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unflinching spirit of all ages and both sexes in the community."

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:

"Charleston was a hostile fortress. In its defence the merchants and property owners appear to have aided by all means within their power. Its defence ceased only when, after a siege almost unexampled since the invention of artillery, for duration and persistency, the approach of a powerful army from the Mississippi Valley rendered any further resistance entirely hopeless. Then the armed Rebel forces abandoned the town, destroying such stores as they could. There was no capitulation, no surrender by which any of the extreme rights of captors were modified or abated in the giving up of an equivalent. The place was defended to the last extremity, and the whole town is a conquest, and as such the property of the conquering Government The warehouses and wharves used in the contraband trade, in violation of the laws and proclamations of the United States, have been used in aid of the Rebellion To put an end to this use, to obtain possession of them, has cost the United States the lives of many thousand of patriotic citizens sacrificed in the skirmishes, assaults,