“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, battles and bombardments which have made the bloody record of this unexampled siege. Shells and torpedoes, by land and by water, have destroyed our citizens.... To restore this property, which cost the loyal people so much blood, and so much treasure, to the original disloyal owners would, it seems to me, give a shock to every earnest and loyal man. Far better give the property to the families and heirs of the victims of the massacre of Wagner, or of those who perished upon the monitors sunk by the agents of the Torpedo Bureau in Charleston Harbor.” It only remains to say that President Andrew Johnson did not share the views of Quartermaster-General Meigs and that the property was restored to the claimants. Ex-Governor D. H. Chamberlain, formerly an officer in the Union army, speaking to a representative young Virginian--a great-grandson of Chief Justice Marshall--in Charleston a few days ago, said: “When I walk the streets of this city of 65,000 inhabitants, and more than half of them colored, and when I see the poverty of its material resources as compared with the large and flourishing business centres of the North, and when I remember that the population of this city in 1861 was not over 41,000, of which not over 24,000 were white, I marvel at the blind confidence and fatuity of this people in inaugurating the most tremendous war of modern times; but when I walk along the sea wall of the ‘Battery’ and see in the distance Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie and other fortifications which, though often attacked, were never carried by storm, I begin to understand the wonderful spirit of this people. Charlestonians held this stronghold for four years against the most powerful fleet of war vessels ever seen up to that time on this hemisphere.” [Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM MOULTRIE.