Charleston (50 page)

Ever since I moved to the Carolina Low Country nearly twenty-five years ago, the fascinating, often bloody history of the region has held me captive. Beyond the borders of the state little seems to be known of this colorful past, save for awareness of a few scattered incidents of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, the firing on Fort Sumter perhaps being the most famous.

The history of the state is far more than a single mural of shells exploding in Charleston Harbor on an April night in 1861, or a vaguely imagined pageant of white-columned plantations, cultured women, harsh masters, and mistreated slaves, though all those existed. Most people are surprised to hear that more Revolutionary War battles were fought in South Carolina than in any other colony. John C. Calhoun's role in setting the intellectual and emotional foundations for secession during the nullification crisis is mostly known through textbooks, scholarly studies, and graduate seminars in history. The list goes on.

Years ago I decided that someday I would write about this unique and paradoxical part of America. When the time came, I began to see a prism that created a spectrum.
The prism was one of the world's most charming cities, and the spectrum its daily life, beautiful and tranquil sometimes, but contentious and violent too. Thus the novel emerged.

Two historians with deep roots in the state started me thinking about the subject in detail. The first is named in the dedication: the late George C. Rogers, Jr., professor of history at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. His
Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys
is still in print and eminently readable. George and I corresponded often, met for lunch when we could, and became friends. Like my wife, Rachel, and me, George's passions included cruise ships and theater.

The second academic to whom I owe a great deal is Dr. Lawrence Rowland, now retired as professor of history at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. In 1989 Rachel and I enrolled in Larry's class on South Carolina history from its beginnings to the War of Separation, as Southerners often called it at the time. The drama and excitement Larry conveyed, so unfamiliar to me then, resulted in a thick volume of class notes that I still depend on.

Although this book focuses on a particular city in a particular state, I would not want it to be considered “regional.” That fate befell
Homeland,
a favorite of mine, when the publisher loftily decreed that “I see it as a heartland book,” meaning Chicago, where most of the promotion money was dumped, largely ignoring the rest of the country.

Further, during the years of the story, South Carolina and Charleston impacted national affairs in a significant way. The reverberations of those years are still with all of us. In a book of essays on the West by Larry McMurtry, I came across a quote that speaks to the point. McMurtry quotes Patricia Nelson Limerick's
The Legacy of Conquest,
on the subject of the wars between Indians and whites:

“In truth, the tragedies of the wars are our national joint property, and how we handle that property is one test of our unity or disunity, maturity or immaturity, as a people wear
ing the label ‘American.'” That is essentially what Alex tries to convey to her recidivistic cousin late in the novel.

Now for some notes about the text.

The fictional house built by Tom Bell between Church and Meeting Streets, on what was later named South Battery, is modeled on an actual house from the 1790s that still stands on the same street. Like Tom's it is a classic “Charleston single house,” one room wide, two rooms deep, with the main door located on the piazza at the side, overlooking the garden. Tom Bell's house was different in that it was brick enhanced with stucco. He was one of those eighteenth-century Charlestonians “bragging in brick” to show his material success.

The drinking party from which Francis Marion escaped took place on March 19, 1780, some weeks before it occurs in the book. I moved it because it was too good to bypass.

The story of the red-coated monkey Colonel Balfour is almost certainly apocryphal, yet remains a part of the lore of Charleston's occupation by the British.

Evidence that British officers attended a so-called Negro ball exists only in a single letter from the period. One scholar whose judgment I trust speculates that the letter may have been American propaganda, designed to embarrass the enemy.

I advanced the confiscation and removal of the bells of St. Michael's by one year. They were later shipped to London as stated.

No records exist to positively identify the place Denmark Vesey was hanged in 1822. I chose the location that for many years had the greatest currency in Charleston oral history.

Angelina Grimké's
Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States
was published in 1836. I advanced the date by one year.

The July 1835 sack of the Charleston Post Office and subsequent rioting occurred as described.

Alex's speech in Dayton is adapted in part from Angelina Grimké's remarks before the Massachusetts State House in 1838. On February 21 that year she and her sis
ter, Sarah, became the first women permitted to appear before an American legislature.

What might be described as the show trial of soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (Colored) presents a fascinating historical mystery. We know that the state in the person of Governor Bonham wanted to prosecute and punish them as slaves in rebellion. We know the identities of attorneys on both sides. We know the trial's outcome. The five-judge panel, declining to handle what was obviously a hot issue, fell back on a time-honored evasion: lack of jurisdiction.

The mystery is, there seems to be no transcript, no record whatsoever, of the trial itself.

This was an irresistible challenge, but I must make clear that the trial as you have it in Chapter 57 is fiction, although the “Beaufort Nine” were real. Obviously Ham Bell wasn't involved. Nelson Mitchell's actual co-counsel was another well-regarded Charleston attorney, Edward McCrady.

Mitchell's defense argument, which led to the “no jurisdiction” decision, was something I was not equipped to write. The argument woven through the scene was generously and very creatively drafted by John Napier, Esq., of Washington, D.C., and Pawleys Island, South Carolina. John is eminently qualified, being an attorney, a former U.S. congressman from our state, and a former Federal Court of Claims judge. I appreciate his contribution, and gratefully acknowledge it here. (Let there be no mutterings about the kind of unacknowledged cribbing that has lately afflicted the field of historical scholarship.)

Although the soldiers of the 54th were spared death or reenslavement, they were not freed. They languished in Charleston jail until December 1864, when they were transferred to the wretched military prison at Florence, South Carolina. The end of the war found them in another prison in North Carolina. There they were released at last.

Looting of Charleston houses by African-American troops led by white officers took place in February 1865, as described, though it probably had less to do with race than with the centuries-old behavior of a conquering army.

In the Reconstruction section I have again adjusted the time of certain events for the sake of the narrative, though never by more than a few months. No significant events have been invented. Race riots, for example, did occur in Charleston in the summer of 1865 and again in 1866.

The use of oleander tea to poison Union troops is mentioned in literature but, so far as I know, not supported by evidence. Still, the idea is fair game for a story: oleander grows widely in the South, and its deadly toxicity is unquestioned. As recently as the 1980s a case of death from ingestion of oleander tea was reported in the
Annals of Emergency Medicine
.

The incident of “Devil Dan” Sickles and his cigar on the horsecar was reported in the
Washington National Intelligencer
in August of 1867, not 1865. Sickles's biographer, W. A. Swanberg, says the story is untrue but I included it because it beautifully represents Sickles's forceful, not to say high-handed, approach to military governance.

Some of Major Wheat's remarks about battle are adapted from a written account by a trooper of the Hampton Legion who survived First Manassas, and the war.

Gibbes's diatribe about the Fourteenth Amendment is likewise adapted from statements published at the time.

Francis L. Cardozo spoke of black and white children going to school together more than eighty years before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused the same dream.

Brigadier General Huffington is fictional, though inspired by a notable South Carolina carpetbagger, “Honest John” Patterson, who in 1872 succeeded in bribing his way to a U.S. Senate seat. The Pennsylvania Reserves are authentic, but Huffington's regiment, the 14th, is not. Pennsylvania Reserve regiments numbered 1 through 13.

Alex's lyric for “A Better, Brighter Morning” has a bit of a history. It was written a few years ago, during my year and a half of collaboration with lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. (
Miss Saigon
,
Big
,
Ain't Misbehavin',
et al.) and composer Charles Strouse (
Annie
,
Rags
,
Bye Bye Birdie,
et al.). We were all hard at work trying to hammer out a story line for a large-scale musical version of
North and South
, an ambitious project conceived by Richard's wife, Janet, who is a
Broadway producer. The project is as yet unfinished (and may remain so).

During one of the sessions I remembered that solo singers and singing groups wrote and performed anthems for antislavery rallies. The Hutchinson Family Singers was one very famous aggregation; they appear briefly with fictional Virgilia Hazard in the novel.

I thought we should have a similar, historically germane moment in the show: a rousing song typical of such anthems, which were long on sentiment and fervor, if sometimes short on literary quality. I wrote the lyric at our place in Greenwich, tucked it away, but never showed it to Richard or Charles. They are, after all, theater luminaries with many Tony Awards between them. I didn't imagine the song would ever be useful in another context.

The infamous
N
word challenges a novelist writing about the past. During the years of the story the word was widely used, uttered even by the most well-intentioned people. To omit it would play false with history. I chose to use it.

A cavalcade of fascinating men and women passed through Charleston during the years of the story. One whom I wanted to fit in but could not was an eighteen-year-old army private from Virginia who served with his artillery battery at Fort Moultrie from November 1827 until December 1828. He had enlisted under the name Edgar Perry and had already published a book of poems. We know him as Edgar Allan Poe.

Another colorful personality I did not find room for, perhaps out of some subconscious concern that she might come to dominate the story, is Mary Chesnut, wife of James Chesnut, Jr., South Carolina soldier and politician. During the war Mary observed life in Charleston and, later, Richmond. She wrote about it in what became known as
A Diary from Dixie.
The diary is unmatched on several counts: Mary's keen perceptions, her lively prose style, and her unabashed bitchiness. Several editions are available, the best in my opinion being that edited by the historian Vann Woodward and published by Yale under the title
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
.

As always, an incredible array of helpful people made the writing task easier at every step. I now thank them formally, though of course with the usual strong caution that they must not be held responsible in any way for what I have put on the page.

In Charleston: attorney and historian Robert Rosen, who, with unstinting generosity, shared his knowledge of the city's history, which he has chronicled in two splendid books; Daisy Bigda, Patton Hash, and Peter Wilkerson, all of whom were at the South Carolina Historical Society when the project was launched; also Nicholas Butler and Mike Coker at the Society's headquarters on Meeting Street.

In Columbia: Dr. Tom Johnson, director of the South Caroliniana Library at the University; Dr. Lacy Ford and Dr. Walter Edgar of the History Department; Catherine Fry and Barbara Brannon, director and managing editor, respectively, of the University of South Carolina Press; Patrick McCawley, reference archivist at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

In London: at the Middle Temple, Anthea Tatton-Brown, deputy under treasurer, and Lesley Whitelaw, archivist; also Hilary Hale and Barbara Boote.

Others who helped in ways large and small are Patricia Cornwell; Dordy Freeman; Herman Gollob; John Lawless; Gilbert M. Martin; Angela Wiggan Marvin; my grandson Hart Montgomery; Judi Murphy; Mary Oliver, archivist-curator of the Montgomery County, Ohio, Historical Society; Michael Renaud of Corel Corporation, Toronto; Dr. Lawrence Rowland of the USC/Beaufort, previously mentioned; and Dr. Stephen Wise, author and director of the Marine Corps Museum at Parris Island, South Carolina. Special thanks to Pat Falci, former president of the New York City Civil War Roundtable, for vetting a portion of the manuscript, and to Jeffrey Ward, who created the maps.