ousand
pounds, a large sum in those times. Their home was in a famous old house
which stands on Meeting Street, and it was from the back yard of this
house that Lord William fled in a rowboat to a British man-o'-war, when
it became evident that Charleston was no longer hospitable to
representatives of the Crown. Later his wife followed him to Great
Britain, where they remained.

The Pringle House, as it is now called, formerly the Brewton house,
perhaps the most superb old residence in the city, was the headquarters
of General Sir Henry Clinton, after he had captured Charleston, and was
the residence of Lord Rawdon, the unpleasant British commander who
succeeded Clinton. Cornwallis lived outside the town at Drayton Hall,
which still stands, on the Ashley River. After his capture Cornwallis
was exchanged for Henry Laurens, a distinguished Charlestonian, who,
though he wept over the Declaration of Independence, was before long
president of the Continental Congress, and later went to France, where
he was associated with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams in
negotiating the treaty of peace and independence for America.

Mrs. Ravenel says in her book that Sherman destroyed all but one of the
superb old houses on the Ashley River, and when we consider that
Sherman's troops invested Charleston just before the end of the War, and
reflect upon the general's notorious "carelessness with fire," we have
cause for national rejoicing that Charleston, with its unmatched
buildings and their splendid contents, was not laid in ashes, as were
Atlanta and Columbia. Had Sherman burned Charleston it would be hard for
even a Yankee to forgive him.

Even without the aid of the Northern general, the city has been able to
furnish disastrous conflagrations of her own, over a period of two
centuries and more, and I find in the quaint reminiscences of Charles
Fraser, already alluded to, a lamentation that, because of fires, many
of the old landmarks have disappeared, and the city is "losing its look
of picturesque antiquity." To make matters worse, there came, in 1886,
an earthquake, rendering seven eighths of the houses uninhabitable until
repairs aggregating some millions of dollars had been made. Up to the
time of the earthquake the old mansion from which Lord William Campbell
fled at the beginning of the Revolution, was adorned by a battlemented
roof. It is recorded that when the shock came, an Englishman was in the
house, and that i