The prosperity of Charleston since the Civil War has depended more, perhaps, than on any other single product, upon the trade in phosphate, large deposits of which underlie this region.

The real wonder of Charleston, the importance of the place among American cities, cannot, however, be said to have resulted primarily from commerce (though her commerce is growing), or from greatness of population (though Charleston is the metropolis of the Carolinas), but is involved with matters of history, tradition and beauty.  The mantle of greatness was assumed by this city in colonial times, and has never been laid aside.  Among the most distinguished early Americans were many Charlestonians, and in not a few instances the old blood still endures there, and even the old names:  such names as Washington, Pinckney, Bull, Pringle, Rutledge, Middleton, Drayton, Alston, Huger, Agassiz, Ravenel, Izard, Gadsden, Rhett, Calhoun, Read, De Saussure, Lamar and Brawley, to mention but a few.

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Charleston’s early history is rich in pirate stories of the most thrilling moving-picture variety.  Blackbeard, Stede Bonnet and other disciples of the Jolly Roger preyed upon Charleston shipping.  Bonnet once held a Mr. Samuel Wragg of Charleston prisoner aboard his ship threatening to send his head to the city unless the unfortunate man should be ransomed—­the demand being for medicines of various kinds.  Colonel Rhett, of Charleston, captured Bonnet and his ship after a savage fight, but Bonnet soon after escaped from the city in woman’s clothing.  Still later he was retaken, hanged, as he deserved to be, and buried along with forty of his band at a point now covered by the Battery Garden, that exquisite little park at the tip of the city, which is the favorite promenade of Charlestonians.  In another fight which occurred just off Charleston bar, a crew of citizens under Governor Robert Johnson defeated the pirate Richard Worley, who was killed in the action, and captured his ship, which, when the hatches were opened proved to be full of prisoners, thirty-six of them women.  Even as late as the period of the War of 1812—­a war which did not affect Charleston save in the way of destroying her shipping and causing poverty and distress—­a case of brutal piracy is recorded.  The daughter of Aaron Burr, Theodosia by name, was married to Governor Joseph Alston.  After her father’s trial for high treason, when he was disgraced and broken, she tried to comfort him, for the two were peculiarly devoted.  Intending to visit him she set sail from Charleston for New York in a ship which was never heard from again.  Somewhere I have read a description of the distraught father’s long vigils at New York, where he would stand gazing out to sea long after all hope had been abandoned by others.  Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel tells us in her charming book, that thirty years later an old sailor, dying in a village of the North Carolina coast, confessed that