Sojourns in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865–1947

Jennie Holton Fant

Description

Travelers' accounts of the people, culture, and politics of the Southern coastal region after the Civil War

Charleston is one of the most intriguing of American cities, a unique combination of quaint streets, historic architecture, picturesque gardens, and age-old tradition, embroidered with a vivid cultural, literary, and social history. It is a city of contrasts and controversy as well. To trace a documentary history of Charleston from the postbellum era into the twentieth century is to encounter an ever-shifting but consistently alluring landscape. In this collection, ranging from 1865 to 1947, correspondents, travelers, tourists, and other visitors describe all aspects of the city as they encounter it.

Sojourns in Charleston begins after the Civil War, when northern journalists flocked south to report on the "city of desolation" and ruin, continues through Reconstruction, and then moves into the era when national magazine writers began to promote the region as a paradise. From there twentieth-century accounts document a wide range of topics, from the living conditions of African Americans to the creation of cultural institutions that supported preservation and tourism. The most recognizable of the writers include author Owen Wister, novelist William Dean Howells, artist Norman Rockwell, Boston poet Amy Lowell, novelist and Zionist leader Ludwig Lewisohn, poet May Sarton, novelist Glenway Wescott on British author Somerset Maugham in the lowcountry, and French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Their varied viewpoints help weave a beautiful tapestry of narratives that reveal the fascinating and evocative history that made this great city what it is today.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Sullivan's Island
• Isle of Palms
• Asedio de Charleston
• Carolina del Sur
• The Saturday Press (literary newspaper)
• South Carolina Historical Society
• Floating Battery of Charleston Harbor
• First Battle of Charleston Harbor
• Charleston Harbor
• Charleston Museum
• William Porcher Miles
• Southern literature
• Cooper River (South Carolina)
• Ashley River (South Carolina)
• University of South Carolina
• Siege of Charleston
• College of Charleston
• State
• Sullivan's Island, South Carolina
• Isle of Palms, South Carolina
• South
• South Carolina
• History of the Americas
• United States
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• Robert Gould Shaw
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 27 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611179408
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Sojourns in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-1947
Sojourns in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-1947
F ROM THE R UINS OF W AR TO THE R ISE OF T OURISM
E DITED B Y
Jennie Holton Fant
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-939-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-940-8 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: view looking north down Church Street to St. Philip s Church, c. 1920-1926, Library of Congress
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
W. F. G. Peck (1865)
Four Years Under Fire
Whitelaw Reid (1865)
City of Desolation
Sidney Andrews (1865)
The Dead Body of Charleston
Oliver Bell Bunce (1870)
Charleston and its Suburbs
Edward King (1873)
Charleston, South Carolina. The Venice of America
Sir George Campbell, M.P. (1878)
The Petrel State
B. (Eliza Houston Barr) (1880)
Inside Southern Cabins
Lady Duffus Hardy (1883)
A Ghost of Dead Days
Owen Wister (1901 and 1902)
Enchanted
Charles Henry White (1907)
Charleston
Edward Hungerford (1912)
Where Romance And Courtesy Do Not Forget
Mrs. T. P. O Connor (Betty Paschal O Connor) (1913)
Hospitable Charleston
William Dean Howells (1915)
In Charleston, A Travel Sketch
Norman Rockwell (1918)
The Battle of Charleston 1918
Amy Lowell (1912-1922)
And the Garden Was a Fire of Magenta
Ludwig Lewisohn (1922)
A Lingering Fragrance
Schuyler Livingston Parsons (1928)
Mr. Parsons Mansion
M. A. De Wolfe Howe (1930)
The Song of Charleston
Emily Clark (1930)
Supper at the Goose Creek Club
Holger Cahill (1935)
Scouting for Folk Art
Edward Twig (Richard Coleman) (1940)
Charleston: The Great Myth
May Sarton (1941)
Charleston Plantations
Glenway Wescott (1942 and 1946)
With Maugham at Yemassee
Vashti Maxwell Grayson (1945)
Charleston
Simone de Beauvoir (1947)
These Aristocratic Paradises
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Charleston, South Carolina. Ruins , 1895
Whitelaw Reid
Charleston, S.C. View of ruined buildings
Charleston, from the Bay by Harry Fenn
A Glimpse of Charleston and Bay by Harry Fenn
A Road-side Scene near Charleston
The Orphan House-Charleston by James Wells Champney
Houses on the Battery by James Wells Champney
Radical members of the first legislature
African Americans working, Charleston, S.C.: Gossiping at the gate
Thomas Heyward, Jr. House, 87 Church Street by George Barnard
President and Mrs. Roosevelt in Charleston
State Street Shops , C. H. White
Barber Shop , C. H. White
Dismantled Charleston , C. H. White
King Street, south, Charleston, S.C .
Frontispiece page from My Beloved South
Old market, Charleston, S.C .
Norman Rockwell , c.1921
Amy Lowell at Sevenels
View down street to St. Philip s Church
O Donnel House, 21 King Street, Charleston, Charleston County, S.C .
Church at crossroads on sealevel highway
Emily Clark Balch by Arthur Davis
Legareville, South Carolina by Portia Trenholm
The Old Plantation , attributed to John Rose
27 State St. misc., Charleston
Nature s Mirror, Magnolia-on-the-Ashley
Glenway Wescott, c.1950s
106 Tradd St., Col. John Stuart House
Louis De Saussure House
Acknowledgments
In the research and preparation of this anthology, I have incurred many debts of gratitude. I owe my appreciation to the descendants of Owen Wister, via Alice E. Stokes, for permission to publish an excerpt from Roosevelt, Story of A Friendship . My thanks to the Norman Rockwell Family Agency for permission to reprint The Battle of Charleston 1918 from Rockwell s autobiography, Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator . My gratitude to the heirs of Schuyler Livingston Parsons, Stephanie Wharton Holbrook and Lena Pless, for permission to reprint the Charleston portion from Parson s autobiography, Untold Friendships . My appreciation to Mark De Wolfe Howe descendant Fanny Howe for permission to reprint the article The Song of Charleston. Credit is owed to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution for the account of Holger Cahill, excerpted from the Rockefeller report in the Holger Cahill papers. My thanks to Russell Volkening, literary agents for the May Sarton Estate, for permission to reprint Sarton s poem Charleston Plantations. My appreciation to Jerry Rosco, literary executor of the Glenway Wescott estate and coeditor of Wescott s journals, Continual Lessons , for permission to reprint excerpts regarding Wescott s visits with Somerset Maugham at Yemassee, South Carolina. I am further indebted to Mr. Rosco for the photograph of Wescott.
My gratitude to the National Gallery of Canada for rights to the artwork of Charles Henry White. My appreciation to Houghton Library at Harvard University for the reproduction of Amy Lowell; and to Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library for the reproduction of Emily Clark Balch. My thanks to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg for rights and reproduction of the paintings Legareville and Old Plantation . My appreciation to the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina for reproductions of the artwork of J. Champney Wells, and Mrs. T. P. O Connor. As well, I am indebted for illustrations garnered from the collections of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs and the New York Public Library.
Finally, my gratitude to James Wood, the incomparable genius with technology, and to friends and family who have tolerated my decades-long obsession with Charleston history, which has taken up all my time.
Introduction
noun pa limp sest \'pa-l m(p)- sest, p -'lim(p)-\: a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing; something that has many obvious stages or levels of meaning, development, or history; a multilayered record.
Here, four years ago, the first fortifications of the war were thrown up. Here the dashing young cavaliers, the haughty Southrons determined to have a country and a history for themselves, rushed madly into the war as into a picnic. Here the boats from Charleston landed every day cases of champagne, p t s innumerable, casks of claret, thousands of Havana cigars, for the use of the luxurious young Captains and Lieutenants and their friends among the privates Here, with feasting, and dancing, and love making, with music improvised from the ballroom, and enthusiasm fed to madness by well-ripened old Madeira, the free-handed, free-mannered young men who had ruled society at Newport and Saratoga dashed into revolution as they would into a waltz. Not one of them doubted that, only a few months later, he should make his accustomed visit to the Northern watering places, and be received with the distinction due a hero of Southern independence. Long before these fortifications, thus begun, were abandoned, they saw their enterprise in far different lights, and conducted it in a far soberer and less luxurious way. -Whitelaw Reid from After the War: A Southern Tour , 1866.
And the story depicted in the irregular weave is of a place extravagant in its beauty, reckless in its fecundity, terrible in its indifference, and dark with memories. -Sally Mann, Hold Still
There is properly no history, only biography. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Five years ago Charleston sat like a queen living upon the waters, writes Farley Peck, among the northern journalists who herded south in 1865 to report on the defeated Confederacy. Its fine society has been dissipated if not completely destroyed. Journalist Whitelaw Reid notes: We steamed into Charleston Harbor early in the morning; and one by one, Sumter, Moultrie, Pinckney, and at last the City of Desolation itself rose from the smooth expanse of water. Correspondent Sidney Andrews observes, A City of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceful barrenness,-that is Charleston.
The queen of the South before the Civil War, Charleston fell to Federal forces on February 17, 1865. Approximately 12,992 South Carolina men had died as soldiers, leaving young boys, old men, women and girls to pull the pieces together. The fire in December of 1861, which destroyed one hundred and forty-five acres of the peninsula, and northern bombardment of the city for eighteen months left Charleston in shambles-a wreck that would remain apparent until well after World War I. Martial law was declared, lands were confiscated by the government, and citizens were ordered to take an oath of allegiance if they wanted their houses returned, passes for mobility, or any favor whatsoever. Reconstruction ensued, and for the next eleven years federal troops were garrisoned in the state.
To present an anthology of travel accounts of Charleston from the Civil War into the twentieth century is to see history unfold in an ever-shifting landscape. Further, even in the decades before the war, any standard genre of travel accounts and travel books that had dominated in earlier antebellum times had ended. After the war, travel documentat