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,
