The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

4. Civil War and Reconstruction

4 civil war and reconstruction On the night of December 26, 1860, Colonel Robert Anderson moved about seventy-four United States soldiers from Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island to a still-incomplete fort, Fort Sumter, in the middle of Charleston Harbor. Anderson had informed his superiors that he could not hope to defend the land-bound Fort Moultrie, open to attack from secessionist forces on three sides. Anderson’s move angered secessionist leaders, though South Carolina’s new governor, Francis W. Pickens, waited until April 1861 to respond. During that time delegates from throughout the Deep South met in Montgomery, Alabama, and formed the Confederate States of America. In the early morning darkness of April 12, Confederate forces in Charleston Harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter. South Carolina, the first state to secede, opened the first battle of the American Civil War. The barrage on Fort Sumter launched a four-year war that became the bloodiest in American history. South Carolina suffered more than twenty-three thousand military deaths during the Civil War, which was more than one-third of the white male population subject to military service in 1860. But in the first days of the conflict, many secessionist leaders boastfully predicted how quickly the North would be defeated. Governor Pickens, a former American ambassador to Russia,said that he would drink all the blood that would be spilled, so insignificant would it be. In late 1861, however, reality struck Confederate South Carolina in the form of an amphibious invasion of its southeastern coast. The largest armada of the nineteenth century, along with about twelve thousand federal troops, seized Beaufort and its adjacent islands connected by Port Royal Sound. Beaufort’s planter elite fled to Charleston and into the upcountry,attempting,and usually failing, to take their slaves with them. Thousands of slaves on the rice plantations of the Combahee River and the sea-island cotton plantations of St.Helena and Hilton Head islands suddenly became free, by force of arms if not by law. By 1862 General David Hunter,a committed abolitionist,served as supreme commander of the region. Teachers, nurses, and missionaries from New England, New York, and Philadelphia came to the region to teach the former slaves basic literacy and the tenets of American democracy.The efforts by these abolitionists would become known as the “Port Royal experiment” or, as the historian Willie Lee Rose termed it, a “rehearsal for Reconstruction.”1 Two of these northern missionaries, Ellen Murray and Laura Towne, opened a school at the meeting place of a Baptist congregation known as the Brick Church on St. Helena Island. Under their leadership this school would educate generations of children from the Sea Islands. It was named the Penn School for William Penn, the Quaker leader and founder of Pennsylvania. Many of the northern teachers who came to Port Royal misunderstood the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands and perceived themselves as civilizing the freed people. Laura Towne expressed shock when she first saw “the ring shout,” a common style of African American worship in which worshipers moved in a circle to the rhythmic sound of clapping hands,pounding feet,and shouted exclamations of fervor. Towne, and other well-meaning northerners, felt that these Gullah traditions had to be eliminated for the freed people to become fully American. Penn Center continues to operate today, now as an institution to preserve rather than destroy the Gullah cultural heritage. During the civil rights era, Penn Center served as a quiet retreat for Martin Luther King Jr., a place for strategy sessions among black leaders. During the Union occupation enslaved people from all over the lowcountry took the initiative in securing their freedom by fleeing to the Port Royal region. Robert Smalls, an enslaved boatman aboard the Confederate steamer Planter, led a daring and justly famous escape from Charleston Harbor in May 1862,turning the steamer over to a Union naval squadron blockading the city. After another daring action, Smalls became the first African American ship’s captain in the U.S. Navy and fought in a number of Civil War naval engagements. He later served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina. The Port Royal experiment took a new turn in the spring of 1862 when General Hunter attempted to raise a black regiment to serve in the Union army. A few hundred freedmen enlisted, some under duress, and Hunter disbanded this early effort before the end of...