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
