“Sounding Charleston’s Bells”

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“[I’ve sent your church some] books instead of bells, sense being preferable to sound.”

—Benjamin Franklin

“He was a rationalist, but he had to confess that he liked the ringing of church bells.”

—Anton Chekov

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—5/17/10—Several years ago, my wife and I were spending a weekend in Charleston, or as she is known in South Carolina, “The Holy City.” I don’t think I’d ever really appreciated that nickname until I opened the French doors of our hotel room to admit the pealing bells. From belfry to belfry, across domes and tin-clad roofs, amid palmetto and live oak, the bells of perhaps 300 churches floated in fine accord. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words, Charleston that Sunday morning was “bell-swarmèd.”

The appealing merger was made even more remarkable by the diversity of the denominations: Baptist, Anglican, and Methodist, of course, but also Lutheran, Huguenot, Quaker, Unitarian, Catholic, Jewish, African Methodist Episcopal, and Muslim. From the balcony, I could not tell, of course, which churches were ringing their bells but, certainly, the polyphonic tune was inclusive. For almost 300 years, though, Charleston was sadly deaf to the in-gathering harmony of its bells.

I’ve never been to Belfast, but I can imagine Roman Catholic and Protestant bells mingling in ways that embarrass those who live there. I have not been to Jerusalem either, where Muslim voices compete with Jewish horns and Christian bells calling people to worship. Whether in Ulster or Israel, one might think of the auditory mix as campanological warfare except for the fact that it is so innocent.

It’s much like light and the shadows it creates—utterly natural, which is to say indifferent, and right. Yet an Irish friend sheepishly confesses that his Catholic family will not visit a Belfast war memorial to honor one of their own because the monument is shaded by a Protestant church at certain hours of the day. Consequently, they time their annual wreath-laying to coincide with the passing of that “God-forsaken shadow.”

But back to Charleston and her bells. In 1756, the Colonial Assembly of South Carolina authorized the construction of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church with a 186-foot-tall steeple and eight bronze bells. Since the church’s completion in 1761, untold ships have used that aural and visual landmark to guide themselves to a safe harbor or to target the city for bombardment. In 1766, British loyalists took note of the fact that when the Stamp Act was repealed by King George III, joyous patriots rang St. Michael’s bells to celebrate. When war came, however, the British Army felt justified in confiscating the bells and shipping them back to London. They also cast the lead roof into bullets and stabled their horses in the sanctuary.

In London, the bells were offered to the public as spoils of war but, as luck would have it, a Charleston merchant placed the highest bid. He purchased the booty and shipped it back home. When it was unloaded on a Charleston dock after the war, someone recognized the bells, and a crowd spontaneously hauled them on horse-drawn wagons to St. Michael’s. The city and church later settled with the owner, who was hoping to turn a profit. It’s not known if he succeeded.

In 1838, 25 years before the last small bell was rung to finalize the sale of an American slave, Fanny Kemble was visiting Charleston from Boston. On her first night in town, the young abolitionist noted in her journal the ringing of bells and beating of drums across the city. “The tocsin is sounded,” she wrote, “as if an invasion were expected. In Charleston, however, it is not the dread of foreign invasion, but of domestic insurrection, which occasions these nightly precautions . . . .”

Kemble may not have known that over half of Charleston’s population was enslaved, but the white residents were nervously aware of their minority status. In 1842, the fear that this knowledge engendered led to the founding of The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. The school and the arsenal it housed were created in part to protect whites should a Denmark-Vesey-style uprising occur. One wonders today what message was sent by the churches’ tolling of the curfew to the enslaved majority who worshipped the same trinity as their masters. Surely many of every pigmentation realized the terrible irony.

To prevent what happened in the Revolution from happening in the Civil War, St. Michael’s bells were shipped to Columbia, the state capital, for safekeeping. Nevertheless, near the end of “the late disturbance,” as Charlestonians are wont to call the war, Gen. Tecumseh Sherman torched Columbia and shattered the bells. When Lee’s surrender came, there was nothing to ring in Columbia or Charleston to announce the return of peace.

In 1866, the charred bronze fragments of St. Michael’s bells were gathered, sent to London, and recast in the original molds at the Whitechapel Foundry. On their return the following year, they were re-hung in such a way that the bells could only be chimed, not swung as the founders intended. They remained stationary until 1993, when they were shipped back to London for the third time. After the recasting and repairs to the tolling mechanism were completed, the bells were hung correctly.

Another knell unrelated to war that also went unheeded came in 1812. In the New Madrid, Missouri area, an 8.3-magnitude earthquake shook a million square miles and briefly reversed the Mississippi River. The tremors were so strong, they rang bells in Charleston, about 500 miles to the east, but to the best of my knowledge, no one in South Carolina heeded nature’s warning.

Seventy-four years later, the Holy City was rudely shaken much the way Northern gunboats and artillery had dropped her to her prayer bones in that “civil disturbance” that left 618,000 dead. The 1886 quake left another hundred dead, and property damage was estimated in 19th-century dollars at $23 million. In turn, the quake shook Charleston’s conviction that it was God’s chosen city and sent a warning that was felt from Boston to Cuba. Geologists say that a 7.3 magnitude quake has struck the Charleston area six times now in the last 2,000 years, yet we continue to build on fault lines, flood plains, and in the path of hurricanes.

In 1902, the mayor of Charleston convinced the Philadelphia City Council to lend the city the Liberty Bell. The occasion was the Interstate and West Indian Exposition, and the mayor hoped not only to draw people to the exposition but remind them of the freedom Southerners were beginning anew to take for granted. In celebrating America’s liberty at the turn of the 20th century, however, few in the state showed much sympathy for African-Americans, whose civil rights were not guaranteed until 1965; or women’s voting rights, which were delayed until 1920; nor the citizens of the Philippines, who did not win their freedom from us until 1946.

What did the Liberty Bell symbolize if not liberty for all, as Moses says in Leviticus? The famed bell’s crack was a fitting reminder that the job begun in 1775 was not complete. Had we just listened to the way the bells peacefully insinuate themselves into every neighborhood, asking nothing in return, South Carolina’s tumultuous past might have been very different.

Note: For images of St. Michael’s, go to Wikipedia’s entry on the church, its history, and its bells: St. Michael’s Episcopal Church (Charleston, South Carolina)