Riordan did not remain long with the Examiner after I left it, and had been at work in Washington. Occasionally he wrote to me, and assured me that he had not given up the newspaper project for Charleston, and that he would put a “peg in” in that direction whenever he had an opportunity. With this in view, he accepted a position offered him on the Charleston Courier, and went back to Charleston. In October, Colonel R. Barnwell Rhett was preparing to resume the publication of the Mercury, and asked Riordan to take his old place on that paper. Riordan declined to do this, and advised Colonel Rhett to take me if I would come. It was only a day or two after I had finished my work with the National Express Company that I received a letter from Riordan, telling me what he had done; and on the heels of his letter came a telegram from Colonel Rhett, offering me an engagement on the Mercury and asking me to come to Charleston immediately. There was nothing to require me to remain in Richmond, so I accepted Colonel Rhett’s offer, and after a round of leave-taking started for Charleston, where I arrived on November 10th, 1866.

My first visit was to Riordan, whom I found in the Courier office in East Bay Street. The next day I went to work in the Mercury office, and remained on that paper until Riordan and I bought one-third of the Charleston News in the autumn of 1867. On May 1, 1867, I was married to Miss Virginia Fourgeaud, a faithful and loving wife. Her health unhappily failed fast, and she died in December, 1872.

In the waning fortunes of the Charleston News was the opportunity that we had long desired of becoming managers of a newspaper of our own; an object which Riordan had kept unflaggingly in view from the moment that he had first talked the project over with me in the Examiner office at Richmond. It was his foresight, of course, in seizing the opportunity to bring me to Charleston, that put us both in the position to take the chance which was presented to us by the decline of the Charleston News. The paper had been exceedingly successful under extravagant and careless management, and we could not, of course, expect to obtain control of it until those who were managing it in Charleston were willing to give it up. Captain James F. McMillan and Mr. R. S. Cathcart had been controlling the paper. Cathcart withdrew, and the condition of the paper grew worse. It was heavily in debt, and the proprietors of the Courier and Mercury looked cheerfully forward to the time when it should quietly expire. We found that the real owner of the property was Mr. Benjamin Wood, of New York, and Riordan went on to New York to open negotiations with him. This ended in Mr. Wood buying out Mr. McMillan, and in our purchasing one-third of the property at the rate of $18,000 for the whole. The new concern, of which Benjamin Wood was a member, as the representative of Henry Evans, a person in his employment, assumed all the liabilities of the old concern. Riordan and I, therefore, found ourselves owners of one-third of a newspaper which had a bona fide circulation of twenty-five hundred, or three thousand, copies daily, with debts amounting to nearly $20,000, and property consisting of two very old presses, a broken down engine, and a suit of badly worn type. But we were very cheerful about it, and our confident expectation was that, in about five years, we should be able to retire from newspaper work, in part, and live at our ease on the property we had accumulated. It did not turn out exactly in that way; but, as all the subsequent operations of the concern are set forth in general terms in the record of the litigation in which we were involved by Mr. Wood’s rascality, it is not necessary to describe them here. I should, however, record the fact, that the money with which I paid for my share of the paper was borrowed from Mr. W. J. Magrath. He advised me strongly against embarking in the venture, but, when I insisted upon doing so, he gave me every assistance in his power.

Some day, perhaps, I may undertake to write the inside history of my connection with the Charleston News, and The News and Courier, and give my experiences in South Carolina politics from 1867 down to the present time. But I cannot do it now; and, indeed, I am too near to the events, and to the persons I should describe, to write as candidly as would be necessary to bring out the whole truth, and make it entirely clear. It would be, I fancy—if I had the time to refresh my memory, by looking over the newspapers for the last fifteen years—a narrative, in its way, quite as interesting, to my friends at least, as the incidents of Confederate service which I have attempted to portray.