Pre-Revolutionary Charleston was divided into two parishes:  St. Michael’s below Broad Street, and St. Philip’s above.  Under governmental regulation citizens were not allowed to hold pews in both churches unless they owned houses in both parishes.  St. Michael’s, being nearer the battery, in which region are the finest old houses, had, perhaps, the wealthier congregation, but St. Philip’s is, to my mind, the more beautiful church of the two, largely because of the open space before it, and the graceful outward bend of Church Street in deference to the projecting portico.

When the Civil War broke out St. Philip’s bells were melted and made into cannon, but those of St. Michael’s were left in place until cannonballs from the blockading fleet struck the church, when they were taken down and sent, together with the silver plate, to Columbia, South Carolina, for safe-keeping.  But Columbia was, as matters turned out, the worst place to which they could have been sent.  The silver was looted by troops under Sherman, and the bells were destroyed when the city was burned.  The fragments were, however, collected and sent to England, whence the bells originally came, and there they were recast.  Their music—­perhaps the most characteristic of all the city’s characteristic sounds—­has been called “the voice of Charleston.”  Of the silver only a few fragments have been returned.  One piece was found in a pawn shop in New York, and another in a small town in Ohio. Mais que voulez-vous?  C’est la guerre!

In mentioning Charleston churches one becomes involved in a large matter.  In 1801, when St. Mary’s, the first Roman Catholic church in the city, was erected, there were already eighteen churches in existence, among them the present Huguenot Church, at the corner of Church and Queen Streets, which, though a very old building, is nevertheless the second Huguenot Church to occupy the same site, the first, built in 1687, having been destroyed in the great conflagration of 1796, which very nearly destroyed St. Philip’s, as well.  A number of the old Huguenot families long ago became Episcopalians, and the descendants of many of the early French settlers of Charleston, buried in the Huguenot churchyard, are now parishioners of St. Michael’s and St. Philip’s.  The Huguenot Church in Charleston is the only church of this denomination in America; its liturgy is translated from the French, and services are held in French on the third Sunday of November, January and March.  A Unitarian Church was established in 1817, as an offshoot of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, the old White Meeting House of which (built 1685, used by the British as a granary, during the Revolution, and torn down 1806) gave Meeting Street its name.  Early in the history of the Unitarian Church, the home of which was a former Presbyterian Church building, in Archdale Street, Dr. Samuel Gilman, a young minister from Gloucester, Massachusetts, became its pastor.  This was the same Dr. Gilman who wrote “Fair Harvard.”