Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/258

244 liberty pole, ninety feet in height, was erected, and a Palmetto flag unfurled from its top. The flag was white, with a green palmetto tree in the middle, and bore the motto of South Carolina : "Animis Opibusque Parati"; that, "Prepared in mind and resources; ready to give life and property."

The raising of this flag was greeted with a roar of cannon a hundred times repeated, and the Marseillaise Hymn by a band; then followed the miserere from II Trovatore, played as a requiem for the departed Union. Full twenty thousand people participated in this inauguration of revolution, and the Rev. C. P. Gadsden invoked the blessing of God upon their acts. These ceremonies were followed by speeches (some from Northern men temporarily in Charleston), in which the people were addressed as citizens of the Southern Republic. Processions filled the streets, bearing from square to square many banners with significant inscriptions; such as "South Carolina goes it alone"; "God, liberty, and the State"; "South Carolina wants no stripes"; "Stand to your arms, Palmetto boys"; "Hurrah for the Southern Confederacy"; "Now, or never, strike for independence"; "Good-by Yankee Doodle"; "Death to all abolitionists"; "Let us bury the Union's dead carcass," &c.

Governor Gist, in his farewell message, December 10th, intended as much for the convention as the Legislature, stimulated it to revolutionary action, and said "he hoped that by the 25th of December no flag but the Palmetto flag would ever float over any part of South Carolina."

Back of the president's chair of the South Carolina Convention which adopted the ordinance of secession was a banner composed of cotton cloth, with devices painted by a Charleston artist named Alexander.

The base of his design was a mass of broken and disordered blocks of stone, on each of which were the name and arms of the free States. Rising from this mass were two columns of perfect and symmetrical blocks of stone, connected by an arch of the same, inscribed on each of which, fifteen in number, were the name and coat of arms of a slave State, South Carolina, foremost in the triangle, forms the keystone of the arch, on which stood Power's statue of Calhoun, leaning upon the trunk