Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War, and: Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863 (review)

BOOK reviews87 Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War. By Robert N. Rosen. (Columbia: University of South CaroUna Press, 1994. Pp. 182. $39.95.) Gate ofHell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863. By Stephen R. Wise. (Columbia: University of South CaroUna Press, 1994. Pp. xn, 324. $27.95.) Books, articles, films, and television programs on the Civü War pour forth in numbers that are astonishing ifonly because so many Americans seem incapable of satisfying their intense curiosity about that conflict. Thus it is hardly remarkable that scholars and aficionados should be attracted to Charleston. It is the city where the Democratic party divided in 1860, the secession convention met eight months later, the first shots of the war were fired five months after that, and Union and Confederate forces struggled against each other for much of that conflict before Union forces finally captured the city in 1865. By focusing on Charleston and the nearby military hostiUties, these two works nicely complement each other with Utile overlap and dupUcation. Stephen R. Wise has written an excellent military history. He provides a lucid summary and analysis of the two-year campaign by Union army and naval forces to occupy Morris Island, take Battery Wagner, and finally secure Fort Sumter, thereby gaining access to the city. Robert N. Rosen in less than one-hundred pages of text—accompanied by abundant iUustrations, photographs , and color prints—concentrates on the poUtics of slavery that made Charleston the hotbed of secession and created a city seething with bravado when war broke out. But that defiance diminished into recriminations, disiUusionment , and bitterness as Union military persistence gradually wore down those Charlestonians so devoted to the Southern cause. In unadorned and precise prose, Wise describes the cooperation, as well as periodic disagreements, among Union naval and army officers—particularly Maj. Gen. Quincy Gilmore and Rear Adm. John Dahlgren—as they planned and implemented joint operations against Confederate installations guarding the approaches by sea to the city. Wise is especially effective in explaining the technical aspects of Union naval and army weaponry, including the vast improvements in the rifled artillery that pounded Wagner and Sumter to rubble. With an assist from twenty-seven splendid maps, Wise untangles the confusion that accompanied the failed infantry assaults on Battery Wagner. He describes the naval operations ofthe ironclad monitors that were unsuccessful in opening the harbor to Union forces. He details the tedious and laborious efforts of sappers to dig trenches and to lay a siege that finally forced a Confederate evacuation ofWagner. Nor does Wise neglect the inspired and effective Confederate defense of the harbor that was organized initially by Robert E. Lee and then led for most of the remainder ofthe conflict by P. G. T. Beauregard. Rosen's shorter work is not exactly what the title impües—an account of Charleston Confederates at war. But readers expecting a skewed history tilted toward a Southern white perspective may be pleased (or disappointed) to find 88CIVIL war history that this is a balanced effort. Relying largely on the works of Roy F. Nichols, Allen Nevins, Robert Johannsen, and Kenneth Stampp, among others, the book forcefully emphasizes that slavery led white Southerners down the slippery slope of secession to a war that Rosen regards as inevitable. Too many white Charlestonians were arrogant and contemptuous as they departed the Union and welcomed war. Emma Holmes characterized Abraham Lincoln in her diary as "stupid, ambiguous, vulgar and insolent." But Northerners could be equally obnoxious and sanctimonious as well. Quoting Holmes again: "The fiercest wrath and bitterest indignation are directed towards Charleston, by Our dearly beloved brethren of the North.' They say 'the rebellion commenced where Charleston is, and shall end where Charleston was.' " Confederate Charleston contains numerous short essays and commentaries that are one of the book's stronger features. They deal with a range of people and topics including Robert Barnwell Rhett, James L. Petigru, WiUiam Tecumseh Sherman, Robert Smalls, Harriet Tubman, and Clara Barton as well as Charleston's Jewish and Irish-American communities. Less praiseworthy is Rosen's disconcerting habit of constantly quoting historians, letters, diaries, and other sources. Rare is the paragraph...