protected themselves with booms.  This resulted in the construction of an actual undersea torpedo boat, the Hunley.  This extraordinary vessel has been spoken of as having had the appearance of a huge iron coffin, as well as the attributes of one, for she proved a death-trap for successive crews on three trial trips.  As there were no electric motors or gasoline engines in those days, she was run by hand, eight men crowded together turning a crank-shaft which operated her propeller.  After repeated sinkings, she was raised, manned by new men, and sent forth again.  Finally, in Charleston harbor she succeeded in destroying the United States man-o’-war Housatonic, but at the same time went down, herself, drowning or suffocating all on board.  A memorial drinking fountain on the Battery, at the foot of Meeting Street, commemorates “the men of the Confederate Army and Navy, first in marine warfare to employ torpedo boats—­1863-1865.”  On this memorial are given the names of sixteen men who perished in torpedo attacks on the blockading fleet, among them Horace L. Hunley, set down as inventor of the submarine boat.  The names of fourteen others who were lost are unknown.

* * * * *

Lord William Campbell, younger son of the Duke of Argyll, was British governor at Charleston when the Revolution broke out.  He had married a Miss Izard, of Charleston, who brought him a dowry of fifty thousand pounds, a large sum in those times.  Their home was in a famous old house which stands on Meeting Street, and it was from the back yard of this house that Lord William fled in a rowboat to a British man-o’-war, when it became evident that Charleston was no longer hospitable to representatives of the Crown.  Later his wife followed him to Great Britain, where they remained.

The Pringle House, as it is now called, formerly the Brewton house, perhaps the most superb old residence in the city, was the headquarters of General Sir Henry Clinton, after he had captured Charleston, and was the residence of Lord Rawdon, the unpleasant British commander who succeeded Clinton.  Cornwallis lived outside the town at Drayton Hall, which still stands, on the Ashley River.  After his capture Cornwallis was exchanged for Henry Laurens, a distinguished Charlestonian, who, though he wept over the Declaration of Independence, was before long president of the Continental Congress, and later went to France, where he was associated with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams in negotiating the treaty of peace and independence for America.

Mrs. Ravenel says in her book that Sherman destroyed all but one of the superb old houses on the Ashley River, and when we consider that Sherman’s troops invested Charleston just before the end of the War, and reflect upon the general’s notorious “carelessness with fire,” we have cause for national rejoicing that Charleston, with its unmatched buildings and their splendid contents, was not laid in ashes, as were Atlanta and Columbia.  Had Sherman burned Charleston it would be hard for even a Yankee to forgive him.