Nearly every grocery in Charleston is also a liquor store; but few keep bars; and the saloons proper are not numerous. This shows that most of the drinking is in a domestic and quiet way, and not on an empty stomach, _standing up_. Beer is not sold in such large proportion as in Northern cities, but distilled or fermented liquors, and beer carts are not absent. There is yet a “smart chance” of illicit distilling in the up-country, and of unlicensed selling in the backwoods.
On public days not much intoxication is visible. Christmas, also observed with heathen fire crackers, is the day of greatest indulgence in firewater, especially among the blacks. But it is said that the colored men very seldom become drunkards. Their drinking is occasional rather than habitual, and when intoxicated they are not combative, but weak and nerveless, or garrulous; while the up-country man (white), when in liquor, with or without his pistol, is bellicose in the extreme.
An incident is in place here, which may be called the last spark of light in the morally dark closing hours of the late House of Representatives at Washington. It relates to both the colored race here and the temperance interest.
Sam Lee, a colored man, of good character it may be inferred, partly from the fact that the _News and Courier_ has not loaded him with obloquy, true or false, had been for two years contesting the seat occupied by one Richardson, who, it was voted in the last hours of that dubious session, was not the choice of his district, but Lee was. The long-pending whiskey bill, virtually giving millions from the United States Treasury to the lobby, who had pushed it through the Senate, was the next thing on the calendar. A formality remained to be accomplished giving Lee actual possession of his seat and pay. Over this the Democrats were filibustering, when the whiskey lobby offered Lee $15,000 to withdraw his claim and permit their bill to come on, which they had reason to expect would pass. But, no! He would stand for his right and _the_ right, and thus did more good for the temperance cause in his few moments of legal, but unpaid, membership of the House, than possibly he might have done in a long session, for that or any other cause. The fact is worth preserving, to the praise of a mighty Providence, that used that Sabbath morning to defeat one grand move of Satan, and by means of a colored man from South Carolina, sticking to a right which he would not exchange for whiskey money.