Charleston revisited

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

Columbia, South Carolina—As we all know, the Cooper and Ashley rivers commemorate the great (not the good) Earl of Shaftesbury and, meeting at Charleston (which commemorates the merry but not good Charles II), become the Atlantic Ocean. Yesterday, the magnificent har- bour that the two rivers form was grey and uneasy. Indeed, 'climatewise' it recalled the Clyde seen, say, from Gourock. Of course the harbour is not as beautiful as the Firth : what harbour is? (Hobart,Tasmania, comes nearest.) But across the grey horizon stretched a, dark line that, a little over a hundred years ago, was very famous indeed, for it was Fort Sumter where began one of the greatest civil wars in history. (It is usually forgotten in the 'Mother Country' that the United States, North and South, lost in it as many men absolutely and many more men relatively than did Britain in the First World War.) But perhaps Fort Sumter is not the most important historical monument of Charleston, for to risk an Irish bull, the most important monument isn't there—the Mechanics Hall, long destroyed, in which the Democratic party split in 1860 and made Fort Sumter and 'the War' (as they still say here) inevitable.

But in the vanished Mechanics Hall or the carefully, preserved fort was the beginning of one of the most important testing times in modern history, the ordeal that decided that what Lincoln called 'the last best hope of earth' would continue to exist as 'a more perfect Union' and twice decide, to use the old rhetorical phrase, the 'destiny of the world.'

But the historical charm of Charleston is equal to its historical importance. Despite the great fire (not caused by the war), much of the elegant city of before the war still exists. The town mansions of the great planters, set side- ways to the street, remain, if mostly turned into apartment houses or into institutions, libraries, museums and the like. If the Mechanics Hall Is gone, the Hibernian Hall that houses the most exclusive gratin of the local Faubourg Saint- Germain remains, culminating in the Saint Cecilia Society, so much more impressive than the rgiony Mardi Gras antics of New Orleans. (1 dismiss the Arksarben romps of Omaha,

Nebraska, for they are as like the pavanes etc of the Saint Cecilia Society, as the cathedral of Omaha, dedicated to Saint Cecilia, is to the cathedral of Albi.) The Huguenot church, un- fortunately new ugly Gothic revival, yet con- tains in the tablets removed there the long list of French refugees who gave the city its special flavour: Gaillard, Huger, Legal* Desportes, Roinsett, Gabriel Guigoard—so many memor- ials to the folly of Lottis XIV. (I was glad to learn from the Charlestonian friend who showed me round, that there is no nonsense here about the good Soots name of Pettigrew or Petigru being Huguenot.)

The fine eighteenth century churches, built in imitation of the Wren and Gibbs churches in London, are as elegantly impressive as they seemed to me when I and a friend first visited Charleston in 1926, an age incredibly remote today. The very elegant Duck Street theatre has been restored and flourishes. Its bar suffers under handicaps, for the present Governor of the Palmetto State has enforced the law and "mnitn-um! What DO you put in it to give It all that marvellous ethnic turmoil?' you can't got a glass of whisky or brandy; you must buy a bottle at a state store. This has led

to proposals to pass another Ordinance Seces- sion, this time directed not against the United States but against the Baptist-dominated back- woods, from which came novi homilies like John Caldwell Calhoun.

An Alsatia here would help the tourist trade and restore the memory of the great days of mint juleps, duels—and slavery. For in 'the

Market,' behind the old city mansions, lie some of the surviving slave quarters. And under the shadow of Saint Philip's lies the grave of Cal- houn for whose doctrines the city stood the long siege. In the harbour, the first submarine was tried out with heroic and futile ingenuity. Along

the battery, the great mortars are lined up. A Greek-style monument shows Pallas sheltering

a young warrior (denounced for being naked,

but he is no more naked than the Achilles monu- ment in Hyde Park). After all, was not slavery defended on the grounds that it alone, as in Athens, made possible the existence of the Greek polls?

The Greek polis is in danger today. Over all the memories of the heroic past hangs the shadow of the present war. General Westmore- land is a South Carolinian and he is defended with local pride. The United States Navy yard is bigger than ever. The famous military school, 'the Citadel, has its 2.000 young Spartiates in rigorous training and some of the local heroes, now noted or lamented, are descendants of the

black helots of the old order. The military

tradition is even stronger in South Carolina than in most Southern states. The most distin-

guished servant of the state told me in a melan- choly tone, 'I am a dove but there are few doves in the state.' South Carolina is peculiarly the state of the lost cause.

In some ways it does not recognise that the cause is lost. In one of those, transvestite acts so common in American political history, the - 'Republican party' of the state is the heir of Cal- houn not of Lincoln, still less of such staunch

Unionists of 1861 as the Petigru who described

all his native state as a madhouse. Local pride may claim Andrew Jackson as a native soft

(as the hero himself did) but few in the state would welcome his reincarnation and his pro- clamation and enforcement of federal authority.

To accept defeat in Vietnam would he 'intoler-

able' just as many find it impossible to notice that it is dead negro students of Orangeburg who have to be explained away, not the mass of negro petitioners who descended on the state capital to present their petition of right. The state is far more prosperous than ever before.

Even the urban negroes are conspicuously more prosperous than before, although the old rural economy based on rice has gone and the more important economy based on the belief that 'cotton is king' is going.

One of the most naive British beliefs (held by some formally intelligent people) is that Americans have no historical sense or historical burdens. The past and the future fight in South Carolina. But perhaps a wider meaning can now be given to Tim rod's epigram on the Con- federate dead?

In seeds of laurel in the earth, The blossom of your deeds is blown.

And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone.

The shaft need not be a monument to the dead of Vietnam; it, one hopes, will be to the future, not to the past.