CHAPTER XXIX

HISTORY AND ARISTOCRACY

The cool shade of aristocracy....

--SIR W.F.P. NAPIER.


Just now, when we are being unpleasantly awakened to the fact that our
vaunted American melting-pot has not been doing its work; when some of
us are perhaps wondering whether the quality of metal produced by the
crucible will ever be of the best; it is comforting to reflect that a
city whose history, traditions and great names are so completely
involved with Americanism in its highest forms, a city we think of as
ultra-American, is peculiarly a melting-pot product.

The original Charleston colonists were English and Irish, sent out under
Colonel Sayle, in 1669, by the Lords Proprietors, to whom Charles II had
granted a tract of land in the New World, embracing the present States
of Georgia and North and South Carolina. These colonists touched at Port
Royal--where the Marine Barracks now are (and ought not to be)--but
settled on the west side of the Ashley River, across from where
Charleston stands. It was not until 1680 that they transferred their
settlement to the present site of the city, naming the place Charles
Town in honor of the King. In 1671 the colony contained 263 men able to
bear arms, 69 women and 59 children. In 1674, when New York was taken by
the English from the Dutch, a number of the latter moved down to the
Carolina colony. French Protestants had, at that time, already begun to
arrive, and more came after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in