The Desolation of War

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1865

The Desolation of War.

The correspondent of the N. Y. Tribune thus speaks of the appearance of Charleston, S. C., as entered by the Union forces, after its evacuation by the rebels.

"The wharves looked as if they had been deserted for half a century—broken down, dilapidated, grass and moss peeping up between the pavements, where once the busy feet of commerce trode incessantly. The warehouse, near the river; the streets as we enter them; the houses and the stores and the public buildings,—we look at them and hold our breaths in utter amazement. Every step we take increases our astonishment. No pen, no pencil, no tongue can do justice to the scene. No imagination can conceive of the utter wreck, the universal ruin, the stupendous desolation. Ruin—ruin—ruin—above and below; on the right hand and the left: ruin, ruin, ruin, everywhere and always—staring at us from every paneless window; looking out at us from every shell-torn wall; glaring at us from every battered door and pillar and verandah; crouching beneath our feet on every sidewalk. Not Pompeii nor Herculaneum, nor Thebes nor the Nile, have ruins so complete, so saddening, so plaintively eloquent, for they speak to us of an age, not ours, and long ago dead, with whose people and life and ideas we have no sympathy whatever. But here, on these shattered wrecks of houses—built in our own style, many of them doing credit to the architecture of our epoch—we read names familiar to us all; telling us of trades and professions and commercial institutions, which every modern city reckons up by the hundred: yet, dead, dead, dead; as silent as the grave of the Pharaohs, as deserted as the bazaars of the merchant princes of Old Tyre. Whoever among us wished to know how his spirit would feel if he were to revisit by the pale glimpse of the moon, the ruins of his native city, after the present civilization shall have passed away, learned it to his complete satisfaction on the morning of last Monday here. It was early—few stragglers were abroad; just enough to make the desolation the more desolate by contrast; and the stillness, not of the Sabbath, but of the desert, hung heavily over all. Hardly a building in all this part of the city—and this the business part—has escaped the terrible crashing and smashing of the shells. And right in the center of it, are at least, (I should judge) ten acres of ruins, the monuments of the great fire which occurred three years ago. This is an open space—only blackened walls and solitary chimneys remain in it. And, all around this area of desolation, are the ruined houses that still stand—'Gillmore's town,' as the negroes call it; a triumph of military skill—of the art destructive of all arts; a proof to the Christian that God's judgments are sure, and that the cries of the poor are heard at The Great Throne, and avenged by the All-righteous Judge. They acted, the men who lived in these mansions and trafficked in these stores and marts, as if God were dead; as if their own will was the only standard of right—they mocked at any 'higher law;' they sold the poor men in their avarice, and killed the good man in their hate; when, lo! the people whom they despised rose up against them and subdued them, and the race whom they enslaved, trode their streets under the banners and as the comrades of their conquerors!"

Again he says:

"At the beginning of the Rebellion or of the threats of Rebellion, Mr. Caleb Cushing predicted that the grass would grow in the streets of Boston and New York if a civil war resulted from Mr. Lincoln's election. The prophecy has failed—rather signally; and I inclose you a handful of proofs of it. I pulled this clover and grass at noon to-day in front of the Charleston Hotel and the Mills House—which before the Union was dissolved, (according to Mr. Cushing's Southern friends) were always the busiest parts of Meeting-st, the chief business street of the city. I wish you to send it to the Boston Athenæum for permanent preservation, to be bound up, if possible, with Mr. Cushing's speech. Could a better reply or fitter illustration be devised for it?"