal.

At the foot of Duke-of-Gloucester Street, in 1760, John Ridout built for himself and his children [Pg 66]three houses that are like a castle; and just across, hidden by the beautiful St. Mary’s Church, lies Carrollton, the home of Charles Carroll.[4] It is occupied now by the Redemptorist priests, and the profane shoe of a woman can gain for its owner no nearer view than that to be had from the bridge that spans the waterway below. It looks a very charming place, built in the Dutch rather than the Georgian taste: gray, small windows, high-roofed, and set in a garden which is what all Annapolis gardens are, and what all gardens everywhere ought to be, an ordered wilderness of hollies, box, magnolias, roses, lilacs, more roses and yet more lilacs, jessamine, wallflowers, iris, lilies, violets, daffodils,—all the old-fashioned flowers which ever were and ever will be the dearest and sweetest flowers in the world.

It is hard to come back even to the first days of the century just closing. The defence [Pg 67]made by the guns of Fort Severn, which kept Admiral Cockburn at bay, seem but recent history in the light of other years, nor can the stirring scenes of the Civil and Spanish wars claim even a glance. Filled with the spirit of the golden days of the Athens of America, we sit in the deep window-seat of a panelled room, looking out across intervening lush and flowery growths, at the dome of the State House and at the aërial procession of the old denizens. What a procession it is! Indians, explorers, Lords Proprietary, Governors Royal, Republicans, Puritans, Cavaliers, priests, shipowners, sailors, slaves! Ships sail out with rich freights of tobacco and other Colonial produce, and ships sail in, bearing yet richer stores of silks and spices, wines and perfumes, silver and porcelain and sumptuous household furnishings. We see the growth in aristocracy, in wealth, in hospitality, in luxury, the plenty of those lavish boards, the splendor and courtliness of dress and manners of the gentry. Sedan chairs, carried by the liveried servants, attended by link boys and by bowing, perruqued gentlemen in gold-lace waistcoats and buckled shoes, bear the patched and powdered ladies to balls and [Pg 68]routs. We hear the gossip of the playhouse—the first in America—or of the races. The bon mots of the Tuesday Club are told again; the wit flashes at the dinner given in honor of the King’s birthday; the defeat of the Pretender, the birth of the Dauphin, the repeal of the Stamp Act, the coming of Washington. Anything would

We hear, above the grave tones of the men who are talking of the affairs of state, the clear voices of the women—fair, slender, sweet, in pearls and brocade, singing to the accompaniment of spinet or harpsichord music, as unlike ours as were their faces or their thoughts, and we all but forget that the Past is dead and can come no more, and that these are but echoes and shadows and the ashes of roses.

Behind a long brick wall, gated and sentried, lies the United States Naval Academy, and another world.

“But that,” as Hans Andersen says, “is [Pg 70]another story”; a story familiar at a thousand American firesides where the life of a son dedicated to the navy is lived over by fond hearts; a story told on every wave of every sea where our American ships ride on their mission.

On the 13th of June, 1845, James K. Polk, being President of the United States, and George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy—a letter was written by Mr. Bancroft to a Board of Examiners of Midshipmen, sitting in Philadelphia, proposing the foundation of a naval school, and suggesting Fort Severn as a suitable site. Urged by Commodore Thomas Ap-Catesby Jones and Captain Isaac Mayo, the Committee approved the suggestion, and, although the usual congressional and sectional opposition had to be overcome, the School was opened on October 10th of the same year. During the war there was a temporary flight to Newport, and there have been, from time to time, various schemes for removing it permanently from Annapolis. It has long since become a permanent fixture, and additions have been made to the Fort Severn property (purchased in 1808), making an ample and beautiful home for the cadets and their corps of instructors.

Time ceases to be subject to clocks when one enters the green, shady Academy grounds, beside which the waters flash and gleam, and bells divide the hours of the busy lives of the lithe young sailors who are forever marching under the trees to this duty or to that; and whose four years of residence are crowded with ten thousand things which a landsman need not know, but which go to make a finished seaman. Among the officers, gravely saluting them as they go to classes, one sees many a famous face, for many of the simple, quiet gentlemen have done great deeds in their day.

There are some memorials of older days—the monument which recalls our victory at Tripoli, some cannon captured in some

and some figure-heads of ancient ships. Most precious of all is the worn flag, guarded jealously in the Naval Institute, which bore the wonderful message

By the docks lie various craft needed for the instruction of the midshipmen; and with [Pg 72]them the old Santee, dismantled, a ghost of herself, lies at her last moorings. She has seen strange sights in her day, the old Santee, none perhaps stranger than the trim young steel giants of our modern navy which steam up the Bay at times.

Historically, the gem of the Academy is the Library building, which was built by Edmund Jennings, and served as a home for our governors from 1760 until 1868. It has had Washington for its guest, and many another great man of his time. And so, no doubt, had the [Pg 73]fine old home of the Dulanys, near by, which was built as early as 1751. An iconoclastic superintendent ordered its destruction in 1883,—a loss irreparable to the lovers of the old town.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Of all the deeds whereby Charles Carroll served his country, none, perhaps, was more noteworthy than the writing of the four letters to the Maryland Gazette, in 1773, signed “First Citizen.” In them he pitted his young strength against the marvellous learning of Daniel Dulany, the greatest lawyer of all the colonies, whose letters to the same paper were signed “Antilon.” His brave defence of the rights of the people brought Mr. Carroll the unprecedented honor of an adjournment of the Legislature that that body might visit his house en masse, to express its thanks and appreciation.

[Pg 75]

FREDERICK TOWN

Long after the lower counties and the eastern shore of Maryland had been turned from a wilderness into a rich and prosperous country, and after Annapolis had grown to be one of the most brilliant and important cities of the New World, there lay in the western part of the domain granted to the Calverts and their heirs forever a vast and beautiful region, which was not only Terra Mariæ, but terra incognita as well. Noble mountains, the remains of far older and nobler Alps, guarded the valleys worn by innumerable streams, and rich with the detritus of uncounted ages of erosion. Vegetation flourished under the kindly skies, and green things of every kind, from loftiest oaks to humblest mosses, grew in rank luxuriance over the heritage of the wild creatures of [Pg 76]earth and air, and the scarcely less wild Indians. The Susquehannoghs, who chiefly lorded it here, were of the fearless and noble Iroquois stock, and, whatever they lacked, had certainly “a genius for nomenclature.” Their

has left in one fair valley such names as Catoctin for its long western mountain range; Linganore for its eastward hills, and Potomac, Monocacy and Tuscarora for its rivers and streams. Vanished, like the red leaves of an autumn forest, in these soft syllables we hear, even yet, the voices of the “First Families” of Frederick.

One of the far-reaching consequences of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, was the unrest and fear which spread all over Europe, and scattered to the four winds tens of thousands of the best men, not only of France and the Low Countries, but of Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia. It is to one of these waves of emigration that we must look for the hardy pioneers who came southward from the settlements in Lower Pennsylvania. With the land-hunger and the land-judgment characteristic of the Teuton, they “took [Pg 77]up,” as the phrase goes, the lands lying along the river they—and the Carrolls, long after them—called Monnokasi, or Monockessy. Certain traits they brought with them as a matter of course, these Palatines,—as they were indiscriminatingly called,—industry, economy, honesty, and an absolute devotion to the principles of civil and religious liberty. Some were Labadists, some Mennonites, some Lutherans, but for the greater part they were of the Calvinistic churches, and held the Helvetic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism next in honor to the open Bible. Hardly less picturesque than the Indians were these pioneers: the women in homespun kirtle and linen bodice; the men in the deerskin costume of the frontiersman, tomahawk, rifle and fringed leggings included. It was not long before they had built roads, cleared fields, sowed crops, built houses and barns, and had planted those countless lovely orchards that make the valley one drift of rose and snow when May-time comes.

In 1745 another settlement was begun along one of the newest roadways, the first house being built by Thomas Schley. There is a glimmer of doubt as to whence came the name of [Pg 78]the village and the county formed a year or so later. There was, it is true, a very dissolute Frederick Calvert who died—the last Lord Baltimore—in 1771; but there was also a Frederick, Prince of Wales, father to King George III.; and it was no doubt in his honor that the name was given by Charles Calvert, then bowing and smiling at the English court.

In 1766, the frontier troubles known as the French and Indian War had assumed such proportions that General Braddock came over to see what could be done about it. A young surveyor from Virginia, tall and brave, with splendid physique and a judgment which impressed all who came in contact with him, was invited to act as aide-de-camp for the British commander. The meeting between Braddock and George Washington took place in Frederick, in April of the ill-fated year 1755, as all men may read, not only in the pages of more serious historians, but also in a chronicle steeped with the very spirit of the eighteenth century, wherein William Makepeace Thackeray has recounted the adventures of The Virginians. Another visitor at the same time was Benjamin Franklin, Postmaster-General of the Colonies, who came to arrange for the delivery [Pg 79]of despatches to and from the expedition, and who then first saw the younger soldier. A court-house was building, by the way, but, by fair means or foul, Braddock, whose angry bluster and loud oaths we can yet almost hear, aided by the wily Franklin, impressed so many hundreds of horses, wagons, teamsters and servants that the work was delayed for some years after the testy General, in his coach-and-six, drove off over the mountain on May-day morning. He left a memorial on Catoctin,—a walled-in spring of icy water, covered by a great flat rock, under whose shelter tiny ferns and silvery-green mosses love to grow.

There was a road to Baltimore and to Annapolis as early as 1760, and a curiously large commerce with the Saltzburgers who had settled in Georgia. The town flourished apace, and, besides the Palatines, some Scotch-Irish and many English began to arrive. The gentry had not been slow in obtaining patents to the fertile lands. In 1723 the Carrolls received the splendid manor of Carrollton, ten thousand acres in extent. Daniel Dulany had eight thousand acres, and the last Lord Baltimore nearly twice as much, while other gentlemen had estates of immense value. With [Pg 80]fortunes such as these figures represent a splendid style of living was possible, the effect of which was seen on every hand. In 1760, the Market House was built, and the Presbyterians had their pastor, while as early as 1764 the Reformed Church boasted of a belfry, which, remodelled in 1807, is yet one of the

that rise from what the enamored Washington called the “garden-spot of Maryland.”

In 1765, Father Hunter began the arduous duties of a priest whose flock was scattered over uncounted miles of wilderness; and even before that, perhaps, the whole county, which embraced all that is now known as Western Maryland, was one parish of the Established Church, with All Saints’ for its centre. Her clergymen had an annual revenue of five thousand pounds, and this rich plum was given to one or another of the beneficed clergy who too often disgraced the reign of the early Georges. The most notorious of all the New World incumbents was, perhaps, the Rev. Bennett Allen, who came to All Saints’ in 1768, greatly against the will of the people.

On the first Sunday after his arrival the [Pg 82]vestrymen left the church in a body. A peace-making worshipper ventured up to the pulpit with a remonstrance, only to be met with a drawn pistol in the clerical hand, and an oathful threat of immediate happy despatch if he interfered with the service. That his wild career included the murder of one Dulany in a duel, and the plotted assassination of another, and that he died an unknown, drunken outcast of London streets, is the shameful and pitiful ending of this o’ertrue tale. That he has been succeeded by a long line of devout and godly men has long ago effaced the stain he left upon the parish annals.

Some miles to the northeast of the town a young man, Robert Strawbridge by name, who had imbibed the doctrines of the Wesleys, formed a class after their ideas in 1764, which Bishop Asbury said was “the first in Maryland and America.” The small log chapel which they built antedated any other Methodist meeting-house in America by three years, which gives the county the right to the title of the Mother of American Methodism.

History was fast making in those days. In 1764 the Stamp Act was passed, and a commissioner was appointed to distribute the [Pg 83]detested paper in the province of Maryland. Court was sitting in Frederick Town, but there was no paper of the prescribed variety on hand. On the 23d of November, 1765, twelve free men of Frederick decreed and declared that Frederick Court could attend to its own affairs without any aid from his Majesty the King, and that, paper or no paper, its work should proceed. John Darnell, the clerk, demurred, refused to issue unstamped paper, was committed for contempt, submitted, and thus the first repudiation of the Stamp Act was accomplished. The names of the twelve justices who, without hesitation or fear, took this great step, were these: Joseph Smith, David Lyon, Charles Jones, Samuel Beall, Joseph Beall, Peter Bainbridge, Thomas Price, Andrew Hugh, William Blair, William Luckett, Thomas Dickson and Thomas Beatty.

People took their pleasures gladly in those days, and in an old New York Postboy (January 2, 1766), and a yet older Philadelphia Gazette (December 26, 1765), we read of a right jolly mock funeral, in which the Stamp Act was buried with much ceremony, the chief mourner being the unlucky distributor, Zachariah Hood, in effigy, which, during the frolic, [Pg 84]was hanged in the Court-House Square, near the stocks and whipping-post. The usual supper and ball of the period ended the day.

The skies grew ever darker, and, in the next old paper to which we turn, we read of pledges made to support the blockaded Bostonians, on whose shoulders the burden of a common injustice was laid. Next came the call to arms, and the start, on their long march to Boston, of two companies, in command of Captain Michael Cresap, whose father had blazed his way to the Ohio. One of his lieutenants was John Ross Key, whose son Francis, yet unborn, was to make his name forever famous.

On the roll of honor the county gives high place to Sergeant Laurence Everhart, who, in the battle of Cowpens, prisoner though he was, bore himself right haughtily in the presence of Colonel Tarleton. Escaping by good fortune, a better fortune enabled him to deal a blow at a British officer whose sword was lifted against Colonel William Augustine Washington, so saving that brave life. Long years afterward we hear of a meeting between the veterans, when “with tears and kisses” the old bond was strengthened.

At home work scarcely less patriotic was [Pg 85]doing. Flax, hemp and wool were grown, spun and woven; a gun-lock factory was established, saltpetre was made and in the iron furnaces owned by D’Hughes and by Thomas Johnson and his brothers, cannon and bombs were cast. The Market House became an arsenal. Hessian prisoners, hundreds of them, were confined in a log jail built for them, and in some stone barracks, still partly standing. To reinforce Washington, and to share the perils of Valley Forge, seventeen hundred men left home, and until peace was declared, the people of Frederick bore their share of the danger and the loss with all bravery and cheerfulness. It is like a page from the history of the darkest ages, however, to read this sentence passed upon seven Tories, convicted of treasonable conspiracies:

A mile or so north of the town, where the lands are richest, and the view up and down the valley and the blue mountains is finest, lies Rose Hill, where Thomas Johnson lived and died. Born in 1732, of sires who had commanded ships against the Invincible Armada, this man had few peers in the era which his wisdom, his industry, his sterling honesty and his pure patriotism adorned. He had made a name at the brilliant provincial Bar, when in 1765, in answer to an appeal made by the [Pg 87]Massachusetts Assembly, a Maryland Assembly was formed, and he took his place among the men who had set for themselves the task of righting the wrongs of the colonies. He became a member of the Committee of Safety and the Committee of Remonstrance, and, in 1774, he aided John Adams, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry in framing the Address to the Crown. On the 15th of June, 1775, Thomas Johnson nominated George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the Continental armies. This act, which would seem to be glory enough for one life, was but an incident in his busy days, for his name is heard of wherever probity and wise-heartedness were needed. That it does not appear on the Declaration of Independence is owing to the fact that the serious illness of a member of his family made his absence from Philadelphia necessary on that fateful 2d of July.

When the partition from England was completed, and the Colony became a State, he was chosen to be its first Governor, an office he filled for three terms. He was an ardent supporter of the Federal Constitution, and was one of those instrumental in making Washington [Pg 88]our first President. The portfolio of Secretary of State and the District Judgeship were earnestly and affectionately urged upon him by his old friend, who finally persuaded him to accept a seat upon the Supreme Bench. This he soon resigned, by reason of delicate health. Together with Daniel Carroll and Dr. Stewart he selected the sites for the Capitol, the President’s mansion and various other public buildings of the new seat of government, after which he retired to private life; his one subsequent public appearance being on the occasion of a commemorative funeral service after the death of Washington, when he pronounced a beautiful eulogy. His own life drew to its earthly close in 1819, and his dust rests in All Saints’ burying-ground, surrounded by the ancient tombstones of his friends and neighbors, overgrown with wild grasses and myrtle, swept by the pure mountain winds and brooded by the deep peace of the valley he loved so well. His best eulogy was the few words spoken by John Adams in which he said that “but for such men as Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson there would have been no Revolution.”

After the peace the town grew steadily in wealth, comfort and luxury. The road which is called the National Pike, the great artery between East and West, was also the main street of Frederick, and was the scene of much life. Inns of great excellence divided the journeys into pleasant stages, wagons and coaches dashed out and in to a great snapping of whips, jangling of bells and blowing of horns, and while the horses were changed many a glimpse was had of the men who were talked about early in the nineteenth century.

In 1797, Frederick College was founded. The church on the hill was outgrown. The older gentry had worshipped there; Bishop Claggett had held there in 1793 the first Confirmation in the State, and the grassy churchyard was sacred with much holy dust,—but it was too small and remote for the growing congregation. Partly by gift, and partly by the curious aid of a lottery, a second church was built in 1814, still used and loved as All Saints’ Chapel. It had a ceiling of singular beauty, high-backed pews, a gallery for servants, and in 1826 the “new organ,” yet in daily use, was placed therein.

One of the faithful worshippers in the church [Pg 91]was Francis Scott Key, who was born in the upper part of the county in 1780, but who spent some years of his early manhood practising at the Frederick Bar. Of his quiet, lovely life, but little is known, comparatively, although a few persons yet linger who remember him. A good citizen, a good master, a good lawyer, a poet of very sweet and true, if limited, powers, the deep spirituality of whose few hymns can never sound elsewhere as in the old church, he would probably have passed through and out of life as many other good men do, but for the strain of one September night in 1814, when his eager eyes watched for the first ray of dawn, if haply they might yet see the Star Spangled Banner [Pg 92]afloat over Fort McHenry, and a nation’s love and loyalty found everlasting voice through his.

To Frederick, in 1801, came Mr. Key’s close friend, soon to be his sister’s husband, Roger Brooke Taney, for many years Chief Justice of the United States. For twenty-one years he lived there, and returned, his long life, full of work and of honors, over, to sleep beside his mother in the little burial-place of the Jesuits at the Novitiate.

May a brief pause be made in this hasty chronicle to look at the great Roman Catholic foundations of Frederick which lend such an unusual aspect to the part of the town in which they stand. The long, dull façade of the Novitiate fronts the school and the beautiful church, [Pg 93]and next that the great walls of the convent arise, shutting out the world from the still, cloistered life within. Many men eminent in the order have been part of the place—none of them more interesting, perhaps, than Father John Du Bois, who came thither in 1792. He was an émigré of the French Revolution, in which his old classmates at the College of Louis-le-Grand, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre, figured so largely, and he afterwards wore a mitre.

In 1824, Lafayette included Frederick in his great tour of rejoicing, and was accorded the usual welcoming parades, speeches, dinner and ball. Only a few years ago a beautiful, blind old lady, who had been a beautiful, bright-eyed young wife, used to tell of her noble guest. She was a favorite granddaughter of Governor Johnson, and in her girlhood had helped Louisa Johnson, the wife of John Quincy Adams, to dispense the unpretentious hospitality of the White House. Mr. Adams, she said, got up and built his hearth-fire of a morning himself! It was a chapter from an old romance to listen to her kindly talk of “the old times and the days that were before us,” and when she “went away,” almost the last of the perfect breeding [Pg 94]and high simplicity of the old, old days left Maryland forever.

So much must be left out that hardly a word can be given to the Civil War, which found the old town alive with the old fervor. Not that all its sons thought alike. Sometimes the gray uniforms thronged the streets; sometimes the blue; once there was even a skirmish on the main street. In the terrible Battle Autumn of 1862, Frederick was the heart of the war. Dr. Holmes came down, after Antietam battle, to make his famous “Hunt after the Captain,” and even the sad, gaunt face of President Lincoln was seen among the rows of wounded and dying men that filled convent and church—every available space. The roads for miles in every direction were crowded with the paraphernalia of war—of hurt and of healing.

In the early September days, Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson were both here with the armies, gathering for the fearful struggles of South Mountain and Antietam. On the night of the 7th General Jackson drove into town in an ambulance, to attend divine service in the Reformed Church, where, as he wrote to his wife, and as is told of him by many who saw him, he fell asleep. On the morning of the [Pg 95]10th, the camps breaking, and the march over the mountain beginning, General Jackson, with Major H. Kyd Douglass of his staff, rode to the Presbyterian manse on Second Street, to pay his respects to his friends, the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Ross.

As they had not yet arisen, the General pencilled a line of greeting and farewell, with military precision noting the hour, “5¹⁄₄ a.m.,” and remounting his horse under the great silver-poplar rode down Mill Alley, a [Pg 96]narrow lane which crosses Carroll Creek by a ford and a high foot-bridge, and so on to the Pike, or Patrick Street, where he rejoined his command, and led them westward.

A few hundred yards to the east of Mill Alley, and again across a winding of Carroll Creek, lived a very old and intensely loyal woman, Barbara Fritchie, who was no myth, but a figure familiar to Frederick from time immemorial. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on December 3, 1766, she had come, as Barbara Hauer, to Frederick so many years before that on the occasion of the visit of General Washington in 1791 and a ball given in his honor, she loaned some of her choice china [Pg 97]to adorn the table, and his Excellency drank a cup of tea poured from her yet carefully cherished teapot. She and her husband, John Fritchie, a glover, had long lived in a small house adjoining the creek which was demolished after one of the perilous floods to which the stream was formerly subject. On the opposite side of the creek is a tiny park, with a deep, cool spring which is often called by her name, and from which many a weary soldier drank. She was of the Reformed faith, and her devotion to the Union cause was almost [Pg 98]passionate. Small hospitality had she for the tired Confederate who sometimes dropped for a moment’s rest upon her “stoop.” Such visitors were shown her cane, and in most vigorous Saxon were invited to “move on.” It was said that just before the battle of South Mountain, as the Union troops were passing her house, General Reno, seeing her venerable welcoming face, asked her age.

“Ninety-six! Boys, give three cheers for ninety-six!” he cried, and so rode on to his death. Perhaps she waved a small flag at him, but this one thing we know, that until Barbara Fritchie, who died on the 18th of December of that year, and Stonewall Jackson met in Whittier’s stirring ballad, they never met at all. Those who honor the memory of a brave Christian soldier are glad that the story is not true; those who see in the poem an incident too picturesque to be willingly lost from the story of the war, are sorry that it is not; but all who have seen the valley will be for ever grateful for the perfect picture of its loveliness.

Clinging to its old faiths, its old churches, its old traditions, its old customs; clinging to its old houses, its old mahogany and china [Pg 99]and portraits, its sweet old gardens and its sweeter friendliness and helpfulness and loyalty, the generations come and go.

[Pg 101]

WASHINGTON

Many generations before George Washington, as the New World Romulus, paced off in person the metes and bounds of the Federal City, the powerful Algonquin tribe of American Indians had established their capital within the confines of what is now the District of Columbia. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, conducted, with his eighty painted chiefs, his savage councils of war, or peaceably smoked his calumet within view of the hill destined to become the site of the forum of the Republic. Nacochtank, afterwards Latinized as Anacostan by the Jesuit fathers who accompanied Lord Baltimore to Maryland, and now called Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, was the precise location of Powhatan’s wigwam capital.

The first white man to approach the seat of government of these barbarian warriors was Captain John Smith, who sailed up the “Patawomeke” in 1608. The famous adventurer only partially explored the country, the principal item in the log-book of his voyage being that he found the river “full of luscious fish and its shores lined with ferocious savages.”

Sixteen years later there began to appear in British publications vivid recitals of adventure in the regions bordering the Patawomeke, and alluring descriptions of the “fair and fertile” domain surrounding the ancient capital of the Algonquins. These articles were written by Henry Fleet, a daring trader, who, in search of furs, and braving the perils of capture, had gone fearlessly as an uncommissioned ambassador to the council-seats of the Monahoacs, the Monacans and the Powhatans, had established trade relations with these crude inhabitants and had roamed at will through their wildernesses. “The most healthful and pleasantest region in all this country” was his characterization of that portion of Maryland embracing the district to be chosen nearly three centuries later as the seat of our national Government.

The description of this region sent to England by the intrepid fur trader attracted, in 1660, a party of emigrants who founded homes in the Maryland forests and meadows, fought or bargained for advantage with the Indians, and soon reduced to ruin the rude huts of their primitive capital. Husbandry invaded their domains and corn and wheat crops were grown. It looked as if romance had fled to remoter forests, and that henceforth that portion of the New World now the capital city of the United States would be given over to the “homely joys and destiny obscure” of emigrant farmers and their heirs.

For more than a hundred years the only record these humble settlers gave the outside world was that they had found the soil productive and that their farms were bordered by a majestic river on which white swan floated in innumerable flocks.

It was reserved for the father of the American Republic to discover that from the time of the original occupation of the region this simple colony of wood-choppers and ploughmen had cherished a reputed prophecy made in 1663 that this locality would, in the course of destiny, become the renowned capital of a great nation.

To Washington and Major L’Enfant, who in an antique tavern in Georgetown met the heirs and descendants of these pioneers to negotiate the transfer of property to the Government, the strange story was told that one, Francis Pope, in the year 1663, had had a vision wherein he beheld a stately house of parliament on what is now Capitol Hill. In pursuance of this dream he had purchased that eminence and had called it “Rome,” and in further keeping with his sense of divination had given to a sluggish yellow stream at the base of the hill the name of “Tiber.” Pope, it was asserted, died in the faith that the wooded hill he had christened would some day be crowned with a grand edifice devoted to the deliberations of a mighty empire. Some of the more irreverent settlers, dolefully observing the continued remoteness of Pope’s uninhabited “Rome” from any possible capital, derisively substituted, it was claimed, the name Goose Creek for the Tiber and denied the hill the dignity of even a colloquial title.

The poet, Tom Moore, who stumbled through the bogs and over the “magnificent [Pg 105]distances” of what pretended to be a capital city in 1804, turned the story around and pictured the founders of the city reveling in burlesque dreams concerning the future of the capital, and attempting to mimic the glory of Rome and give absurd dignity to Goose Creek by naming it the Tiber.

The original maps of the city, drawn by Major L’Enfant in 1790, give both names to the stream, and there has come to light a much older document, proving the groundlessness of the poet’s lampoon, and giving substance to the romantic tale concerning Francis Pope and his prophecy. It is his original abstract of title and reads as follows:

Whether this nomenclature in the title attests the dream of this pioneer or was adopted by him in a spirit of whimsical humor may be left to the fancy of the reader, but the fact that 237 years ago Capitol Hill was called Rome, and a stream at its base the Tiber, gives dramatic interest to the reputed prophecy. It is one of the several beautiful traditions that impart a romantic interest to the genesis of Washington.

The record of the complicated circumstances resulting in the final location of a site for the capital is one of the most fascinating chapters in American history. The Continental Congress was a migratory body. It had no abiding capital, the exigencies of war forcing it from city to city. During the stress of the Revolution it convened its sessions at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, York, Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton and New York City.

For four years prior to the capitulation of Cornwallis, Congress had held its sessions in Philadelphia, and the city seemed destined to become the permanent capital. Public sentiment favored such selection, for the Quaker [Pg 107]City was identified with most of the great and far-reaching acts of the American colonies. There a document of human rights, unparalleled since Magna Charta, had been signed by a company of immortals, and there the Liberty Bell had pealed forth its joyous tones for freedom.

Notwithstanding the splendid sentiments favoring the retention of Philadelphia as the capital, there were statesmen in that day who opposed selecting a city whose immediate interests and political strength might influence and perhaps dominate the legislation that should be national. Paris had not yet risen to override France, but London had at times shown its mastery over Parliament and the King. Some of the public men, therefore, hopeful of establishing the capital remote from the concentrated power of a great city, favored the creation of a city that should be wholly under the control of the nation.

The project might never have been accomplished but for the mutinous uprising of a body of unpaid soldiers who attempted to compel Congress by force of arms to settle their arrears. In this extremity, the Executive Council of Pennsylvania was appealed to, [Pg 108]but declined to interfere, claiming that the State militia could not be relied upon, as its members were largely in sympathy with the revolters. In the bankrupt condition of the Treasury, however, Congress had a sure defence, and the hopelessness of further sedition served to disarm the insurrectionary band. But Congress had learned its lesson and sought a more peaceful session at Trenton.

From this time, with Congress sitting in various cities until 1790, the question of selecting a permanent site for the capital became one of the most engrossing issues before the American people. New York offered public buildings free; Virginia and Maryland offered to cede districts ten miles square and to furnish additional subsidies as an inducement. The advantages of Philadelphia and Baltimore were ably advanced, while Germantown, Conogocheague, Wright’s Ferry, Peach Bottom and other ambitious centres sent persuasive orators into the acrimonious forum to plead their respective claims.

Contumacy, satire, hatred, envy and unreason struggled with wisdom and patriotism for nearly a decade. It was conceded by all that the American capital should be fixed as near [Pg 109]as possible to what would remain the centre of population, but as to the location destined to enjoy the distinction there was the greatest possible conflict of conjecture. Goodhue declared that it would remain in the North for countless ages, and that when it did shift it would travel toward the manufacturing districts of New England.

Stone of Maryland argued that as the tides of humanity followed the lines of least resistance, they would flow into the warm and fertile South.

The vast domain to the westward was not taken into the calculations of statesmen predicting the course of empire. The profoundest philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century were unable to grasp the transformations soon to be wrought by the application of steam. They could not dream that subsequent generations would establish a teeming civilization in the distant and unmeasured solitudes. A century later, when the eleventh census was taken, the centre of population was five hundred and twenty miles westward of the spot Congress had fixed upon as the unchanging focus of our growth. Madison alone caught a glimpse of continental [Pg 110]possibilities, and believed that America might “speedily behold an astonishing mass of people on the western waters;” and although for that reason it might be impossible to select a site for the capital that would remain central as regards population, it was of the utmost importance to choose a point whence the knowledge of new enactments could be the most quickly disseminated throughout the land. If it were possible, he contended, to promulgate the proceedings of Congress by some simultaneous operation, it would be of less consequence where the seat of government might be established. A site along the Potomac began to be favored, as the then projected canal, now paralleling the Potomac from Georgetown to Cumberland, would afford the most convenient and rapid means of conveying to waiting citizens beyond the Alleghanies the documentary decrees of the Congress of the United States.

Could Washington and his colleagues have imagined that in a later age the tidings of the deliberations of Congress, instead of depending for transmission upon canal-boats, would be flashed instantly, by the clicking of mysterious keys, to the distant shores of the continent, [Pg 111]and even to possessions beyond the seas, the Potomac to-day would probably not be graced by the beautiful city of Washington.

Nearly all the members agreed that the capital should be located on some waterway communicating with the Atlantic and connected with the territory of the West. The Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and even Codorus Creek, were urged.

In the midst of the diatribes which these debates created, the unconscious comedian of the House, Thomas Vining of Maryland, delivered a speech in favor of the Potomac which became famous not for its lucidity or logic, but for the absurdities of its bombast.

Charles Dickens’s comment concerning Congressional debate of a later day, that the constituents of American statesmen boasted not of what their representatives said, but of the length of time they talked, would have fittingly described the attitude of the popular mind toward the fight for the capital. Every member of both Houses had won the plaudits of his respective followers by almost endless speeches championing some locality, or devoted to arraignment of the sinister motives of opponents.

Mr. Vining’s speech was a decided relief. In the first place, it was brief, and secondly, its freedom from malevolence together with its bizarre humor gave it a distinction unique in the famous controversy.

Obscurity of logic and serio-comic rhetoric [Pg 113]had accomplished what solemn oratory and studied satire had failed to do, and the House, for the first time since the question of locating the capital had provoked the ambitions and hostilities of every State, joined in unanimous and jocular applause.

The Constitution adopted in 1787 gave to Congress the power to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may by cession of particular States and the acceptance of Congress become the seat of the Government of the United States.” This provision served only to increase the competition. After the conflicting efforts of several States to secure the prize, a bill was passed on September 27, 1789, locating the capital at Germantown, but, pending an amendment to the bill, the Senate adjourned, and when the next session was convened both Houses had decided to change their vote.

The contest might have continued long enough to dismember the Union but for the genius of Jefferson and Hamilton, who brought about a compromise. Jefferson, in his Ana, has recorded the inside history leading to the final selection of a site for the capital. At the [Pg 114]time Hamilton was urging the passage of his bill to have the Federal Government assume the State debts, amounting to $20,000,000. The measure was defeated in the House, and Hamilton invoked Jefferson’s aid to secure a reconsideration, stating that the creditor States of the East threatened secession if their claims were not considered.

Some historians have accepted Jefferson’s account as final, but others, studying the inflexible purposes of Washington, believe that a controlling power more potent than the wine and compromises at a political dinner finally secured the vote for the Potomac site. Years before, when a young lieutenant, encamped with Braddock’s army on Observatory Hill, Washington had “noted the beauty of the broad plateau” on which the Capitol was destined to be reared, and had “marked the breadth of the picture, and the strong colors in the ground and the environing wall of wooded heights which rolled back against the sky, as if to enclose a noble area of landscape, fit for the supreme deliberations of a continental nation.”

The loftiest minds in Congress were swayed by Washington’s judgment. They agreed with him that America should establish the splendid precedent of a nation locating and founding a city by legislative enactment for its permanent capital. Furthermore, they wished to honor their first President and the great general and counsellor who had made their independence [Pg 116]possible, by conferring upon him the power to select for this Federal city the locality he had in prophetic fancy chosen as a suitable site for the capital of the Republic.

In the act passed July 16, 1790, Congress expressed its faith in the President by permitting him to establish the capital anywhere along the Potomac between the East Branch and the Conogocheague, a distance of eighty miles. The boundaries of no other city were ever fixed by so illustrious a surveyor. It is recorded that, as he walked over the wilderness with his engineering instruments and corps, he was harassed by the “importunities of anxious residents and grasping speculators,” but not for a moment did he waver in his purpose to select the site whose majesty had appealed to him in former years as a fitting environment for the Federal home. Within nine months the confines of the federal territory were established. The corner-stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies at Jones’s Point, Alexandria, April 15, 1791, but the territory west of the river was retroceded to Virginia in 1846. Not a cent was advanced by Congress for buildings or grounds. In fact, with an empty treasury [Pg 117]and no credit, Congress was unable to give financial aid.

Washington himself drew up the original agreement by which the owners were to convey the land to the Government. The proprietors agreed that all lands necessary for streets, avenues, alleys, etc., should be surrendered free of cost. The building lots were to be equally apportioned between the Government and the individuals. For the larger plots necessary for public buildings and other government uses, the owners were to receive compensation at the rate of £25 per acre. Washington thought that by this arrangement the Government might sell the smaller lots and with the proceeds buy the large ones needed for public uses.

It is a memorable picture, that of the “Cincinnatus of the West,” the renowned statesman, President, general and engineer, planting his theodolite here and there, marking the confines of the capital city, or travelling on horseback to the Georgetown tavern to discuss terms and titles with the owners of the land. The spectacle of Washington laying out the city and presiding at the laying of the corner-stone of its Capitol, appealed to the dramatic sense of Daniel Webster, who in delivering the [Pg 118]oration on the occasion of the laying of the corner-stone of the extension of the Capitol, July 4, 1851, alluded as follows to the city’s illustrious founder: “He heads a short procession over these naked fields; he crosses yonder stream on a fallen tree; he ascends to the top of this eminence, whose original oaks of the forest stood as thick around him as if [Pg 119]the spot had been devoted to Druidical worship, and here he performs the appointed duty of the day.”

The planning of the city was entrusted to Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who had been a major of engineers during the Revolution, and later had proved a popular architect both in Philadelphia and New York. He studied the Potomac situation and drew up the plan of a city on so magnificent a scale that it was considered wild and chimerical. Nothing like it existed in the New World, and few cities in the Old equalled the grandeur of his projections. L’Enfant was removed before having progressed far with the work, and Andrew Ellicott of Pennsylvania was appointed in his place. But the present widely admired plan of Washington had its origin in the artistic, creative mind of L’Enfant.

In 1792, Congress voted him a sum of five hundred guineas, and deeded him a lot in Washington, as compensation for his services; but the designing of the capital city had been to him a work of art and love, and he rejected all considerations of payment. His dismissal had been brought about by his refusal to submit his plans to the Commissioners, his defence [Pg 120]being that if his design were published speculators would seize upon the “vistas and architectural squares and raise huddles of shanties which would permanently disfigure the city.”

When Madison became President, he sought to honor L’Enfant by offering him the professorship of engineering at West Point, but again the artistic foreigner declined to accept anything at the hands of the people who, he felt, had failed to appreciate the supreme effort of his genius. His final years he spent as a pensioner at the manor houses of the Digges family in Maryland. He died in the home of Dudley Digges in 1824, and was buried in the garden of the Chellum Castle Manor near Bladensburg, where to-day his grave is marked only by a cedar tree. Inasmuch as the great projects of L’Enfant are receiving to this day the attention of the Government, it would not be inappropriate, in the centennial year of Washington’s existence, to give his remains fitting and affectionate sepulture in the city he designed.

The Commissioners, at a meeting held in Georgetown, September 8, 1791, decided to call the Federal district, “Territory of Columbia,” and the Federal city, the “City of Washington.” At this same meeting the method of [Pg 121]designating the streets by letters and numbers was adopted. The name of the city has remained unchanged, but the name of the territory was afterwards changed by Congress to the “District of Columbia.”

For a short time after the city was plotted, Washington enjoyed its first real-estate boom, although that word was not then known. The lots sold more readily abroad than at home, and for a time brought extravagant prices in London. However, comparatively few seem to have been disposed of, and the meagre return from sales was most unfortunate because the money was badly needed to pay for the first public buildings. Finally, the President made a personal appeal to Maryland, which lent $100,000, not, however, without first securing the personal bond of the Commissioners.

The Capitol was planned by Dr. William Thornton, an Englishman, who seems to have been a man of some natural talent, but unskilled in architecture. Stephen L. Hallett, a professional house-builder, also submitted specifications for the building, and there is good reason to suppose that Thornton’s plans, as finally accepted, were considerably affected by Hallett’s more practical drawings.

When the corner-stone of the Capitol was ready to be laid, great preparations were made for the event. Companies of militia and artillery were called out, and civic societies, public officials and many distinguished citizens were invited. With appropriate ceremonies of the military and of the Masonic order, the President deposited in the corner-stone, together with corn, wine, and oil, a silver plate bearing this inscription, which the Commissioners first ordered to be read aloud:

Two years later Thomas Twining, an English traveller who had taken an important part in laying the foundations of the Indian Empire, visited Washington, and thus describes a trip from Georgetown to Mr. Law’s house at Washington:

Sometime before this, and in answer to an advertisement by the Commissioners, James Hoban, an Irish architect, then acting as supervising architect of the Capitol, had submitted plans for a “President’s House,” and they had been accepted. Inasmuch as the Act of Congress creating the District decreed that the houses for Congress and the President should be ready for occupancy by the year 1800, the work on both was now carried forward vigorously. Washington, retiring to his home at Mount Vernon at the close of his second term in 1797, gave over the care of the Federal city to his successor, John Adams. President Adams first appointed a new architect for the Capitol, Stephen Hallett, who resigned after holding the position for one year. George Hadfield, an Englishman, next appointed, resigned in 1798, and left James [Pg 126]Hoban, the supervising architect, to finish the work alone.

Congress having adjourned about May 20, 1800, to meet in Washington in November, the seat of government was removed from Philadelphia to Washington early in June of that year. The records and files of the various departments were transferred by vessels chartered for the purpose, and, as soon as possible, were put in order in the buildings to which they had been assigned. The government officials and clerks came by stage, bringing their families with them. From the records of the Treasury Department it appears that the Government met all the expenses of moving them and their household effects.

When the government officials arrived, only the north wing of the Capitol had been completed, while the Treasury Building, a plain two-story structure of thirty rooms located on the site of the south front of the present edifice, was the only public building ready for the occupancy of the executive departments. Work had been begun on the War Office at the southwest corner of the White House grounds.

The few hotels [Pg 128]and buildings of the city were so overcrowded that few of the members could secure quarters nearer than Georgetown, three miles away through mud and forest. Streets existed for the most part only on paper, and Pennsylvania Avenue, the principal thoroughfare, was really a bog lined with bushes. The only sidewalk, that from the Capitol to the Treasury, being made of stone chippings, so wounded the feet and tempers of pedestrians as to make the mud of the street preferable.

One of the few ladies to follow their husbands into “the wilderness” at this time was Mrs. Adams. To her belongs the distinction of being the first mistress to grace the President’s house. The house itself was but partially finished, and, though Congress had appropriated $6000 with which to furnish it, but little of the furniture was in place when she arrived. Mrs. Adams, however, seems to have been of a bright and cheerful disposition, for, in her letters to her daughter, she gives a more lenient account of the inconveniences and a more just view of the possibilities of the city than many of the new residents.

During the short remaining period of President Adams’s term, Mrs. Adams assisted her husband to [Pg 130]receive at many formal dinners and stately functions, and under their combined influence Washington society became as polished and as exclusive as the best in other cities.

A drawback to the city’s progress lay in the constant agitation for the removal of the capital—an agitation that in no wise abated until in very recent times, when the railroad and the telegraph overcame “remoteness and inaccessibility,” the chief grounds for complaint. The press of New York and Philadelphia united with the Northern members in declaiming against the discomforts of the infant city, and such pressure was brought to bear that in March, 1804, a bill “to remove the seat of government to Baltimore” passed to its second reading in the Senate. However, the “Capital-movers,” as they came to be called, succeeded only in retarding the growth of the city. As a result, at the close of Jefferson’s administration there were but five thousand inhabitants. The North spread the sarcasm that Washington was a city of streets without houses and houses without streets. The ludicrous fame of America’s capital created laughter even in Europe. Foreigners after gazing at the President’s house were said to peer into [Pg 131]the woods and inquire ingenuously where the city was. The satire of Tom Moore has been mentioned. Here is his picture of Washington:

With the inauguration ceremonies of President Madison, March 4, 1809, the capital returned from Jeffersonian simplicity to the stateliness and fashion of Washington and Adams. Mrs. Madison, the charming hostess of the White House, revived the stately dinners and formal levees, and a court circle gradually grew up resplendent at balls and assemblies.

The War of 1812 had a special bearing on the history of Washington. It had been in progress almost two years when, early in the summer of 1814, rumor told of a great British [Pg 132]armada fitting out at Bermuda, some thought to attack New York, others Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington.

On the night of August 19, 1814, a courier, dashing at full speed over the sandy roads of Maryland, drew rein for an instant at every little post-town and shouted the warning note: “To arms! The British have landed at Benedict, and are marching inland. To arms!”

Then at once it was known that the city of Washington was the object of the invasion. The British forces now marching upon the city numbered 5123. They were some of Wellington’s veterans, fresh from the fields of France and Spain. Opposed to them and in defence of the city, General Winder had nearly six thousand men. Only nine hundred of these were regular troops.

The attempt to resist the invasion resulted in the battle of Bladensburg, which was fought near the spot which later became famous as duelling-grounds. A brief but brave defence was made, the raw and undrilled American troops being compelled to give way to the disciplined veterans who had fought with Wellington.

Washington has had its days of tragedy. [Pg 134]Two American Presidents have been assassinated within the city, and its inhabitants shuddered at the approach of Southern armies during the Civil War. But at no other time in the history of the Federal city has there been such a moment of supreme terror as on the night of the 24th of August, 1814, when the British gave to the flames the Capitol, the President’s house, the Navy Yard and the Treasury. President Madison and his Cabinet had taken refuge in flight; the frightened citizens were hurrying bewildered into Virginia when, towards sunset, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn drew up their troops on the esplanade east of the Capitol. Thus far the movement had been conducted according to the rigid etiquette of war, but the spectacle of the American capital at their mercy awoke both in officers and men the wanton spirit of revenge.

American school-books have perpetuated the unique fable that the British held a mock session in the Hall of the House of Representatives; that Cockburn from the Speaker’s desk, while the soldiers filled the seats, put the question: “Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?” and that, when the motion was boisterously carried, gave orders [Pg 135]to apply the torch. The scene is an imaginary one; the tale is a piece of romance. It is the sort of historical fiction that Lamartine delighted to invent to add dramatic interest to events.

It is unnecessary to resort to imagination to make a vivid picture of the sacking of Washington. By the glare of the burning Capitol the red-coats marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s house. The Palace, as the Federalists called it, was not palatial. The portico had not been built; what was to be the garden was a field of rocks and tree stumps; the interior of the house was crude, and the East Room, since associated with great historical events, had, since the time of Mrs. Adams, been given over to the uses of the laundry.

A second fiction connected with the British raid is that they found a great dinner spread on the President’s table and in much glee and derision sat down to devour it. That tale, like the fable of the mock session at the Capitol, was given to a London paper by a merry midshipman.

At midnight a violent thunder-storm checked the four conflagrations. The next day the British renewed the devastation, adding to the [Pg 136]flames the Departments of State and War, and private buildings. But nature, as if protesting against the outrage, came to the rescue with a cyclone that drove the enemy to seek shelter.

Panic seized the combatants. On the Washington side, General Ross, perceiving Americans on the Virginia shore, set fire to the great bridge spanning the Potomac. On the Virginia side, Americans, believing the British were about to cross, simultaneously applied the torch. While the two sheets of flame rushed together, the British army left the ruined capital.

Sentiment in England was divided over the destruction of Washington. “Willingly,” said the London Statesman, “would we throw a veil of oblivion over the transactions of our buccaneers at Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America.”

Other British authorities justified the ruin as a reprisal for the burning and destruction of York, the capital of Upper Canada, though that unwarranted act was the work of soldiers acting without authority, and had been generally condemned in America and publicly disavowed by General Dearborn, who commanded the expedition.

The preparations for rebuilding the city were begun before the smoldering ruins had ceased to glow. The designs of the Capitol and other public buildings were somewhat altered, but the White House, under the supervision of Hoban, the original architect, was reared on the old walls—almost a replica of the former mansion. Although the reconstruction was begun immediately, there was a continuation of the old difficulties. The question of removing the capital again became an issue, [Pg 138]and continually hampered the work of rebuilding. However, the old buildings were slowly replaced, new ones were constructed, and the Government was soon comfortably housed. But the city itself developed with woeful languor. The few attempts to beautify it failed. By 1860, there were but two or three miles of poorly constructed pavements. Most of the streets were worse than country roads. In summer the dust rose in clouds and blinded and choked those who ventured forth, while in winter the mud was so deep that at times the streets were well-nigh impassable. Until 1862 there were no street railways.

Charles Dickens, who was a visitor to Washington during its period of struggle and reconstruction, drew this startling picture of the capital:

As there were few attractions to tempt the wealthy, plain and inexpensive dwellings were mostly in evidence. During the sessions the members of Congress could hardly find suitable quarters, since the inns and hotels, with few exceptions, were of such a character that they brought forth vilification from those who were compelled to live in them. Boarding-houses were somewhat better. An old directory shows that in 1834 Senators Daniel Webster, John Tyler, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay; Representatives John Ouincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk and many other well-known men of the time sought homes with private families or in semi-public boarding-houses. The modern method of numbering houses was not then used, and we find addresses given as follows: Henry Clay, “at [Pg 141]Mrs. Ditty’s, C Street near the corner of Four-and-a-half”; Nathaniel Silsbee and Daniel Webster, “Boarding-house of Mrs. Bayliss, opposite Central Market.”

The Civil War added the final touch to the national significance of the capital. From the straggling city of seventy thousand inhabitants, those stirring times transformed it into a vast military post of two hundred and fifty thousand. In appearance the city resembled an extensive military camp and hospital. Yet when the foe did come the city was in but poor condition to withstand attack. In the summer of 1864, General Jubal Early was sent north to attack Washington, and, if possible, to divert Grant from Richmond. General Lew Wallace was then in command of the Middle Division, which included Washington. Home Guard, crippled soldiers, and Department clerks were mustered in; but in all there were not more than thirty-five hundred men. General Early had by his own account ten thousand picked veterans, including nine field batteries with forty guns. At Monocacy, thirty miles from Washington, after a brave contest, the Union forces retreated in good order. At night, Early camped within ten miles of the capital; [Pg 142]But Wallace had delayed him long enough to enable Grant to send a part of the Sixth and Nineteenth corps, and Washington was saved.

Meanwhile, work on the public buildings went steadily forward. During the war the dome of the Capitol was raised, and the Treasury and Patent Office buildings were almost completed. In 1863, the statue of Freedom was placed upon the dome with imposing ceremony, accompanied by the salutes of guns of the surrounding forts. The enormous military population during the war brought greatly increased responsibilities to the city, and a better realization of its importance to the nation. From 1860 to 1870, more noteworthy and substantial improvements were made than had been before undertaken in the whole history of the city, and the population in this single decade increased from seventy thousand to 120,000.

With the return of peace the habitual slothfulness returned, and the old do-nothing policy seemed about to be resumed.

But there were a few energetic citizens in whom the short period of progressiveness had instilled an unquenchable desire for a better order of things, [Pg 144]and by their untiring energy they prevented a recurrence of the former stagnation.

One man in particular seems to have been inspired with a resistless ambition for the city’s salvation. Around this person—Alexander R. Shepherd—the little body of reformers rallied their forces.

A territorial form, with a governor, legislature and delegate to Congress, was created for the District. A Board of Public Works, appointed by the President with the approval of the Senate, was created to undertake the remodelling of the city. Subsequently this Board became the pivot around which the rest of the municipal machinery revolved. Shepherd was appointed Governor, and under his guidance the Board immediately began its difficult and thankless task.

The changes which the Board wrought in the city were stupendous. The result is Washington as it is known to-day. The enormous expense entailed by the great reconstruction created an opposition which forced Congress to appoint committees of investigation. The extent of the Board’s operations are best illustrated by the enlargement of the District’s debt.

The debt of the territory, which in [Pg 146]1871 was but three millions, had risen in 1875 to twenty millions, and of this “astounding increase only the original loan of four millions was submitted to the vote of the people, and this, at the time it was voted on, was understood to include all the main improvements necessary for remodelling the city.”

Shepherd, whose master mind had directed the whole undertaking, finally left the city. When, a few years later, he returned on a visit from Mexico, his advent was celebrated by the citizens of the new and beautified capital by demonstrations of welcome so sincere and genuine as to atone for the former lack of appreciation.

Washington to-day is richer in historic memories than any other city on the continent. To the literary worker and historian it is a boundless treasure-house. Standing on the hills of Anacostia, and musing on the story of Powhatan’s vanished capital, one may read in the surrounding spires and domes and monuments of the city the eventful story of Anglo-Saxon triumph in the Western Hemisphere. One smiles now at the satire of the poet Moore; for the morasses have indeed become parks, and imposing shrines have been [Pg 147]built to commemorate heroes that were then unborn. In what was once the wilderness of “magnificent distances” are the palatial houses in brick and granite of men and women celebrated in letters, in art and in public life. In the galleries of the Capitol will be found the portraits and memorials of America’s illustrious dead. In the State Department is to be seen the faded original of the Declaration of Independence.

The city that Washington founded has become one of venerable memories and matchless triumphs.

From the “Rome” of Francis Pope the visitor looks down Pennsylvania Avenue, the Via Sacra of the new world, whereon the men most illustrious in the annals of the Republic have walked and ridden to their public offices, and along whose historic thoroughfares the heroes of great wars have enjoyed their triumphs. Here Lafayette was received with joyous welcome when, in 1824, he returned to measure the majestic growth of the Republic during the fifty years that had passed since he and Washington were comrades in the fight for freedom. As, standing on the superb terraces on the west front of the Capitol, one views the [Pg 148]monument, the sacred hills of Arlington, the Potomac winding towards Alexandria, which Adams predicted would become the continent’s metropolis and greatest export city, the imposing declivities of old Georgetown, at whose base were once anchored merchant ships from foreign ports, there passes before the mind a vivid panorama of the history of the American people. Beauty and majesty have obliterated the infant city of a hundred years ago. The achievements of science have mocked many of the ancient prophecies. The canal, starting at Georgetown, which was to have carried the deliberations of Congress to the Western world, knows no such use, and the ships that were to crowd the Potomac are content to moor at railway termini along the Atlantic coast.

But although applied science has confounded the wisdom of a hundred years ago, the hopes and dreams of the founder of the capital have been realized. In 1798, before the Government moved to the new city, Washington wrote concerning the capital:

“A century hence if this country keeps united, it will produce a city, though not so large as London, yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe.”

Had Washington looked down the century[Pg 150] and caught the gleam of the gigantic shaft that attests his glory, and the golden dome of the Congressional Library, the most superb temple ever reared to literature, or in an illumined moment beheld the Goddess of Liberty standing between Heaven and earth and symbolizing freedom for seventy-five millions of people, he could not have written with loftier faith in the destiny of the Republic.

Washington is no longer the city of magnificent intentions; it is Washington the Magnificent.

[Pg 151]

RICHMOND ON THE JAMES

On the 11th of April, 1606, a patent was issued by James I. of England to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and others for the establishment of a colony in Virginia. The charter prescribed that it was to be managed by a council of thirteen persons, under the direction of a council of thirteen in England. On December the 19th of that year, one hundred and nine years after the discovery of North America by Cabot, three small vessels, the Susan Constant, the God Speed and the Discovery, sailed for the New [Pg 152]World, bearing one hundred and twelve passengers and a crew of thirty-nine men.

They encountered many perils by sea, having bad weather and losing their reckoning, but the 26th of April, 1607, brought them to the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and they soon entered a noble stream called by the natives the “Powhatan,” but renamed by them the James, in honor of their King. On the 13th of May, they landed on a spot which seemed suitable for a settlement, and called the place Jamestown. The colony previously planted at Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh having perished, this was the beginning of the permanent Anglo-Saxon occupation of North America. From it has developed English possession of the continent with free institutions based upon English representative government.

In 1619, a General Assembly was held, which was the first legislative body elected by the people to convene this side of the Atlantic. It was an English acorn germinating in American soil, and from it has sprung the tree of liberty which has filled the continent. Among the colonists who landed at Jamestown, was the celebrated Captain John Smith, who was [Pg 153]destined later to be snatched from the jaws of death by the lovely Indian princess, Pocahontas.

From the story of his life, told by himself, and the Rev. Samuel Purchas in his Pilgrims, we learn that he had already been the hero of many adventures. He had been robbed, had encountered pirates, and had [Pg 154]been shipwrecked at sea. He had slain three Turks in single combat while serving under Sigismundus Báthori, the Prince of Transylvania. He had been beloved by the fair Turkish lady, Tragabigzanda, besides having had many other affaires du cœur—notably one with the good lady Calamata of Russia.

Nine days after the landing of the colony at Jamestown, and thirteen years before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth, Captain Newport, with Smith and a party of men, ascended the James River, and discovered the site of the city of Richmond. In Smith’s True Relation, printed in London in 1608, he says:

This was the first view had by Englishmen of the situation where the city of Richmond was located.

In September, 1609, when Smith was president, he set out to find a more favorable spot for the colony than marshy Jamestown. He sailed again to the Indian village Powhatan, at the falls of the river, and bought of the natives some land near the present site of Richmond, where the landscape presented such charming features that he called the place “None Such.” On his way home he was wounded by the explosion of a bag of gunpowder, and the next month he left the colony and sailed for England, leaving only a small settlement to occupy the site he had purchased. In 1645, “Fforte Charles” was built below the falls of the James, but no permanent settlement was effected. In 1675, Colonel William Byrd was granted 7351 acres of land beginning [Pg 156]at the mouth of Shockoe’s Creek, which joins the river at the falls, and again, in 1687, he had a patent of 956 acres on the east side of the creek, extending up and down the line of the James River. On a part of these two tracts the present city of Richmond was founded some years later by his son, Colonel William Evelyn Byrd, who gives this account in his journal:

He also advertised in the Virginia Gazette of April, 1737, “that on the north side of James River, near the uppermost landing and a little below the falls, is lately built by Major Mayo a town called Richmond with streets sixty feet wide in a pleasant and healthy situation, and well supplied with springs of good water.”

The founder of Richmond was one of the [Pg 158]worthiest and most intellectual men in the Colony of Virginia. His portrait, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, shows a face of remarkable beauty, framed in the curls of a flowing peruke of the time of Queen Anne. He was noted as “the Great Virginia wit,” and his writings are among the most valuable that have descended to us from that era. His library was the largest that had ever been brought over to the New World. A catalogue of it, in folio, is now in possession of the Franklin Library in Philadelphia. He was the father of the beautiful Evelyn Byrd, whose death of a broken heart because her father refused to give his consent to her marriage with her lover—said to have been Lord Peterborough—has furnished a theme for poet and novelist. He was buried at his family estate, Westover, and his tombstone, in the old flower garden there, not only gives a history of his life, but tells us also of several of his noble and illustrious friends and their good qualities.

Richmond was established as a town by the Assembly of Virginia in 1742. Originally built on seven hills, it has been called the “Modern Rome,” and one of Richmond’s gifted daughters once wrote:

In 1842, when Dickens visited Richmond, it already covered yet another hill, and he wrote of it as

The oldest house in Richmond, the “Old Stone House,” situated on Main Street, was built by Jacob Ege in 1737, and is now used as a museum filled with relics and curiosities.

St. John’s Episcopal Church, which was built in 1740, is in a state of excellent preservation, and religious services are held in it as they were in the days before the Revolution. It was built under the superintendence of Richard Randolph of Curls Neck, the son of William Randolph of Turkey Island and Jane Bolling, the great-great-granddaughter of Pocahontas. In its graveyard are many quaint old tombstones—the oldest, that of the Rev. Robert [Pg 160]Rose, is dated 1751. The learned and accomplished George Wythe, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and many other famous sons of Virginia lie buried in the graveyard.

The most interesting event in the history of the Church, and one with which its name will be forever linked, was the meeting within its walls of the famous Virginia Convention of March 20, 1775. A few months after the adjournment of the first Continental Congress, this convention met to hear a report of its proceedings, and to deliberate on the political situation. The bitter hostility [Pg 161]to the patriots on the part of Lord Dunmore made it unsafe for them to meet in Williamsburg, the capital of the colony, and the importance and sacredness of the cause made it appropriate to meet in the sanctuary of God, to whom they humbly looked for guidance on their sea of troubles. The vestry recognized this, and offered to the convention this, the largest building in the town. It was during the session of this convention that Patrick Henry made his famous speech, in which he proclaimed the folly of longer expecting peace, and the necessity of arming for immediate war, ending with the words: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” The very spot where the orator stood is pointed out.

Some six years later, January 6, 1781, Benedict Arnold, the traitor, entered the city at the head of nine hundred British soldiers. That night part of his troops were quartered in the old church, desecrating it as far as they were able.

In 1779, the Legislature ordered the removal [Pg 162]of the seat of government from Williamsburg to Richmond, then only a collection of disjointed villages placed amid the ragged ground at the falls of the James. Virginia had been settled largely by sons of country gentlemen, who brought from their far-off homes the love of country life. Her citizens preferred that life, and the title “Country Gentlemen” was the most desired. In consequence there were no large cities in the State.

In 1781, the Marquis Chastellux, who served with honor in the French army, thus described the city:

In 1782, Richmond was incorporated as a city, and three years later the foundations of the Capitol were laid. Especially beautiful in the summer months, when the grass is as green as emerald and the noble trees give grateful shade, is the Capitol Square.

Squirrels play [Pg 164]as if at home about the grounds, much to the delight of the children. The square, with its area of about twelve acres, includes the lot on which the Executive mansion stands, and is supposed to be a part of Nathaniel Bacon’s plantation, where his overseer was murdered by the Indians, whose punishment by him, without permission of the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was the beginning of the famous Bacon’s rebellion.

The model sent by Jefferson is still preserved, and looks like a miniature of the Capitol with [Pg 165]very slight variations. Jefferson says of it: “Here I am gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée like a lover at his mistress.”

The corner-stone was laid in 1785, and on October 19, 1789, eight years to the day after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, the Legislature convened in it.

The Capitol is full of memories of bygone days. Here were debated and adopted the famous resolutions of 1798-99, drafted by James Madison as the true interpretation of the Federal compact. Here sat the convention of 1829-30, of which Marshall, Madison, Monroe and John Randolph of Roanoke were members, the convention of 1851, which enlarged the right of suffrage and, ten years later, the body which adopted the Act of Secession. Here, in 1862, met the congress of the Confederate States of America, which sat until April, 1865, when it adjourned—“Not sine die indeed, yet never to meet again.”

In the rotunda of the Capitol is the most valuable marble in America, Houdon’s statue of Washington, modelled from life. Virginia had voted this statue to him May 15, 1784, and Madison penned the inscription which appears on the pedestal:

Mr. Jefferson, being then in Paris, engaged Houdon to come to Virginia to make the statue, saying of him: “He is without rivalship, the first statuary of his age, as proof of which he receives orders from every other country for things intended to be capital.”

It is a tradition that Houdon spent several days at Mount Vernon before he selected the attitude for the statue. One day Washington was summoned to inspect a pair of horses offered for sale. He asked their price, and was told “a thousand dollars.” At once he drew himself up, with an expression of indignation at the price, and Houdon, watching him, exclaimed, “Ah, I ’ave him, I ’ave him!” and immediately set to work to make the pose immortal.

In the Capitol grounds stands Crawford’s famous equestrian statue of the great hero.

Thomas Crawford, father of F. Marion [Pg 168]Crawford, the distinguished novelist of our day, had received an order from the State of Virginia to make this statue of Washington and also to make effigies of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry to stand at its base. He had just completed his work when he was afflicted with a mortal disease, and when an order came to add the figures of Mason, Marshall, Nelson and Lewis he was unable to fill it, and the monument was subsequently completed by Randolph Rogers. The statue was unveiled February 22, 1858, the one hundred and twenty-sixth anniversary of Washington’s birth, and a proud day it was in the history of Richmond. Henry A. Wise, Governor of the State, presided and delivered an eloquent address. Senator R. M. T. Hunter was the orator of the occasion, and John R. Thompson and James Barron Hope, who were then the “rose and expectancy of the State,” recited poems prepared by them. It is considered one of the best equestrian statues in the world.

A fine marble statue of Henry Clay, executed by Joel T. Hart and erected by the efforts of some patriotic ladies, stands near by. Contemporaries of Mr. Clay pronounced [Pg 169]it lifelike. Virginia claims Mr. Clay for a son, as he was born in Hanover County, and did not move to Kentucky until he reached manhood.

On the Capitol grounds is an old building known as the Bell House which, though erected many years previous, is chiefly interesting for its association with the Civil War. The bell had been purchased in 1790, when the Directors of Public Buildings were authorized to “fit up a sufficient bell for the use of the Capitol.” Tradition says the [Pg 170]bell rang an alarm at the time of the “Nat Turner” insurrection, but it is consecrated to the trying times of 1861 to 1865 as is no other object connected with the Civil War. When its well-known peal rang out three quick taps and an interval, soldiers and citizens, old men and young, rushed with common impulse to the rendezvous, with hearts and hands ready for the defence of the city.

There is also on the grounds a statue of the great soldier, Thomas J. Jackson, executed by Foley, the celebrated English sculptor, and presented to Virginia by some of his English admirers. Old soldiers say of this, that it is the best likeness extant of their great leader. “Look! there is Jackson, standing like a stone wall,” is inscribed on the pedestal.

One of the most interesting sites in the city is that now occupied by the Monumental Church, on Broad Street, on what was formerly known as Academy Square. Here a certain Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire erected a large wooden building for an academy of fine arts. He was full of enthusiasm, and visited Paris to present his plan to the French Academy, which body gave their approval, but his scheme failed and the building [Pg 171]was turned into a theatre. Here assembled in 1788 a brilliant coterie of statesmen—Marshall, Madison, Mason, Monroe, Randolph, Henry, Lee, Wythe, Pendleton and others, who met to discuss and finally ratify the Constitution of the United States as framed in Philadelphia.

Twenty-three years afterwards on a fatal December evening it was the scene of a dreadful disaster, when seventy-two persons, including the Governor of the State, who were attending a performance at the theatre, perished in the flames which destroyed the building. The portico of the church covers the tombs and charred remains of most of the victims of the fire, and a monument bears their names.

The house of Chief Justice Marshall stands on the street named in his honor. It was built in 1795, and is as simple and unpretentious as was its distinguished owner. Still in the possession of his descendants, the house has not been remodelled and but few changes have been made inside. By some mischance, in the absence of Judge Marshall, the house was built rear side front. The handsome hall and staircase, with their carved balusters of [Pg 172]cherry, are at the back, opening towards the garden, the dining-room looks out on Marshall Street, and the entrance for visitors is by a small door on the side street.

Here lived and loved, in the simple, good old fashion, the great lawyer and his lovely wife, Mary Willis Ambler. Their married life was a peaceful idyl lasting forty-two years. Folded in his will was a touching tribute to his wife, ending:

Both Washington and Lafayette visited the city in 1784, and were welcomed by the citizens and legislature then in session, who expressed their appreciation of the great services they had rendered the country. In response to an address made upon the occasion of this visit, Washington said: “That this growing city may enjoy the benefits which are to be derived from liberty, independence and peace—that it may improve such of its advantages as a bountiful nature has bestowed, and that it may soon be ranked first in the Union for population, commerce and wealth, is my sincere and fervent wish.” Lafayette visited Richmond again in 1824. Houdon had made a bust of him, which Virginia gave to France, and a copy of which she kept in the rotunda of the Capitol. By chance, just before his visit, the nose was broken off, and there was great concern lest he reach the city before it [Pg 174]could be restored. Happily, however, the nose was finished in time.

The Swan tavern, still preserved on Broad Street, was an ancient place of entertainment kept by Major Moss, who was said to be “full of good feeding, breeding and fellowship.” His home was the Lincoln’s Inn or Doctors’ Commons of Richmond, for there assembled in term times the non-resident judges and lawyers. Though of unpretending exterior, the Swan was of highest repute for good fare, good wine and good company. An annex to the Swan was the house where Aaron Burr was kept prisoner during his trial for treason in 1807, the Federal Court having then no prison under its control. Chief Justice Marshall presided at the trial, and the Court sat in the Hall of Delegates in the Capitol.

Edgar Allan Poe spent many of his boyhood days in Richmond, with John Allan, a rich merchant of Scotch descent who adopted him. Until recently, the fine old residence of Mr. Allan was standing on Fifth Street, and near by was the residence of William Wirt, who loved the place and thus writes of it:

The Valentine Museum, which was given to the city by one of its most valued citizens, the late Mann S. Valentine, contains archæological specimens numbering more than one hundred thousand, also an art collection and a number of original works donated by his brother, Edward V. Valentine, Virginia’s talented sculptor. A short walk brings you to the studio of this artist, where, among many beautiful and interesting figures, the chief interest centres in the model for the recumbent statue of General Robert E. Lee, the marble of which is in the annex to the Episcopal Church in Lexington. [Pg 176]This statue has won for Valentine the admiration and love of the people of the South.

At once the capital and the citadel of the Confederacy, Richmond was the objective point of assault in the Civil War, and the greatest generalship on both sides was displayed in its attack and its defence. From May, 1862, to April, 1865, it may be said to have been in a state of siege, holding out steadily and grandly against great odds. During this period it is said that fifteen pitched battles and more than twenty skirmishes were fought in the effort to capture it. When its defenders were finally obliged to leave the city to its fate, they set on fire the warehouses to prevent the capture of the tobacco which they contained, burned the bridges behind them as the last soldier crossed the river, and left the business portion smoldering in flames—a barren trophy to the victors. It is in consequence of this that so few of the typical old buildings remain standing, for the flames leaped from house to house and destroyed many old landmarks. The city was not long in rising from its ashes and taking on new life, and there could be no greater contrast than that between the city of 1865 and the Richmond of to-day.

Nevertheless it will [Pg 178]always be remembered as the capital of the Lost Cause, and, as such, it will be invested with a pathetic interest. Its suburbs, attractive as they are from their natural beauty, derive their chief interest from having been the scenes of the conflict. In many places there remain the earthworks thrown up for the defence of the city, and every avenue out of the city for miles around leads to battlefields. Many monuments mark the love and veneration of the people for the heroes of the war. Foremost of these is the equestrian statue of General Robert E. Lee by Mercie, a French sculptor. It represents the great general riding slowly down the line, mounted on “Traveller,” his well-known war-horse. It is located in Lee Circle, one of the most beautiful parts of the city. A monument, the corner-stone of which has already been laid, will be erected to the memory of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States.

His residence while occupying that office is a building imposing in appearance, with grounds beautifully laid out, and adorned with fountains and flowers. It is known as the “White House of the Confederacy,” and is kept in admirable condition by a band of devoted women, the Confederate [Pg 180]Literary Memorial Society. The residence occupied by General Lee and his family is in the care of the Virginia Historical Society, and contains the extensive library of books, manuscripts and publications of that society.

A favorite drive is to Hollywood, silent city of the dead, which nature and art have united to beautify. Here sleep many of Virginia’s famous men; among them, Monroe and Tyler, Presidents of the United States, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, John R. Thompson, the poet, John Randolph, caustic [Pg 181]Master of Roanoke, and Matthew F. Maury, “Pathfinder of the Seas.” A beautiful monument of granite, pyramidal in form, and covered with Virginia creeper and ivy, marks the graves of twelve hundred Confederate dead.

The Government has lately finished a fine road, leading from Chimborazo Park to the National Cemetery, where lie buried 6547 of the Federal soldiers who fell in the attempts to capture the city.

Nature has done much for the city. The climate is pleasant and healthful; trees shade and flowers beautify the residences. The river glistens as it flows around wooded islands and rushes toward the sea over craggy rocks. Numerous lines of travel centre [Pg 182]in its midst and there is a growing spirit of enterprise among its citizens. The water-power is very fine, and besides being utilized for many manufactories, is about to be used for the generation of electricity on a large scale. Richmond claims the honor of being among the first, if not the very first city, to be lighted with gas. A man named Henfrey visited the city early in the present century, and induced some of the prominent citizens to witness experiments made by him in which he poured flame instead of steam from the spout of a tea-kettle. Money was raised by subscription and a lighthouse was built. On a tower forty feet high was a large lantern with many jets, and gas was generated in the basement and conducted by a pipe to the burners. Not, however, until many years after were the gas-works erected, and though Henfrey’s light was short-lived, his tower remained a monument of the enterprise of the citizens.

The people of Richmond are refined and hospitable. “It is the merriest place and the most picturesque, I have seen in America,” wrote Thackeray.

The city is filled with the echoes of the past. She cherishes tender memories of brave men [Pg 183]and gracious women. Rich in historic interest, progressive in her industries and in education, Richmond easily takes the lead in the State. Perhaps it is not too much to say that her great mental activity to-day, and her rapid advancement of late years in material concerns, gives her a position by no means insignificant among the cities of America, a fitting capital of the “Mother of States and of statesmen.”

[Pg 185]

WILLIAMSBURG

Williamsburg is situated on the famous Peninsula of Virginia, between the James and York rivers. On this Peninsula have occurred some of the most important events in history. One thing alone entitles it to pre-eminence in American history.

At Jamestown, seven miles distant from Williamsburg, was established the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent. There at Jamestown English settlers planted English institutions, had the first jury trial, and summoned the first assembly of the people. There, too, was the first enunciation on this continent of the memorable principle that taxes must not be imposed except with consent of the people in their representative assembly. All subsequent [Pg 186]English colonization in America had its chief inspiration in the successful upbuilding of the settlement at Jamestown. The Peninsula is in truth “the cradle of the Union.”

But the Peninsula has also its Yorktown, [Pg 187]thirteen miles distant from Williamsburg. This place, which once had a very great trade with Glasgow and London, but which was never more than a village of a few hundred inhabitants, may, nevertheless, claim to be the beginning and ending of Colonial resistance. Towering on the river bank is the beautiful monument, erected in 1881, which tells that there Lord Cornwallis surrendered in 1781 the British power in America to George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the American armies. But another monument might stand in close proximity, with this inscription, that there the first meeting of the people of Virginia was held in 1635 under the leadership of Nicholas Martian, an ancestor of Washington, to protest against the tyranny of the Governor, Sir John Harvey, who was shortly after deposed and sent a prisoner to England in the custody of two members of the Assembly. Nor, in referring to this neighborhood, must I omit mention of Hampton at the extreme end of the Peninsula, which is the oldest town in English America, which boasts the oldest free school, and which, twice a victim to the flames of war, gave its name to the great landlocked haven where the Merrimac [Pg 188]revolutionized naval warfare by its victory over the Federal wooden battle-ships in 1862.

Finally, six miles from Hampton is Newport News, where the first cotton was planted in America, and where there has suddenly sprung up a rushing, driving city, tremulous with the hopes of the future, and already realizing the dream of its first settlers, who relied on the magnificent opportunities which its situation at the conjunction of the James River with Hampton Roads afforded. The Peninsula has been traversed by British, French, and American armies, and in our own times is memorable as the scene of the tremendous struggle between the opposing armies of the Northern and Southern States, under the lead of McClellan and Johnston—a struggle sustained on both sides with conspicuous bravery and endurance, and culminating in the battles about Richmond in 1862.

Until 1630, the settlements of the English in Virginia were confined to the Accomac Peninsula, on the other side of Chesapeake Bay, and to the valley of the James. In that year the Governor and Council determined to make a settlement in the Indian district of Chiskiack in the neighborhood of Yorktown.

Soon [Pg 190]after one of the leading men, Dr. John Pott, from Harop, in Yorkshire, England, observed the advantages of a location on the ridge between Jamestown and Chiskiack, obtained a patent for a plantation there, and called it “Harop.” The authorities endorsed his judgment and in 1632 sent settlers thither for the purpose of establishing a town upon the spot. This was the beginning of Williamsburg, which was called at first the “Middle Plantation,” because of its location midway between the York and the James.

The Middle Plantation, though for many years a small village, was from the first a strategic point of much value. Two deep creeks, with wide morasses, penetrate to the spot from the James and York respectively, so that no hostile force can proceed up or down the Peninsula without passing through the place. The first settlement was walled in with palisades, and the corn-fields lay on the west of these. In the war with Opechancanough in 1644, the place was commanded by Captain Robert Higginson,[5] a soldier of credit and [Pg 191]renown. When Bacon in 1676 drove Sir William Berkeley from Jamestown, here at Middle Plantation, just a hundred years before the American Revolution, the former, calling himself “General by consent of the People,” held his famous parliament of the leading men of the Colony, who published those papers which sound so much like the inspiring literature of the Revolution.[6]

In preparing an oath to be administered to the people, the three articles proposed were read by James Minge, Clerk of the House of Burgesses: First, that they should aid General Bacon in the Indian war; second, that they would oppose Sir William Berkeley’s endeavor to hinder the same; third, that they [Pg 192]would oppose any power sent out from England, till terms were agreed to.

The overweening confidence of the people of Virginia in themselves was shown in the remark of Bacon that “one Virginian was equal to four red-coats.” Middle Plantation, however, witnessed a sad sight some months later. The hero of the people had succumbed to disease, and Sir William Berkeley was again in power. Among those who supported Bacon with their counsel and sympathy, though not with arms, was William Drummond, first Governor of North Carolina, and here at Middle Plantation he expiated his offence on the gallows. The circumstances surrounding the execution were unusually affecting. Tried by a drumhead court-martial, he was condemned, stripped, the ring torn from his finger, sentenced at one o’clock and hanged at four. Berkeley, however, did not long exult in his power, for the British Government recalled him to England, where he soon died.

Jamestown with all the public buildings had been destroyed during the course of the war. The suggestion was now offered to make Middle Plantation the capital, but was not adopted, and Jamestown was again restored.

In 1683, a handsome brick church was erected at Middle Plantation, and fifteen years later the “old fields” in front of the town were selected as the site for the “Royall Colledge” of William and Mary. Then in 1698, the State House at Jamestown falling again a victim to flames, Governor Francis Nicholson proposed to carry out the original suggestion of making the Middle Plantation the seat of government. The Legislature seconded him in this, stating in the preamble to their act that “the Middle Plantation had been found by constant experience to be healthy and agreeable to the constitutions of the inhabitants of this, his Majesty’s, colony and dominion;” that “its air was serene and temperate,” and that “its land was dry and champaign, and plentifully stored with wholesome springs.”

Soon there rose at Middle Plantation a building in the shape of an “H,” the first “Capitol” so called in the United States (the term “State House” being used in the other colonies), then a palace for the governor, a theatre, the first also in English America, for the enacting of tragedies and comedies, an armory for the care of the public arms and ammunition, a public prison, the first hospital for the insane in [Pg 195]America, and other buildings—all of brick. In honor of the reigning monarch the name of the place was in 1699 changed to that of Williamsburg, for which a city charter, in 1722, was obtained in the name of King George I., and under the seal of the Colony.

Thenceforward, the history of Williamsburg became the history of Virginia—for here until 1779 resided the Governor of the Colony, and here were held the sessions of the Council and the House of Burgesses, and the sessions of the Supreme Court.

But the life in Virginia was essentially a rural one, and Williamsburg never attained a population of over two thousand. During great public occasions, it assumed something of a real city character. On such occasions, the streets of Williamsburg were crowded with the chariots of the great planters, who rolled in great state from their plantations, carrying their families and attended by postilions and outriders.

In 1716, Governor Spotswood left Williamsburg on his memorable trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, instituting on his return the order of “The Knights of the Horseshoe,” which has been celebrated in story and verse. This expedition was the beginning of that march of empire to the West which in our time has arrived at the far-distant Philippine Islands.

In 1754, from the same city of Williamsburg, went George Washington to demand of the French commander an explanation of his occupation of Virginia soil on the Ohio. This was the first act in the drama of the French and Indian War, which, by driving the French power from this continent, laid the foundation of the future American nation. Subsequently, in all the events that finally culminated in war with Great Britain, Williamsburg was not only the capital of Virginia, but in many ways the capital of the revolting colonies.

It was a memorable day in 1765, when Patrick Henry offered in Williamsburg his famous resolutions against the Stamp Act. Samuel Adams of Massachusetts led the way in 1764 in remonstrating against the passage of the Stamp Act, and Virginia and the other colonies had quickly followed along the same [Pg 197]line; but protests and petitions were unavailing. Parliament enacted the stamp bill into law, and the alternatives presented were submission or resistance. There was a painful silence throughout the colonies. In the North “there was no declared purpose of action.” The usual and constitutional method of petition and remonstrance, often resorted to in the past history of the colonies against governmental action, had been tried. Otis advised submission, and was elected by Boston to a seat in the Legislature. When the Massachusetts Legislature met, Oliver, the stamp distributor, was elected councillor. Samuel Adams advised only a meeting of the colonies to confer on the condition of things. It was a supreme moment, but Virginia rose to the occasion. From the Capitol at Williamsburg rang out the clarion voice of Patrick Henry. He maintained by resolutions that the inhabitants of Virginia inherited from the first adventurers [Pg 198]and settlers of that dominion equal franchises with the people of Great Britain; that royal charters had declared that equality; that taxation by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them was the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom; that the people of that most ancient Colony had uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their own laws respecting their internal policy and taxation; that this right had never been forfeited or in any other way given up, but had been constantly recognized by the King and people of Great Britain; that the General Assembly of the whole Colony had the sole right and power to lay taxes on the inhabitants of the Colony; that any attempt to vest such power in any other person whatever tended to destroy British as well as American freedom; that the people of Virginia were not bound to give obedience to any law designed to impose taxation upon them other than the laws of their own General Assembly; and that any one who should, either by speaking or writing, maintain the contrary should be deemed an enemy to the Colony.

In the maintenance of these resolutions [Pg 199]Henry, lifted out of self, shouted those immortal words, “Tarquin and Cæsar had each his Brutus, Charles I. his Cromwell, and George III.”—and here he was interrupted by the cry of “Treason!”—“may profit by their example; if this be treason, make the most of it.” “This is the way,” says Bancroft, “that the fire began. Virginia rang the alarm bell for the continent.”

After this, with each of the great epochs in the constitutional development following the Stamp Act, Williamsburg, either through the men born and raised in the place, or educated at its famous college of William and Mary, had an imperishable connection. It was Richard Bland, an alumnus of the college, who first announced, in a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, the startling doctrine that America was no part of the kingdom of England, and had never been united with it except by the common tie of the crown. Dabney Carr, another alumnus of the college, was the patron of the resolutions in 1773 for appointment of intercolonial committees of correspondence,—the first step taken towards united action on the part of the colonies. Then it was Peyton Randolph, [Pg 200]born in Williamsburg and educated at its college, who when the first Congress came together in 1774, offered himself as the conspicuous mark of British resentment in consenting to act as first President of the Continental Congress.

In 1776, it was another [Pg 201]alumnus of the college, Thomas Jefferson, who, in the language of Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, “poured the soul of the continent into the monumental act of Independence.” In 1786, John Tyler, Sr., born in the country near Williamsburg, and another alumnus, carried through the Virginia Legislature the proposition for a convention of the States at Annapolis. In 1787, Edmund Randolph, a native of Williamsburg and an alumnus of the college, opened the proceedings of the convention at Philadelphia by submitting “the Virginia plan” of a constitution which gave direction to its proceedings.

A sketch of Williamsburg, however, would not be complete without some details of the famous Convention which met in the city on May 6, 1776. Edmund Pendleton of Caroline County was elected President, and John Tazewell of Williamsburg, Secretary. On the day after the Convention met they fixed on the 13th to go into the Committee of the Whole to consider the state of the Colony. Colonel Archibald Cary, an alumnus of William and Mary College, presided over this committee. The question of independence was introduced at once, and was debated on that and [Pg 202]the next day, and the committee rose and reported the following resolutions, drawn by Edmund Pendleton, which were unanimously agreed to by the Convention, 112 members being present:

On June 11, 1776, a committee, at the head of which was Thomas Jefferson, was appointed by Congress in Philadelphia to prepare a “Declaration of Independence”; and on July [Pg 204]1st, R. H. Lee’s resolution of independence was adopted, and on July 4th the immortal Declaration by Thomas Jefferson. Nor was this all that Virginia did. It having been determined to procure a Declaration of Rights and a written constitution for the State, the Convention, on May 15th, appointed a committee of thirty-one, at the head of which was Archibald Cary, to do the work. Many projects were submitted, but the Declaration of Rights and the State constitution prepared by the master-hand of George Mason, “swallowed up all the rest.” The former document, adopted June 12, 1776, contained all that was valuable in Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights of 1689, and much more; for it stands without a rival as a summary of the rights of man and also of the principles of free government. The latter document,—the constitution,—adopted on June 29, 1776, unlike the similar constitutions established by South Carolina and other colonies, declared the connection with Great Britain “totally dissolved,” furnishing in this way the first example in this country of a written constitution of a free and independent State.

Thus, in the language of John Adams of [Pg 206]Massachusetts, Virginia “has the glory with posterity of beginning with the resolutions against the Stamp Act, and of concluding with the acts of the Convention of May, 1776, the great American Revolution”; and Williamsburg was the scene of these great proceedings in the annals of the world.

Williamsburg lost its metropolitan honors in 1779, when Richmond became the capital of Virginia. The effect was disastrous, and its population decreased from two thousand in 1776 to twelve hundred in 1795. Many of the houses became tenantless, and the population of the place never rose above sixteen hundred in after years.

But the old city still retained its college, which, despite many vicissitudes, continued to maintain its influence in the Union. Indeed, William and Mary College holds a unique position in the history of the United States. In its antecedents, it is the oldest of American colleges; in actual operation, it is second only to Harvard. It is the only college that received its charter direct from the Crown under the seal of the Privy Council in England. It was the first college to have a full faculty of professors. It was the first to abandon [Pg 207]the Oxford curriculum and adopt the “elective system,” which it did in 1779. It was the first to adopt the “honor system,” which discountenances the custom prevailing at some colleges even now of spying and informing on students. It was the first college in America to widen its curriculum into the scope of a university by establishing chairs of law and medicine, in addition to the classics and the sciences. It was the first to establish schools of modern languages, history, political economy and constitutional and political law. It was the first to establish, in the Phi Beta Kappa Society, an intercollegiate fraternity, having for its object purely literary improvement; and it was the first to award strictly collegiate prizes, as manifested in the gold medals donated by Lord Botetourt in 1771.

Of the seven Presidents born in Virginia, three—Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Tyler—were educated at William and Mary. To these men is to be ascribed the annexation of Louisiana, Florida, Texas and most of the Western territory, thus trebling the original area of the Union. Four out of five judges contributed by Virginia to the Supreme Bench of the United States were [Pg 208]educated at William and Mary. The most illustrious commander of the Federal armies down to 1861, General Winfield Scott, was a William and Mary man. Of twenty-seven Senators from Virginia (1789-1861), sixteen, and of the four Speakers of the House of Representatives from Virginia, three, of three ministers plenipotentiary to England, two, and of six ministers to France, four, were alumni; and John James Beckly, first Librarian of Congress and first Clerk of the House of Representatives, was a William and Mary man.

Of forty-three members of the Supreme Court of Virginia, down to 1861, twenty-one, and of thirty-three governors of Virginia, fifteen, were alumni. Out of a numerical total of seventy-six judges and governors of Virginia, William and Mary contributed thirty-six; Princeton, two; Hampden-Sidney, two; University of Virginia, three; Dickinson College, one; University of Pennsylvania, one; College of South Carolina, one; Randolph-Macon, one; Yale, one; Washington College, Pennsylvania, one; European colleges, five, and the rest obtained their education at private schools.

The Rev. [Pg 210]Hugh Jones, Chaplain of Governor Spotswood and Professor of Mathematics in the college, thus wrote of the town in 1722:

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, [Pg 212]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.

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 [Pg 216]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. [Pg 217]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.”

[Pg 219]

WILMINGTON

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 [Pg 220]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:

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 [Pg 222]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.

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 [Pg 226]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 [Pg 227]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 [Pg 228]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 [Pg 229]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 [Pg 230]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 [Pg 231]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, [Pg 232]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 [Pg 233]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. [Pg 234]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 [Pg 235]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, [Pg 236]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 [Pg 238]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, [Pg 239]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 [Pg 240]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 [Pg 241]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 [Pg 242]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 [Pg 243]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 [Pg 244]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 [Pg 246]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 [Pg 247]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.

[Pg 249]

CHARLESTON

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 [Pg 250]... 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 [Pg 251]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. [Pg 252]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 [Pg 254]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.

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 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 [Pg 257]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, [Pg 258]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 [Pg 259]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 [Pg 260]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 [Pg 261]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 [Pg 262]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 [Pg 264]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.

“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 [Pg 266]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:

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:

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:

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

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 [Pg 269]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:

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 [Pg 271]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.

Mr. Wragg, who was loyal to the King, was at first confined to the limits of his plantation, “The Barony,” as it was then styled, and finally expatriated by order of the patriot Council of Safety. He went to England never to return, and up to our own day he was the only American whose name was commemorated in Westminster Abbey. Many Charlestonians were wealthy enough to travel through Europe as gentlemen of leisure, and one of them, Ralph Izard, maintained an establishment in London and travelled through France, Italy and a part of Germany.

While the pursuit of culture for its own sake is an evidence of a highly enlightened civilization, it is unfortunate that the intellectual coterie of Charleston and the neighboring parishes left so little, comparatively, to posterity. Perhaps their most notable productions during the last century were the novels of Richard Beresford and The First Comprehensive [Pg 272]Theory of Dew, by William Charles Wells, both of whom, however, left their native State and lived and wrote in England. Both Darwin and Tyndall pay hearty tribute to the ability and scientific discoveries of Wells, whose paper on the theory of natural selection furnished the groundwork for many scientists of our day. Other works of South Carolinians of the last century were the histories of Ramsay and Drayton, the military memoirs of Moultrie and the political memoirs of Drayton, the Flora Caroliniana of the botanist Walter, a few brochures of indifferent poems and some occasional plays, two of which were selected by the Dublin University Magazine as the subject of ridicule in an article on the “Beginnings of the American Drama.”

The Augustan Age, if we may apply such a term to the insignificant South Carolina literature, was early in the thirties, when Hugh S. Legaré, Stephen Elliott and other kindred spirits founded at Charleston the Southern Review, which, while it continued to exist, “had a more brilliant reputation than any like publication ever obtained in this country.”

A little later there was a coterie of specialists in natural history, such as Bachman, the [Pg 273]natural historian, Holbrook, the herpetologist and ichthyologist, John Lawrence Smith, mineralogist, the two Ravenels, McCrady, Gibbes, Porcher and others.

Agassiz found very congenial friends here and lent invaluable aid to the Museum of the College of Charleston, and Audubon published jointly with Bachman The Quadrupeds of North America, the figures by Audubon, the text by Bachman.

Dr. John Lawrence Smith is probably as well known in Europe as in America. He was employed by the Turkish government to explore its mineral resources. He received two decorations from the Sublime Porte, the order of St. Stanislaus from Russia and the cross of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon III., and succeeded Sir Charles Lyell as member of the French Institute. He was also the inventor of the inverted microscope.

Simms, the novelist and poet, and Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, the poets, are the three Charlestonians whose names are best known to the world of letters. Their memory will be cherished more and more at the home of their birth, as wealth increases, and all the effects of the fierce struggle for existence [Pg 274]which followed war and reconstruction have disappeared. The enthusiastic reception and rapid sale of the recently published memorial edition of Timrod’s poems is a hopeful sign of reawakened interest in the sweetest love poems and most stirring martial lyrics ever penned by a Southern poet.

No great artist first saw the light in Charleston, but the city boasts of several of more than mediocre ability. Early in the eighteenth century Henrietta Johnson executed a number of crayon portraits which are still treasured by some of the old families. Portrait painting was indeed almost the only branch of art encouraged for over one hundred years, the local portrait painter Theus having opened his studio in Charleston in 1750, and done much excellent work, some of which is still extant. But if there were no great painters at home, the wealthy Charlestonians brought back art treasures from Europe, and some of their stately homes were beautified by works of Allan Ramsay, Zoffany, Romney, Gainsborough, West, Copley and Gilbert Stuart.

Washington Allston spent several years in Charleston, where were many of his relatives, whose descendants still possess several of his paintings.

“Saint Mémin, limner,” is one of the names to be found in the Charleston City Directory for 1809; but few of the original crayon drawings and copper plates of that industrious French gentleman have escaped the tooth of time. Louis R. Mignot, the son of a French confectioner, was the only landscape painter from Charleston whose ability is recognized in Europe. S. G. W. Benjamin considers him one of the most remarkable artists of our country and says that he was equally happy in rendering the various aspects of nature, “whether it was the superb splendor of the tropical scenery of the Rio Bamba in South America, the sublime maddening rush of [Pg 276]iris-circled water at Niagara, or the fairy-like grace, the exquisite and ethereal loveliness of new-fallen snow.”

The only living Charlestonian known to the art world is the artist-author Rufus Fairchild Zogbaum, who was born in August, 1849, was educated at the Art Students’ League in New York and studied under Donnat in Paris. He is still in the heyday of his powers, and has no superior in the United States as a delineator of military and naval subjects.

The economic and commercial history of the city, while not so eventful or of so absorbing interest as its military and civil annals, cannot be entirely overlooked. One crop which is not now cultivated in the State, but which once enriched the people of the planter city, was first cultivated by a woman, Eliza Lucas, the accomplished daughter of Colonel Lucas, Governor of Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands, and afterward the mother of General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and General Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina. With seed sent her by her father, Miss Lucas, in 1741-42, planted the first indigo in South Carolina. In 1748, Parliament passed an act allowing a bounty of sixpence per pound, and [Pg 277]just before the Revolution the export from Charleston had risen to 1,107,660 pounds.

The cultivation of rice was one of the earliest planting experiments in the State, and though Ramsay, the historian, attributes its introduction to Governor Thomas Smith and a small bag of seed procured from Madagascar in 1694, it is certain that rice had been successfully grown in South Carolina as early as 1691. In 1770, the surplus over consumption exported from Charleston had risen to 120,000 barrels, valued at $1,530,000.

As early as 1770, “patches” of cotton were grown in South Carolina, and year by year thereafter for two decades indigo cultivation declined, and was finally entirely abandoned.

Though slavery is commonly supposed to have rendered those living under its debasing [Pg 278]influence inert and slow to enter upon great commercial enterprises, it is remarkable that Charleston merchants and planters planned and successfully constructed the earliest great railroad line in America. Mr. Courtenay says:

In the royal grants of land in Carolina the Crown reserved an interest in all precious and base metals, and some of the grants reserved for the King a share of the diamonds and precious stones which avarice rather than common sense suggested might underlie tide-water South Carolina. Geologists and lawyers laughed at the idea of precious stones in marshes and sand dunes, though there had been [Pg 279]“black diamonds” there for thousands of years. It was not until after the war between the States that Dr. St. Julien Ravenel’s discovery of the commercial value of the immense phosphate deposits brought wealth and prosperity to many whose needs were the greatest. The fertilizer business then established is still in successful operation and Charleston continues to be the largest phosphate shipping port in the world.

Of the war between the States it is not [Pg 280]necessary to write at length. Whether one regards “the firing of the first gun on Fort Sumter as the first rash act of a wild and fatal delusion,” or as the beginning of the greatest war in modern times for constitutional liberty and against the lust for power and territorial domination, no fair man can deny the heroism against unnumbered odds displayed by the Confederate soldiers.

It would be interesting to quote the opinion of Lord Wolseley as to the value of the study of the siege of Charleston in its tactical features as compared with the siege of Sebastopol and other great naval attacks. All the world wondered at the marvellous success of the blockade-runners, and the pages of history may be searched in vain for greater heroism than that displayed by Glassell, Dixon and others who first proved to the world the value of the torpedo in naval warfare; but let two sets of figures suffice:

Charleston with a white population of 24,000 furnished twenty-three companies of infantry, eleven of artillery and eight of cavalry to the Confederate armies.

The comments of a British officer and of two officers who served in the Federal army as to the extraordinary defence of Charleston are submitted;—for one born and reared in sight of Fort Sumter, and as a child carried away from the city to escape the shells from the “Swamp Angel” on Morris Island, cannot write of his people sine ira et studio.

Col. H. Wemyss Feilden, colonel and chief paymaster (retired list), H. B. M. Army says:

Quartermaster-General M. C. Meigs, U. S. A., in an adverse report to Secretary of War Stanton, in August, 1865, upon the petition of various merchants and wharf owners of Charleston, asking that their warehouses and wharves in the possession of the government be restored to them, says:

It only remains to say that President Andrew Johnson did not share the views of Quartermaster-General Meigs and that the property was restored to the claimants.

Ex-Governor D. H. Chamberlain, formerly an officer in the Union army, speaking to a representative young Virginian—a great-grandson of Chief Justice Marshall—in Charleston a few days ago, said:

Disastrous fires have destroyed many of the historic landmarks of the town, and the most interesting public building still standing is the Colonial Exchange, built in 1771, at a cost of £41,470. In its basement Colonel Isaac Hayne and other patriot prisoners were confined, and here General Moultrie walled up one hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder, which remained undiscovered during the three years that the British held the town. It was the scene of a ball and public reception in honor of General Washington when he visited Charleston after the Revolution, and was used as the Post Office from 1783 until the construction of the new granite Post Office, in Italian Renaissance style, during the last decade.

Of the first St. Philip’s Church, built on the present site, Edmund Burke said that it “is spacious, and executed in a very handsome taste, exceeding everything of that kind which [Pg 287]we have in America,” and another author (the biographer of Whitefield) called it “a grand church resembling one of the new Churches in London.” That building was constructed in 1723 and was the leading church in the State until its destruction in the great fire of 1835. The architectural proportions and beauty of the present St. Philip’s Church,—with its lofty steeple reaching to a height of nearly two hundred feet, from which shines at night a beacon light to mariners far away at sea,—“though perhaps peculiar to themselves, command the instant admiration of every beholder, professional or otherwise.”

No visitor to Charleston fails to visit St. Michael’s Church, the finest piece of colonial ecclesiastical architecture in the South, and which was first opened for divine service in 1761. The story of its chime of bells attracts the stranger and makes the bells doubly dear to all born within the shadow of the lofty tower. They never jangled out of tune, except on the eventful night of August 31, 1886, when the steeple was swayed by the earthquake. In 1782, Major Traille, of the Royal Artillery, took possession of the bells as spoils of war and sent them back to England, but the next [Pg 288]year they were repurchased by a Mr. Rhyner and sent back to Charleston, where they continued to voice the people’s joy or woe until the war between the States, when they were sent to Columbia for safe keeping. When General Sherman burned that city in 1865, two of the bells were stolen and the rest were so injured as to be useless. Once again the bells were shipped to England, where they were recast by the successors of the firm which had made them in 1764, from the same patterns, and again returned to Charleston and replaced in the belfry on March 21, 1867.

The church has been commemorated in the popular lyric of Mrs. Stansberry, How he Saved St. Michael’s, though as a matter of fact it was the spire of St. Philip’s that was saved from fire by an heroic negro. Timrod, during the war between the States, refers to the church in one of his tenderest poems entitled, Christmas, and Simms, when the steeple was made a target for Federal guns, published his passionate lines beginning:

From the “pigeon holes,” the highest point in the tower, patriots of the Revolution watched the coming and progress of the British fleets of Parker and Arbuthnot, and almost a century later the war-ships of Dupont and Dahlgren were sighted from the same aerie long before they crossed the bar.

Its congregation is so largely composed of the élite of Charleston society that a local wit had irreverently called the venerable structure “the Chapel of Ease of the St. Cecilia Society.”

It is claimed that the French Protestant (Huguenot) Church in Charleston is nearly if not quite coeval in date with the present city. There is some evidence that the church owes its origin to the colony of French Protestants sent out to the Province in 1680 by Charles II. of England. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the consequent Huguenot emigration to America in 1685 put the church on a solid foundation, though many of the Huguenots who came to Carolina settled at Orange Quarter, on the Santee River, at St. John’s, Berkeley, and possibly in St. James, Goose Creek. In 1687, came Elias Prioleau, the first recognized and regular pastor of the [Pg 291]French Church in Charleston. Two of his lineal descendants are now in the eldership of the church. After the fire of 1740, in which the early records of the church were destroyed, the liturgy of Neufchâtel and Valangin was adopted and an English translation of it is still in use.

In 1845 the present tasteful Gothic edifice, the fourth upon the same site, was built, and has been in use ever since, except during the war between the States.

In 1858, before a baptism of blood and fire had put the courage and tenacity of Charleston to the supreme test, and twenty-eight years before the memorable earthquake, James L. Petigru, the head of the bar of Charleston, and President of the Historical Society of South Carolina, said in a public speech: “Perhaps the opinion is tinged with partiality; yet, after making due allowance for such bias, I think I may say that in the circle of vision from the belfry of St. Michael’s there has been as much high thought spoken, as much heroic action taken, as much patient endurance borne as in any equal area of land on this Continent.”

With such a past, Charleston looks hopefully [Pg 292]into the future, confidently expecting as signal triumphs in the arts of peace as her sons once achieved against the fleets of France, Spain and England.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The crude rules for passenger transportation in “the thirties” read strangely to the traveller who almost annihilates time and space in the modern “vestibule train,” at the rate of sixty miles or more an hour. An early resolution of the South Carolina Railroad Board of Directors declares that there shall be “in future not over twenty-five passengers to any car; speed shall not exceed one car and passengers at fifteen miles per hour; two cars and passengers at twelve miles per hour; three cars and passengers at ten miles per hour.”

The city of Savannah is now a centre of railroad and steamship lines. It has the heaviest commerce of all the Atlantic ports south of Baltimore. It is the largest naval stores market in the world, and its cotton and lumber receipts are very considerable. But in spite of its commercial primacy Savannah preserves a distinct flavor of the olden time. On the shores of the Savannah River, where the British ships were burned in the Revolution, a railroad system is cutting slips and building piers, spending a million dollars in terminal facilities. The high bluff where the early colonists planted their crane in 1732 to move goods from the ships to the river bank is now walled-in stone, and the strand is gridironed with steel rails. The [Pg 294]powder magazine near “the Old Fort,” afterwards seized by the patriots of the Revolution, is the site of flourishing foundries. The filature where early colonists were taught to spin silk has been dismantled, and long rows of brick tenements front upon the sandy streets. The tall pines under which Oglethorpe pitched his tents survived the shock of war, and succumbed only to the sweeping storms in 1800. To-day this site is paved with brick and Belgian block, and is the centre of the Bay, where cotton and wholesale men do congregate. “The publick oven” on Congress Street stood opposite Tondee’s tavern, where the first liberty pole was elevated by the patriots, and where a tablet has been placed in the wall of a thriving grocery store to mark the birth of newer freedom. “Fort Halifax,” the breastworks of the “Liberty Boys,” is now covered by the wharves and warehouses of the Ocean Steamship Company, the busiest spot in all Georgia. Spring Hill redoubt, where Pulaski died, is lined by the brick walls of the Georgia Central Railway.

The executive mansion of Sir James Wright, the last royal Governor, stood where the United States has just finished its marble post office, perhaps the handsomest public [Pg 296]building in the country, with the exception of the Congressional Library.

In spite of all these changes, Savannah has followed the original lines laid down by Oglethorpe. The lots are still sixty by ninety feet, flanked front and rear by open streets. The public squares which marked the city at convenient distances, used by the early settlers as camp-grounds and corrals in cases of military alarm, are to-day verdant and fresh with beds of flowers and spraying fountains, and dotted by historic monuments. “The tint of antiquity” still rests upon its walls. Now and then the white mulberry, where the silkworm fed in the eighteenth century, crops out and shows its familiar leaves along the streets, and the house of General Lachlan McIntosh, where the Legislature met in 1782, on South Broad Street, still stands, preserving many of its Colonial lines.

There was a time when Sunbury, the cradle of that splendid secession of 1776, was a port of entry, and the Altamaha was looked upon as a rival of the Savannah. Now the forts of Sunbury are overgrown, and the place is seldom heard of save once a year, when one of “the Critter companies” of the neighborhood [Pg 297]repairs to the historic spot and holds its annual target contest and barbecue. Frederica was a flourishing settlement on South Newport River, but after the Spanish War of 1742 sank into decay.

Ebenezer, on the Savannah, was the home of the thrifty Salzburgers, who gave a distinct stamp to the Georgia colony, but Ebenezer did not long survive the shock of the Revolution, when the British scandalized these primitive people by quartering their horses in the old brick church, which stands to-day. Only Savannah, of all these early settlements, remains, and when one walks through [Pg 298]its beautiful streets and Colonial parks, even now he can easily recall the conditions of that February morning in 1732, when “the odor of the jessamine mingled with the balm of the pine,” and the palmetto and magnolia threw their shade across the sandy bluff.

Hon. P. W. Meldrim, Mayor of Savannah, in a tribute to his city in a recent address, called attention to the fact that the very name of Savannah’s streets, “State,” “Congress,” “President,” are full of patriotic suggestions, telling the story of the Revolutionary struggle. Other avenues bear the historic names of Montgomery, Perry, and McDonough, while the wards have been labeled Washington, Warren, Franklin and Greene.

The real romance of history is the settlement of the colony of Georgia. Two centuries ago the fertile lands extending from the Savannah to the Altamaha had attracted the attention of pioneers and public men. Sir Robert Montgomery had his eye upon this favored tract, as yet unsettled, and described it as “an amiable [Pg 300]land lying along the same parallel with Palestine.” But it was reserved for the first soldier and gentleman of his day to found the new colony and perfect a noble benefaction. Had England exercised the same care over the other colonies as over Georgia, it is possible that the War of the Revolution might have been postponed indefinitely. It is worthy of note that while Virginia and the New England colonies were settled by exiles who drifted to the barren shores of Jamestown and Plymouth to escape religious and civil persecution, the Georgia colonists sailed the seas in the good ship Ann under the fostering care of the mother country, piloted by statesmen and noblemen, and sought the smiling Savannahs with all the forms of royal patronage. These people, released from debtors’ prisons and freed from pecuniary obligations, cleared by a single act of royal clemency from bankruptcy, departed for Georgia with ships supplied from the coffers of nobility, while the spiritual welfare of the people was nurtured by the clergymen of the Established Church. It was a lofty benefaction, and when these hitherto unfortunate men felt their fetters fall, and knew that no bailiff awaited them in Savannah, it was no [Pg 301]wonder that, on the morning of the 2d of February, 1733, they gave thanks “for the safe conduct of the colony to its appointed destination.”

The foundation of the colony was laid along the lines of fraternity. The Carolinians met them at the threshold, and gave them refreshment and substantial aid in laying out their city. The principal streets, Bull, Whitaker, Drayton, St. Julian, and Bryan, were named for prominent Carolina farmers who crossed the river with their servants and helped the Georgians start life in the new world. The fact that Carolina realized that she was building an outpost to protect her against the Indians and Spanish does not detract from the cheerfulness of this assistance. The early days of the enterprise were almost Arcadian. Sir Robert Montgomery, who desired to erect an ideal commonwealth upon this spot and call it “the Margravate of Azalia,” could have conceived no more Utopian plan than that upon which the colony actually commenced to grow. Land was divided into lots for each freeholder under a strict agrarian law. The tracts were entailed, preventing the estrangement of his holdings by an improvident [Pg 302]man. There was no chance for the rich to monopolize the country. The landshark was unknown. Government bounty was prompt and liberal in encouraging silk culture, and the seal of the colony contains the altruistic motto, descriptive of the unselfish product of the silkworm, Non sibi, sed aliis. The very land which Hernando De Soto and his rapacious Spaniards had just ravished in their search for gold was now claimed by these Christian socialists, who started the first work of “benevolent assimilation” on this continent.

Eight years after the colony had been founded, a visitor to Savannah described the progress made in a very clear way. Savannah was then a mile and a quarter in circumference, situated upon a steep bluff forty-five feet above the river. The houses were built of wood, Mr. Oglethorpe’s being no finer than those of forty other freeholders. Residences were good distances apart. To-day, Savannah is one of the most closely constructed cities in the United States. Few houses have gardens, and some of the streets present long rows of tenements in maddening monotony. The squares designed by Oglethorpe for market-places and assembly grounds are now good [Pg 303]breathing-spots, which serve in a measure to make up for the lack of private gardens.

On one of these squares stands the monument to General Nathanael Greene, of Rhode Island, who, according to the historian, shared with Washington the gratitude of the patriots of the Revolution. There are also shafts to the memory of Sergeant William Jasper and Count Pulaski, who fell, martyrs in the siege of Savannah, in 1779. The corner-stones of these monuments were laid by no less a person than the Marquis de Lafayette.

At the time of Mr. Francis Moore’s report [Pg 304]there was a guardhouse along the river where nineteen or twenty cannon were mounted, and continual watch was kept by the freeholders. No lawyers were allowed to plead for hire; no attorneys were licensed to make money; but, as in old times in England, every man pleaded his own case. Where an orphan was interested, or one could not speak for himself, there were persons “of the best substance in town” appointed by the trustees to defend the helpless, and that without fee or reward.

Silk culture was to be the principal industry of the young colony. Italians were brought over from Piedmont to feed the worms and wind the silk. Liberal bounty was given to encourage the Georgians. So intent were the authorities upon this interest that they neglected the cultivation of cotton, rice, indigo and more satisfactory crops. The old filature was designed as a sort of normal school for instruction in this art. This shed was built of rough boards, thirty-six feet long and twenty feet wide, and had a loft, upon the flooring of which the green cocoons were spread. Finally, the trustees, desiring to push this industry, purchased the silk-balls from the growers and wound them at their own expense. But [Pg 305]all this outlay was for nothing. The Government spent £1500 in machines, salaries, bounties and filatures, and raised scarcely one thousand pounds of silk, and yet we are told that England expected the experiment to realize five hundred thousand pounds and to give employment to forty thousand people. To secure a high class of skilful, self-reliant colonists, the trustees had barred out slavery and rum. But the colony projected upon such lofty planes for some reason did not prosper. The people clamored for slaves to cultivate the rice fields, and for the West Indian traffic in sugar and rum to build up their foreign trade. They fought the restricted land tenures; in fine, they wanted to become plain, every-day colonists, like the Carolinians and Virginians. They had been reinforced by the sturdy Salzburgers, the canny Scots, the pious Moravians, and the thrifty Hebrews, but still the humanitarian principles of the charter did not insure them a thriving existence.

If silk culture failed, it is not a little remarkable that in the ranks of this same people, one hundred years later, an invention was perfected which gave rise to a new empire and enthroned as king the best fibre of the field. The filature [Pg 306]on St. Julian Street lost its distinctive character, and became an assembly hall for the town meeting and the militia muster; but upon the Savannah River, a few miles above the city, Eli Whitney, the shrewd Connecticut contriver, worked out the secret saws of the cotton-gin, and made Georgia and the whole South opulent and powerful. The Piedmontese still spin their silk under their own trees at home; but ten million bales of cotton annually whiten in the suns and frosts, and to-day more than one million bales each year are exported from Savannah alone. So two New England heroes, Nathanael Greene and Eli Whitney, aided in protecting the people of Georgia from a foreign foe and in building up their commercial supremacy.

No sketch of colonial Georgia is adequate which omits the name of Tomochichi. This aged Creek was over ninety years old when he welcomed Oglethorpe to his demesne. The loyalty of the venerable mico to his white friends never faltered. He hailed them with all the grace and amity of Montezuma, and guarded them against attacks from the tribes of the interior. In his youth a great warrior, Tomochichi in the evening of his life was noted [Pg 307]for his wit, perception and generosity. When he died, the colonists buried him with military honors in the public square. Oglethorpe ordered a pyramid of stones to be erected over his grave as a testimony of gratitude. It was only during the last year that the Georgia Society of Colonial Dames of America caused a granite boulder, rough-hewn from a Georgia quarry, to be placed in the square where his remains are supposed to lie, commemorating his noble character and heroic virtues.

On the original spot where the colonists established a house of worship stands to-day the beautiful and classic proportions of Christ Church. Here Wesley preached and Whitefield exhorted,—the most gifted and erratic characters in the early settlement of Georgia. Wesley came to the Georgia shores with a fervor amounting almost to religious mysticism. He thought his mission was to Christianize the Indians. No priest from Spain ever carried the Cross among the Aztecs [Pg 309]and Incas of Mexico and Peru with more zeal than the sanguine Wesley.

His career in Georgia was checkered and unfruitful. A man of great ability and undoubted piety, he suspended his missionary work among the Indians because he could not learn the language and never understood their temperament. His ministry among the whites was marked by a severity which made him unpopular. He seems to have been a martinet in the pulpit,—as Colonel Jones calls him, “a censor morum in the community.” He became embroiled with his parishioners and left Savannah [Pg 310]between the suns. And yet Bishop Chandler of Georgia probably spoke the words of truth from the pulpit of Wesley Monumental Church in Savannah, in November, 1899, when he said that “no grander man ever walked these historic streets than John Wesley.”

George Whitefield was a preacher of such talent that Chesterfield said he had never listened to so eloquent a man. Benjamin Franklin regarded him as a model of logic and power. This good Oxford graduate was actuated, like Oglethorpe, by the broadest benevolence [Pg 311]when he established an orphan home at Bethesda; but his zeal outran his slender resources. He incurred heavy debts, mismanaged his laudable enterprise until his spirit gave way under the discouraging situation. He died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, while he was soliciting aid for his cherished project. Whitefield desired to broaden the lines of his Bethesda work, and to found a college for the Province of Georgia. Had the colony given its revenues to such a plan as the people of Massachusetts gave to the support of Harvard, Georgia might have founded a great educational institution fifty years before Jefferson started his work at Monticello, and a full century before Governor Milledge established Franklin College in this State.

After twenty years, Georgia ceased to be a province under the trustees, and became a colony under the King. As originally projected, the enterprise was expensive. The great Oglethorpe returned to England and spent his old age in peace. The trustees surrendered their charter, but the old country had been good to the people. Ties with the motherland were hard to break. This accounted for the fact that Georgia, the youngest of the thirteen, was the [Pg 312]last to sever her relations with England and join in the Revolutionary movement.

Her most prominent men, James Habersham and Noble Jones, through their influence with the Royalists and the popular Governor, Sir James Wright, held the people down at least to a show of allegiance to the British Crown. “It excites small wonder,” writes Col. Charles C. Jones, “that many of the wealthiest and most influential citizens of Georgia should have tenaciously clung to the fortunes of the Crown, and sincerely deprecated all ideas of separation. Of all the American colonies, this province had subsisted most generously upon royal bounty, and had been the recipient of favors far beyond those extended to sister States.” But if the old families were still faithful to England, there was one spot where Republicanism was aflame. The parish of St. John had been settled by New England people who had moved first to South Carolina and then to Dorchester and Sunbury [Pg 313]in Georgia. They were Puritans with no sympathy for the Established Church or for the divine right of kings. They loved liberty, and hated royalty. They were brave, resolute and anxious to form a league against English oppression. Led by Dr. Lyman Hall, a sturdy rice planter and prominent physician of Sunbury, they responded with alacrity to the call from Boston. He went to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, May 13, 1775, and was admitted to a seat as a delegate, not from the colony, but from the parish of St. John. Until Georgia was fully represented Dr. Hall declined to vote upon questions which were to be decided by the colonies. He, however, participated in the debates, and predicted that the example shown by his parish would soon be followed. A native of Connecticut, Dr. Hall was a member of the Midway Congregation, where many patriots worshipped liberty as a part of their religion. The rebel spirit of St. John, in advance of the other parishes, received special recognition when the Legislature afterwards conferred the name “Liberty County” upon this section, where dwelt the descendants of New England people and the Puritan independent sect.

Dr. Hall’s prediction that the example of St. John’s would soon be followed, was rapidly fulfilled. Events moved beyond the control of the old Royalists. The elder Jones and the knightly Habersham about this time passed away, and their impetuous young sons had already made vigorous progress in the gathering struggle for independence. The first liberty pole was elevated in Savannah, June 5, 1775. The loyal men were even then celebrating the King’s birthday; but “the Liberty Boys” spiked the cannon which were ready to be fired on this royal anniversary, and rolled the [Pg 315]dismantled guns to the bottom of the bluff. About this time the powder magazine in the eastern part of the city was seized and some of the ammunition shipped to Boston, where it was used at the battle of Bunker Hill. In June, 1776, Major Joseph Habersham, acting under the authority of the Council of Safety, proceeded to the residence of the chief magistrate, General Wright. He passed the sentinel at the door, and advancing to the Governor placed his hand upon his shoulder and said, “Sir James, you are my prisoner.” Georgia now plunged boldly into the Revolution. Her sufferings and struggles, her prolonged captivity and final issuance from British occupation in July, 1782, are familiar chapters of Revolutionary history.

It is entirely creditable to James Edward Oglethorpe that he should have refused to take control of the British armies against the American people. The great soldier, who had fought under Prince Eugene of Savoy and John of Argyle, declined to draw his sword to strike down the young colonies he had done so much to build up. If England was his mother, Georgia he considered his offspring. He had founded it and protected it, and from the [Pg 316]ramparts of Frederica had beaten back the invading Spaniards at “Bloody Marsh.”

He had sought no reward. The highest philanthropy brought him to these shores to share the lot of the emigrant. The friend of Hannah More, the companion of Pope, the patron of Sothern, Dr. Johnson wished to write his life, and Edmund Burke regarded him as the most extraordinary person of whom he had ever read. There is no specific monument to Oglethorpe in Georgia. Why should there be? A tablet in Cranham Church in England proclaims his excellence; but here, in the language of Chas. C. Jones, “The Savannah repeats to the Altamaha the stories of his virtues and his valor.”

Savannah during the Revolution recalls a story of blood and suffering. If her people [Pg 317]delayed in severing the bonds which united them to the mother country, they struck promptly and boldly when the issue came, and were zealous throughout their long period of captivity in opposing the forces of his Majesty’s government. After the colonists had seized the powder from the royal magazine, and had erected the liberty pole on King George’s birthday, they went actively to work in fortifying the city against the British troops. In February, 1776, when the English war-ships and transports sailed up the river, they were met by the patriots with a galling volley, and their fleet was afterwards scattered by a fire-ship set adrift from the American shore, communicating the flames to the British boats and sending their men and sailors through the marshes in flight. On the 29th of December, 1778, General Howe, the commander of the Americans, was defeated by Colonel Campbell. The English and Hessian soldiers marched through a small path in the swamp, and fell suddenly upon the flank and rear of the Americans, consisting of but nine hundred men, while Colonel Campbell’s forces, which had been landed at Tybee Island, numbered three thousand five hundred. The remainder of [Pg 318]General Howe’s army escaped into South Carolina, and the British took possession of Savannah, which they held for three years and a half. In October, 1779, a bloody battle was fought at Savannah, but the British again triumphed over the allied forces of the French and Americans. Count D’Estaing arrived off Tybee with thirty-five ships and five thousand men. General Lachlan McIntosh and Count Casimir Pulaski marched down from Augusta and formed a junction with D’Estaing. The engagement took place at Spring Hill redoubt, now the site of the Georgia Railway. Count D’Estaing was shot, the noble Pulaski was killed, and the gallant Jasper, who endeavored to plant the American flag upon the redoubt, fell mortally wounded. Shortly afterwards, the French fleet sailed away, and the American forces were left to harass the enemy from time to time. This was done in splendid style by General Anthony Wayne, the Rough Rider of the Revolution, who dashed into the British with his flying columns and inflicted damage day by day. Finally, on the 11th of July, 1782, the English surrendered to General Wayne, who entered the city and rescued it from its long captivity.

A memorial tablet, placed in position at the old site of Tondee’s tavern, marks the spot where the early patriots, braving violence abroad, and even derision at home, erected their liberty pole, while the [Pg 320]frowning battlements of a model bastion commemorate the name of Pulaski.

At the siege of Savannah the city held only about four hundred houses and less than one thousand people. George Washington, who visited the city in 1790, writes in his diary that the place was “high and sandy,” that the town was surrounded with “rich and luxuriant rice fields,” that the harbor was “filled with square-rigged vessels,” and that the chief trade was tobacco, indigo, hemp, lumber and cotton. General Washington was received with every evidence of honor, and the Chatham Artillery was by him presented with handsome guns. This memorable organization, second only to the Ancient and Honorables, of Hartford, fired a salute to George Washington, as they afterwards did to Presidents Monroe, Arthur, Cleveland and McKinley upon their visits to this city. The Chathams served in the Civil War and in the late Spanish-American struggle.

The first steamship ever built in the United States was projected and owned in this city. It was named the Savannah, and in April, 1819, sailed for Liverpool, completing the voyage across the sea in twenty-two days.

Off Cape Clear the Savannah was signalled as a vessel [Pg 322]on fire, and a cutter was sent to Cork for her relief. Thus Savannah perfected not only the cotton-gin, but steam navigation, which revolutionized the industry and commerce of the world. Savannah continued to prosper down to the period of the Civil War, having completed the Georgia Central Railway, the longest and most important line in the South and built up large foreign and domestic commerce at her port.

When the troubles leading up to the Civil War opened, Savannah did not wait for the State of Georgia to secede, but, true to the traditions of Revolutionary ancestry, seized Fort Pulaski on the 3d of January, 1861. The State convention, which framed a new constitution for Georgia, assembled in Savannah on the 7th of March, and the flag of the Confederacy was thrown to the breeze from the United States Custom-House with a salute of seven guns, one for each State of the young nation. The moving spirit of secession in Savannah, the “Mad Anthony Wayne” of the State, was Francis S. Bartow, a young man who, failing to receive permission from the State authorities to go to Virginia, summoned his company and went without orders, sending [Pg 323]back in defiance the message to Governor Brown: “I go to illustrate Georgia.”

He was killed with several of his command at the first battle of Manassas, so that Savannah received the baptism of blood at the very beginning of the Civil War. In November, 1861, General Robert E. Lee made his headquarters in Savannah and inspected its defences. He pronounced Fort Pulaski impregnable, and said its walls, which were seven and a half feet thick, would withstand the heaviest cannon. The rifled guns of large calibre, however, had not then been tested, and their penetrating power was unknown. As a matter of fact, the fort was breached by Union batteries from Tybee Island in one day. On the 11th of April, 1862, [Pg 324]General Gillmore, who had constructed the fort for the Government at a cost of $500,000, reduced it at a range of from two thousand to three thousand five hundred yards. One remarkable fact about the defence of Fort Pulaski was that the Confederates allowed the Northern fleet to sail back of the fort through Wall’s Cut, and interrupt communication with the city. It was through this identical channel that the British reinforced their troops in 1779, the French fleet failing to guard the narrow pass. In July, 1863, the Confederate ironclad ship Atlanta, fitted out in Savannah, sailed for Warsaw Sound to meet the monitors Weehawken and Nahant. The Atlanta ran aground, and was shot to pieces by her antagonists. On December 26, 1864, General Sherman’s army captured the city, eighty-six years, almost to the day, after the British captured it from General Howe. Savannah then contained about twenty thousand people. To-day it has over sixty thousand, is the largest and busiest seaport on the South Atlantic, ships more than a million bales of cotton a year, and handles more than a million packages of naval stores. At Tybee Roads, where Oglethorpe first anchored his good ship Ann; where the [Pg 325]English fleet halted before attacking the town; where D’Estaing moored his French frigates and waited for the Americans to join him; where the colonists captured the powder ship from the English, the first naval engagement of the Revolution; where the sturdy Southern ironclad met the invulnerable monitors of the Union, ships of every flag now ride and rest. Not alone the little “square-rigged vessels” which Washington saw, but big ocean steamships, of which the Savannah was the pioneer, now plow their way to foreign and domestic ports. The shipping of Savannah exceeds that of all the South Atlantic and Gulf ports from Baltimore to Mobile.

Perhaps Mobile is the only American city which has seen five flags wave as emblems of the peaceful rule of as many civilized powers. She has been French, English, Spanish, American and Confederate by turn, and her street names perpetuate her varied story. In the original Creole limits, we find Dauphin and Royal, of the French era; Government, St. Joseph, and Conception, of the Spanish; just without, come many American names like Jackson, Franklin, Monroe, and Congress; and the Mexican War produced Monterey; while Beauregard, Davis Avenue, and Charleston Street, among others, point to Confederate times and feelings. The Latin element is merged in the Teutonic, but it is still shown by the narrow thoroughfares, in the character of [Pg 328]the people, and in some of their institutions and diversions. Steam, electricity, sewers, waterworks, shell roads and handsome buildings have caused a long and romantic history to be half forgotten. Let us recall its chief events.

The region had a story even back of the European. Not only are Dauphine Island and the Portersville coast at the mouth of the bay fringed with banks of oyster-shell, but on the marsh islands of the Mobile delta, and in the swamps adjoining, one often finds huge piles of clam-shells and high mounds of earth. These sometimes contain human bones and ornaments, and point to a large native population before the white man came.

An Indian race, the Choctaw, gave the name to the river and bay, and thus to the present city; for Maubila, or “paddling” Indians, long occupied what is now South Alabama, and their language was in later days the trade jargon from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Their primitive manner of living was interrupted about three centuries and a half ago. The West Indies then became Spanish, and the mainland was explored in all directions for colonization. A map of 1513, attributed [Pg 329]to Columbus, shows many indentations on the north coast of the Mexican Gulf, then without a name, and the only one of them with a river (Rio de la Palma) resembles Mobile Bay. From time to time afterwards a score of other maps, with gradually increasing distinctness, develop the true outline. On them the principal feature of the north coast is a pear-shaped bay within the shore-line, into which empty one or more rivers called Rio del Espiritu Santo, or some variation of that name. It is first distinct on the map which Governor Garay of Jamaica sent home, as showing Piñeda’s exploration of Florida in 1519. Some have thought this the Mississippi River, with a total disregard of the fact that the delta of that great river projects out into the Gulf, while this bay is within the coast. We have to wait a century and a half before there is any account of the exploration of the Mississippi mouth; and meantime, dozens of maps show the bay or river of the Holy Spirit. It is, on the map, the most prominent object on the north coast of the Gulf, corresponding to Panuco (Tampico) on the west. Spanish ships visited it, and some explorers have left descriptions. Narvaez possibly wintered in it on his disastrous voyage [Pg 330]of 1528, and a French tradition was that piles of bones on Dauphine Island were remains of his men. Here, or in Pensacola Bay, De Soto’s admiral, Maldonado, waited for De Soto, and here he certainly touched later in search of his lost master.

The famous expedition of De Soto crossed the Mobile River basin at right angles, but the itinerary is uncertain. The Spaniards did not care enough to map it intelligently, and the Indians, according to the proverb, could tell no tales.

It is doubtful, indeed, if De Soto came much within a hundred miles of the present site of Mobile, although early French tradition makes him to have crossed somewhere near the later settlement of Mobile Indians, about Mount Vernon landing.

In 1558 was made the careful exploration by Bazares, who proceeded from Mexico eastward towards peninsular Florida. Two bays he named Bas Fonde and Filipina. One was Mobile, and it was probably that called Filipina. The object was settlement, and the next year Tristan de Luna occupied the country with fifteen hundred colonists and explored the interior by Nanipacna and Cosa, up to the gold [Pg 331]region of Georgia. But it all ended only in mutiny and misfortune. There was more gold and less fighting in Mexico and South America. The Spaniards claimed regions further north more to keep others from the Gulf than to colonize what is now the United States.

Soon Hawkins, Drake, and the buccaneers on the Gulf gave Spain enough to do. The French occupied the St. Lawrence, and even part of Florida. Raleigh and others led out unsuccessful English colonies. After the wreck of the Armada had destroyed Spanish prestige, the advance of the French in Canada, and of the English farther south, was more rapid. Jamestown and Plymouth were the beginning of colonies which gradually lined the Atlantic. The French took possession of the Great Lakes, and, under Marquette, Joliet, and La Salle, explored the Mississippi to its mouth.

The grand plan gradually took shape in the French mind of colonizing the mouth of the great river, bringing the native tribes under control, opening trade with them, discovering mines, and uniting Louisiana, as La Salle called it, with Canada by a chain of forts at [Pg 332]strategic points. La Salle did not live to accomplish this. He was assassinated in modern Texas, after missing the mouth of the Mississippi. But a worthy successor was found after a few years in the elder Lemoyne, better known as Iberville. In 1699, he was successful in finding the mouth of the great river, but realized that its swamps offered no site for a colony. He and his brother, Bienville, explored the tributaries and the adjacent coasts, and a fort was temporarily thrown up on what is now the east side of the Back Bay of Biloxi. On Iberville’s return from France, in 1702, the permanent seat of the colony was placed at 27 Mile Bluff, on Mobile River, amid the friendly and industrious Indians. The Spaniards, who had themselves lately occupied Pensacola, vigorously remonstrated at this occupation of Florida, as they had at the building of Fort Maurepas at Biloxi. But Iberville was acting for Louis XIV., and soon had everything of value moved via Massacre (now Dauphine) Island and Mobile Bay to Fort Louis de la Mobile. A town was laid out and settled. Conferences with Choctaws and Chickasaws followed, and alliances were made.

The establishment of what was even then popularly [Pg 334]called Mobile was the entrance of a new power into the Gulf country. Tonty, the old companion of La Salle, came to stay, and colonists from France were brought to the port at Dauphine Island by every ship. The shadowy Spanish claim became forgotten west of Pensacola, and the English traders from the Atlantic colonies found active competitors. French influence became dominant in all the great Mississippi Valley. It showed itself in exploration, religion, trade, and war, and was all directed from Mobile.

Exploration and religion went together. The Jesuits had not as strong a hold as in Canada, and the Relations throw little light on Louisiana. But the Seminary of Quebec had missionaries like Davion on the Mississippi and at Mobile, and Jesuits were found among the Creeks and Choctaws. The Illinois region was already known, and portages there and eastward became important, where canoes and supplies were carried from the Lakes to head waters of rivers emptying into the Gulf. Their value continued until our own century, and has pointed the way for systems of canals. Le Sueur, who, with his influential family, lived at Mobile, explored the [Pg 335]upper Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers, whence he carried green earth to France. The Ohio River was occupied to keep back the English, whose traders penetrated even to the Chickasaws and Arkansas, near modern Memphis, and Juchereau established a fort and tannery not far from our Cairo. The Red River was explored in order to bar out the Spaniards and to seize their mines. St. Denis penetrated Texas, and, as a prisoner, visited Mexico. Even the Missouri was ascended in the hopes of finding a way to the Pacific and to the Chinese trading there. Of course, the Mobile waters were well known, and fringed with industrious plantations. In 1714, Bienville took advantage of a war between the Creeks and English colonists to found Fort Toulouse among the Alibamon Indians, below Wetumpka, a move of great importance, and Fort Tombecbé high up on the Tombigbee was one good result of the unfortunate 1736 war with the Chickasaws.

Trade was at the bottom of everything. The Spaniards of Pensacola and Vera Cruz refused all commercial intercourse, and there was little more success with Havana. There was some smuggling, however, and a good [Pg 336]deal was accomplished through the buccaneers and freebooters who roved the Gulf. But the Indians needed blankets, guns and ammunition, beads and gewgaws, and could supply furs, skins and provisions. Much could have been done in the way of agriculture, but, beyond introducing figs and raising some vegetables for local use and indigo for export, the colonists accomplished little. They were not of the right kind. At first they were from too high a rank in society to do much manual labor, and after John Law and his Mississippi Bubble exploited the province they were often jail-birds and prostitutes. Starvation faced them every now and then; mutiny was not unknown; and quarrels of priest and commandant, governor and intendant, were going on almost all the time.

And yet in war and diplomacy they did much. It was mainly with the Indians, although once Pensacola was captured from the Spanish, and Dauphine Island suffered from both Spanish and English attacks.

The Choctaws and Creeks were held in alliance by congresses at Mobile; the Cherokees and Chickasaws were sometimes friendly, and the Mississippi River was kept open for free [Pg 338]intercourse with Canada and the Illinois. Toulouse, Tombecbé, Biloxi, Natchez, Natchitoches, and, later, New Orleans and Fort Chartres and other Mississippi outposts, show the extent of French influence from the capital at Mobile.

In 1710, the site of this town had been moved from 27 Mile Bluff to where the river joins the bay. There the new Fort Louis was built, at first of logs, as shown on the plan of next year, and afterwards of brick, as Fort Condé. Its foundations still exist below the soil of the block bounded by Church, Theatre, Royal and St. Emanuel Streets, with bastions projecting across Royal and Church. Around it was laid out the town, with Royal, Conti, Dauphin and other streets just as to-day; and lots were assigned to Bienville, the sailor Chateaugué, the soldier Blondel, the explorer St. Denis, the engineer La Tour, to the priests and others. For several years affairs were generally prosperous.

The shoaling of the port on Dauphine Island in 1717 led to the removal somewhat later of the capital from Mobile, at first to Biloxi, and then to the daughter-town, New Orleans; and this made a great difference. But the fort was [Pg 339]not abandoned and the place remained important. The Indian congresses were always held here, probably at the Indian house of posts and bark, once standing on the site of the German Relief Hall. There was the annual distribution of presents, too, with talks and solemn smoking, and Mobile was the centre of French influence for all Indian affairs. Choctaws and Creeks were always on the streets. The trade road northwestwardly to Yowanne and other Choctaw towns has become Spring Hill Avenue, connecting Dauphin Street with the suburban homes of Spring Hill, and its portage at Three-Mile Creek was long the boundary of the modern city.

The little town had its society, its church and homes, its public and private history. There are two executions of peculiar horror which are said to have occurred on the esplanade of the fort, possibly where now stands the Court-House. One was when Beaudrot, who under compulsion had guided to safety the men who killed the cruel governor of Cat Island, was placed in a coffin and sawn asunder. The other was when a similar punishment even earlier fell upon the mutineers of Fort Toulouse who murdered their [Pg 340]commandant, Marchand, through an Indian princess, ancestor of the Creek chief McGillivray, of Washington’s time. A pleasanter remembrance of Toulouse, perhaps also in Marchand’s time, was the romance of Madame D’Aubant. Tradition makes her to have been that wife of Alexis Petrovich, the son of Peter the Great, who was thought to have died suddenly in Russia. She only feigned death, however, and escaped to America. At Mobile she met D’Aubant, an old or new lover, and, when he was stationed at the fort among the Alibamons, went there with him, taking their little girl. After his death she returned to Europe.

Mutiny was confined to the outposts, but Mobile had its own troubles. After Bienville finally left the colony in 1740, French influence over the Indians declined. Even he had been unable to restore the confidence and prestige lost through Perier’s harsh treatment of the Natchez. By the Tennessee valley and a land trail above Fort Toulouse passing not far from modern Birmingham, the English from Carolina increased their hold on the Chickasaws, and by Adair’s address had even provoked a civil war among the Choctaws.

Mobile became unsafe, and Vaudreuil connected the three squares north with Fort Condé by palisades, having gates at the esplanade, Dauphin Street, and by the present post office. So reduced was the city that a grant was made to Madame de Lusser of the south and west parts of the old town for a plantation, to be cultivated by her slaves.

This was one of many grants, but the others were not so near. The earliest known was that of a part of Dauphine Island, another of Mon Louis Island (really a part of the mainland), and the St. Louis tract between Three-Mile creek and Chickasabogue, above the city. This was where the Christian Apalaches lived, whom Bienville had colonized on their flight from Florida, as he did the Tensaws, whom he rescued from extinction on the Mississippi. These two tribes became civilized, and were moved to the east side of the Mobile delta, where they gave names to large rivers. French farmers settled all through the country, as far up as the Tombigbee, possibly as Bladon Springs, and along Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound. French names still abound, and some have been only translated. Dog River, Deer River, Fowl River, Fish River, Red Bluff, are [Pg 342]translations, and Bayou Chateaugué (or Three-Mile Creek) still recalls Bienville’s sailor brother, as does Pont Chatooga on Dauphine Island, and Grand Bay; Isle aux Oies, Bayou Coden (Coq d’Inde), Bayou la Batré (batterie), Bon Secours and others are French to this day. Of French families, Grondel, Favre, Lusser, Narbonne, Chastang, Dubroca, and Rochon were important.

But the French development was now to cease. The Seven Years’ War had come, with the world for its stage. In that war America and India saw less fighting than Europe, but their maps were more changed. The English colonies had hitherto fringed the Atlantic, the French inhabited the banks of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, with posts between; but Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham caused the transfer to England of all America east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans. On October 20, 1763, Colonel Robertson, with a company of Highlanders, took possession of Mobile. Fort Condé became Fort Charlotte, named for the young queen of George III., and seventeen years of British rule began.

This was not a long time, and yet in it was much change. It has been only recently made [Pg 343]clear how thoroughly British everything became. Mather, Ancrum, Stuart, McGillivray, McCurtin, in Mobile; Walker, Carson, McGrew, Sunflower, Lizard, Campbell, and McIntosh up the river, were well-known merchants or settlers, and some of these families or sites still survive.

Attorney-General Edmund Rush Wegg had a home on Mobile Bay near Battle’s, and Governor Durnford, to whom when provincial surveyor we owe the first chart of the bay (1771), lived near Montrose. The machinery of government was fully developed. [Pg 344]The governor, council and assembly sat at Pensacola, the capital, and Mobile delegates were leaders there in what Governor Chester calls the “cantankerous” lower house. Mobile was the largest town in the vast province of West Florida, which extended from the Mississippi to the Chattahoochee River, and had her own common law courts. A British custom-house was in full operation. We learn much from the military exploration of the Bigbee by Romans’s and Bartram’s botanical expedition, but most from the papers of General Haldimand, who was long in West Florida. They are preserved in the British Museum, and have been copied for the Canadian government. The collection is a mine for American history in the late sixties and early seventies. He pronounced Mobile that part of the province best fitted for development.

The British established on the Mississippi two forts that were the origin of Natchez and Baton Rouge, and also the one where the Iberville River (Bayou Manchac) left the Mississippi to take off its surplus waters to Lake Pontchartrain and the Sound. Thence the communication with Mobile was covered by a chain of islands, of which Dauphine is the [Pg 345]easternmost. This Bayou Lake Sound passage the British endeavored to clear out and utilize, it being shorter than the ascent from the river mouth, which also they had a treaty right to use. In this way Mobile became a depot and starting-point for expeditions up the Mississippi River to the Illinois and other parts of the great West. Major Loftus started thence on his disastrous attempt to take possession, and the famous Major Robert Farmer successfully ascended from Mobile, and in conjunction with a force from the east occupied Fort Chartres. Locally the most important feature of British times was the Choctaw congress of 1765, which began for this part of America the process of “extinguishing the Indian title.” The French had acted as if the natives were subjects of their king and all territory was French. The English theory was that the savages were under a protectorate, but, while they could not treat with other nations, their lands remained their own until bought by the Crown. This is the modern doctrine of civilized nations as to all savage countries, and the United States have regularly acted on it.

The French had found no trouble with the [Pg 346]climate or the marshes of the Mobile delta, but the British troops were less careful, and for several years suffered greatly. Summer camps were provided, one year on historic Dauphine Island, and longer at “Croftown,” on the high red bluff below Montrose, where the eye commands the full expanse of the beautiful upper bay, and where the British ships could lie at anchor within musket-shot of the sandy beach. The troops one year were practically withdrawn from all Florida on account of the expense of the establishments; but, as New Orleans was in Spanish hands, prudence compelled their early restoration. A popular revolution broke out in New Orleans, followed by a strong Spanish occupation, and the British at Mobile found it expedient to watch their neighbors closely.

When war began in Europe between these two powers, the American colonies on the Atlantic were in revolt against Great Britain. West Florida, under the overcautious General Campbell, was weak in military force. Louisiana, on the other hand, with Mexico and Cuba at her back, and ruled by the young, able, and ambitious Galvez, was strong. The result was what might have been expected.

Galvez reduced the Mississippi forts in the fall of 1779, and the next spring attacked Mobile by land, after an adventurous voyage. Durnford was in command, but he had only two hundred and seventy-five men with which to oppose two thousand. A cannonade, and Campbell’s slowness in sending aid, compelled a capitulation on March 14th, and the district became Spanish. Next year, Pensacola also succumbed. The treaty of 1783 confirmed the Floridas to Spain, and gave the English but a few months to sell their property and leave.

During the intervening years, Mobile was under military rule, but affairs gradually settled down to a peace basis. Many British abandoned their houses or farms, and left them as the property of his Catholic Majesty. The King, after an inquest showing their vacancy, regranted them, in different sizes, to his own subjects, and even to British who had taken an oath of allegiance. In this way, the grants still existing are generally new, and can seldom be traced back to English owners. Courts were held by alcaldes, and the commandant, as civil (political) and military governor, also exercised judicial power. Many proclamations, grants, suits, wills and inventories of this time are still [Pg 348]preserved in the Probate Court. They are in thin books of rough paper, the size of legal cap, with curious old watermarks showing through the Spanish text.

The Spaniards renamed many of the streets. St. Joseph survives instead of St. Charles, and St. Emanuel, Conception, Joachim, St. Anthony and St. Michael also superseded French names. On the other hand, St. Francis, St. Louis, Conti, Dauphin and Royal have outlasted the Spanish changes. The population remained essentially French. Negro slavery had existed since the importations in the time of John Law, and there were many negroes and mulattoes, themselves owning land and slaves. But the commandant, the keeper of the royal hospital, in what is now Bienville Square, the royal physician, the commissary,—for a long time Don Miguel Eslava,—officers of the garrison and other officials were Spanish, and with their families and the priest made up an important part of the population.

For the first eight or ten years even official papers were often in French; but after the out-break of the great Revolution, everything French fell into disfavor.

Proclamations posted on the gate of Fort Charlotte, not far [Pg 350]from Royal and Government of our day, expressed the horror of the Spanish King at the crimes of that great upheaval, and called his children to a holy war. But Spain had her hands full in Europe, and the progress of her half-French post at Mobile was checked. No large public buildings were erected, and most of the private dwellings were small. They have been almost swept away by fires, but the type is preserved in old American homes. It was generally of frame, filled in between with mortar. In front was a wide porch, or gallery, as it is invariably called, often extending around the house, and a long hall, going all the way through, opened into rooms on each side. The chimneys were generally of native brick, and house and surrounding picket fence were whitewashed. The many shells furnished lime, the clay by Montrose and west of the city was utilized for brickyards, while on Dog River, on creeks above the town and on bayous across Tensaw River, were sawmills. These industries have all continued. In agriculture cotton was important, but freshets made indigo unprofitable.

Most of the cotton came from up the rivers, as around Fort St. Stephen, where are the first [Pg 351]shoals of the Tombigbee.

But the delimitation, so long demanded by the new country called the United States was finally run at 31°, and cut Mobile off from her river system. The treaty was made in 1795, and four years [Pg 352]later Andrew Ellicott, of the joint commission, erected near the Creole settlement of Chastang’s, twenty miles from Mobile, the stone which marked the boundary. The result was a rapid influx of Americans north of the line, and the formation of the Mississippi Territory.

The hoisting of the American flag at Fort St. Stephen began the marvellous development and expansion of the United States. Kentucky and Tennessee became States, and Louisiana was purchased, by which the Union crossed the Mississippi. Finally, during the War of 1812, General James Wilkinson took possession of Mobile on April 15, 1813. This was on the theory, consistently adhered to by our Government, that Mobile was still a part of Louisiana. Whether the theory would have been carried out if Spain had been a strong power at the time is a different question.

So Mobile became American, the seaport of Mississippi Territory, whose extent was much that of the old British province of West Florida. The chief difference was that, as its south line was at 31°, there was no seacoast except about Mobile, and that this was compensated by giving a greater extent to the north. When the territory was divided in two, the [Pg 353]west half made Mississippi and the east became Alabama, embracing roughly the basins draining to Mobile Bay.

Most of Wilkinson’s soldiers came via New Orleans, but Mobile was really Americanized from the up-country. Washington County, that vast district of the territory on both sides of the Tombigbee, had been rapidly settled after the Spaniards withdrew. The Methodist, Lorenzo Dow, repeatedly ministered there on his meteor circuits. St. Stephen’s, Tensaw and Fort Stoddert became centres of influence. American courts were regularly held at Wakefield, and American civilization was firmly established in the first few years of this century. The Government was strong enough, in 1807, even to capture the popular Aaron Burr, near the Court-House on his flight from Natchez to the Spanish lines, and to send him on to Richmond for trial.

This development was largely in anticipation of the occupation of Mobile, and when that occurred many people moved thither. Some of the oldest families trace their ancestors to Washington County. St. Stephen’s was almost as much the first site of American Mobile as 27 Mile Bluff was of the French town; [Pg 354]and both are now as deserted as Nineveh. Even an American rival, the younger town of Blakeley, over on the Tensaw River, has succumbed and joined its people to the Gulf City. Much of Mobile’s American growth has been due to immigration from the upriver counties.

For the first few years the great Creek War prevailed, which resulted in driving the Creeks east of a line running southeast from old Fort Toulouse. It was begun by the massacre of perhaps five hundred men, women and children at Fort Mims, in the Tensaw [Pg 355]district, terrifying the whole Southwest. It did not reach Mobile, but a blockhouse was built near the present cathedral. The war was marked by thrilling scenes in Washington County and the fork made by the Alabama and Bigbee; by such incidents as the Canoe Fight on the lower Alabama River and Austill’s night ride; and by Claiborne’s storming of the Holy Ground. In it Andrew Jackson won his fame up on the Coosa and Tallapoosa by such battles as that of the Horse Shoe Bend. When he had made peace with the brave Creek Weatherford, and sent Pushmataha and the allied Choctaws home, he floated down to Mobile.

And there was need. The British were preparing to invade the country. Four vessels under Commodore Percy attacked Fort Bowyer at the mouth of the bay, but Lawrence with the garrison brilliantly repelled them. His motto was, “Don’t give up the fort.” The Hermes drifted directly under his guns and was fired, and then the others withdrew. Indians, under Woodbine, were on land near by, but had no opportunity to participate.

Jackson reconnoitred around Mobile. His headquarters are said to have been at an old [Pg 356]Spanish building, standing until a few years since at the southwest corner of Conti and Conception Streets, opposite the site of the Indian House of former times; but the troops were encamped south of the town, near Frascati. A tree under which he dined used to be pointed out over Three-Mile Creek, and a magnificent Jackson Oak is still shown at the village on the bay above Daphne, commemorating a stop on the way to the capture of Pensacola. It was from Mobile that he issued the two famous proclamations to Louisianians, white and black; and the first stage of his march westward to win the battle of New Orleans was at that beautiful spot near Cottage Hill ever since called the Cantonment.

After their defeat at New Orleans, the British reappeared at Mobile in overwhelming force. Fort Bowyer now had to surrender, and Dauphine Island was for months occupied by British troops. But the treaty of Ghent caused its restoration, and Mobile settled down to its long American development.

“Peace hath its victories no less renowned than war,” but they have less of incident. The settlement of Alabama, the immigration from the Atlantic States to the lands won [Pg 357]in the Creek War, developed her Gulf port. Cotton was king, and it made her queen. Even in 1818, the year before Alabama became a State, Mobile had established her Bank of Mobile, and primitive steamboats, such as the Harriet and Cotton Plant, built much on the model of Fulton’s Clermont, were already plying the rivers.

Everything was rude, as in frontier towns, but here could be found all kinds of people. Bertrand, Comte Clausel, the distinguished opponent of Wellington in Spain, lived for a number of years after 1816 on the bay, near present Arlington, the possible site of Bienville’s villa. Here he wrote his Exposé Justificatif, explaining that defection to Napoleon during the Hundred Days for which the Bourbons condemned him to death; and here he raised vegetables and carried them to market in his own wagon. Through Mobile passed those other Napoleonic exiles who, in 1818, ascended the Bigbee to found the unfortunate Vine and Olive company, in what was called for them Marengo County. Near Clausel lived Lakanal, the regicide, the creator of the educational system of revolutionary France. He was for a short time president of the [Pg 358]Orleans College of Louisiana; but with his wife, Marie Barbe, he also spent most of his American life raising market vegetables in Garrow’s Bend. Tradition says that he and his neighbor Clausel brought their political differences with them, and would not associate. He was violently opposed to Lafayette. That great Frenchman was enthusiastically welcomed to Mobile in 1825. Arches were erected on Royal Street, and he is said to have been entertained at the house on Government Street opposite the Presbyterian Church. Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, included America in his grand tour, and in January, 1826, he also was at Mobile. He does not mention Lakanal at all, nor the Protestant Union Church, built a few years before where Christ Church stands. But the Catholic Church on Royal and Conti, with its tin altar service, and the three thousand people,—French, American, Indian and negro,—interested him; the compress, which by a vise reduced the bale one third; the thirty vessels in the harbor waiting for cotton; the volunteer company celebrating the battle of New Orleans; the wooden houses and brick public buildings, the plank walks and the gambling-houses, the prison, with its [Pg 359]whipping-post, are all recorded. This marks a great advance on Hodgson’s unpleasing description of the place in 1820, and, in fact, Mobile had begun that progress which soon distanced the progress of her rivals and made her in the thirties a great city.

She was the natural result of the growth of the interior, whose products in those days, before railroads, could go nowhere except to Mobile. This growth brought trade, and with it immigration. In 1830, the cotton exported exceeded one hundred thousand bales; in 1837, over three hundred thousand, and by 1840 was almost four hundred and fifty thousand. The population grew to twelve thousand. The results were apparent everywhere. The United States Bank and the State Bank had branches, and others were organized. There was paper money galore. Water and gas were introduced; lands for Bienville Square were bought by the city; the Presbyterian, Christ and other churches were built; a public school system, the first in Alabama, was organized, and the Barton Academy erected; Hitchcock’s Press was operated, and the Cedar Point Railway and Grant’s Pass show attempts to get nearer to Dauphine Island and the Sound. A [Pg 360]lighter side of the same activity was the formation, in 1830, by Michael Krafft and his merry companions of the famous Cowbellion de Rakin Society, the predecessor of the Strikers, O. O. M., and every other mystic organization in the South. It was the transfer of their celebrations from New Year’s Eve to Mardi Gras which has made the carnival season famous. The city grew in all directions; old Creole homes gave way to modern houses, the Orange Grove Tract was built up in warehouses, and St. Michael Street, because of its shipping interests, was called the British Channel. New streets were opened, Spring Hill became a famous summer resort, and handsome residences soon adorned both shores of the bay.

Then, alas, came the panic of 1837, in which, however, the Bank of Mobile is said to have been one of the four banks in the whole country which did not suspend. Everything else seemed to go to pieces. Even the city government made an assignment. To add to the distress, in 1839 was the most disastrous of all fires, in its two attacks sweeping Royal Street and Dauphin and St. Francis up to where the cathedral then stood unfinished. An epidemic of yellow fever the same summer slew the [Pg 361]inhabitants as the fire destroyed their property. The year 1839 is the blackest in Mobile’s history, and Percy Walker’s picture of that dire summer, before the Alabama Legislature, deserves to rank high among American orations.

The depression lasted several years, and before complete recovery it became complicated with a commercial problem. Railroads had been invented, and Mobile with all other ports had to face new problems. M. J. D. Baldwin preached the necessity of building a Mobile road to the growing West, but long he was laughed at as a Cassandra. He persevered, and in 1848 the Mobile & Ohio Railroad was begun towards Cairo, Illinois. It was a magnificent conception, and right fitting it was that Baldwin should have driven the last spike of its realization. The result was that by 1860 the cotton receipts had grown to eight hundred thousand bales, and the next year were about a million.

In 1852 was a disastrous flood, and next year the worst epidemic of her history; but the results were only temporary. New banks, like the Southern and Mechanics (afterwards the Mobile Savings), were organized, the Battle House, Custom-House and other fine [Pg 362]buildings erected, and Fort Gaines faced older Fort Morgan at the mouth of the bay.

Society had long outgrown the crudeness of earlier days, and Mobile hospitality and refinement were famous. At her Bar were John A. Campbell (whose sister, Mrs. Chandler, was the grandmother of the Mrs. Maybrick, now so famous), Daniel Chandler, George N. Stewart, Robert H. Smith, Peter Hamilton, D. C. Anderson, Philip Phillips, E. S. Dargan and other splendid lawyers. In literature there was ample atonement for the neglect of early days. Among Mobile’s books appeared in 1854 Dr. Nott’s Types of Mankind, and in 1859 came Madame LeVert’s Souvenirs of Travel, and Augusta Evans’s Beulah. John [Pg 363]Forsyth and Charles C. Langdon were famous editors of the time, and politics, of course, ran high. The town was generally Whig, and Mr. Clay’s welcome in 1844 was as cordial as was that of Jackson in earlier years. At that time, by the way, Macready held the boards, and drawled a strenuous objection to the announcement on his playbills that Henry Clay would be present at one of his performances.

Mobile theatres, except the last, have generally burned after a few years. The best was built by Caldwell on Royal Street, near St. Michael, and the best-known manager was Noah M. Ludlow, who, with Sol. Smith, operated a Mobile-New Orleans-St. Louis circuit. Ludlow and Smith played a great part in the history of the theatre in the Mississippi Valley. Ludlow’s memoirs are an invaluable compilation, and can almost be claimed as a Mobile book, for he long lived here. J. H. Hackett, Madame Celeste, Ellen Tree, Edwin Forrest, J. B. Booth, Macready, H. Placide, Charles Kean, Mrs. Mowatt, Julia Dean, John T. Raymond and Charlotte Cushman were often on the Mobile stage. The present theatre was opened in 1860, and the late Speaker Crisp [Pg 364]was often about it when his father conducted it during the war.

Fortunately for her, Mobile was not the immediate seat of any part of that great civil conflict; but she was thoroughly loyal to the Confederate cause, and furnished most of her best blood to its support. The Mobile Cadets were tendered by Captain Sands immediately on receipt of President Davis’s call for volunteers, and from there went out, among others, the 3d, 8th, 21st and 24th Alabama regiments, the two companies of State Artillery and Charpentier’s and Watters’s Batteries. There are unmarked graves of Mobile boys from Pennsylvania to Texas.

The Mobile post office in the interregnum issued its much-prized stamps,—two-cent black and five-cent blue. Later the streets were alive with Confederate uniforms, for camps were in the suburbs, and Government Street was the scene of memorable reviews. Society even in those war times was often gay. Courts, too, continued open, although litigation was limited.

Groceries and staples changed hands, much as ever, but at prices measured in gradually depreciating Confederate money. Two hundred dollars for a barrel of flour, or finally even for a pair of shoes, and twelve hundred for a suit of clothes, were not unknown. The wits said that a basket was as much needed to carry the paper money to market as to bring back what it bought. After a while co-operative associations, with agents all through the country to buy supplies, became necessary in order to get things to the city at all. Coffee and some other articles almost disappeared, and various substitutes were used. Books and even money were printed on material that once would have been discarded, and the rough Confederate writing-paper still remains a curiosity.

One new occupation came into being. While Semmes of Mobile, in the privateers Sumter and Alabama, and Maffitt in the Florida, were destroying all Northern commerce which they could find on the ocean, the Federal navy was blockading Southern ports. This was designed to prevent supplies from getting in and cotton from getting out to Europe, and thus doubly to cripple the South. Blockade-running by swift Confederate vessels became common and often successful. The destination of the runners was generally the neutral port of Nassau, in British West Indies. Among these grayish-white vessels were the Alice, Denbigh, and Red Gauntlet. They carried, according to the size, from six hundred to twelve hundred bales of cotton, and brought back miscellaneous cargoes, in which drugs and war stores usually figured. Many of them were captured, and there was no insurance; but others made a dozen or more successful trips. The Heroine, now used as a bay boat, was one of the small blockade-runners. A Mobile Presbyterian minister took his wedding trip on the Swan, bound for Nassau, but was captured with his bride and taken North.

Fort Morgan, under General Page, was well [Pg 367]equipped, and kept the blockaders at a respectful distance. Shots were frequently exchanged between them and the fort, and sometimes, when they ventured to anchor too near the coast, they were surprised by a ball from a cannon, run out behind a sandhill during the night.

The cruiser Florida was one of the ships built in England for the Confederacy, and turned over to its authorities out at sea. [Pg 368]Maffitt took her to Nassau and Cuba, but, as his small crew was sick with yellow fever, and he needed further equipment, he made for Mobile. Personating an English vessel, the Florida, in broad daylight on September 4, 1862, ran by the Oneida, Winona and Cayuga into Mobile Bay, amid a hail of shot and shell. She remained four months, mainly in the deep water off Montrose. The Union fleet was strengthened, and was on the watch for her to come out. But Maffitt, on January 16th, before day, ran through the blockaders again, to their great chagrin, and, although chased, got away to capture prizes off the coast of Cuba. As it turned out, the only way the Federals were able to capture the Florida was in the neutral port of Bahia, while her captain was ashore,—a flagrant breach of international law.

About Mobile a line of land fortifications was early built, at first too far out to be held by a small force. The entrenchments are still visible two miles from town, the most prominent being Fort Sidney Johnson, on the bay beyond Frascati. Afterwards one or more lines were constructed nearer in, and remains lately could be seen near the head of St. Joseph Street, on both sides of Government east of [Pg 369]Ann Street, near the Bascombe race track and near the Southern Drain. Slave labor built them under the supervision of Engineers Pillans and Van Scheliha. These redoubts were never much used, however. The great battles for Mobile were fought at the mouth of the bay and near Blakeley.

Obstructions and torpedoes filled the channels between Forts Gaines and Morgan, except for a short distance immediately under the guns of Morgan. Within the bay lay the Confederate fleet, consisting of three gunboats and the powerful ram Tennessee. This vessel had been built during 1863 and 1864 at Selma, and was equipped with five-inch iron armor at Mobile. As she drew thirteen feet, while the Dog River bar allowed but eight or nine, wooden caissons were sunk and attached to her, and when they were pumped out they raised and lifted her also. The whole Confederate fleet mustered but four hundred and seventy men and twenty-two guns, while the Federal consisted of fourteen steamers and four monitors, carrying twenty-seven hundred men and one hundred and ninety-nine guns.

Farragut started on his perilous passage [Pg 370]early in the morning of August 5th, his vessels lashed in pairs, the monitor Tecumseh in the lead. Then came the Brooklyn with her mate, and next the flagship Hartford, the Admiral in the rigging. As the stately procession neared the fort, all engaged on both sides in a murderous cannonade. Suddenly the Tecumseh lurched, and, in a few seconds, sank, struck by a torpedo. The Brooklyn, despite her torpedo protector, wavered and backed, confusing the whole column, and giving the gunners in the fort an opportunity of which they made good use. But Farragut pushed the Hartford to the front, and restored order, leading the others, amidst a galling fire, into the bay. A little boat had rowed out to save the few who did not go down in the Tecumseh, and the Confederates chivalrously refused to fire upon them, despite the Union flag defiantly run up. The fleet, though much damaged, gradually passed in.

An engagement followed with the little Confederate squadron, but the odds were too great. One gunboat was sunk, another captured, a third finally got away to Mobile, and the ram took shelter, apparently for repairs, under the guns of the fort. And then, to the [Pg 371]astonishment of friend and foe, the Tennessee boldly made straight up the bay to ram the Federal fleet. Vessel after vessel rammed and fought her, but she held her own, unwavering, seeking the flagship Hartford, which, however, was too swift for her to overtake. She engaged the whole fleet at once in one of the most heroic naval combats of history, and did not desist until her plates were loosened, port shutters jammed, smoke-stack carried away, many of the crew wounded, Admiral Buchanan disabled, and the steering apparatus shot away, leaving her as helpless as a log. Then, at last, she hauled down her flag. Farragut sent Buchanan and the wounded to Pensacola, a ship peaceably passing the fort after arrangements had been made for that purpose under a flag of truce.

Troops landed on Dauphine Island had already driven the Confederates into Fort Gaines, and it was invested by land and sea. Farragut had an interview with Col. Anderson, convinced him that resistance was useless, and thus induced him to surrender the fort with all its stores. The Pelham Cadets, Mobile’s home guard of young men, had lately been sent down, and they were captured with the regular garrison.

General Granger landed at Navy Cove with an overwhelming force, and after approaches, run gradually closer from day to day, by the 22d Fort Morgan was completely invested by army and navy. The discipline of the garrison continued perfect, standing the test of an unbroken bombardment, whose thunders were heard at Mobile, thirty miles away. Many shells were thrown into the fort, the citadel fired, and at last the walls were breached in several places. Further defence was impossible, and after spending a night in destroying everything capable of destruction General Page surrendered.

General J. E. Johnston is said to have pronounced Mobile the best fortified city in the Confederacy. If the fortifications on or near the Tensaw River could be taken, however, transports, if not vessels of the fleet, could be sent behind the torpedoes and obstructions to the city wharves.

Therefore Canby, with forty-five thousand troops, including a column under Steele from Pensacola, undertook to overcome about five thousand Confederates in Spanish Fort, which was named from the bastion built by Galvez almost a century before.

Randall L. Gibson, [Pg 374]since Senator from Louisiana, was there in command, reporting—like Lidell at Blakeley—by telegraph to D. H. Maury at Mobile. Gibson handled his fifteen hundred men admirably from Fort McDermott on the right, Red Fort in the centre, and along the line to the swamp, which was relied on to protect his left. The principal gun in his Red Fort was an eight-inch Columbiad, cast at Selma in 1863, and manned by Louisiana artillery, commanded by Slocum. This gun did terrible execution, and dismantled a whole fortification. But, while the sand-bags were still removed for that shot, Federal gunners dismounted her, and killed several men at their posts by her side.[8] Spanish Fort held out thirteen days against over thirty thousand men. The riflemen in the opposing pits even became friendly, and exchanged yarns and courtesies. The fleet, after three vessels had been sunk by torpedoes, picked up enough torpedoes to get within range, and the discovery of a passage through the swamp made it necessary to abandon the whole fort. Blakeley, with its garrison of about three thousand, was finally [Pg 375]stormed on April 9th, the day Lee surrendered in Virginia.

Maury felt that he could not hold Mobile with only four thousand five hundred men, for the Federals could now attack from the river and land at once; and so he withdrew to Meridian. Blakeley was the last great battle of the war.

The Federal troops occupied Mobile immediately upon the surrender by Mayor Slough on April 12th, camping in the suburbs, on Government Street and elsewhere. One unfortunate result was the terrible explosion on May 25th, from careless handling of ammunition in a warehouse on Water and Lipscomb Streets. There were hundreds killed, more than $700,000 of warehouse property was destroyed, and the whole business section of the city was injured. Such was the return of peace!

Mobile, since the Civil War, offers a fruitful field for study. The few flush years, when commerce first revived; Reconstruction, with slaves over masters; bond issues from 1870 on railroads that were never built, resulting in bankruptcy in 1879; the panics of 1873 and [Pg 376]1893, the first of which depressed everything, while the other showed that Mobile had become sound again; new railroads and commercial growth in every line, consequent on the Government’s cutting the ship channel, twenty-three feet deep, through the bars to the lower bay; the growing rivalry of the Gulf port with Eastern harbors for the Western trade to Latin America and even Europe; the passing of the once dreaded yellow fever; the good relations which have existed between the negroes and whites since they were relieved of outside interference; the Cuban War, with its American soldiers (some from Mobile) encamped on ground once occupied by Confederates, and the picturesque embarkation of troops for Santiago; extensive municipal improvements; impressive public structures, such [Pg 377]as the Y. M. C. A. Building, new hotels, and the Semmes statue; the advance of literature, also, which has kept Augusta Evans as Mrs. Wilson, and added Madame Chaudron, Father Ryan, T. C. De Leon, Amélie Rives, Hannis Taylor, and others:—these things are important, but are too recent for detailed treatment.

The net result, however, is that Mobile has faced the political questions growing out of the war, the commercial conditions arising from the building of railroad systems eastward, the development of independent cities in what had been her exclusive territory, just as she has met so many other problems in her long history. What she could conquer she has overcome, and for what she must lose she has substituted other industries. Lumber, coal and iron far overbalance the loss of cotton, and there is no mean array of manufactures, while her railroad and steamship territory yearly increase. To-day her population, trade and prospects are greater than anything she has known before. She has had little of the outside capital which other towns have enjoyed, and she has had no “booms.” But the great fire of 1890, the storm of 1893, and even pestilence in 1897 did not daunt her. In wealth, culture and [Pg 378]industry this Latin-American town has carved out her own place. Her shady streets and drives invite visitors, and her pleasant homes shelter quiet but energetic people. Born in romance, baptized in fire, educated in commerce, her past is interesting, her present prosperous, while her future promises to surpass them both.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] This gun, called the Lady Slocum, could long be seen on Government Street in Mobile, but is now in New Orleans.

[Pg 379]

MONTGOMERY

Montgomery is best known to the general reader as the “Cradle of the Confederacy.” He turns to its history, if he cares to read it at all, to get a clearer local background for the stirring scenes enacted there in ’61. And it would have been hard to select for them a more appropriate setting. For in many ways Montgomery was then a typical Southern town. Situated in the heart of the cotton region, surrounded and supported by large plantations, it was the centre of much wealth and refinement. As the home of Yancey and other men of unusual ability and divergent politics, it had been the battleground where all phases of secession were keenly discussed. Moreover, although founded by a New Englander and [Pg 380]originally named New Philadelphia, it had from the first taken a vigorous part in the economic and political struggles which gradually separated North and South.

To reach the origin of Montgomery, one must go back nearly to the beginning of the century. From the misty traditions that early gathered like an Indian-summer haze about the red bluffs on which the city now stands, the first tangible object to emerge is old Moore’s log cabin, perched insecurely on the high river bank. Here Captain Woodward visited him, and long afterwards wrote: “Arthur Moore, the first white man that built a house and lived in it at Montgomery, built it in the latter part of 1815, or early in 1816. The cabin stood upon the bluff above what was once called the ravine.... The spot where the cabin stood had long gone into the river before I left the country.” Here it stood high and solitary on the crumbling cliff, a picturesque connecting link between the legendary [Pg 381]days of the Indian Town, Ecunchatty, and the bustling Western scenes so soon to follow.

Barely two years later the territorial government of Alabama was established, and the prospect of protection under it proved an inducement to the tide of population then setting strongly toward the Southwest. Fabulous reports of the fertility of the soil got abroad, and a steady stream of settlers poured across from the land office at Milledgeville, Georgia, through the Creek lands into Alabama territory.

Among these pioneers were many men of excellent family from all parts of the South, and even from far-off New England. One of the earliest was Andrew Dexter, of Rhode Island, nephew of the well-known Samuel Dexter, of Massachusetts. In 1817 he bought the land on which the eastern half of Montgomery now stands, and paid for it later with the assistance of John Falconer, a fellow pioneer from South Carolina. Dexter was a man of large ideas and remarkable foresight, and at once recognized the importance of his purchase as a site for a town. By the very modern plan of offering free lots, he persuaded several traders to join his venture, and proceeded to lay off [Pg 382]his town. With touching faith, he reserved a fine site on the crest of the most commanding hill for the future state capitol. It was a prophetic dream that had to wait thirty years for its fulfilment. Goat-sheds meanwhile adorned its brow, and gave it the unpoetic name, “Goat Hill.”

Among the original settlers who came with Dexter was John G. Klinck, a South Carolinian of sanguine and enthusiastic temperament, who, writing years afterwards of the town in these early days, says:

Immigration was brisk, and the high and healthy bluffs were tempting sites for homes. So the next year, 1818, two more towns sprang up in sight of New Philadelphia. One was a mile or two down stream, and bore the name “Alabama Town.” The other, [Pg 383]immediately adjoining, was called “East Alabama Town.” Its site is now included in the part of Montgomery west of Court Street. The jealous rivalry that followed was seasoned with many pranks played by one town on the other. The redoubtable Mr. Klinck, on one chilly night, fired his musket with such continued energy that the neighboring town supposed the Indians were upon them, fled over the river, and men, women and children spent the night among the canes and bushes.

The inconvenience of this rivalry soon became apparent, and on December 3, 1819, New Philadelphia and East Alabama Town were united in one town called Montgomery, a name whose origin Mr. Klinck explains thus:

On the other hand, the Montgomery Republican of 1821 states very positively that the county was named after Lemuel Montgomery, who fell in the fight against the Creek Indians [Pg 384]at Horseshoe, and the town after Richard Montgomery, who was killed at Quebec. Perhaps the river bluffs may have suggested to local pride the heights of Quebec, or possibly the true explanation is suggested in Klinck’s last sentence. It was a name equally satisfactory to all parties. Like a political platform, they all accepted it, and then interpreted it to suit their tastes. The origin of the city in the union of two towns may still be traced in the fact that the streets west of lower Court Street run at an angle to those east of it. Alabama Town stayed out of the consolidation, but the union town had superior resources. First the business, then the citizens, drifted over, and like the earlier Indian town it passed into the twilight of history.

With union came strength and bigger notions, and Montgomery, in the twenties, was a bustling little frontier town, full of enterprise and ambition. One writer, with fond enthusiasm, speaks of its “dense population.” The editor of its first newspaper wrote: “Montgomery, from its high and airy situation ... is considered peculiarly healthy; indeed, many resort to that section during the Summer months.... For an infant establishment, [Pg 385]it may be called a pleasant, flourishing town.” In another issue he adds: “Its present population is about six hundred.”

There was a healthy demand for houses, as is shown by the advertisements in the newspaper. One man offers a gun and a rifle in exchange for planks and shingles, and another a saddle-horse for bricks and mortar. A wholesome respect, at least, was shown for learning in the prompt establishment of schools, and in the advertised arrival of such sturdy books as Murray’s Grammar, Webster’s Speller, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, and (for lighter use) song and dream books. Town and country struggle amusingly in the ordinance that imposed a tax of fifty cents for every dog a family kept—more than one.

The Court-House stood in the centre of what is at present Court Square, and from it the houses extended mainly in two lines, one up what is now Dexter Avenue, toward Goat Hill, the other down Commerce Street toward the river. Perhaps a trace of the New England “Meeting-house” is to be found in the multifarious uses to which this building was put. Here law courts met with suggestive frequency during the week, and the congregation [Pg 386]assembled on Sundays when notified by a special messenger that a preacher was in town, while celebrations, oratory, and even dancing, kept it lively at night.

A motley population rises before our eyes as we run through the list of their amusements. There is the speculator at the horse-races, the frontiersman at the Indian ball game, the vociferous patriot at the regular celebration of the Fourth of July and Washington’s Birthday, and even the spirits of defeated Indians and English seem to gaze grimly from the background at the hearty observance of Jackson Day. Yet among all these the most significant fact is the earnestness and delight with which the drama was cultivated. A company composed of local amateurs on December 17, 1822, presented Shakespeare’s play, Julius Cæsar, in the upper story of the old building still standing at the corner of Commerce and Tallapoosa Streets, and if we may believe the newspaper “it went down to the satisfaction of a numerous and splendid audience.” Of the actors, one afterwards became Governor of Alabama, another United States Senator, another a State Supreme Court Judge, and a fourth, Governor of Georgia.

It was a memorable day in the history of this little town when, on April 3, 1825, the great Frenchman Lafayette, then on his last visit to America, stopped here. The reception given him, though not without its amusing incidents, portrays vividly the eager and open-hearted temper of the citizens. Escorted by three hundred Alabamians and a number of Indians, he reached Montgomery on a beautiful spring morning, and was met by the entire population on what is now Capitol Hill. Captain Woodward, who was one of his escort, thus quaintly describes the scene:

He was hospitably entertained at Colonel Edmonson’s, on Commerce Street, where he received with kindly grace the crowds that pressed around him. At night a grand ball [Pg 390]was given him in the building now standing on the corner of Commerce and Tallapoosa Streets; and in the small hours “a large concourse of citizens escorted him through the darkness down to the landing, and bid him a hearty but mournful adieu amid torrents of tears.”

Frontier life conduces to early maturity in cities as well as in men, and Montgomery was no exception to the rule. The hard knocks that produce self-reliance were not slow in coming. In spite of disastrous freshets and destructive epidemics, the population increased, and with its growth came a new and rougher element. An old newspaper suggests drily: “It requires no stretch of art to put rubbish before a shop door; to take down a gingerbread-maker’s sign; to take the wheels from a lady’s carriage and put them on a silversmith’s shop; and make noise enough to disturb the slumbers of the sick by beating stirrups for triangles, and blowing conch-shells for French horns.” Drunkenness and gambling increased, and the same paper soon had occasion to add: “This is the third, if not the fourth, attempt at homicide in this place within a few months.” Such things were the first test of the city’s [Pg 391]capacity for self-government, and were met by primitive but rigorous measures. Indecency of language or conduct was punished by a ducking in some neighboring pond, followed by a ride on a rail. There is a record of an outrageous scoundrel who attempted to steal and sell an Indian family, and was promptly whipped through the streets by the squaws while the citizens lined up and saw it well done. But the lawlessness increased until finally it destroyed the peace and threatened the existence of the town. Then it was that the law-abiding class rose in mass, and under the leadership of Colonel John H. Thorington put down the gang and cleaned out their haunts.

If they had at times been too lenient toward lawlessness, and at others too impatient to wait for legal formalities, a ready explanation may be found in their absorption in business cares and enterprises. A new country of unknown resources had to be developed. Other things must wait. Governor Gilmer, of Georgia, who visited Montgomery in 1833, was deeply—perhaps too deeply—impressed with this side of their life. He says:

The hardest problem that the business man of those early times had to face was the question of transportation. Dry goods, groceries and manufactured articles had at first been brought from Savannah and Charleston by wagon or horseback. But the way was long, the roads wretched,—especially through the Creek territory,—and the Indians demanded exorbitant tolls at the bridges; so the method was anything but satisfactory, and other plans were soon tried. Barges and flatboats were laboriously poled up from Mobile. They bore the promising names, Alabama Swan, Lady of the Lake, Cotton Patch and Ready Money, but consumed from fifty to seventy days on the trip. The local paper records the arrival of an “amphibious animal in the shape of a boat from East Tennessee.” It came down the Tennessee, [Pg 393]was transported across thirty miles of land to the Coosa, and by that river reached its destination. After a journey of a thousand miles, it finally arrived with an amusing assortment of flour, whiskey, apple brandy, cider, dried fruit, feathers and a five-wheel carriage,—some of which must have been taken on board near the end of the trip.

Under such circumstances, the arrival of the first steamboat, the Harriet, on October 22, 1821, marked an epoch. Nor did the town fail to appreciate its importance. The entire population turned out to bid it welcome. The next day it carried an excursion up the river at the lively rate of six miles an hour. Steam was too precious to be wasted in whistling, so a gun was fired to signal its approach.

While the Swans and the Harriets were struggling for supremacy, a third rival destined to supplant them both made its modest appearance. The Montgomery Railroad, delayed by the panic of ’37, opened the first twelve miles of its line for business in 1840. It made no great display, and when the engine was out of fix horses were substituted without hesitation or serious loss of time. But it was the beginning of a system that soon put the city in close [Pg 394]communication with the older Eastern States; and when President Davis came in 1861 over the same road, he traveled in a private car made in its own shops at Montgomery.

Business was the dominant interest during the first two decades of the city’s existence, and may have seemed to visitors like Governor Gilmer to exclude all other thoughts; yet beneath the surface there smouldered the Southern devotion to politics. The town was scarcely two years old when the Missouri question gave rise to an ardent discussion of State rights, which found frequent occasion for renewal in subsequent years; and at the public dinner prepared in celebration of the Fourth of July, 1826, there were two toasts whose sentiment seems strangely significant in the light of after events. They were:

Nor was their zest for politics a mere fondness for empty debate or idle personalities. It was an innate love for public affairs, a desire [Pg 395]to discuss and to take part in whatever touched the public welfare. Now it was a question of State versus national power in the Creek region, and they with other Alabamians took such a lively hand in it that Francis S. Key, the author of The Star Spangled Banner, had to be sent down as special commissioner to smooth matters over. A year later it was Texas struggling against the absolutism of Santa Anna, and so keen was the interest felt at Montgomery that a mass-meeting was held in the theatre, funds were contributed, and a company of forty men under Captain Ticknor was raised in the immediate neighborhood. In addition to the princely pay of $8 a month, there was the uncertain promise of a square mile of land out there. They got just six feet of it; for they were massacred after surrender at Goliad. In 1840, their attention was engrossed by the picturesque “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign. Log cabins, coon-skins, and hard cider were seen on every hand, and the “Great ball,” which the Whig enthusiasts rolled through so many cities as a spectacular admonition to “keep the ball rolling,” passed through the streets inscribed with denunciations of the Nullifiers.

But, after all, the event which made politics a prominent feature of life at Montgomery was the removal thither of the State capital. Tuscaloosa, its location at that time, not being accessible enough, a constitutional amendment was adopted providing for its removal, and on January 28, 1846, the Legislature, after a hot contest, selected Montgomery as the site. Two days later, the Selma stage brought the news to the city. Next day there was a [Pg 397]grand procession, and at night there were bonfires and a jollification that would have gladdened the soul of old Andrew Dexter. His desire was to be fulfilled, and the capitol was to stand on the very lot he had reserved for it on Goat Hill nearly thirty years before. The new building, erected by the city, was ready in the fall of ’47; the archives in one hundred and thirteen boxes were laboriously brought from Tuscaloosa in thirteen wagons, at a cost of $1325—figures as significant of poor transportation facilities as they are full of the magical number thirteen—and all was ready for the Legislature, which met in December. The effect on the city is vividly described in Garrett’s Public Men:

The new building was burned two years later, but was immediately rebuilt on substantially the same plan.

Immediately on becoming the seat of government, Montgomery of course became the most important place politically in the State, and during the stirring years before the Civil War was the scene of many events which connected its history more and more closely with that of the country at large, and paved the way for the conspicuous part it was to play in ’61.

The war with Mexico, like the struggle of Texas, aroused here more than a passing interest. In spite of the sad fate of Captain Ticknor’s men, its citizens enlisted again and went to the front under Captain Rush Elmore and Colonel J. J. Seibels; and during the first few weeks of its session in the new capitol the Legislature suspended routine work more than once to join in the enthusiastic receptions accorded such returning heroes as Generals Quitman and Shields.

From that time until the Confederacy was born in its midst, the little city, like a mountain lake, bore on its ruffled surface traces of every storm that passed over the land. No other city reflected more vividly the heated debates in Congress over the fatal territorial problems thrust on us by the Mexican War. [Pg 399]Nowhere else was the attitude of the South on these burning questions stated so promptly and so emphatically as in the once famous Alabama Platform, first presented by Mr. Yancey, February 14, 1848, to a great political convention assembled in the capitol. The scene was historic, and is thus described by his biographer, Mr. DuBose:

It was a characteristic example of his keen political foresight and also of the wonderfully persuasive eloquence that set his hearers on fire. No orator ever combined more perfectly closeness of reasoning with the fire of earnestness and an irresistible personal magnetism. The capitol, old Estelle Hall, every public place in the city, rang with the mellow tones of his voice; his debates with Hilliard were attended by throngs never equaled in the [Pg 400]State before or since; and the mention of his name at this day arouses in the memory of old residents a sense of ecstasy produced by no other. No better idea of his manner can be given than by quoting once more from his biography, this time from a letter of General H. D. Clayton, describing a subsequent impromptu debate with his great friend and opponent, Hilliard:

In the debates and speeches of those days the men and the measures of the last decade [Pg 402]before the war are preserved with a vividness that seems almost magical. Estelle Hall echoes with fierce discussions of the great Compromise of 1850. What a vista of history opens before the mind as the streets resound to the tramp of Colonel Buford’s men on their vain errand to Kansas! And what a sobering sense of reality it brings to read his card in the papers! “I wish to raise three hundred industrious, sober, discreet, reliable men, capable of bearing arms; not prone to use them wickedly or unnecessarily, but willing to protect their section in every real emergency.”

But interesting as these incidents are to the student, they were historically only preliminary to the dramatic events connected with the secession of the State and the organization of the Confederate Government. The course of South Carolina and the propositions for compromise had been watched with the greatest eagerness, and when the Alabama Convention assembled in the capitol on January 7, 1861, the excitement was intense.

Hotels were crowded, lobbies thronged, the factions were busy caucusing, and so close did the estimate of votes run that a delegate who was opposed to secession exclaimed: “Mr. Yancey can save [Pg 404]the Union by the wave of his hand.” When the convention finally, on January 11th, came to a vote, the scene was a solemn and impressive one. Mr. Yancey, as chairman of the committee to draw up the ordinance of secession, rose to close the debate. The majority of the committee, he said, preferred that the ordinance should state simply that the State resumed its original sovereignty by its own act, without adding anything that might seem an apology; but for harmony they had yielded to the desire of the minority and agreed to a preamble and certain resolutions. The question was put and the vote stood 61 to 39. Alabama had declared her independence.

At night the capitol and other buildings were “most beautifully illumined,” and fireworks and speeches gave vent to feelings long pent up.

But in the excited crowd were sad hearts as well as gay. Many who heartily believed in the right of secession deemed it inexpedient at the time. A few caught some vision of the dreadful days to come; and one house at least amidst the general rejoicing was draped in mourning.

All hesitation was, however, soon swept away by the contagious excitement of the speedy assembling of the Confederate Congress. South Carolina had suggested Montgomery as the place of meeting, partly because of its central location, partly because of the conspicuous part it had already played. The idea met with favor, and the Alabama convention gave the proper formal invitation.

The little city, so soon to become the storm centre of the South, was at that time a town of some twelve thousand inhabitants, but made the proud boast of being the richest for its size in the country. A newspaper writer of the day thus describes it:

Here assembled, on February 4, 1861, the delegates from the Southern States that had seceded, and, amidst scenes still familiar to all [Pg 408]Americans, they proceeded to organize the Confederate Government.

The excitement culminated with the arrival and inauguration of Mr. Davis. An enormous crowd escorted him from the depot to the Exchange Hotel, where he was welcomed by Mr. Yancey in an apt little speech containing the famous words “The man and the hour have met.” The ceremony of inauguration took place February 18th in front of the capitol. The enthusiasm was unbounded. One who was present declared years afterwards: “I never before or since that hour so experienced the ecstasy of patriotism.” At 10 o’clock in the morning Mr. Davis left the Exchange in a carriage drawn by six white [Pg 409]horses. A vast throng escorted him up Dexter Avenue to the capitol.

Years have gone by since those brave days. The scenes that so stirred not only Montgomery but the entire land have passed into the pages of history. The eager throng that crowded Capitol Hill, and hung breathlessly on every word of the brief inaugural address; the ringing cheers and the roar of cannon that welcomed the news of Virginia’s secession; the groups of leaders planning earnestly laws and constitutions and deep schemes of public policy; the soldiers in gray marching by with high hopes and light step; the sad day when the Confederate Government packed its archives and took its departure for Richmond—these memories and a thousand others that cluster about them will always be kept alive by the tender sentiment that clings to the Lost Cause.

But Montgomery, true to the spirit of its history, does not look backward. Business enterprise has adapted itself to new surroundings. It is to-day a city of the New South. On the site of the old Indian town, Ecunchatty, stands a great modern factory. The change is typical. Far over the wide stretches of field and river float the long streamers of smoke, the banners of the modern army of industry, in striking but friendly contrast to the white dome on Capitol Hill, the centre of Montgomery’s past and present political life.

[Pg 411]

NEW ORLEANS

Sail across the blue waters of the Gulf and make your way up the mighty current of the Mississippi, like the leisurely traveler of yore, if you wish to approach New Orleans in the proper way and spirit; unless—which also furnishes a proper way and spirit—you wind your way down the mighty current, from some far northern starting-point. And for guidance provide not yourself with an up-to-date map of the United States, crisscrossed with railroads, and speckled with illegibly printed names of swarming towns. The pilot chart of the steamboat is the true informant here if you are not the fortunate possessor or borrower of some old print of the last century, one of those happy combinations of fact and imagination issued by the ancient cartographer [Pg 412]in the effort to compromise old theories with new discoveries; charts tracked by the foot of the pioneer, not by the wheel of the locomotive, graded by the paddle of the canoe, not by that of the steamer; charts that bear record to the history as well as geography of a country and chronicle its ever-clearer and ever-increasing vastness and importance. Upon such a map was the name New Orleans first written down. Naught to the north but Canada and the Great Lakes; to the east, the Atlantic seaboard with its mere fringe of English settlements fenced in by impassable mountains; to the west, mountains again, and illimitable prairies, covered over by bounding buffalo. South, lay the Gulf of Mexico with Florida on the one side, Mexico on the other. From one of the Great Lakes at the north, Lake Michigan, to the Gulf of Mexico at the south, comes through the blank expanse of paper, the huge, black serpent line of the Mississippi twisting and curving through, a triumph of the artist, its great valley, pictured from mountain range to mountain range, teeming with Indian villages, fields of waving corn, droves of innumerable deer, and illimitable forests. At the head of navigation lay the little village of [Pg 413]Chicagou, about midway the little stronghold of St. Louis, at the terminus New Orleans; the three names linking together across the distance two hundred years ago even as to-day.

De Soto first conceived the project of founding a settlement upon the Mississippi River, his Rio Grande. As he lay stricken with fever upon its banks within sight of its majestic currents, his mind dwelt upon the glory of annexing the great stream and its territory to Spain, the souls of its peoples to the Catholic Church. From his couch, he urged forward the building of the ships to be sent to Havana for the [Pg 414]necessary supplies; with dying ears he listened to the sound of the busy axes and hammers, and with dying voice he charged upon his men the accomplishment of what would turn all the suffering and loss of their expedition into brilliant success and ensure his fame and theirs to all time.

But the Spaniards, sinking the body of their commander beneath the turbid waters of the Mississippi, sank there too his plans and ambitions, and, turning their backs upon the river, recked not that Spain should gain or lose it.

Over the burial spot of the Spanish explorer floated, a century and a half later, the boats of La Salle, the Canadian explorer. As he paddled his way down the gigantic stream, the like of which he had never dreamed existed in the world, he was, in thought, making that map of the country described above. And by the time his boats came into view of the Gulf, his scheme for affixing the great river and valley to France lay as clear in his mind as the blue expanse before his eyes. He would first build strongholds, settle colonies, and mass friendly Indians at the mouth of each tributary. French traders, coureurs de bois, and missionaries, with a free and secure route [Pg 415]before them, would then ply their canoes backwards and forwards between Lake Michigan and the Gulf, where French vessels would be lying at anchor in the sheltered harbor of the commodious city he purposed to build. The French flag once securely established on the Gulf coast of the continent meant nothing less than the gradual elbowing of the English out of the country on the Atlantic side, and the capture of the Mexican gold mines from Spain whenever opportunity offered.

Like De Soto, La Salle proved only a forerunner in history. The brilliant scheme he [Pg 416]conceived and failed to execute was carried to success ten years after his death by Iberville. He discovered the river from the Gulf, and, entering it, explored its course until he identified it as the river discovered from the Lakes by La Salle. And he it was who selected the site for the future city upon the Mississippi, the possession of which meant, to any power that held it, domination of the Gulf of Mexico and of the great waterway, the life artery of the American continent. When Iberville selected that site upon the narrow neck of land lying between the river and an equally navigable chain of lakes, he wrote the history of his city in advance.

The first year of the eighteenth century saw France indeed mistress of the Mississippi and of the Gulf of Mexico, but Iberville, like De Soto and La Salle, was cut off in the prime of life and activity, and his work was left to another for accomplishment—to Bienville, his young brother.

One cannot think of New Orleans without Bienville, nor of Bienville without New Orleans. From the time he came into the country, a mere stripling, midshipman to Iberville, until he left it, a middle-aged man, the city [Pg 417]upon the Mississippi was the star by which he guided all his hopes and ambitions, all his colonial ventures. For eighteen years, during which the seat of government was shifted from Biloxi to Mobile and from Mobile back again to Biloxi, through changes of king and ministry, and through all the personal political vicissitudes of an official dependant of those troublous times, he never ceased to urge upon the home authorities the founding of the city, all the while setting aside with unwearied patience the baffling objections against it in his own council-boards.

His opportunity came at last, in 1718, when Louisiana was made over by contract to John Law and the Company of the West; then, as Governor, he had full authority to act with men and money at his disposal. He himself brought his axemen to the spot, saw the land cleared and laid off in lots, according to the map prepared by the royal engineers. A handsome little city it was to be according to this map; with fair, square sides, straight streets; with a place d’armes, parish church, cemetery, barracks; all complete, even to the naming of the streets—Chartres, Condé, Royal, Bourbon, Dauphine, Burgundy, Conti, St. Louis, [Pg 418]Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Anne. No nicknames were to be allowed here to chance and illiteracy, no plebeian “Broads,” “Mains,” “Highs”—a right royal little city it was designed to be from the first, and one worthy its princely godfather, Law’s patron, the Duke of Orleans.

Bienville himself piloted the first royal vessel of provisions and immigrants through the mouth of the river, and made the first landing at the levee bank, crowded to-day with commerce and shipping. Finally, in 1723, Bienville removed thither all the government offices and stores, and made New Orleans the capital of the colony. In a year, the city was in full tide of progress, and attaining its majority as a city among the oldest cities of the continent.

History and romance carry on the chronicle of its life, for it is a place whose history has become romance, romance history, in our literature.

The neat little square checker-board prepared by Bienville’s engineers, has grown out of all regularity of proportion; unwieldy and awkward enough it is now upon paper, with its streets that vainly strive to run straight, as they follow the bend of the river, or “Crescent” [Pg 420]as it is called. But the first map still represents the centre, the heart of the city, the source of its tradition and sentiment. And to the children of the city—or, we should say, the descendants of the children of the first-born of the city, there has been no change in this “mother” spot, save that of harmonious growth and age;—at least so they think in tender reverence as they saunter through the old thoroughfares with the high-sounding names.

The place d’armes has become Jackson Square; the public market, the French market; the parish church, the Cathedral; the Ursulines Convent, the Archbishopric; the cemetery is now the old St. Louis—beyond Rampart Street, instead of outside the Ramparts, as it used to be called. The vieu carré—as the original city is affectionately called—has suffered its share of the vicissitudes of cities. More than once, tornadoes and fires have swept whole quarters of it bare of dwellings. Epidemics of yellow fever—then as now said to be brought in from Havana—decimated the inhabitants at recurrent intervals; while the river ever and anon rose up and overflowed its banks, producing a steady crop of [Pg 421]domestic fevers. But the gay-hearted inhabitants—then, even as now—seemed to draw from their misfortunes only zest for greater energy of work and greater pleasure in life.

Every ship that arrived brought accessions to the population—accessions, not immigrants, and therefore reckoned by quality, not quantity. Gay sprigs of the nobility were sent out to “la Nouvelle Orleans” to mend their morals; thrifty ones, to mend their fortunes; ambitious sons of the bourgeoisie came seeking opportunity for acquiring landed estate; old officers remained when their terms of service expired; [Pg 422]new officers willingly grew into old ones in a place so near akin in society and elegance to Paris. For Paris was the arbiter and model of New Orleans, and never had the great city by the Seine an apter pupil than the little city by the Mississippi.

Social elegance and pleasure reached its standard height under the administration of the Marquis de Vaudreuil—“le grand Marquis,” as he was called. His entertainments, banquets, balls, theatrical performances, his manners, dress, conversation, his etiquette, civil and military, furnished the code which, in a way, still governs social practice in the city.

When, in 1763, France, by the Treaty of Paris, signed away all her possessions east of the Mississippi to England, she yet retained her grasp on the jugular vein of the North American continent by reserving the Island of Orleans, as it was denominated—that is, the mouth of the Mississippi. And now the city, by right and title the sole French metropolis of North America, made so rapid and so great a stride forward in wealth, population, and commercial activity, that even its easy-going, pleasure-loving citizens began to feel the exhilarating [Pg 423]reality of the possibilities of their geographical and political situation in the country; of their importance, not alone to France, but to the American continent. But the awakening of the people to the consciousness of their political virility was no better than an awakening by the hand of an executioner.

On a bright day in October, 1764, the men of the city were called together in the place d’armes, to listen to the royal edict that transferred them, their families, and property; in short, all the territory and subjects yet possessed by France in America, to Spain. The consternation of the people, their indignation and excitement, their public meetings, address to the King, their repudiation of Spanish authority and Spanish government, the bloody [Pg 424]punishment by O’Reilly, executing six and imprisoning in Havana five of the conspirators, as he called them, and, finally, the forcing of the colony under the domination of Spain—all of this can but be enumerated here, but it forms a chapter in the history of New Orleans, the omission of which can be justified only by necessity.

The city became Spanish in language, law, manner, dress,—in all externals, but its heart remained firmly French, as after events proved. It is ever acknowledged, however, in the history of the city, that the Spanish rule was a wise and just one; and, as is well said by all chroniclers, the Spanish found the city a city of wooden one-story houses, and left it a city of brick mansions.

It was during the Spanish domination that the great conflagration of 1788 took place—when the heart of the vieu carré was left a mere heap of rubbish and ashes. Bienville himself had not a barer spot before him when he laid out the first streets in his clearing than Don Andres Almonester, the Alferez Real had when, in the midst of the public sorrow and grief over the disaster, he offered to rebuild the religious and civil official edifices. His tombstone [Pg 425]in the Cathedral gives the list of his claims upon the gratitude of posterity: founder and donor of the Holy Cathedral Church, founder of the Royal Hospital of St. Charles (the present Charity Hospital), founder of the hospital for lepers, of the Church of the Ursulines Convent, of a public school; of the Casa-Curiel (Court-House)—in virtue of which munificence, Don Andres lies buried under the altar of the Cathedral, and a prayer is said for the repose of his soul every day at Vespers.

Following the example of the edifices of Don Andres, private buildings were constructed on a style grandiose beyond any that the city had seen before, and the manner of living imitated the manner of building. And now, under the well-regulated, ponderous monotony of the Spanish domination, the city might have enjoyed a repose as immutable as that of her pious benefactor, had it not been for the great stream rolling past her to the Gulf.

No longer did the Upper Mississippi flow through virgin forests and savage villages. Out of the independence of the United colonies was born the “West,”—the great West as it was [Pg 426]then and is still called, teeming with energy and hardihood, with fruitfulness and prosperity. Before the day of railroads rivers furnished the only outlet to commerce. The Mississippi, gathering up with the waters of its tributaries the harvests of their valleys, bore down to New Orleans a continuous line of flatboats laden to the edge. The cargoes found ready sale and were soon the main food supply of the city, and the sturdy flatboatmen returning to their farms were ever better and better satisfied with their market, and more and more discontented with the foreign ownership of it. In their parlance, the valley owned the river, and the river owned the mouth. Spanish obstinacy and American temper, concessions and evasions, threats and brawls, kept the city for a score of years filled to the brim with political excitement. Outside the wall and canal—the Canal Street of to-day—lay a new city, an American city, populated by flatboatmen and produce traders, against which the gates of the Spanish city were carefully closed and sentinels set at nightfall.

But it were as well to attempt to hold back the current of the river itself as the current of popular determination that flowed down with [Pg 427]it from its great valley.

As it came, so, by secret compact, the Spanish flag went—to be replaced not by the old Fleur-de-Lys, but by the Tricolor; the new and glorious banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was easily made at home in a city whose republicanism under the pruning of Spanish rule had only rooted itself the more deeply.

For a short space, popular joy rioted in wild rejoicings. But it was only for a moment that the French flag fluttered over the place d’armes, a bare three weeks. Then it descended its staff and the American flag rose in its place. In the Casa Real, the seat of the Spanish Cabildo, the ceremony of the cession of Louisiana to the United States took place, the most important event, judged by results, that has taken place in the history of the Republic, enlarging the United States in domain by a territory three and a half times as great as its original size, raising it in political sovereignty to parity with the greatest European powers.

The Spanish walls were demolished, but the American [Pg 430]domination made slow impression upon the vieu carré. It has never really altered the type. There was, correctly speaking, no American domination in the vieu carré until the term ceased to be used, when Louisiana was admitted as a State into the Union.

The memorable discussion in Congress over the admission of Louisiana need be recalled here only to introduce the next important event in her history,—the great and glorious victory of the Battle of New Orleans on the 8th of January, 1815. That victory was the vindication of Louisiana’s right to Statehood in the Union;—it was New Orleans’s dower gift to the Nation’s history.

The American quarter, the new town, built by the flatboatmen outside the wall of the old town, is still called the American quarter by the old inhabitants. In architecture and physiognomy, in material prosperity and educational progress, it rightfully and justly represents the American domination. But for art, poetry, romance, sentiment, and inspiration the denizens of the new city flee into the old mother quarter as into a sanctuary, where in the quiet and gloom, it may be, of the past, they find refuge from the glare and incessant pursuit of [Pg 431]activities of the present. It is the quarter that strangers love. Upon any one of the fine days of a New Orleans winter, a score or more of these visitors may be seen, strolling through the aisles of the Cathedral, or the halls of the old Cabildo, or sitting in the sun on the benches of Jackson Square watching the leisurely, picturesque procession of passers-by, as the soft bells of the Cathedral mark the no less leisurely procession of the hours.

Vicksburg has no colonial traditions. The Walnut Hills on which it stands, near the northern margin of that portion of Mississippi which was successively under the sway of France, Great Britain and Spain, could not be settled and improved until long after the region about Natchez. The city is, in fact, of modern origin. The county of Warren was not organized until 1809, and Vicksburg had no real existence until it became in 1836, second after Warrenton, the county-seat.

To understand the late origin of the town, one should study the colonial history of Mississippi. By the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi in 1680-82, France claimed all the territory drained by the river and its affluents [Pg 434]from the source to the mouth, and also all territory east and west drained by streams that entered the Gulf of Mexico. The French colony was planted at Biloxi on the Gulf coast, which was made the capital. Shortly afterwards the capital was transferred to Mobile and finally located at New Orleans. Settlements spread slowly along the shores of the Gulf and up the Mississippi River, penetrating but a short distance inland on account of the contiguity of hostile Indians.

During the eighteen years of British control that followed the French and Indian War, an impulse was given to emigration from Great Britain, and from the older colonies some settlers came who desired to avoid participation in the Revolutionary War. In 1779-80 Spain drove Great Britain out of the territory west of the Mississippi, acquired by the treaty which closed the French and Indian War, and held and controlled the same for fifteen or more years, with the colonial seat of authority at Natchez. By the treaty of peace with Great Britain at the close of the Revolutionary War, the Mississippi River on the west and the 31st parallel on the south were declared the boundaries of the United States.

During the Spanish possession and control of the lower Mississippi River, serious protests and diplomatic representations had been made to Spain against the onerous exactions and tributes which she imposed on commerce from the upper valley and imports through New Orleans. To haul the tobacco, wheat, corn, pork and other bulky products of the region across the mountains over dirt roads to Baltimore, the nearest seaport and market, was hardly possible. The Mississippi River was the quick and easy highway to New Orleans and tide-water. Spain was under treaty obligation to allow free navigation of the Mississippi, and to deal liberally at New Orleans with commerce from the upper valley, but she shamefully set at nought her obligations, until, in sheer exasperation, the people of Kentucky and Tennessee were on the point of fitting out a military force with which to open the river to free navigation and commerce and to drive Spain from New Orleans. The Federal Government rose to the emergency, and Spain, obliged to choose between war or cession, concluded in 1795 a treaty of cession, by which she surrendered the territory in question and agreed to retire within six months after ratification of the treaty.

Georgia, claiming that her colonial limits by the charter of 1735 extended by parallel lines westward to the Mississippi River, in 1785 organized in southwest Mississippi a county called Bourbon, and appointed justices of the peace, who, however, never attempted to exercise their functions. In 1795, the year the treaty was made with Spain, Georgia sold to four of the speculation land companies enormous acreages of land in what is now Alabama and Mississippi.

The first relief, permanent and secure, from all the discouragements to emigration was furnished when the Congress of the United States, in 1798, organized a territorial government for Mississippi and applied to it all the benefits, advantages and privileges of the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of the territory northwest of the river Ohio, except the clause of the sixth article, which prohibited slavery. Georgia in turn promptly yielded up her territorial and political claims to the United States for pecuniary and other considerations.

From the date of organized authority, population rapidly poured in. The Bayou, Pearl and the Big Black ceased to be the outer [Pg 438]confines of the new settlers. They spread rapidly over all the lands which the Indians had ceded. As settlements were carried east of the Walnut Hills a town at that point became a necessity for trade. A town was laid off on the plantations of William Vick and John Lane into blocks or squares by parallel streets north and south, east and west. The building of a town on the bluff at the southern extremity of the delta and of easy access to the uplands eastward was a natural response to the needs of commerce. Its growth and development have kept pace with the increase of agricultural production of the region tributary to it. The Vicksburg of to-day is specially adapted to the manufacture of cotton, lumber and metals into finished goods. Raw material is abundant and available. Transportation by water and rail to home and foreign markets is adequate to meet the largest demands. When the Isthmian Canal shall have been constructed, the ports on the Gulf will be nearer the Orient than the ports on the Atlantic, and unusual impulse will be given to manufactures and agriculture.

Large plants for the utilization of cotton seed are in full operation at Vicksburg; match [Pg 439]and furniture factories are actively at work. Other enterprises are slowly building up, and the natural and economic advantages of the city for manufactures are becoming more apparent.

The public buildings of Vicksburg—Court-House, Post Office, churches, schoolhouses, and hotels—are typical and creditable. The Court-House, situated on one of the highest eminences, towers above the surrounding buildings and is pleasing to the eye from every point of view. The tradition is that it was planned and designed by a slave belonging to the contractor who built it. The United States building is handsome and commodious. The city abounds in churches. It is provided with an excellent system of waterworks and electric street-railway service. The system recently adopted of free education for both races has from time to time been so enlarged as to its curriculum of studies and improved as to its methods, that it has superseded private schools, except an educational establishment for both sexes under the control of the Roman Catholic Church.

Vicksburg has been the home of several of the State’s ablest men, who have proved large [Pg 440]factors in making history. S. S. Prentiss was an orator of national reputation and an eminent lawyer. Others worthy of mention are: Judge W. L. Sharkey, one of the most learned jurists of the Southwest; Governor John J. Guion; Governor McNutt; Walter Brooks; United States Senator George Yerger; a great lawyer, Joseph Holt, in later life Attorney-General of the United States. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, Senator in Congress and a gallant and distinguished soldier, lived the greater part of his life in Warren County, a few miles south of the city.

We now come to that period in the history of Vicksburg, when, during the Civil War, for a time the even current of commercial and business life gave place to a series of events, perhaps the most notable and far-reaching in influence on the shifting fortunes and results of the great conflict. The bluffs at Vicksburg are of pre-eminent importance as a strategic point to the complete control of the great river which almost divides the continent from south to north, penetrates the upper valley nearly to the great chain of lakes, and with its affluents affords about fifteen thousand miles of navigation. No object contributing to the [Pg 441]final issue of the war could have presented itself to the great leaders on both sides of the conflict as of more urgent need than the possession and control of the Mississippi. In 1862, movements were begun against the fortifications which the Confederates had placed on the Cumberland and Tennessee and the upper Mississippi. So important and urgent did this appear as a necessary means to a speedy and successful close of the war that operations were begun very early to drive the Confederates from the river, and were conducted both from above and from its mouth. The close of the year 1862 found the Federal naval and military forces dominating the river from the north as far south as Vicksburg, and from the south as far north as Port Hudson. A campaign, supported by the fleet, was undertaken on the east side of the river. The Federal forces moved from the Yazoo River along the banks of the Chickasaw Bayou with a view of gaining a foothold on the bluffs above the city. A battle, stubbornly contested, was fought, and resulted in the defeat and repulse of the Union forces. It demonstrated the impracticability of capturing the city by attacking the army entrenched on the bluffs.

The following year a much larger army was convoyed down the river by a fleet of gunboats, and landed at Milliken’s bend, sixteen or seventeen miles above the city, on the west bank of the river. A tentative and unsuccessful effort was made by General Grant to divert the river across the peninsula by cutting a canal, so as to pass his vessels of war and transports below out of reach of the batteries on the bluffs. Meantime a furious and incessant cannonade was kept up between the gunboats and shore batteries. Finally a large part of [Pg 443]his fleet, under cover of the darkness of night, succeeded in passing the batteries, with the loss of one vessel and serious damage to others. This movement on the water, followed by the marching of the army down the west bank, unmistakably indicated to General Pemberton, Confederate commandant, the plan and purpose of the campaign. He promptly withdrew the most of his army from the breastworks, crossed the Big Black River, and so disposed his men as to retard or arrest altogether the march of General Grant. General Pemberton’s plan was to form a junction with General Johnston, who was on his way to take part in the defence of Vicksburg. General Grant succeeded in interposing his army between Johnston and Pemberton, gave battle to Johnston at Jackson, and obliged him to fall back northward to Canton. Heavy and obstinate battles were fought at Baker’s Creek, Champion Hills and at Big Black. Pemberton, failing to unite forces with Johnston, deemed it prudent to recross the Big Black, return and re-occupy his trenches round the city. General Grant followed and closely invested the Confederate works, placing his army behind breastworks and in trenches. Two or three gallant [Pg 444]assaults made on the Confederate works were met with determined courage and repulsed with great loss of life. The control of the river by the gunboats, above and below, made the reception of reinforcements or supplies from the west or from any source by water, impossible. The land forces spread around the fortifications cut off succor from the south and east, so that it became a mere question of time, before starvation would compel a surrender without more waste of life in hazardous and bloody assaults. When Pemberton marched to the Big Black, the supply of food in the city was low; on his return his army was placed on short rations. Constant service on the fortifications, inadequate food supply and midsummer heat developed a great deal of sickness, so that when the surrender was made on the 4th of July, after a siege of forty days, provisions were about exhausted, and one third or more of the garrison were on the sick-list, unfit for military duty. It is perhaps not out of place to say that in no campaign of the Civil War was there higher courage or greater devotion to soldierly duty displayed than here, by both participants.

The events of the siege derive their true significance from the circumstance [Pg 446]that they constituted the fatal blow which broke the Confederate power and hastened the war to its end.

The National Cemetery on the bluffs, just north of the corporate limits of the city, is, taken all in all, perhaps the most attractive patriotic cemetery in the South. The visitor to the city always seeks it first. Nature has given to it sublimity; art and landscape-engineering have imparted all the freshness and loveliness that flower and shrub and tree can give. Here rest sixteen thousand soldiers who lost their lives in the service of their country in and around Vicksburg. Such care and veneration for those who fell under the national flag while a grateful tribute to valor and heroism serve at the same time to keep ever fresh and active sentiments of martial valor and a warmer pride in all that adds glory to the country and illustrates its military prowess.

Nothing could more strongly and nobly testify to the fact that all the issues and controversies which culminated in a long and bloody war have been closed and settled and relegated to the past than the measures now in process of execution to convert the trenches and bastions around the city of Vicksburg [Pg 447]into a park beautified by all that landscape-engineering and art can do to make the place attractive. That which appeals to-day with so much force to the sensibilities of Americans is not so much the mere transformation of the rugged hills, as that the place so wonderfully transformed is and will ever be a perpetual witness that sectional discords and strifes have disappeared from our national life, and that henceforth the great family of States and Territories, with their seventy or eighty millions of people, are members and citizens of a common country, protected by the same flag, the emblem of sovereignty to all.

The beginnings of Knoxville were Scotch-Irish. Its founder was James White, a Scotch-Irishman from North Carolina. Its first place of worship was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Church, wherein the faith of the Covenant was preached without mitigation, to the edification and uplifting of the community. The dominant element of its population until after the Civil War was Presbyterian, and it is still strong.

The first effort of the white men to possess themselves of any part of Tennessee was in 1756, when old Fort Loudon was erected about thirty miles west of where Knoxville now stands. Fort Loudon did not long resist the Cherokees. Its short story is one of the most [Pg 450]romantic and one of the most tragic in the early history of the Southwest.

Twelve years later, the first permanent settlement in Tennessee was made upon the waters of the Watauga in the northeast corner of the State. This little community became, soon afterwards, the Watauga Association, a practically independent government, with a written constitution; indisputably the first of the kind that was formed on this continent, by men of American birth, and inspired by American sentiment. Its leaders were James Robertson, afterwards the founder of Nashville, a typical Scotch-Irish pioneer; John Sevier, afterwards the first Governor of Tennessee, a man of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Huguenot descent, and of [Pg 451]extraordinary abilities, who became a resident of Knoxville; and John Carter, presumably descended from the noted Virginia family of that name, many of whose descendants are citizens of Knoxville.

About the year 1787, the settlements having extended gradually down the Holston, we find James White living upon the site of Knoxville and owning, then or later, much of the land now covered by the city. If traditionary statements are to be trusted, a part at least of the first house erected by James White is still standing, its original sturdy and loopholed logs protected and preserved by a sheathing of boards. The name first given the settlement was “White’s Fort.”

In 1790, North Carolina having ceded her possessions west of the Alleghanies to the United States, the “Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio” was created, and President Washington named as its Governor his friend William Blount, of North Carolina. In 1791, Governor Blount decided to make White’s Fort, which was by that time called Knoxville in honor of General Henry Knox, the capital of the territory, and the town site was surveyed in part and laid off [Pg 452]into lots by its owner, James White, in that year.

The location is on the north bank of the Holston, four miles south of the junction of the French Broad and Holston rivers, giving to the last stream the name to which it is entitled, without regard to many temporary, ineffective and indefensible changes of river nomenclature in East Tennessee by legislation. Between two creeks, once clear and vigorous, but now defiled and depleted by many civilized uses, rises a plateau of about two hundred and fifty acres, of diversified but comparatively level surface. Where this elevation slopes to the river on the southeast, the town made its [Pg 453]beginning, and climbed slowly up the hill until it reached the highest point overlooking the river, which was crowned with a blockhouse known as the barracks, where a scanty garrison of regulars was intended to protect the settlers and to overawe the Cherokees. The barracks boasted at least one great gun, which was fired morning and evening with punctuality and impressiveness.

The coming of Governor Blount was the beginning of the greatness of Knoxville. Blount was a notable man. He had been a silent but respected and not uninfluential member of the convention that framed the Federal Constitution. He was the friend of Washington, and his lineage was most ancient and most honorable, reaching back to the time of William the Conqueror, in whose train, and among the beneficiaries of whose bounty, was one of his ancestors. The family had been settled long, in opulent circumstances and in social and political prominence, in North Carolina. The Governor was a man of education, of fine presence, of graceful and winning manners and of unfailing, if dignified, urbanity. He was unquestionably the first gentleman as well as the chief magistrate of [Pg 454]the “Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio,” although neither honorable lineages nor good manners were wanting there. In addition to all this his Excellency was most fortunate in his wife. The praises of the lovely and accomplished Mary Grainger Blount were in the mouths of all men, and even of many women in those days. It was a memorable occasion when the Governor brought his gracious lady from North Carolina to Knoxville, and placed her at the head of his court, which was conducted with no little circumstance and dignity.

It is said that he imported, likewise, weather-boarding, wherewith he encased the logs of a great house which he had constructed as a home for his wife, and that no sooner had this attractive and expensive transformation been accomplished, than the front yard was converted into a flower garden, the first of its kind in the town, and certainly one of the most admired anywhere.

In July, 1791, Governor Blount made at Knoxville a treaty with the Cherokees. Nearly fifteen hundred Indians were present, including forty-one chiefs. The Governor had caused to be erected in a conspicuous place on [Pg 455]a hillside overlooking the river a large tent, wherein he remained withdrawn until all the expected company had assembled. Then the doors of the tent were thrown open and he stood forth, arrayed in splendor, and surrounded by the chief civil and military notables of the territory. The resplendency of his Excellency’s dress-sword, laced coat and cocked hat are much commented on by historians. Second in splendor of raiment and dignity of deportment to the Governor only, was James Armstrong, known as “Trooper,” formerly a dragoon in his Britannic Majesty’s service, and versed in the ways of courts. The Annalist of Tennessee characterizes him, for this occasion, as “arbiter elegantiarum.” The Governor stood upon a platform, and one by one in due order the Cherokee chiefs were presented by Mr. Armstrong, while the assembled warriors gazed in awe upon the imposing ceremony. A treaty was solemnly entered into, and was speedily broken by both whites and Indians.

In 1794, an act of the territorial Legislature was passed, which after reciting the founding, in 1791, of a town named Knoxville in honor of Major-General Henry Knox, [Pg 456]“said town consisting of sixty-four lots, numbered from one to sixty-four consecutively,” enacts in solemn form, that a town be established on the spot indicated, and names commissioners for its government. In 1797, fifty-nine more lots with necessary streets were added. In 1799, the town was authorized by law to elect its commissioners, but for two years the act seems to have been ineffective. The commissioners when finally elected entered promptly upon a course of vigorous municipal legislation and administration. Among other things a town sergeant was elected, and required to patrol the streets three nights a week, or oftener at his option. Slaughter-pens within the town limits, wooden chimneys, hogs upon the streets, dead or alive, and the firing of guns and pistols within the corporate limits were declared nuisances, punishable by fine, fifty cents being the highest lawful fine. Two of the offences for which this highest fine was prescribed were drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. A few years later, presumably under pressure of popular demand, the hog ordinance was repealed, but the provision against wooden chimneys seems to have been rigorously enforced.

In 1815, the town was empowered to elect a Mayor, and Thomas Emmerson, afterwards a Judge of the Supreme Court of the State, became the first Mayor.

That the name Knoxville had been adopted before November 5, 1791, is made certain by the fact that on that day appeared the initial number of the Knoxville Gazette, the first newspaper published within the bounds of Tennessee. Its publisher was one George Roulstone, a native of New England, whose Yankee enterprise appeared in the fact that while the paper from the first was called the Knoxville Gazette, it was for some time published at Rogersville, an older town, seventy miles east of Knoxville. It is supposed that the publisher was prevented by difficulties of transportation from moving his press to Knoxville. The Gazette was a three-column paper of four pages. It had not many advertisements and very little local news, but was filled with accounts of the French Revolution and of European affairs in general. It gave much space to questions of ethics, and reprinted many political and patriotic speeches.

The first and only Legislature of the Territory met at Knoxville in February, 1794. [Pg 458]Among the acts passed was one establishing a college near Knoxville, to be called Blount College, in honor of the Governor. This it is believed was the first strictly non-sectarian institution of higher learning established in the United States. It was afterwards successively named East Tennessee College, East Tennessee University, and the University of Tennessee, under which last name it now exists and flourishes. It is unsurpassed among Southern institutions of learning for its thoroughness, and in respect of its beautiful situation is almost unequaled in the whole country.

The treaty made by Governor Blount in 1791 bound the whites to refrain from encroachments on the Indian lands, and pledged the Indians to desist from hostilities. The whites did not all act in good faith, while the Indians, with characteristic treachery, failed from the outset to regard the treaty. At first the Cherokees contented themselves with occasional outrages, but in the year 1793 it was known that the whole nation was in arms. The Indians were emboldened by the avowedly pacific policy of the Federal Government. Governor Blount had received specific instructions to act only on the defensive. Arson and [Pg 459]murder were of daily occurrence and went unpunished. It was with genuine relief, therefore, that the whites received news, late in the summer of 1793, that the Indians had, in effect, declared war.

On the night of the 24th of September, 1793, a body of more than a thousand warriors crossed the Tennessee River some twenty-five miles below Knoxville and marched in the direction of that place. Seven hundred of this invading force were Creeks and the remainder Cherokees, and, strangely enough, one hundred of the Creeks were [Pg 460]mounted. It was the intention to reach and to attack Knoxville at daylight, but they found difficulty in crossing the river, and were further delayed by a consultation among the leaders upon an interesting question. This was whether they should kill all the people of Knoxville, or only the men. The discussion of this nice question of casuistry proved so attractive, or provoked so many differences, that daylight seems to have found it still unsettled.

At sunrise on the 25th the Indians heard the morning gun at the barracks at Knoxville and concluded that it was an alarm signal. Halting near Cavet’s blockhouse, eight miles from the village, they entertained themselves by decoying and butchering the inmates. Their coming had been made known on the 24th to the people of Knoxville, who prepared with courage and energy to resist them. The total fighting strength of the whites was forty men. It was determined to waylay the Indians, and after firing upon them to retreat to the barracks. Accordingly, leaving two old men with the women and children, the remaining thirty-eight spent the night concealed on a wooded ridge west of the town, fearlessly awaiting [Pg 461]a foe outnumbering them more than twenty to one. Early on the morning of the 25th, however, a messenger brought the news that the Indians had lost heart after the affair at Cavet’s and were in full retreat.

In this little band of defenders was the Rev. Samuel Carrick, a Presbyterian minister, afterwards the first President of Blount College, of whose conduct on this occasion there is a pleasing and honorable tradition. It is said that when news of the invasion came he was preparing to bury his wife, who had just died, but, putting aside his grief, and leaving her beloved remains to be buried by the women of the neighborhood, he seized his rifle and hastened to take his post at the front.

A month later the Tennessee militia, led by Sevier, were in the heart of the Indian country, and the battle of Etowah, on the 17th of October, 1793, ended the campaign and cowed the savages.

From this time until the Civil War, Knoxville was outside the current of important public events. From 1792 to 1796, it was the capital of the “Territory South of the River Ohio”; from 1796 to 1811, except for a little while in 1807, it was the capital of Tennessee. [Pg 462]About this time the capital of the State became peripatetic, on account of the westward trend of population. As late as 1834, we find a member of the Constitutional Convention of that year introducing a resolution for the ascertainment of the “centre of gravity” of the State, with a view to the permanent location of the capital upon it. It will be interesting to know that the official to whom the question was referred reported the centre of gravity to be identical with the geographical centre. The capital was finally fixed at Nashville, which is not on the centre of gravity, but is otherwise fully entitled to the honor. Meanwhile, in 1817, the capital returned for a brief stay at Knoxville, and then finally departed westward.

The Constitutional Convention of 1796 met at Knoxville in January of that year with William Blount as President, and promulgated the first Constitution of Tennessee. John Sevier was the first Governor and took up his abode at Knoxville. He began to build a large brick house, but hospitality and every form of liberality exhausted his means and he removed to the country before the first story of the house had been constructed. The house was completed by another owner and was designed [Pg 463]to overlook the town from a distance. It now stands with its back and one side to intersecting modern streets, and its front to the side yard. Sevier was for eleven years Governor, and then was elected to Congress. He died in 1815 while on a journey to the Creek nation as Commissioner of the United States. His remains reposed in Alabama until 1889, when they were disinterred, brought to Knoxville, and deposited in the Court-House yard, where their final resting-place is marked by a graceful shaft of native white marble. Sevier, always the popular hero of Tennessee, is the most brilliant figure in the pioneer history of the Southwest.

Blount was one of the first Senators from Tennessee. His impeachment as Senator upon charges which to this day no man fully understands and which to the Western people seem to have imported no turpitude, did not affect his standing in Tennessee. He is buried in Knoxville in the old First Presbyterian churchyard.

Within a few feet of his grave is the tomb of Hugh Lawson White, son of James White, “the founder,” and known as the “American Cato.” He was a Judge of the Supreme Court [Pg 464]of Tennessee, many years a member of the United States Senate, and for a time its President.

He was long the intimate friend of Andrew Jackson, but was alienated by Jackson’s imperious methods, and became a candidate for the Presidency of the United States against Jackson’s political heir, Martin Van Buren. He was defeated, but carried his own and two other Southern States. He was one of the strongest, purest and most patriotic of American statesmen, and was a conspicuous figure in the Senate even in the days of Webster, Calhoun, Clay and Benton. For fifteen years (from 1812 to 1827) he was President of the Bank of Tennessee, located at Knoxville, which was almost the only bank in the South that weathered the [Pg 465]financial storms which followed the War of 1812.

On the western limit of the town stands an old weather-boarded log house, wherein tradition declares that George Farragut, the father of the Admiral, once lived. The county records show that George Farragut owned the ground on which the house is situated. The great Admiral certainly was born in Knox county at Low’s Ferry near Campbell’s Station, where, on the 15th of May, 1900, Admiral Dewey unveiled a monument, which was erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution to his illustrious predecessor. Old deeds to George Farragut sometimes call him “Fairregret,” but he signs himself Farragut.

Sam Houston was reared near Knoxville, and there are many stories of his handsome [Pg 466]presence, winning manners, great abilities and abounding debts.

Full of interest to strangers is a frame dwelling in East Knoxville, standing flush with the sidewalk, and entered by high steps that encroach upon the pavement. This was the home of William G. Brownlow, known as the “Fighting Parson,” one of the most remarkable men in the history of Tennessee. He was a Methodist minister, an editor with a gift of invective that has never been surpassed, an ardent and fearless Unionist, the Reconstruction Governor of Tennessee, and finally United States Senator. Brownlow was a man of the Andrew Jackson type. The Southwest, and especially Tennessee, gave to public life in the first half of this century a class of men with distinctive physical, intellectual and moral qualities. Physically, they were tall, angular, rawboned; intellectually they were alert, positive and often narrow; they were honest and sincerely patriotic, but vindictive and unrelenting, the truest of friends, the most aggressive and dangerous of foes. Jackson, Brownlow and Isham G. Harris were men of this kind; Harris seemingly the last of them.

In theological and political controversy, in [Pg 467]both of which he delighted, Brownlow neither sought nor gave quarter, and his fame as a polemic went through the Southwest long before the Civil War.

Soon after Tennessee seceded he was imprisoned, and then released and sent North, where he made many characteristic speeches, and wrote a book into which he gathered all the bitterness of his hatred of secession and of the secessionists. When the Federal authority was re-established in Tennessee, it was supported, and its local policy mainly directed, by the loyalists of East Tennessee, among whom Brownlow was most prominent in State affairs, and in national affairs Horace Maynard and Andrew Johnson. The intensity and resolution of Brownlow’s nature were such that he [Pg 468]sometimes followed the logic of his hatred of secession to extreme ends, so that by the Southern element in the State he was hated as the Irish Catholics hated Cromwell. But his conduct, after all, was in keeping with the spirit of the times, and not a little of the censure that fell upon him was unjust. In private affairs, while always forcible and positive, he was a kindly, just and generous man, of pure life and of correct principles.

Horace Maynard, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Amherst, came to Knoxville in 1837 and became Professor of Mathematics in the University. Later, he was for twelve years a member of Congress, then Attorney-General of the State, Minister to Turkey and Postmaster-General. His eminent abilities and his pure character entitle him to special mention and to the highest commendation. His son, Commander Washburn Maynard, distinguished himself in the late Spanish War.

Another noteworthy citizen of Knoxville was Thomas A. R. Nelson, whose speech in Congress against secession was praised by the London Times in the highest terms. Mr. Nelson was of the counsel for Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial, and was afterwards a [Pg 469]Judge of the Supreme Court of the State. He was one of the best lawyers and one of the most eloquent and accomplished public speakers the State has produced.

When the Civil War broke out, East Tennessee, not being a slaveholding section, and being the Whig stronghold, was overwhelmingly for the Union. The Union leaders were Johnson, Maynard, Brownlow and many others of almost equal ability. Knoxville was the capital of East Tennessee. It had grown principally by the increase of the original population, and the kinships of its people, especially of the more prominent families, were exceptionally extensive and intricate. A majority of these well-to-do people went with the South, but a large minority was loyal, and the common people, as a rule, held to the Union.

The first encounter of hostile forces at Knoxville was on the 20th of June, 1863, when Colonel Saunders with a force of fifteen hundred Federal soldiers on a raid through East Tennessee, halted in front of the town. A brief artillery duel ensued, in the course of which Captain Pleasant McClung of Knoxville, a conspicuously gallant Confederate officer, was [Pg 470]killed. After an hour’s firing Saunders resumed his march without entering Knoxville.

Toward the end of August, 1863, the Confederates evacuated the city, never to re-enter it, and on the 2d of September, General Burnside entered and occupied it. The next event of importance was the siege. It will be remembered that after his retreat from Gettysburg, General Lee detached Longstreet’s corps from his army and sent it south to aid General Bragg. Longstreet remained with Bragg until November 4th, when he set out to rejoin Lee, marching overland through East Tennessee and western Virginia. This movement was a serious menace to General Burnside, who had at Knoxville and in its vicinity about twelve thousand men to oppose to Longstreet’s twenty thousand. Longstreet’s approach to Knoxville, however, was so deliberate as to allow Burnside time to concentrate his forces and to fortify himself hastily but effectively. On the 20th of November, the town was invested, but not thoroughly. The Confederate General was not aware apparently that the Holston and French Broad rivers came together four miles above Knoxville, and contented himself with [Pg 471]blockading the Holston above the junction, leaving open the French Broad, by means of which supplies were constantly conveyed to the besieged.

On the 29th of November, at daylight, the Confederates assaulted Fort Saunders, on the west of the town, an almost impregnable point in its outer defences. The attacking force consisted of three brigades of McLaw’s division. The attack was delivered upon the northwest angle of the fort, probably its strongest point. It was necessary for the storming party, after climbing a high hill, to pass a difficult abattis, and to make its way through a labyrinth of telegraph wires stretched between the stumps of the original forest trees which had been felled. Having overcome these obstacles, a deep ditch was reached, beyond which rose the parapet of the fort to the height of more than twenty feet. When the broken, disordered and bleeding mass of Confederates reached the verge of the ditch there was no hesitation. In the face of a deadly musket fire and of a continuous discharge of hand grenades, they hurled themselves into the ditch and scrambled upon hands and knees up the steep and slippery [Pg 472]embankment. Three times they succeeded in planting their battle-flags upon the parapet, and once they entered the fort, but only to be killed or captured after a desperate struggle. The assault failed. Three hundred Confederates were captured, and from five to seven hundred dead and wounded lay before the abattis, among the broken wires and in the ditch.

This attack upon Fort Saunders was one of the most gallant and desperate encounters of the whole war, and if it had occurred upon a more conspicuous field would have been ranked with Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

General Longstreet now concluded to molest Burnside no more, and leisurely retired to Virginia. Grant sent twenty thousand men to reinforce Burnside, but Longstreet had already withdrawn.

Immediately after the war Knoxville began to increase rapidly in population. The loyalty of East Tennessee won much favor for it at the North, and many desirable additions to the population of Knoxville came from that section.

It is probable that no city in the South contains so large a proportion of citizens of [Pg 474]Northern and Western birth. Of foreign-born citizens there are comparatively few, the tides of immigration having flowed always north of Mason and Dixon’s line. Knoxville is therefore a thoroughly American city, of forty thousand population, free from sectional sentiment, progressive, but withal conservative, and proud of its deserved reputation as a center of education and of culture.

Its free schools, handsomely and commodiously housed, are most liberally supported, while the State University is the pride of the intelligent people of Tennessee. The State Deaf and Dumb School and a branch of the Asylum for the Insane are located there, and Knoxville College for the education of negroes is one of the best of its kind.

Knoxville contributed a handsome building to the “White City” of the Nashville Centennial, and afterwards the women of the city secured the removal of the building to Knoxville, where, at a point of vantage, it was re-erected and dedicated to the cause of woman’s advancement and to all the Muses.

Knoxville is an old town as things go in America, yet much of it is new. Its population has increased tenfold within thirty-five years. [Pg 475]It is therefore, in the main, modern in construction. In proportion to population it has by far the largest wholesale trade among the Southern cities. It enjoys a high degree of prosperity. It is the industrial, commercial and educational center of East Tennessee, and its future is full of promise.

The beautiful site upon which the city of Nashville stands must have been famous in prehistoric times. Its natural salt spring near the bank of the Cumberland River was a noted resort of the Indian and buffalo. Some years ago, the huge bones of a mastodon were exhumed from the alluvial deposit upon its margin. Near the flowing spring was an ancient cemetery of the long-vanished Stone Grave race, the mound builders, of Tennessee, and upon the opposite bank of the river and in the adjacent valleys have been found not less than ten thousand rude stone cists containing their mortuary remains. These interesting memorials have yielded a vast store of archæological treasures, illustrating their arts [Pg 478]and industries and telling a pathetic story of aboriginal life in the valley of the Cumberland.

A race of Village Indians, probably akin to the Pueblo Builders or Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, once made their home in Middle Tennessee and the adjacent territory. These industrious pottery makers and mound builders must have dwelt for several centuries in this lovely Garden of Eden.

In an evil hour, unhappily, some destroyer came, perhaps the ancestors of the savage and vindictive Mohawk or Iroquois Indians of the north, and devastated their towns and homes and scattered or exterminated the humble and less warlike Villagers. The first white hunters and pioneers discovered in the shadowy forest only their strange and mysterious mounds, and the ancient lines of earthworks that had formed their forts.

For perhaps a hundred years or more before the advent of the white man, the beautiful valley of the Cumberland seems to have been a wilderness uninhabited save by the wild animals of the forest.

As early as 1714, M. Charleville, a French trader, came, and tarried for a time near the [Pg 479]salt spring, known thereafter as the French Lick. In 1775, Timothy De Monbreun, a native of France, visited the spring, and later settled near the site of Nashville. Occasionally adventurous hunters and trappers passed down the valley. In 1778, a man of singular courage and gigantic stature named Spencer came with a party from Kentucky in search of homes and fortune, and settled near Bledsoe’s Lick, north of the Cumberland. They planted a small field of corn. Spencer’s companions soon became discouraged and returned to Kentucky, but this self-reliant hunter, undismayed by the solitude of the wilderness and the fear of the crafty Cherokee, refused to leave his new home in the lonely forest, and passed the long winter there, with only a great hollow sycamore tree as a shelter.

The story of the founding of Nashville is full of heroic incidents. It reads like a romance. About ten years had elapsed since the stout-hearted pioneers of Virginia and the Carolinas had pushed their way westward through the blue ridges of the Alleghanies, and planted an independent colony upon the banks of the Watauga River. Its master spirits, John Sevier, James Robertson and Isaac and [Pg 480]Evan Shelby would have been men of mark in any community.

From this parent hive, already grown into a strong and prosperous settlement, a new colony of two hundred and more hardy riflemen and pioneers, in the fall of 1779, set out upon a far journey to the west, under the leadership of James Robertson.

Allured by the wonderful stories of the beauty and fertility of the Cumberland Valley, they determined to seek there new homes. It was an heroic venture, unsurpassed in the history of the march of western civilization. No military force blazed a way for them. High mountain ranges, deep and unknown rivers, hundreds of miles of dense forest, lay before them. The dread of the crafty savage, upon whose hunting-grounds they were encroaching, did not deter them.

Bidding farewell to their friends at Watauga they struck out upon the wilderness trail of Daniel Boone for the Far West. They passed through the gap in the Cumberland Mountains, across the headwaters of the Cumberland River, and still westward across the rivers and valleys of Central and Southern Kentucky, until, after weary weeks of marching, through [Pg 481]storm and snow and ice, they finally reached the old French Lick on Christmas Day, 1779.

The wives and families of this advance-guard of the frontier, unable to endure the hardships of the march, were sent in boats and [Pg 482]canoes down the Holston and Tennessee rivers. Captain John Donelson was in command, a man of rare courage and judgment. His handsome young daughter, Rachel, one of the voyagers, afterwards became mistress of the White House as the wife of President Jackson.

They left Fort Patrick Henry on the Holston River, December 27, 1779. The distance by water around the long, winding circuit of the Holston, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Cumberland up to the Cumberland Bluffs was more than a thousand miles. Captain Donelson’s interesting journal, kept during the four-months’ journey and still preserved among the treasures of the Tennessee Historical Society, recounts in plain and modest words a story of heroism, of thrilling adventures, of singular pathos, scarcely equaled in the annals of our American frontier. It was a midwinter journey. The voyagers were attacked by the savage Chickamauga Indians. Their frail boats were swept through unknown rapids and floods. They had to force their way up the Ohio and Cumberland rivers. Many of the party perished, some were shot down by the Indians, others were wounded and ill; but [Pg 483]with thankful hearts the survivors finally reached their anxious friends at the “Big Salt Lick” on the Cumberland, April 24, 1780. It was a joyful meeting, a reunion of happy families, long remembered in the settlement.

The commanding bluff on the south side of the river seemed an ideal home for the new colony, united, hopeful and enthusiastic. The rich valley and the winding river added beauty to the landscape. Ranges of noble and picturesque hills, not far distant, surrounded the site. The land was fertile. Springs of pure water abounded, and here in [Pg 484]the far western wilderness was planted the new germ of civilization, which in after years was to grow and blossom into rich fruition. In honor of General Nash, of North Carolina, a distinguished officer of the Revolution, the village was christened Nashborough.

And now the cheery sound of the woodman’s axe rang out in the forest. Cabins were built. The land was cleared and crops were planted. Log forts were erected, planned after the good model of the fort at Watauga that had saved the precious lives of the little parent colony from the assaults of the Cherokees.

A regiment of riflemen was formed, with James Robertson as Colonel and John Donelson as Lieutenant-Colonel. An independent civil government was organized and established. This isolated little settlement was rightly called by James Robertson “The advance-guard of western civilization.” It was six or seven hundred miles from the nearest established government. It was over three hundred miles from the Watauga, and nearly as far from the Kentucky settlements, yet law, order and justice prevailed.

The carefully drawn articles of the compact under which the local civil government was [Pg 485]organized, indicate the high character of its citizens. They bore the impress of the true Anglo-Saxon spirit,—the love of order and equity. They required strict obedience to the will of the majority. Invoking the blessing of Divine Providence, the compact set up in the wilderness a temple of justice that secured ample legal protection to the citizen and the stranger, until the lawful jurisdiction of the parent State of North Carolina could be extended over the new territory.

James Robertson, the well-recognized leader of the settlement, was not blessed with the genius and natural gifts of John Sevier, the soldier and statesman of the eastern section, but he was a born ruler and organizer, a man full of resources, of lofty personal character and purposes. Well might he be called the founder and father of Nashville. His life is an epitome of the early history of Middle Tennessee.

Dr. Ramsey, the historian of Tennessee, tells us that when the treaty was made with the Indians at Watauga, giving the whites the right to possess the rich hunting-grounds of Middle Tennessee and Kentucky, the aged Indian chief Oconostota took Daniel Boone by the hand, and remarked with significant earnestness: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” How prophetic were these words! The brave little colony upon the bluffs at Nashborough, with settlements stretching for many miles along the valley of the Cumberland, was destined to pass through years of peril and anxiety. The young warriors of the Cherokees and Creeks were not willing to confirm the surrender of their favorite hunting-grounds to the insatiate and land-hungry paleface. Their footprints were soon discovered in the forest. The settlers were ambushed near their homes, and were shot down by unseen foes as they drank at the springs. Horses and cattle were stampeded and stolen. The strongest forts were attacked. At times the dangers and discouragements were so great that it seemed as if this vanguard settlement, with all its hopes and promises, [Pg 487]must be abandoned. A number of the settlers yielded to their fears, and returned with their families to Kentucky or to their old homes in the East. In those dark days the exalted character of James Robertson stood out in noble relief. He resolutely stemmed the tide of apprehension. He would not discuss a retreat. He was the very life and mainstay of the settlement. “These rich and beautiful lands,” Robertson said, “were not designed to be given up to savages and wild beasts. The God of Creation and Providence has nobler purposes in view.” “Each one should do what seems to him his duty. As for myself, my station is here, and here I shall stay if every man of you deserts.”

Solitary and alone, and apparently unmindful of danger, Robertson made long journeys through the forest to confer with the Cherokee chiefs in the interest of peace. When the ammunition at the forts was exhausted, and an attack was threatened, he set out in midwinter upon a lonely trail through the wilderness for the Kentucky settlements, and never rested until he had returned to Freeland Station with an ample supply.

His return was none too soon. That very [Pg 488]night, at the dead hour of midnight, a band of savage Chickasaws attacked Freeland Station. The moon was shining brightly, but they crept up noiselessly through the shadows to the very gates of the fort. They finally unlocked its bars and were pushing through the opening, when the quick ear of Robertson, who was sleeping near by, caught the sound of danger. He shouted a cry of alarm. A shot from his rifle rang out on the still night air. His comrades within the fort grasped their guns and fired from every cabin door. It was a sharp contest, but the Indians were finally routed and driven from the fort.

In the early spring they attacked the station at Nashborough in almost overwhelming numbers. They forced their way nearly to the gates of the old fort, located near the present corner of Market and Church streets, intercepting the retreat of many of the settlers. There was a desperate struggle for possession of the fort. At an opportune moment, the pack of powerful watch-dogs and hounds in the fort was turned loose, attacked the Indians fiercely, and greatly aided in repelling the onslaught. Both sides lost heavily, but the fort and settlement were saved.

For long and anxious years the settlements upon the Cumberland River were in constant warfare and danger. There was no period of peace or repose, yet year by year the restless march of the western pioneers and “movers” continued. The colony grew in strength and numbers, and at the end of the first decade of its history, several thousand thrifty and prosperous settlers occupied the fertile territory along the valley.

The village of Nashborough had become the ambitious town of Nashville. North Carolina had taken the settlements under her motherly protection. A court-house and prison had been erected. Davidson Academy, that later grew into Nashville University, had been chartered and endowed. In 1788, Andrew Jackson, a young lawyer unknown to [Pg 490]fame, came to the town bearing a commission from the Governor of North Carolina as attorney of the Mero District. Colonel James Robertson was appointed a Brigadier-General. Tennessee was organized into a State and admitted into the Union in 1796.

From its infancy as a village, Nashville has been something of a historic center. It has been the home of a number of men of national reputation. Under the leadership of Generals Jackson and Coffee, the gallant Tennessee troops who helped to win the famous victory at New Orleans assembled at Nashville.

One of the happy events in the early life of the city, still treasured in our local histories, was the visit of General Lafayette in 1825. He was received and entertained with joyful demonstrations of affection, and it is said that he long remembered and often recalled with pleasure the cordiality of his reception.

Nashville has been the arena of many hotly contested political battles. The eloquence of Sargeant Prentiss, of Henry Clay, of Meredith P. Gentry, of Haskell and the old-time orators is still remembered. The city was the home of Felix Grundy, of Thomas H. Benton, later the famous Missouri Senator, of General Sam [Pg 491]Houston, the hero of San Jacinto, and of John Bell. The historic and hospitable mansion of President Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, a few miles east of Nashville, in those early days, as now was the Mecca of many pilgrimages. Visitors are always charmed with the beauty of the surrounding country. A picturesque avenue lined with overshadowing cedars leads to the house. Its stately pillars and broad porch remind us of an old Virginia homestead.

Here the hero and his beloved wife, Rachel Donelson, lived many happy years, [Pg 492]and entertained their friends and neighbors with generous hospitality. Here Aaron Burr was a welcome visitor, before he was suspected of treasonable purposes, and Lafayette, James Monroe and Martin Van Buren were honored guests. In a field adjoining the mansion, two hundred or more friends and neighbors were entertained at a dinner given in honor of the election of James K. Polk as President.

Like the home of Washington at Mt. Vernon, the residence at the Hermitage was a veritable museum of souvenirs, arranged and treasured by Mrs. Jackson and her adopted daughter. The walls were adorned with family and historic portraits, the work of noted artists.

Near by, in a corner of the garden of the Hermitage, the remains of President Jackson and his dear wife lie side by side, under a modest but beautiful marble tomb, prepared by him for their reception. In his later years the old General rarely exhibited the sterner side of his nature. He was mild and courtly in manner. His kindness was proverbial among his neighbors. He became deeply interested in religion. To please his devoted wife, he had a modest chapel erected near their [Pg 493]home, and they were faithful attendants at all religious meetings held there.

By an act of the Legislature of Tennessee, the Ladies’ Hermitage Association, a society of patriotic ladies of Nashville, has charge of the Hermitage, its mansion and surroundings, [Pg 494]and through their untiring devotion the historic old home and its many treasures are well preserved and cared for.

The residence of President James K. Polk still stands upon an elevated site in the center of the city of Nashville. It was a stately dwelling in its day, worthy to be the home of a President. His remains were deposited in a tomb of noble proportions erected in front of the mansion, but some years ago, by an act of the Legislature, they were removed to the grounds of the State Capitol.

The revered widow of President Polk survived him many years, and the old home and her gracious welcome added a charm to the social life of the city and attracted visitors from near and far.

It was not until the year 1843 that Nashville became the seat of government of the State of Tennessee. The city presented to the State the splendid grounds upon which its beautiful capitol building stands. The famed Acropolis at Athens did not afford a nobler site for its temples. The traveler can see it from afar, and from the broad porticos of the State House one can survey the winding Cumberland and the varied beauties of the surrounding hills.

Nashville continued to grow in importance and prosperity year by year, until the shadows of the great conflict between the States clouded its happy life. The hearts of the people were mainly in sympathy with the Southern cause. True to the history of the Volunteer State, [Pg 496]its young men enlisted in the army, and its devoted women nursed the wounded in the hospitals.

Unhappily, Fort Donelson soon fell; the Federal gunboats steamed up the river; General Buell and his troops appeared on the north bank of the Cumberland, and in February, 1862, the proud city was forced to surrender to the Union army.

Nashville became a vast military camp. Federal brigades and divisions marched through its streets and camped in the beautiful woodland parks about the city. A cordon of elaborate forts and earthworks was built along the chain of suburban hills to the south and west. An imposing fortress soon encircled the stately Capitol building, in the very heart of the city, and towered threateningly above the homes of its people. Its battlements and sharp angles, the very porticos of the Capitol, bristled with cannon. It became the central citadel of Federal defence. The fierce cannonade that announced the bloody battle at Murfreesboro, thirty miles away, could almost be heard by the anxious mothers and friends within the walls at Nashville.

General N. B. Forrest, with his cavalry force, [Pg 497]came and threatened the city for a time, but made no serious attack. Later, General Hood marched up from the south with a splendid army, reviving the hopes of the Confederates in Nashville; but the fatal disaster at Franklin, and the overwhelming defeat of the Confederates by General Thomas on the hills south of the city, shattered all hope, and left the Union forces in possession of the coveted prize until the close of the war.

Ah! those were days that tore the heart-strings. East Tennessee had cast its affections and strength with the North, and remained loyal to the Union. Each section of the State had followed its convictions as to the right, and Tennessee may well be proud of her sons who fought on either side. Nashville was the home of gallant Frank Cheatham, of General William H. Jackson, General William B. Bate, General Rains, General Maney and a host of other Confederates who won honor and distinction in the Southern cause. Buell, Rosecrans, Thomas, Sherman, Grant, distinguished generals on the Federal side, had all held command there.

Happily, peace came at last, and the long-beleaguered city breathed more freely. The remains of the Confederates who fell in the battles about Nashville were lovingly gathered into the beautiful grounds of the “Confederate Circle” at Mt. Olivet. The Federals sleep peacefully in the National Cemetery not far away, under the kindly care of the government.

The heart of Cornelius Vanderbilt was warmed toward the desolated South, and a noble institution [Pg 500]of learning was endowed in his name. The Trustees of George Peabody came to the rescue also, and founded the Peabody Normal College. The Jubilee Singers of Nashville sang Fisk University into life, and endowed a useful institution dedicated to the education of the colored race recently freed from slavery.

A new Nashville has adjusted itself to the changed order of things in the South, and is assuming the appearance and proportions of a metropolis. Its borders have extended to the picturesque hills that circle the city. Its fame as an educational center perhaps more than rivals its importance in commerce and manufactures. More than five thousand students from other sections of the country are included in its scholastic population, and within the city limits there are not less than eighty schools and colleges—schools of theology, law, medicine, pharmacy, music and art. They are the glory of Nashville.

The throng of teachers and students help to give it the charm of a literary and intellectual atmosphere. Right justly may it be called the “Athens of the South.” Vanderbilt University and Peabody Normal College, with their beautiful parks and clusters of fine buildings, [Pg 501]are institutions of which any city might be proud.

In 1880, Nashville celebrated its Centennial in honor of the founding of the city. It was an inspiring occasion, but the Centennial of the State of Tennessee, celebrated at the capital in 1896-’97, crowned the city with laurels that will long be remembered with honorable pride. It was a revelation,—a noble memorial of a century of statehood. The dream of James Robertson, the father and founder of Nashville, was more than realized. In a little more than a century of progress, the camp of the brave little colony on the bank of the Cumberland had grown into a splendid Southern city.

[Pg 503]

LOUISVILLE

Beautiful of situation is Louisville, the metropolis of Kentucky, and the Gateway City to the South. Builded along the Ohio at the Falls, the river stretches away to the northeast in a sheet of water nearly a mile wide and six miles in extent with a scarcely perceptible current, making one of the finest harbors in the whole course of this “Rhine of America.” Circling hills surround the city, and the parks upon them are unsurpassed in this section of the country. The avenues are broad and well shaded, and while the residences are, as a rule, handsomely modern, many splendid specimens of Colonial architecture are to be seen. The homesteads in the suburbs are delightful, dreamy retreats, and the river valley is as fertile as that of the Jordan.

[Pg 504] As the visitor approaches over any one of the railroads leading into Louisville and looks upon the charming scene just outlined, he may recall the historic associations connected with it. Here, in the long ago, Daniel Boone loved to linger and hunt. It was here that George Rogers Clark, the famous Indian fighter and leader of western civilization, first won renown. Here John Fitch studied the problem of steamboat navigation, anticipating Robert Fulton many years, and so far succeeded that Fulton acknowledged him the original inventor of steam craft. Here the fathers of ornithology in the new world, Alexander Wilson and John J. Audubon, resided and labored, the latter first awaking to a realization of his marvellous genius in the Kentucky wilds. In this vicinity Zachary Taylor spent his childhood, learned the art of war, and returned at intervals of peace to reside, after achieving notable triumphs for the Republic on the hard-fought fields of Mexico and elsewhere. It was here that George Keats, favorite brother of the poet, John Keats, came to live, bringing with him from old England an atmosphere of classic culture and refinement which influenced the development [Pg 505]of intellectual Louisville. It was here, also, that Henry Clay often came to confer with his political colleagues, and to charm the people with his superb oratory.

Here George D. Prentice, whose witty, trenchant paragraphs on the editorial page of The Louisville Journal made it the most widely quoted American paper in foreign realms, wielded his wonderful influence as the champion of the great Pacificator of Ashland. Near this city General Robert Anderson, the fearless hero of Fort Sumter in 1861, was reared, and hither he returned after its surrender and received the welcome plaudits of all parties for his memorable loyalty to the Stars and Stripes. In this city many of the ablest Federal commanders [Pg 506]first came into national notice during the Civil War; and here resides now Henry Watterson, whose patriotic pen and eloquent lips in recent years have dispelled the last feeling of prejudice between the once estranged sections of the Union, and who, speaking for his fellow citizens, cordially received the Grand Army of the Republic into the South on their first visit since they left its soil as conquerors.

In the evolution of nations struggle is unavoidable, but higher results ensue: and it is the peculiar pride of the State of Kentucky that though Lincoln and Davis, the two leaders of the Federal and Confederate governments while the fate of the Union was being decided on the bloody field, were her sons, nevertheless her conservatism, wise counsel and gentle forbearance—beginning in the speeches of Henry Clay long previous to the late unpleasantness, and continuing in the admirable efforts of Henry Watterson afterward—indicated the path to peace and prosperity. The motto of the Republic is “Many in one”; that of Kentucky, “United we stand, divided we fall”; and it has been the mission of our State to emphasize the vital political truth that many commonwealths with widely diverse institutions [Pg 507]may safely unite in the formation of one strong central government; that a multiplicity of peoples with entirely different interests and pursuits may still be one in sympathy, purpose and hope. Situated midway between the North and the South, not only is her climate a delightful mingling of both extremes, but the temper of her inhabitants is a dignified reserve and a spontaneous fervor of feeling happily proportioned. Able, on the one hand, to appreciate the spirit of progress which makes the North impatient of those conditions and tendencies which the South has wisely altered with caution; and, on the other hand, apprehending the principle of personal independence which causes the South to suspect Northern counsel as impelled by a desire to interfere with individual liberty, she has long occupied a position similar to that of Tennyson’s sweet little heroine, Annie, who, sitting between Enoch and Philip, with a hand of each in her own, would weep,

Scarcely less sublime than Columbus pacing the deck of his ship at sea and looking wistfully westward in search of the new world he [Pg 508]so faithfully sought, seems Daniel Boone, in 1769, venturing forth from the quiet valleys of the Yadkin in response to the promptings of his restless spirit, unconsciously going to prepare the way for the millions that were subsequently to follow him, and as if by magic to transform into fertile fields the pathless forests beyond the Alleghanies which he was the first to penetrate and explore.

Dauntless, noble souls they were who created our commonwealth; and Byron, fascinated with the refreshing fame of Daniel Boone, which extended throughout Europe as well as America, celebrated him and his fellow Kentuckians in a number of fine stanzas in the eighth canto [Pg 509]of Don Juan. Henry James, in his life of Hawthorne, laments the lack of historic inspiration for prose and verse in this country; yet Byron, sadly turning from the shams and hypocrisies of the Old World, which he scathingly satirized in his great production, burst into a beautiful strain of hope as he contemplated the uncorrupted heroes of the new world beyond the Atlantic. The description begins half humorously with the sixty-first stanza:

The reader cannot help smiling at the poet’s mistake in leaving off the final letter of Boone’s name and calling him “General,” when all Kentuckians, even including the illustrious pioneer, are “Colonels”; but the spirit of a master interpreter of Nature is in the stanzas that follow.

It was not until 1778 that LouisVille, as it was then called, was founded, George Rogers Clarke [Pg 510]being a resident of Harrodsburg, Ky., during the years 1776 and 1777.

The incidents connected with the settlement he established at the Falls are memorable in the annals of the West. The British leaders were seeking to strike an effectual blow at all the American frontier fortresses, and with this end in view were enlisting the sympathies and co-operation of the Indian tribes. Detroit, Vincennes, Kaskaskia and similar British stations were well fortified, and plans were speedily forming for a descent on the unprepared and unsuspecting pioneers in the Ohio Valley. Clark instinctively discerned this scheme and secretly but courageously determined to thwart it. He [Pg 511]accordingly went to Williamsburg, Va., in November, 1777. The news of Burgoyne’s surrender had inspired the Virginia authorities with patriotic enthusiasm, and Governor Henry sanctioned Clark’s proposal to raise a sufficient force to proceed against the British in the Northwest. Orders were issued and Clark was put in command of the expedition. Six thousand dollars in colonial currency were voted him, and with the rank of Colonel he set out for Pittsburg. After much discouragement he secured three companies of volunteers and a number of adventurers and continued his journey down the river to the Falls. The fort that he built on his arrival furnished a nucleus around which the village subsequently sprang up.

Thirteen families remained at the Falls while Clark and his men went on against Kaskaskia. The campaign was a brilliant success. One post after another fell into the hands of the fearless Kentuckians, and the whole of the Northwest Territory was opened to emigration. It is said that when Clark and his followers appeared before the astonished garrisons during these operations, the red-coats almost imagined a force had dropped from the skies, so [Pg 512]inaccessible had they deemed their strongholds to be, and so suddenly had their conquerors come upon them. It was not strange, therefore, that the eloquent John Randolph of Roanoke spoke of Clark in after years as the “American Hannibal, who, by the reduction of those military posts in the wilderness, obtained the Lakes for the northern boundary of our Union at the peace in 1783.”

If the visitor desires to see the location of the first settlement at the Falls let him stand upon the Fourteenth Street Bridge and look down the river. To the right is the main current of the Ohio as it plunges roaring over the Falls, and to the left is the island on which Colonel Clark and his men built a fort when they arrived in the spring of 1778. This was called “Corn Island,” from the fact that a crop of corn was planted by the risky pioneers around the fortress, and carefully cultivated, notwithstanding they were hourly exposed to Indian attacks.

Either in the autumn of 1778 or the spring of 1779 (history is not certain which), the garrison on Corn Island went ashore and laid the foundation of the future city of Louisville.

Huts, blockhouses and stockades were erected, and [Pg 514]the Indians saw that the intruders had come to stay. During the year 1779, Colonel Clark directed his energies against the British post Vincennes, and easily captured it.

In May, 1780, the Virginia Legislature passed an “Act for Establishing the Town of Louisville at the Falls of Ohio.” The population of the place had increased to six hundred; but the increase of strength rendered the pioneers careless, and as a consequence the Indians on several occasions surprised and captured parties beyond the protection of the fort and escaped with them across the river, or into the wilderness to the south, almost before an alarm could be given. Colonel Clark, in order to ward off the attacks of the red men, constructed a unique sort of gunboat supplied with four-pound cannon. It was the first actual vessel of war ever seen on the Ohio, and though some chroniclers are disposed to make light of its actual utility as a means of defence, it kept the insidious savages from crossing the river in its vicinity.

This period in the history of Kentucky (1780-1800) was admirably portrayed by the facile pen of Washington Irving after his literary tour of the West in 1834, when he [Pg 516]visited Louisville and took notes for future sketches. An eccentric though shrewd character of the day, William P. Duval, whose career as a pioneer lawyer, and whose adventures as an Indian commissioner under Monroe gave him fame scarcely second to that of George Rogers Clark, inspired those two narratives in Crayon Papers, called “The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood,” and “The Conspiracy of Neamathla.” Mr. Irving’s humor is at its best in the first of these and his picture of primitive people is unsurpassed. James K. Paulding likewise wrote of Governor Duval in a novel called Nimrod Wildfire.

With the old-style method of travel by keel-boat and barges (1780-1810), going down the river was easy enough, but ascending stream was indeed difficult. A mile an hour was the maximum rate of progress, and if the wind and tide chanced to be unfavorable, many days were lost in waiting. Then, again, the craft was likely to strike a snag or run aground, and the strength and patience of the crew would be completely exhausted ere another start could be effected. Sometimes the men became so exasperated that they would leave the boat or barge en masse and return afoot [Pg 517]whence they had started. It required three and often four months to come up to Louisville from New Orleans. Nor was this all. Bands of desperadoes infested the forest on either shore, and would hold up a boat or barge,—prototypes of the notorious train robbers of later days. The records of river navigation are filled with thrilling incidents and studies of unique character.

But notwithstanding these difficulties European tourists ventured into the wilds in search of novelty or on business speculations. One of these came to the Falls city as early as 1806, and afterwards, in writing his impressions of the place, said: “I had thought Cincinnati one of the most beautiful towns I had seen in America, but Louisville, which is almost as large, equals it in beauty and in the opinion of many exceeds it.”

Robert Fulton and Daniel French went into the steamboat-building business at Pittsburg, after the trip of the Orleans in 1811; and a few years later better facilities were afforded for travel on the Ohio. The Eastern visitor to Louisville should by all means come from Cincinnati, or even Pittsburg, by boat in order to study the historic scenes and associations [Pg 518]of the “Rhine of America.” Distinct epochs in American literature have arisen from the inspiration and suggestion given by this celebrated stream and life along its course to the various writers who travelled its waters.

First and foremost among these was John J. Audubon who came in 1809, previous to the opening of navigation by steamboat. Reports of the happy wilds of Kentucky had reached him in his Pennsylvania home subsequent to his return from Paris, where he had been sojourning as an art student. His passion for ornithology drove him to the West, and the hour he left Pittsburg marked the beginning of a new era in his wonderful career as a naturalist. The Ohio charmed him, and, locating at Louisville, he collected specimens of every bird that could be found in forest or field. In 1810, Alexander Wilson, the distinguished Scotch-American ornithologist, traversed the Ohio and Mississippi valleys on a mission similar to Audubon’s. Stopping for a season at the Falls city he chanced to become acquainted with Audubon, and in the course of conversation the two exchanged ideas and were astonished to discover that they were pursuing the same line of work.

This meeting [Pg 520]was memorable, for it awakened Audubon to a full realization of his genius and helped Wilson unspeakably. Indeed, so far-reaching were its results that in order to appreciate them one has first to familiarize himself with some of the subtlest tendencies and movements of the nineteenth century.

When steamboat navigation began on the Ohio (1812-16) the rush of emigration commenced anew. Thirty-nine English families sent Henry Bradshaw Fearon over in 1816 to make a careful study of places and people in the Ohio Valley. He was an intelligent, practical observer, and his descriptions of the inhabitants and social conditions of Louisville are strikingly suggestive of Dickens. There is a vein of sarcasm in his observations, due to the fact that he has little sympathy with the commercial ambition that seemed to possess the people to the exclusion of higher pursuits. Every one seemed self-absorbed and bent on money-making; even the best hotels were conducted on the crowding policy. The people had unparalleled appetites, according to Mr. Fearon, for his description of a tavern meal in Louisville is similar to Dickens’s report of the fast-eating Americans he met while among us.

The tide of emigration from England swelled enormously in the decades succeeding 1820-40, and swindlers reaped so rich a harvest by selling imaginary land bargains in imaginary towns of the Ohio Valley that an investigation became necessary. A leading purpose with Charles Dickens in coming to America on his first tour in 1842 was to examine into and expose these frauds, which he did with fearless sarcasm and irresistible irony. The whole plot of Martin Chuzzlewit hinges on real-estate speculations at Cairo, Ill., at the mouth of the Ohio, the original of the city of “Eden,” which Scadder, the real-estate agent, so eulogistically described to Martin that the credulous young Englishman forthwith invested all his funds in the hope of reaping an ample fortune by the day he set foot in the place. Pittsburg, Cincinnati and Louisville are realistically, and in some respects ridiculously, portrayed in chapters xxi.-xxiii., and if the reader will compare these with Dickens’s American Notes, the actual scenes and experiences that suggested the story may be found.

As an offset to the severity of this inimitable satire, the reader should peruse the article [Pg 522]“English Writers on America” in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, which was called forth by exaggerated stories propagated by the pens of early British travellers in this country after their return home. Dickens came to Louisville in 1842, and when he had gone up to his room at the Galt House, Major Throckmorton, the proprietor, who was as high-spirited as he was polite, appeared at the novelist’s door and said, “Sir, I am proud to extend you the hospitality of the house; and shall be delighted to serve you to the best of my ability.” “Boz,” in spite of his alertness, was not aware of the vast difference there is between the social standing of an American hotel proprietor and that of an English innkeeper. Glancing at the Major he replied, “All right, sir; all right; if I want anything I’ll ring for you.” Throckmorton’s eyes flashed with anger as he exclaimed, “What do you mean by such impudence to me? You don’t know whom you are talking to; I’ll throw you out of the window.” The Major was a powerful man and would doubtless have made good his threat had not Dickens speedily apologized for his mistake.

Among the Englishmen induced to emigrate [Pg 524]to Kentucky by Mr. Fearon’s book in 1818, was George Keats, brother of the poet, John Keats. The circumstances of his coming and his career after arriving form one of the interesting chapters in the early history of the State.

George returned to England in the autumn of 1819, leaving his wife in Louisville. Securing the remainder of the family estate which fell to him, he invested in the lumber trade at the Falls city and made a fortune. His mills were located on First Street, between Washington Street and the river, and in 1835 he built an elegant residence on what is now Walnut Street, between Third and Fourth. The square on which this mansion still stands was then the aristocratic section of the city, and while the house was in course of construction people would stroll along and speak admiringly of it as “The Englishman’s Palace.” With the exception of the roof, which was altered, and the present portico, which was added by a subsequent purchaser, the residence is in no wise changed since George Keats occupied it. Lavish was the hospitality dispensed by the poet’s brother, and he will always rank among the noblest citizens Louisville has ever had. [Pg 525]Though the happiness of helping John was not, as he had hoped, permitted him, his house became the center of a circle of warm admirers of the author of Endymion, and for a long time the culture of the city and State found in him a leader both liberal and inspiring. James Freeman Clarke was for seven or eight years pastor of the Unitarian Church in Louisville, and George Keats was a member of his congregation. The two became intimate friends, and Mr. Clarke afterward wrote entertainingly of him. He served in the city council and aided in the establishment of the Louisville school system.

The correspondence between George and John includes some of the poet’s finest letters. These descended to one of George’s daughters. About the year 1873 her son, John Gilmer Speed, the well-known writer, now of New York, chanced to be looking over these priceless papers and noticed that they had not been published in Lord Houghton’s life of Keats. He accordingly collected them, and from one of the volumes we select a few brief sentences pertinent to the purpose of the present sketch.

One letter from John tells George to take [Pg 526]financial reverses as coolly as possible, considering he had done his best. Another, declining an invitation to come to Kentucky, says, “You will perceive that it is quite out of my interest to come to America. What could I do there? How could I employ myself, out of the reach of libraries?” And thus he counsels George: “Be careful of those Americans. I could almost advise you to come, whenever you have the sum of five hundred pounds, to England. Those Americans will, I am afraid, still fleece you.” In a letter to George’s wife in January, 1820, he speaks of his wish to cross the sea with his brother: “I could almost promise you that if I had the means I would accompany George back to America, and pay you a visit of a few months.” Had he made the trip and beheld with his own eyes the loveliness of the Ohio Valley, and met the kindly people of Kentucky, he would not have been so inclined to disparage Louisville society: “I was surprised to hear of the state of society at Louisville: it seems you are just as ridiculous there as we are here—threepenny parties, halfpenny dances. The best thing I have heard of is your shooting, for it seems you follow the gun.”

A terrible tragedy occurred at the Keats mansion, back in the forties, about which there is a pathetic tradition. Isabella, the beautiful young daughter of George Keats, according to tradition, killed herself in a fit of despondency at the unhappy termination of a love-affair. A circumstance said to have taken place in 1890 seemed to substantiate the tradition. An elderly, refined-looking and quiet stranger appeared repeatedly at the Keats house and requested to be left alone in the library, where the girl was shot. At first he offered no explanation of his unusual request, but when finally leaving he said to the lady who had admitted him, “I parted from her in there, and have returned from California to visit the scene once more.” The rumor was soon circulated that the mysterious stranger was the lover whose unfaithfulness had robbed the unhappy girl of the desire to live.

The descendants of George Keats still living in Louisville deny the pathetic story throughout. They affirm that the girl was heartwhole and free from any morbid tendencies.

Their version of the tragedy is substantially as follows: Isabella’s brother Clarence had been out hunting in the vicinity of the [Pg 530]city, and, returning home, carelessly left his gun on a sofa in the darkened library. Isabella shortly afterward went into the room to lie down, and, not seeing the loaded weapon, struck the trigger in such a way with her foot that the contents were discharged, mortally wounding her.

Edward Eggleston’s inimitable Hoosier Tales portray the next period in the history of the Ohio Valley (1840-60), immortalizing those pedagogues of the Ichabod Crane type who came swarming from New England when the tide of emigration first set westward. Mr. Eggleston spent his childhood on the river between Cincinnati and Louisville, and his pictures of primitive social life in Kentucky and southern Indiana are in the style of Irving’s sketch already mentioned. Zachary Taylor went to school, not far from the Falls fort, to one of these Yankee teachers, a native of Connecticut by the name of Ayers, who was a sagacious fellow, able to watch the Indians and urchins simultaneously. The South and West owe these wandering educators a debt of gratitude that can hardly be overestimated.

It was from the Falls city that Aaron Burr planned to make his treasonable descent upon [Pg 531]the South in November, 1805, and there is still current in the State much interesting tradition concerning him. The court-house in Louisville contains the noble statue of Henry Clay by Joel T. Hart. At the Polytechnic Society on Fourth Avenue are Hart’s other pieces of statuary; and on Third Avenue, at the residence of Mrs. Elizabeth Menefee, are many of those superb portraits painted by Matthew H. Jouett, Gilbert Stuart’s favorite pupil, and a master American artist. His genius and that of Hart developed beyond the confines of classic civilization, and though subsequently aided and directed by the best instruction of conventional schools retained an individuality and conformity to nature all their own.

Just across the court-house square, and within a stone’s throw of the imposing figure of the sage of Ashland is the site of the old Pope residence where Worden Pope and his sons entertained James Monroe and Andrew Jackson during their tour through the South in 1819. The Popes held a high position of political influence in the State, and at a conference called on this occasion the name of Andrew Jackson was first proposed to the Southern people as Monroe’s successor.

The home of Zachary Taylor, five miles from the city, is well worth visiting. Near it is the house in which Jefferson Davis was married to his first wife, the daughter of General Taylor.

On August 6, 1855, occurred the terrible political riot precipitated by the Know-nothings. A mob with a cannon at their head went murdering and burning through the streets of Louisville. The day is known in history as “Bloody Monday.”

Louisville was decidedly Union in its sympathies during the Civil War, though many of its inhabitants inclined to support the Southern cause. George D. Prentice, though just and kindly to the South, was always loyal to the national government, and his paper, the Journal, was notably influential on that side. The Falls city as a recruiting station at the beginning of the struggle between the States was fully as important in the West as was Washington in the East. It was the basis of numerous military movements that turned the tide of fortune against the Confederates, and in this city some of the most eminent Federal commanders were at different times located.

At the home of Col. Reuben T. Durrett on [Pg 534]East Chestnut Street are relics innumerable, and the scholarly host, who knows every fact of the city’s history, is ever ready to show them to the visitor. Louisville is not only a lively commercial center, but is also the home of culture and art. The brain and beauty of which she boasts can be found throughout the Blue Grass region, and the hospitality she dispenses is characteristic of the whole commonwealth. Mary Anderson de Navarro first won fame in this city, her girlhood home, and has never ceased to love it. Henry Watterson and his able young lieutenant, Harrison Robertson, still keep the Courier-Journal to the front; and James Lane Allen, though not a native nor a resident of the Falls city, portrays the traits of her people upon his inimitable pages when he writes of all Kentuckians. Madison Cawein, the Keats of America, is here; and Charles J. O’Malley, who voices the sentiment of every Kentuckian when he sings:

[Pg 537]

LITTLE ROCK

There are spots marked out by nature for the sites of cities, where they must spring up as soon as civilization is established and remain as long as it endures. Such a spot is Little Rock.

The southeastern half of Arkansas is low and flat, composed chiefly of alluvial plains; the northwestern half rugged and broken, rising toward the western border into the mountains, some three thousand feet in elevation, which gradually drop away toward the east till they disappear altogether. At the point, almost the exact center of the State, where the last foothills form the south bank of the principal river, it was inevitable that a city should be built and that that city should become the State’s capital. Indeed, so manifest [Pg 538]was the destiny of the position that it was made the seat of government before it had become a town, and when it was far beyond the limits of actual settlement.

Nor would it be easy to find a more desirable spot not beside the sea. The foundation is a rock bluff of slight elevation, but sufficient to lift the city above the danger of overflow. On this there rests a bed of gravelly clay, covered with a thin vegetable mould, and rising to the south and west in a succession of gently swelling eminences, presenting innumerable building sites of the most attractive character, and draining in every direction; equally free from steep acclivities and unwholesome flatness, and clothed by nature with a magnificent forest of wide-spreading oaks and lofty pines. Far out into the river there projects a rocky peninsula, against whose adamantine sides the stream has dashed its ineffectual fury for countless ages; and this, in contrast to the bold precipice upon the other bank, which was called the Big Rock, gave to the place its name.

This promontory is now used as the abutment of one of the three bridges that span the river, and its beauty has been destroyed; but [Pg 539]in the old days, when it was clothed with trees and ferns clinging to its rocky sides and reflected in the waters below, it was a charming sight, and must have been hailed with joy by the early travelers after their weary journey from the distant sea through the monotony of the low-lying wilderness.

The original inhabitants of the region were the Quapaw or Arkansas Indians, a race much superior to the surrounding savages, and who dwelt not in scattered wigwams but in walled villages, and seem always to have lived in amity with the whites. Father Pierre François de Charlevoix, an early French missionary, [Pg 540]says of them, “The Arkansas are reckoned to be the tallest and best-shaped of all the savages on this continent,” and he speaks at length of their kindness to the French, and their fidelity to their engagements. So Du Pratz, an early voyageur, says: “I am so prepossessed in favor of this country that I persuade myself that the beauty of the climate has a great influence on the character of the inhabitants, who are at the same time very gentle and very brave.”

In the days when Little Rock was a part of the favorite hunting-ground of the Quapaws it must have been a lovely spot. Then the [Pg 541]tall trees grew untouched upon its rolling hills, and its numerous little streams, now converted into sewers, flowed murmuring beneath overhanging ferns to mingle with the river.

When it was first visited by white men no one knows. During 1541 and 1542 De Soto marched back and forth through the region, seeking for gold with a Spaniard’s hunger; but the accounts of his wanderings are uncertain and confused, and the blood of the unhappy natives which once marked out his pathway has long since mingled with the dust.

Then for almost two hundred years the solitude of the wilderness remained unbroken. At rare intervals the French voyageurs went up and down the Mississippi, establishing forts and trading-posts; but the great river so engrossed their attention that they left its tributaries unexplored. At length, in 1722, a French officer, Bernard de la Harpe, ascended the Arkansas, and on April 9th reached the picturesque heights of Big Rock, where the army post is now located. Standing upon the brink of its lofty precipice he watched the river winding far away in the distance between the mountains of the West, and dreamed of the mighty empire that France should build up [Pg 542]where lay the untrodden beauty of the woods. The whole site of Little Rock was spread out beneath him, clothed in verdure, and he mentions the slate bluffs which it presents to the stream.

Then again the curtain is drawn over the scene. Doubtless from time to time French voyageurs ascended the river to barter with the Indians for their furs, but they left no mark. In 1803, the country passed to the United States as a part of the Louisiana purchase, and the hardy Anglo-Saxon pioneer began to penetrate the wilderness, his Bible in one hand and in the other his long, death-dealing rifle. As early as 1814 three or four squatters were dwelling at Little Rock or in its vicinity, subsisting chiefly by the chase; and even then the importance of the site was so conspicuous that strong men dwelling in St. Louis and other places began to struggle for possession of the title with a pertinacity rarely equalled.

At this period it escaped a great danger. An effort was made to christen it Arkopolis, and deeds were executed with that designation; but better counsels prevailed, and it retained its old name, “The Little Rock,” the article then being an inseparable portion of the title.

It was still a mere spot in the forest marked by a few log huts when, on October 24, 1820, it was made the capital of the territory. On the 4th of July of that year the Rev. Cephas Washburn had preached the first sermon ever heard there, and in the rude cabin there were gathered to listen to him only fourteen men,—no women,—probably all the inhabitants of the place. Yet no one doubted that they were standing upon the site of a future city, or questioned the wisdom of the Legislature when it established the capital in the remote wilderness, far from the Mississippi in whose neighborhood the scanty population of the territory was chiefly gathered.

The town grew slowly. It was far from the centers of population, and the means of travel were slight and precarious. It was made a post office town on April 10, 1820, but the inhabitants in 1830 numbered only four hundred and fifty, and it was not incorporated until Nov. 7, 1831.

In 1860, the population was only about five thousand. Between 1833 and 1846 the State House was built, a handsome edifice for the time and place; but generally the buildings [Pg 545]were constructed of wood, not infrequently of logs, and were wholly unpretentious. Yet it is probable that there has never been in the city so much ability, certainly never so many striking personalities, as in those early days.

Politics ran high, and conflicting ambitions led to a degree of personal virulence in writing and in speech surpassing anything that we have to-day. When these young men first met, fire flashed as when flint and steel are struck together, and in the territorial days their quarrels were too often solved by the duel. After the admission of the State in 1836 affairs became more tranquil. The strong men gradually learned to dwell together in peace; but their rivalries, though less bloody, were not less strenuous.

All parts of the country contributed their quota. From Massachusetts there came perhaps the two ablest men, Chester Ashley and Albert Pike, men who would have been remarkable in any age or place. Connecticut sent Samuel H. Hempstead; Virginia, Henry W. Conway and Solon Borland; Kentucky, the State’s most accomplished orators, Robert Crittenden and Frederick W. Trapnall, besides William and Ebenezer Cummins and George C. Watkins; North Carolina, Archibald Yell; Tennessee, Absalom Fowler and Ambrose H. Sevier; and there were many others from various sections worthy to enter the same arena.

And not at home alone were the great [Pg 549]abilities of these men acknowledged. Arkansas’ first two senators were Ashley and Sevier, and the former was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, while the latter was the chairman of its Committee on Foreign Relations, the only time when the chairmanship of both those great committees has been lodged in the hands of a single State,—and that a State whose population consisted of a few frontiersmen almost lost in the primeval forest.

And when the Mexican War was over and the [Pg 550]time came to reap the fruits of victory, it was Mr. Sevier who, together with Mr. Justice Clifford, negotiated the treaty of peace.

The leaders of the infant commonwealth were all lawyers. In the early days of the Republic the position of lawyers was much more commanding than it is at present.

Their social influence has waned before the aristocracy of wealth; and their political power has largely passed to the “boss” and the machine, whose authority rests on a more material [Pg 552]basis than eloquence and reason. And never was there a city so dominated by its bar as Little Rock in the olden times. Everything circled around the great lawyers. Even the wealth of the community was mostly in their hands. The houses of the citizens were generally of wood, and usually stood upon the street; but scattered about there arose the stately mansions of the leaders of the bar,—of Ashley, Pike, Trapnall, Fowler, Crittenden, Hempstead and others, encircled by extensive grounds and shaded by patriarchal trees, dominating the surrounding dwellings almost like feudal châteaux. In these mansions were concentrated the social and intellectual life of the community, and its history was the story of their daily struggles for pre-eminence.

So Little Rock grew and flourished, men dwelling in peace beneath their vines and fig trees, until the year 1861 brought up the momentous question of disunion and war. Arkansas was strongly attached to the Union. In its mountainous regions there were no slaves, and three fourths of the people were white. The convention called to determine the course the State should take adjourned without action, declining to enter the confederacy that [Pg 553]had been formed at Montgomery, Ala. But when they reassembled the war was already flagrant, and with only a single dissenting vote they cast in their lot with their brethren of the South. The result was hailed by the people of Little Rock with unlimited enthusiasm. Confidence in the success of Southern arms was universal. No grim spectre of invasion and despair haunted their dreams. But the awakening was rude. The Northern armies poured across the border in overwhelming numbers, and soon the people had to fight for their altars and their firesides. Rarely have a people sprung so universally to arms, or defended their homes with such tenacity. Out of a voting population of 61,198, fully fifty thousand were in the ranks. But they fought in vain. On Sept. 10, 1863, Little Rock was captured by the Northern forces under General Steele. They did the place no harm, save that upon one of its highest eminences they constructed a powerful fort, and to hold it in security leveled the forest to a great distance in every direction, destroying many a monarch of the wood which it will require centuries to replace.

Since the Civil War the history of Little [Pg 554] Rock has been one of continuous development.

Its inhabitants are fond of art and of foreign travel, and few cities of its size send to Europe a larger or more regular contingent, or can show to the visitor more statues and pictures brought home from abroad. A breadth of view unique in the South, which has led it to welcome immigration from the North, has saved it from stagnation, and in all departments of business there [Pg 556]are almost as many men from the North as from the South. The Indian Territory, which for years has stood as a Chinese wall upon the State’s western border, cutting it off from all participation in the great movement of transcontinental traffic, and retarding its progress to an extent that is almost inconceivable, is now opening, and railroads are penetrating the new field. Commerce is flourishing, factories springing up, and everywhere the schoolmaster is abroad in the land. The decrees of the future are inscrutable, but, so far as mortal eye can discern, the twentieth century will be for Little Rock one of constant growth and advancement, material and intellectual, and the wisdom of the men who planted the State’s capital upon this rock when it stood alone in the pathless wilderness will be more than justified.

[Pg 557]

ST. AUGUSTINE

Far down on the Atlantic coast lies the old city of St. Augustine. Unlike most of our early towns, which have either been abandoned, like Jamestown, or rebuilt and modernized until their ancient form and fashion are no longer recognizable, St. Augustine has preserved its antiquity. Its newness is placed alongside, but does not overlie and hide, its ancient character. Its old self is still there, always to be felt and seen, and ever about the old city there cling historic associations which throw around it a charm that few can fail to feel.

The aroma of its life is in its past: and when we recall the fact that it is more than forty years older than Jamestown; that it was a comparatively old town when the Puritans landed [Pg 558]at Plymouth; that here, for the first time, isolated within the shadows of the primeval forest, the civilization of the old world made its abiding-place, where all was new and wild and strange; that this now so insignificant place was the key to a possible empire; that on its occupation or destruction rested French or Spanish domination; that it was a vice-provincial court, boasted of its Addantados, men of the first mark and note, of its Royal Exchequer, its public functionaries, its brave men-at-arms; that its proud name, La siempre fiel ciudad de San Agustin (“the ever-faithful city of St. [Pg 559]Augustine”), was conferred by its monarch; that here the cross was first planted; that from the Papal chair itself rescripts were addressed to its governors; that the first great efforts at Christianizing the fierce native tribes proceeded from this spot; that the martyrs’ blood was first here shed; that around these walls the clash of arms and the battle-cry have been heard, we may well feel a greater interest in this ancient city than is possessed by mere brick and mortar, rapid growth or unwonted prosperity.

The first European who visited this spot, so far as we know, was that sturdy cavalier, Juan Ponce de Leon, who in 1513 came to Florida in search of the fountain of youth, but, failing to find it, gave to Florida its name and perpetuated his own by the romantic quest upon which he came.

More than fifty years afterwards, St. Augustine was visited by Menendez with a Spanish fleet, and a permanent settlement was made. Admiral Coligny, a distinguished leader of the Huguenot party in France, harassed by the religious animosities which prevailed between the Roman Catholics and Protestants, conceived the idea of planting a colony of his [Pg 560]co-religionists in America, both for their protection and to extend the possessions of France into the new world.

For this purpose a small fleet was equipped in the year 1562, and sent out under the command of Captain Jean Ribaut. The expedition came upon the coast of Florida, near St. Augustine, the harbor of which they named the River of Dolphins, because of the many porpoises they saw there. They then entered the mouth of the River St. John’s, planted a column of stone, and passed on to the coast of South Carolina, where they built a small fort called Charlesfort. Leaving there a small garrison, Ribaut returned to France, intending soon to return with a larger force.

Circumstances prevented his return, and it [Pg 561]was not until 1564 that Laudonniere, with three vessels and a larger number of Huguenots, came prepared to make a permanent settlement of the country. He also came first to the River of Dolphins, and thence to the St. John’s, called by them the River May, and after some delay in further explorations of the coast decided to plant his settlement on the St. John’s, where he constructed a fort which he named Fort Caroline, on the south bank of the river, a few miles from its mouth. The colony, however, failed to obtain from the soil or the sea sufficient food, and were about abandoning the country in the following year, when Ribaut arrived with a larger and better class of people, to reinforce Laudonniere’s settlement.

In the meantime, the Spanish sovereign had learned of these Huguenot expeditions, and of their encroachment upon a territory which he claimed for Spain by right of discovery, and at once set on foot an expedition under the command of Pedro Menendez to drive out of Florida the French Huguenots, whose faith he regarded with detestation.

Both the French and Spanish fleets came upon the coast of Florida about the same [Pg 562]time. Ribaut passed St. Augustine and anchored off St. John’s bar. Menendez followed and exchanged a few shots with Ribaut’s vessels, and retired to the harbor of St. Augustine, where he landed his forces, occupying an Indian village called Selooe, which seems to have stood about half a mile north of the fort, upon a tidal creek.

Ribaut, learning of the landing of Menendez’s [Pg 563]forces, determined to attack the Spanish vessels, which lay outside because of the low water on the bar, and thus cut off the Spanish force from molesting the French at Fort Caroline. He had hardly put to sea before he encountered a terrible storm, by which his vessels were driven down the coast and cast ashore.

Menendez, being apprised of Ribaut’s movements, and satisfied that the French vessels would be either driven afar or wrecked on the coast, determined to take the initiative, march across the country and surprise Fort Caroline in its weakened condition, during Ribaut’s absence. Guided by natives familiar with the country, he traversed the forty miles of low, flat woods, and reaching his destination in the early morning made a sudden attack upon the French fort and easily captured it. Moved by a morbid hatred of the French Protestants, as intruders on the Spanish territory, and still more as enemies to his faith and hence entitled to neither mercy nor compassion, most of them were slaughtered in the onset, and Menendez caused his prisoners to be hung on the neighboring trees, with an inscription that he did this to them “not as Frenchmen, but as [Pg 564]Lutherans.” Some twenty or more escaped with Laudonniere to two vessels at the mouth of the river and thence to France.

All of Ribaut’s vessels having been wrecked along the coast between St. Augustine and Canaveral, although most of the people escaped with their lives, they had no means of regaining Fort Caroline or of leaving the coast for any point of refuge. Wrecked and wretched, they moved northward along the coast, and at Matanzas, an inlet twenty miles below St. Augustine, they were met by Menendez, who had returned from Fort Caroline, and was informed of their shipwreck and condition by natives living along the coast. Ribaut asked safe conduct, but Menendez refused all overtures for terms of surrender, requiring unconditional submission to his will or clemency. The result was that, as fast as the French were brought across the inlet in small parties, he directed that they should all be killed. This sad tragedy is commemorated by the name, still borne by the inlet, Matanzas, the place of slaughter.

The French Huguenots thus disposed of, Menendez proceeded to lay out and build his proposed city. A castle and religious house [Pg 566]were first constructed, the castle as a protection against the Indians, or the French, should others come. The castle or fort was built of the trunks of trees, in an octagonal shape, near the present fort, and the dwellings were located in the southern portion of the peninsula on which the present city stands. The shoalness of the water on the bar was a protection against an attack by sea, and the bay on one side, and the Maria Sanchez Creek and St. Sebastian River on the other made the town secure against an attack by land.

Menendez, having secured the safety of his settlement, returned to Spain, little dreaming of the retribution soon to fall upon his fortified posts on the St. John’s from the hand of Dominic de Gourgues, who, with a force of some two hundred and fifty men, left France in 1568, with the purpose of avenging the massacre of his countrymen. Arriving on the coast in April, he passed the mouth of the St. John’s and brought his three vessels into Cumberland Sound. Here, communicating with the Indians, whom he found very hostile to the Spaniards, he gathered a large force of Indian allies, attacked the Spanish forts at the mouth of the St. John’s River, captured [Pg 567]them after but little resistance, and then marched against Fort Caroline, changed to San Matteo. Although the fort was well garrisoned, the Spanish commander, believing that he was surrounded by a superior force, fled, and De Gourgues captured the fort, meeting with little resistance. In retaliation for the massacre of the Huguenots, he hung his prisoners to the same trees, with the inscription, burned upon a plank, that he did this “not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, thieves, and murderers.”

No further attempt was made by the French to colonize the southern Atlantic coast, and thus ended the sad beginnings of what, under other circumstances, might have proved the establishment of French colonization along our whole Atlantic coast.

The annals of St. Augustine during the remainder of the life of Menendez present only the usual vicissitudes of new settlements, the alternation of want and supply and occasional disaffections and annoyances by unruly soldiers or hostile Indians.

Unluckily for the little city, Sir Francis Drake, in 1586, returning from the coasts of South America, discovered, in passing, the [Pg 568]Spanish lookout on Anastasia Island, at the entrance of the harbor. Having sent some boats in, a town across the bay was discovered. During the night, a fifer came out to the fleet playing the Prince of Orange march, and informed Sir Francis that the Spaniards had abandoned their fort. This report proved to be true, and Sir Francis found that in their haste they had left behind some ten thousand dollars in the treasury chest. Being fired upon by some of the inhabitants, he burned the town.

An engraved plan of Drake’s descent upon St. Augustine, published in England upon his return, represents an octagonal fort between two streams, and at the distance of half a mile another stream, and beyond that the town, with a lookout and church and monastery. The plan shows three squares lengthwise, and four in breadth, with gardens on the west side. The relative position of the town with reference to the entrance to the harbor is correctly shown, and there seems no sufficient ground to doubt the identity of the present city with the original location.

The province was then under the government of Don Pedro Menendez, a nephew of the [Pg 570]Adelantado, who, after the departure of the English fleet under Drake, began, with some assistance from Havana, to rebuild the town.

A body of Franciscan missionaries came to Florida in 1592, and established missions among the Indians at various points along the coast and in the interior. For a time considerable apparent success attended these efforts; but a few years later a concerted attack was made by the Indians upon the missionaries, several of whom were massacred at their posts. Hostilities became active in 1638 between the Appalachian Indians and the Spanish settlements upon the coast. The Indians were soon subdued, large numbers were brought to St. Augustine, and as a punishment for their out-break they were forced to labor—it is said for sixty years—upon the public works and the fortifications, in quarrying and transporting the coquina stone from Anastasia Island.

About this period the English settlements in Carolina were established, which was considered an encroachment upon the territory claimed by the Spanish Crown by virtue of discovery and occupation. Unfriendly feelings speedily grew up between the English and Spanish colonies, embittered by difference of [Pg 571]religious faith and an inherited rancor on both sides.

In 1648, St. Augustine is described as having more than three hundred householders, and containing a flourishing monastery of the Order of St. Francis, with fifty brothers in residence, all zealous for the conversion of the Indians. The parish Church was built of wood.

But the poor little city was destined not to rest in peace. In 1665, one hundred years from its foundation, it was visited by Captain Davis, an English buccaneer and free-booter, of a class then numerous in those seas. He landed his forces near the city, marched directly upon the town, looted and plundered it without meeting, it is said, with any resistance from the Spanish garrison in the fort, which numbered some two hundred men-at-arms. The easy capture of the town by this casual free-booter indicated the necessity for stronger fortifications and better means of resistance.

The Castle of San Marco had been commenced and partly constructed by the labor of the Appalachian Indians, no doubt very slowly and unwillingly rendered. Don Juan Marquez de Cabrera, having been appointed [Pg 572]Governor in 1681, at once applied himself to the completion of the castle and other fortifications.

The English settlements in Carolina continued to create much dissatisfaction. The Spanish Crown claimed the whole Atlantic coast as their province of Florida, and it is so designated on ancient maps, even including Delaware and Pennsylvania, then being settled by Penn and his colonists. An attack was made in 1681 on a Scotch and English settlement at Port Royal by three armed galleys sent out from St. Augustine. Many of the English colonists lost their lives, and much property was destroyed, which later led to bitter retaliation.

Menendez, by his contract with the Spanish Crown, had been authorized to take to Florida five hundred negro slaves, but did not avail himself of the privilege, and it was not until 1687 that one Captain de Aila brought the first Spanish negro slave into Florida. Later the inhabitants of Carolina complained that the authorities at St. Augustine seduced and harbored their runaway slaves, which was not denied, but justified by the claim that they did it for the good of the souls of the negroes.

Hostilities having broken out between England and Spain, and a bitter feeling already existing between the English in Carolina and the Spaniards in Florida, Governor Moore, of South Carolina, led an expedition into Florida in 1702, and with a considerable force made an attack upon St. Augustine by sea and by land. He easily captured the town, and the inhabitants retired to the fort, where they were besieged for over a month. For want of heavier guns, Moore was unable to capture the fort, and had to retire; not, however, till he had committed the useless barbarity of burning the town. Upon the departure of the English forces, the inhabitants gladly set to work to repair or rebuild their ruined homes.

About this period the building of a sea wall was begun, to protect the town from the encroachment of the sea, and leisurely proceeded for many years. Portions of this ancient wall may yet be seen within the present wall, which was built by the United States after the change of flags.

In 1704, Governor Moore again appeared before the old city, and partially destroyed its habitations, but was unable to make any impression on the stalwart castle. Bad feelings [Pg 575]were reciprocally held for many years by the English in Carolina and the Spaniards in Florida.

In the meantime, another English settlement having been made in Georgia by General Oglethorpe, the English drew nearer to Florida and occupied a country still claimed by the Spanish Crown. The Spanish Governor notified Oglethorpe to depart, and gave indications of a forcible attempt to dispossess the new colony. Oglethorpe determined to be beforehand with the Spaniards, and organized an expedition made up from his own colony and Carolina, and proceeded to invest St. Augustine by sea and by land. The town was now, however, better fortified, and the Castle had been greatly strengthened. Oglethorpe’s batteries on Anastasia Island were too light to make an impression upon the walls of San Marco, the soft rock imbedding his balls without injury. The siege lasted thirty-eight days, but, being unable to reduce the Castle, Oglethorpe at last gave up the attempt, and withdrew his forces. The marks of his cannonade may still be seen on the eastern walls of the fort.

The repeated outbreaks of the Indians and [Pg 576]the inroads of the English had discouraged all attempts at cultivation in the vicinity, and the city remained little more than a garrison town, until, by the Treaty of 1762, Florida was ceded to the English Crown. The Spanish inhabitants nearly all left with the garrison for Cuba. The English flag was raised upon the Castle of San Marco, and an English Governor, an English garrison and English colonists came in to occupy the city and the province. Judicious measures were at once taken to advance the interest and growth of the city and the two Floridas. Bounties were offered for the production of indigo and naval stores, and a considerable commerce at once grew up. Roads were opened, and settlements made in the interior and on the coast. During the twenty years of English occupation extensive barracks were erected in the city, which was much built up and improved; and, could it have remained under the English flag, Florida would have been as well populated and as prosperous as the other colonies of England in America. The acknowledgment of the independence of her other colonies, which had organized a confederacy against her rule, rendered Florida of little consequence as a small [Pg 577]and isolated colony, and, in 1783, England ceded Florida back to Spain.

As a consequence of this recession and change of government, the English inhabitants nearly all left for Carolina and Georgia or the British West India Islands. St. Augustine fell back into its old condition of a garrison town; the works of improvement begun by the English were abandoned, and the old city renewed its sleepy existence. There was indeed some attempt by land grants to induce immigration, but with no great result.

So things went until 1812, when, fearing that England intended to acquire Florida, which would be a menace to the interests of the United States, President Monroe, under a resolution of Congress, ordered troops into Florida. St. Augustine was threatened, but not conquered or reduced. The country was raided, plantations were devastated, and much injury done before the United States troops were recalled. Finally, Spain was worried into an agreement to sell Florida to the United States for a pecuniary compensation.

In the year 1821, the Spanish flag, planted at St. Augustine in 1565, was hauled down finally, and the Stars and Stripes waved over [Pg 578]the Castle of San Marco, which by a senseless order was renamed Fort Marion, which name it now bears. The Spanish inhabitants generally remained, and their descendants still constitute the larger portion of the resident population of the ancient city. Under American rule people from the adjoining States came in and began to establish settlements, but the Indian tribes still held possession of the largest portion of the territory.

In 1835, the Seminole Indian War broke out; for seven years hostilities were maintained, and it was not until 1842 that peace was restored. St. Augustine suffered with the rest of the territory, and little progress was made in population or prosperity. It still remained the leading town, though that did not mean much, and when the war was over other towns, notably Jacksonville, grew into importance. Some invalids, not many, came for a winter’s sojourn, but there was little change until the Civil War. At an early day Commodore Dupont came into the harbor with his armed vessels, and the town was quietly surrendered, supplied with a garrison, and went into an enforced apathy from which it never emerged until the war was over.

After 1865, a new era sprang up for St. Augustine; railroad communication was opened to Tocoi, on the St. John’s, and, later on, to Jacksonville. Winter visitors began to come in large numbers, and hotels on a large scale were built. Finally, Mr. H. M. Flagler became interested in the old city, and built the famous and most beautiful Ponce de Leon, the Alcazar, and the Cordova, with many other handsome buildings. He purchased and improved the railroad, filled in the marshes of the St. Sebastian, and erected a new city alongside of the old. The population has been doubled, and its attractions have greatly increased. A railway system has been established, taking in the whole east coast of Florida as far down as Miami, with connecting lines of steamers to Key West, Havana and Nassau. Few towns can now boast of more attractive residences, and none of such magnificent hotels for the solace of the traveler. After a varied existence of over three centuries, the ancient city has put on a new life of elegance and prosperity.

Dear old city! how many sweet associations it has for the many thousands who have visited it in these past years! How many walks on [Pg 581]the sea wall; how many boat rides on its placid waters; how many excursions into its meandering creeks, and strolls along the beach of Anastasia Island; how many cozy corners in the loggia of the Ponce de Leon, and the corridors of the Alcazar, come at the call of memory!

The gray and time-worn old Castle of San Marco, with its gloomy portals and dark chambers, seems in a moment to carry the visitor back three centuries to another people and another age. People may come, and people may go, but the old Castle will remain for centuries, a memorial to the long-past age of the Spanish monarchy in America.

Total number of projectiles fired against it	46,053
Total weight in tons of metal thrown (estimate)	3,500
Total number of days under three great bombardments	117
[Pg 282]Total number of days under eight minor bombardments	40
Total number of days under fire, steady and desultory	280
Total number of casualties (52 killed, 267 wounded)	319

Page ix: “Provincial Forces 6”	“Provincial Forces 9”
Page 67: “Royal, Republican,”	“Royal, Republicans,”
Page 107: “City was indentified with”	“City was identified with”
Page 122: “which the Commisioners”	“which the Commissioners”
Page 138: “with woful languor”	“with woeful languor”
Page 220: “Immmediately in its front”	“Immediately in its front”
Page 273: “and icthyologist”	“and ichthyologist”
Page 275: “300 portraits dur a”	“300 portraits during a”
Page 300: “But it w reserved”	“But it was reserved”
Page 386: “the vocifferous patriot”	“the vociferous patriot”
Page 397: “was ready in in the fall”	“was ready in the fall”
Page 530: “contents was discharged”	“contents were discharged”
Page 558: “siempre fiel cuidad”	“siempre fiel ciudad”

HISTORIC TOWNS

OF THE

SOUTHERN STATES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

FOOTNOTES:

HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE SOUTHERN STATES

FOOTNOTES:

ANNAPOLIS

FOOTNOTES:

FREDERICK TOWN

WASHINGTON

RICHMOND ON THE JAMES

WILLIAMSBURG

FOOTNOTES:

WILMINGTON

CHARLESTON

FOOTNOTES:

SAVANNAH

MOBILE

FOOTNOTES:

MONTGOMERY

NEW ORLEANS

VICKSBURG

KNOXVILLE

NASHVILLE

LOUISVILLE

LITTLE ROCK

ST. AUGUSTINE

INDEX

Transcriber’s note

		PAGE
Baltimore	St. George L. Sioussat	1
Annapolis	Sara Andrew Shafer	47
Frederick Town	Sara Andrew Shafer	75
Washington	Frank A. Vanderlip	101
Richmond on the James	William Wirt Henry	151
Williamsburg	Lyon G. Tyler	185
Wilmington	Joseph Blount Cheshire	219
Charleston	Yates Snowden	249
Savannah	Pleasant Alexander Stovall	293
Mobile	Peter J. Hamilton	327
Montgomery	George Petrie	379
New Orleans	Grace King	411
Vicksburg	H. F. Simrall	433
Knoxville	Joshua W. Caldwell	449
Nashville	Gates P. Thruston	477
Louisville	Lucien V. Rule	503
Little Rock	George B. Rose	537
St. Augustine	George R. Fairbanks	557

	PAGE
The Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.	Frontispiece
BALTIMORE
Old Court-House (1768) and Powder Magazine	5
From an old print in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society.
Edward Fell, in Uniform of Provincial Forces	9
From original painting in possession of William Fell Johnson.
Moale’s Sketch of Baltimore in 1752	13
From the original in the possession of the Maryland Historical Society.
Battle Monument	17
Mount Clare, 1760, Residence of Charles Carroll, Barrister	19
Boos House, near which Lafayette’s Troops Encamped	23
John Eager Howard	27
From the painting by Rembrandt Peale, owned by R. Bayard.
St. Paul’s Church	31
From an old copper print, owned by Rev. J. S. B. Hodges.
Belvidere, 1786, the Home of Colonel John E. Howard	35
From the original in the possession of the Misses McKim, Belvidere Terrace, Baltimore, Md.
Bust of Johns Hopkins	43
From the original in Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Seal of Baltimore	45[Pg x]
ANNAPOLIS
George Calvert, First Lord Baltimore	48
Reproduced from an old print.
Cecilius Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore	49
Reproduced from an old print.
St. John’s College and the Treaty Tree	55
The State House	57
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 1737-1832	60
The Old House of Burgesses, now Used as the State Treasury	61
The Brice House	62
The Peggy Stewart House	64
The Burning of the “Peggy Stewart”	65
From the painting by Frank B. Mayer.
The Naval Institute	69
(Where the battle-flags are kept.)
The Old Governor’s Mansion, now the Naval Academy Library	72
The Seal of the Naval Academy	73
FREDERICK TOWN
Prospect Hall. The Dulany Mansion	81
Rose Hill, the Home of Governor Thomas Johnson	86
Governor Thomas Johnson and Family	89
From the painting by Charles Wilson Peale.
Francis Scott Key	91
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney	92
The Old Reformed Church	95
Barbara Frietchie	96
Home of Barbara Frietchie	97
The Hated British Tax-Stamp, 1765-1766	99[Pg xi]
WASHINGTON
Pierre Charles L’Enfant	105
Statue of Gen. Winfield Scott, Washington	118
The Capitol	123
From the Congressional Library.
The City of Washington in 1800	127
From an old print.
The White House	129
From the northeast.
State, War and Navy Building	133
From the southeast.
The “Octagon House” used by President and Mrs. Madison during the Rebuilding of the White House in 1814	137
Grand Staircase in the Hall of the Congressional Library	139
The United States Treasury	143
From the southwest.
Rotunda of the Congressional Library, Washington	145
Washington Monument	149
Looking across the “flats.”
The Seal of the District of Columbia	150
RICHMOND ON THE JAMES
Grave of Powhatan on the James	153
Colonel William Evelyn Byrd	157
From a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
Old Stone House, Built in 1737	160
Bird’s-eye View of Richmond	163
Washington Monument and Capitol, Richmond, Virginia	167
Henry Clay	169
The Marshall House, Richmond, Virginia	172
Richmond in Flames	177[Pg xii]
Monument to General Robert E. Lee, Richmond	179
The White House of the Confederacy, Richmond	180
Monument over Confederate Dead at Hollywood	181
Seal of Richmond	183
WILLIAMSBURG
“Old Powder-horn”	186
Interior of Bruton Parish Church at Williamsburg, Va.	189
College of William and Mary	193
Jacobus Blair	195
The founder of William and Mary College.
Benj. S. Ewell	197
John Tyler, Sr.	200
Mary Cary, Washington’s Early Love	205
Chief Justice Marshall	209
George Wythe	213
John Tyler, President of the United States	215
Seal of William and Mary College	217
WILMINGTON
Residence of James Sprunt	223
Formerly the residence of Governor Dudley.
St. Paul’s Church, Edenton, N. C., from the Southeast	225
Begun in 1736.
Harnett’s House, “Hilton,” near Wilmington	230
“Orton House”	232
The Walls of St. Philip’s Church, Brunswick	234
Showing part of the corner-stone broken out and rifled by Federal soldiers in 1865.
Commission of Louis de Rosset as Captain in the French Army, Signed by Louis XIV., and Countersigned by Tellier	237
Hugh Waddell	239[Pg xiii]
William Hooper of North Carolina, Signer of the Declaration of Independence	241
Headquarters of Lord Cornwallis, Wilmington	243
Commission of Louis de Rosset as Captain, Given by William and Mary	245
Seal of Wilmington	247
CHARLESTON
Plan of Charleston	253
From a survey by Edward Crisp in 1704.
St. Philip’s Church, Charleston	255
A Modern Charleston Residence	259
Defence of Fort Moultrie	263
From a painting by J. A. Oertel.
The Attack on Fort Moultrie by the British Fleet, 1776	265
Philadelphia Street (Coon Alley)	279
Scene in rear of St. Philip’s Church.
The Attack on Charleston by the Federal Ironclad Fleet, April 7, 1863	281
Major-General William Moultrie	285
From a painting by Col. J. Trumbull.
St. Michael’s Church, Charleston	289
Seal of Charleston	292
SAVANNAH
The Post Office	295
House where the Colonial Legislature Assembled in 1782	297
Headquarters of Washington during a Visit to Savannah	299
The Jasper Monument	303
The Burial Place of Tomochichi	307
Christ Church	309[Pg xiv]
Oaks at Bethesda Orphanage under which Whitefield Preached	310
Great Seal of Georgia in Colonial Days	312
Old Fort, where Powder Magazine was Seized in 1775	314
General Oglethorpe	316
Count Casimir Pulaski	319
Fort Pulaski	321
R. M. Charlton, Poet, Jurist, U. S. Senator	323
Seal of Savannah	325
MOBILE
Facsimile Page of Baptismal Record (1704) with the Autograph of Bienville	333
Plan of Mobile and of Fort Louis in 1711	337
The Bay Shell Road at Lovers’ Lane	343
Mobile in 1765	349
The Ellicott Stone	351
Place where Aaron Burr was Captured	354
John A. Campbell	362
Raphael Semmes in 1861	364
C. S. S. “Florida” Entering Mobile Bay, Sept. 4, 1862	367
From a painting by R. S. Floyd.
Home of Augusta Evans Wilson	373
Augusta Evans Wilson	376
Seal of Mobile	378
MONTGOMERY
Old Cannon of Bienville	380
Dexter Avenue during a Street Fair	387
Old Building in which Lafayette Ball was Given in 1825	389
Alabama State Capitol where President Davis was Inaugurated	396[Pg xv]
First Page of the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States, as Reported by the Committee	401
This is in the handwriting of Gen. Thos. R. R. Cobb, who was a member of the committee. Taken from the original, which is in the possession of Mr. A. L. Hull, Athens, Ga.
The Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States	403
As reported by committee and amended by Congress, is in the possession of the daughter of Mr. Alex. B. Clitherall, Mrs. A. C. Birch, Montgomery, Ala.
The Pollard Residence, Built before the War	406
Monument to Confederate Soldiers Erected on the Capitol Grounds by the Ladies’ Memorial Association	407
Jefferson Davis	408
Seal of Montgomery	410
NEW ORLEANS
Tomb of Avar, City Park	413
The Custom-House, New Orleans	415
Chartres Street and Cathedral	419
The Ursulines Convent	421
The Jackson Monument	423
Canal Street, New Orleans	427
The Cabildo, Old Court Building, Jackson Square	428
St. Fries Cathedral	429
Seal of New Orleans	431
VICKSBURG
Meeting of Generals Grant and Pemberton at the “Stone House” inside the Rebel Works on the Morning of July 4, 1863	435
(From an actual sketch made on the spot by one of the special artists of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, now in the collection of Major George Haven Putnam.)[Pg xvi]
General U. S. Grant	442
Plan of the Siege of Vicksburg	445
Seal of Vicksburg	447
KNOXVILLE
John Sevier, First Governor of Tennessee	450
William Blount, Governor of Southwest Territory	452
University of Tennessee	459
Hugh L. White	464
Admiral Farragut	465
William G. Brownlow, the “Fighting Parson”	467
Battle of Fort Saunders	473
Seal of Knoxville	475
NASHVILLE
James Robertson	481
The First Residence of Andrew Jackson	483
Fort Ridley, an Old Nashville Blockhouse	485
Andrew Jackson	489
The Hermitage Mansion, Residence of Andrew Jackson	491
James K. Polk	493
Tomb of James K. Polk, Nashville	495
The State House	497
The Parthenon, Nashville, Tenn.	499
Seal of Nashville	501
LOUISVILLE
George D. Prentice	505
From an old painting owned by the Polytechnic Society of Kentucky.
Daniel Boone	508
From a painting in the possession of Col. R. T. Durrett, Louisville, Ky.[Pg xvii]
George Rogers Clark	510
From a painting in the possession of Col. R. T. Durrett, Louisville, Ky.
Blockhouse and Log Cabins on Corn Island, 1778, First Settlement of Louisville, Ky.	513
From an old print in the possession of Col. R. T. Durrett, Louisville, Ky.
Residence of George Rogers Clark on the Indiana Shore, opposite Louisville	515
From an old print in the possession of Col. R. T. Durrett, Louisville, Ky.
The City Hall	519
On the Tobacco Breaks	523
The Keats House (The Elks Building)	527
The Court-House	529
A Scene at the Wharf	533
Seal of Louisville	535
LITTLE ROCK
The “Little Rock,” to which the City Owes its Name	539
Little Rock Levee	540
New State House	543
Old State House	545
The House where the Arkansas Legislature was Held in 1835	546
Albert Pike	547
Robert Crittenden	548
The Old Fowler Mansion	549
Now the residence of John M. Gracie.
The Crittenden Residence	550
The first brick house built in Little Rock. Now the home of Governor James P. Eagle.
The Old Pike Mansion	551
Now the residence of Colonel John G. Fletcher.[Pg xviii]
Custom-House and Post Office	554
Little Rock University	555
ST. AUGUSTINE
The Old City Gate	558
Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Founder of St. Augustine	560
Old Forge	562
Old Spanish Fort on Matanzas River	565
The Oldest House in St. Augustine	569
Ruins of the Old Spanish Fort at Matanzas Inlet	573
Hotel Ponce de Leon	579
Seal of St. Augustine	581