Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/221

 rather thought not. Nor did he believe that a true South Carolinian would like to sell any of his property to Northern men. State pride forbade it. But South Carolina would go to Europe, raise money there upon the security afforded by her real estate, and thus work out her own destinies. The old gentleman, who evidently felt himself as South Carolina personified, uttered these sentiments with unaffected gravity and in a tone of conscious dignity unimpaired by adverse fortune—a tone, indeed, which had something of condescension in it. Nothing could have been more pathetic. At the time when the grizzled patrician thus gave voice to his pride in the name of his State he himself was reported to be in pinching want, while some of his fellow citizens in various parts of the State, struggling painfully with the necessities of the day, were actually obliged to accept daily rations from the hands of the Federal garrison to sustain life.

My travels in the interior took me to the track of Sherman's march, which, in South Carolina, at least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation—the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings, which had been destroyed by a sweeping conflagration.

No part of the South I then visited had indeed suffered as much from the ravages of the war as South Carolina—the State which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator of the whole mischief and therefore