A sterner tradition clings around an old building on a remoter
wharf; for men have but lately died who had seen slaves pass
within its doors for confinement. The wharf in those days
appertained to a distillery, an establishment then constantly
connected with the slave-trade, rum being sent to Africa, and
human beings brought back. Occasionally a cargo was landed here,
instead of being sent to the West Indies or to South Carolina,
and this building was fitted up for their temporary quarters. It
is but some twenty-five feet square, and must be less than thirty
feet in height, yet it is divided into three stories, of which
the lowest was used for other purposes, and the two upper were
reserved for slaves. There are still to be seen the barred
partitions and latticed door, making half the second floor into a
sort of cage, while the agent's room appears to have occupied the
other half. A similar latticed door--just such as I have seen in
Southern slave-pens--secures the foot of the upper stairway. The
whole small attic constitutes a single room, with a couple of
windows, and two additional breathing-holes, two feet square,
opening on the yard. It makes one sick to think of the poor
creatures who may once have gripped those bars with their hands,
or have glared with eager eyes between them; and it makes me
recall with delight the day when I once wrenched away the stocks
and chains from the floor of a pen like this, on the St. Mary's
River in Florida. It is almost forty years since this distillery
became a mill, and sixty since the slave-trade was abolished. The
date "1803" is scrawled upon the door of the cage,--the very year
when the port of Charleston was reopened for slaves, just before
the traffic ceased. A few years more, and such horrors will seem
as remote a memory in South Carolina, thank God! as in Rhode