from Canada in 1755, twelve hundred of them immigrated to Carolina.  By 1790, then, the city had a population of a little more than 15,000, which was about half the number of inhabitants then contained in the city of New York.  In the case of Charleston, however, more than one half her people, at that time, were negroes, slavery having been introduced by Sir John Yeamans, an early British governor.  By 1850 the city had about 20,000 white citizens and 23,000 blacks, and by 1880 some 7,500 more, of which additional number two thirds were negroes.  The present population is estimated at 65,000, which makes Charleston a place of about the size of Rockford, Illinois, Sioux City, Iowa, or Covington, Kentucky; but as, in the case of Charleston, more than half this number is colored, Charleston is, if the white population only is considered, a place of approximately 30,000 inhabitants, or, roughly speaking, about the size of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., or Colorado Springs, Colorado.

In area, also, Charleston is small, covering less than four square miles.  This is due to the position of the city on a peninsula formed by the convergence and confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, which meet at Charleston’s beautiful Battery precisely as the Hudson River and the East River meet at the Battery in New York.  The shape of Charleston, indeed, greatly resembles that of Manhattan Island, and though her harbor and her rivers are neither so large nor so deep as those of the port of New York, they are altogether adequate to a considerable maritime activity.

The Charleston Chamber of Commerce (which, like everything else in Charleston dates from long ago, having been founded in 1748) quotes President Taft as calling this port the most convenient one to Panama—­a statement which the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce is in position to dispute.  The fact remains, however, that Charleston’s position on the map justifies the Chamber of Commerce’s alliterative designation of the place as “The Plumb-line Port to Panama.”  This is so true that if Charleston should one day be shaken loose from its moorings by an earthquake—­something not unknown there—­and should fall due south upon the map, it would choke up the mouth of the Canal, were not Cuba interposed, to catch the debris.

Before the Civil War, Charleston was the greatest cotton shipping port of the country, and it still handles large amounts of cotton and rice.  Until a few years ago South Carolina was the chief rice producing State in the Union, and history records that the first rice planted in the Carolinas, if not in the country, was secured and sown by an early governor of Carolina, Thomas Smith, who died in 1694.  It may be noted in passing that this Thomas Smith bore the title “Landgrave,” the Lords Proprietors, in their plan of government for the colony—­which, by the way, was drawn up by the philosopher Locke—­having provided for a colonial nobility with titles.  The titles “Baron” and “Landgrave” were hereditary in several Charleston families, and constitute, so far as I know, the only purely American titles of nobility that ever existed.  Descendants of the old Landgraves still reside in Charleston, and in at least one instance continue to use the word “Landgrave” in connection with the family name.