Moon Coastal Carolinas

by Jim Morekis

  Militarily, the Carolinas were the key to the colonist’s eventual victory. With George Washington in a stalemate with British troops in the northeast, the war hinged on the success or failure of the British “Southern Strategy,” an attempt to expand Redcoat ranks by enlisting support from loyalists in the area.

  South Carolinian planters like Christopher Gadsden, Henry Laurens, John Rutledge, and Arthur Middleton were early leaders in the movement for independence. In 1773, North Carolina installed nonimportation agreements that forced local merchants to drop trade with Great Britain. The next year, North Carolina planters sent food and supplies to Massachusetts, then facing the brunt of the British crackdown.

  At war’s outbreak, North Carolina saw its first engagement at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge near Wilmington in early 1776. This clash of loyalist and patriot forces was a clear-cut patriot victory, and little fighting occurred on the North Carolina coast through the end of the conflict.

  The poor showing of the loyalists prompted British General Sir Henry Clinton to head further south to attempt to take Charleston, South Carolina—fourth-largest city in the colonies—in June 1776. The episode gave South Carolina its “Palmetto State” moniker when Redcoat cannonballs bounced off the palm tree-lined walls of Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. The British successfully took the city, however, in 1780, holding it until 1782.

  Though the southeast coast’s two major cities were captured—Savannah fell to the British in 1778—the war raged on throughout the surrounding area. With over 130 known military engagements occurring in South Carolina, that colony sacrificed more men during the war than any other—including Massachusetts itself.

  The struggle became a guerrilla war of colonists vs. the British as well as a civil war between patriots and loyalists, or Tories. Committing what would today undoubtedly be called war crimes, the British routinely burned homes, churches, and fields, and killed recalcitrant civilians. In response, patriots of the Lowcountry bred a group of deadly guerrilla soldiers under legendary leaders such as Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox,” and Thomas Sumter, “the Gamecock.” Using unorthodox tactics perfected in years of backcountry Indian fighting, the patriots of the Carolinas attacked the British in daring hit-and-run raids staged from the swamps and marshes, from the hills and forests.

  The Cotton Boom

  True to form, the new nation wasted no time in asserting its economic strength. Rice planters from Wilmington, North Carolina, on down to the St. Johns River in Florida built on their already-impressive wealth, becoming America’s richest men by far—with fortunes built, of course, on the backs of the slaves working in the fields and paddies.

  Charleston was still by far the largest, most powerful, and most influential city in the southeast. While most Lowcountry planters spent the warmer months away from the mosquito-and-malaria-infested coast, Charleston’s elite grew so fond of their little peninsula that they took to living in their “summer homes” year-round, becoming absentee landlords of their various plantations. As a result of this affluent, somewhat hedonistic atmosphere, Charleston became an early arts and cultural center for the United States.

  In 1786, a new crop was introduced that would only enhance the financial clout of the coastal region: cotton. A former loyalist colonel, Roger Kelsal, sent some seed from Anguilla in the West Indies to his friend James Spaulding, owner of a plantation on St. Simons Island, Georgia. This crop, soon to be known as Sea Island cotton and considered the best in the world, would eventually supplant rice as the crop of choice for coastal plantations. Plantations on Hilton Head, Edisto, Daufuskie, and Kiawah islands would make the shift to this more profitable product and amass even greater fortunes for their owners.

  With the boom in cotton there needed to be a better way to get that cash crop to market quickly. In 1827, the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company was chartered to build a line that would expedite cotton trade from the Upcountry down to the port of Charleston. The resulting 137-mile Charleston-Hamburg line, begun in 1833, was at the time the longest railroad in the world.

  Up in North Carolina, New Bern was at this time the state’s most populous city, though it had lost its capital status to Raleigh in 1794.

  Secession

  Though much of the lead-in to the Civil War focused on whether or not slavery would be allowed in America’s newest territories in the West, all figurative roads eventually led to South Carolina.

  During Andrew Jackson’s presidency in the 1820s, his vice president, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, became a thorn in Jackson’s side with his aggressive advocacy for the concept of nullification, which Jackson strenuously rejected. In a nutshell, Calhoun said that if a state decided that the federal government wasn’t treating it fairly—in this case with regards to tariffs that were hurting the cotton trade in the Palmetto State—it could simply nullify the federal law, superseding it with law of its own.

  As the abolition movement gained steam and tension over slavery rose, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks took things to the next level. On May 22, 1856, he beat fellow Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death with his walking cane on the Senate floor. Sumner had just given a speech criticizing pro-slavery forces—including a relative of Brooks—and called slavery “a harlot.” (In a show of support, South Carolinians sent Brooks dozens of new canes to replace the one he broke over Sumner’s head.)

  In 1860, the national convention of the Democratic Party, then the dominant force in U.S. politics, was held in—where else?—Charleston. Rancor over slavery and state’s rights was so high that they couldn’t agree on a single candidate to run to replace President James Buchanan. Reconvening in Maryland, the party split along sectional lines, with the northern wing backing Stephen A. Douglas. The southern wing, fervently desiring secession above all else, deliberately chose its own candidate, John Breckenridge, in order to split the Democratic vote and throw the election to Republican Abraham Lincoln, an outspoken opponent of slavery.

  During that so-called Secession Winter before Lincoln took office, seven states seceded from the union, first among them the Palmetto State, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

  Ironically, South Carolina’s neighbor to the north was the last Southern state to secede, leaving the union after the war had already begun. Known as being quite reluctant to the cause, the Tarheel State may have even gotten its nickname for having metaphorical feet that were too sticky to take a step.

  Not nearly as dependent on slave labor as South Carolina, North Carolinians for the most part saw no reason to be hasty about dissolving a union that for the most part had been quite good to it. Once committed, however, they were fully devoted to the Confederacy, and indeed lost more troops in the conflict than any other Southern state.

  A UNION DISSOLVED

  Five days after South Carolina’s secession on December 21, 1860, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson moved his garrison from Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor to nearby Fort Sumter. Over the next few months and into the spring, Anderson would ignore many calls to surrender the fort and Confederate forces would prevent any Union resupply or reinforcement. Shortly before dawn on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries around Charleston—ironically none of which were at the Battery itself—opened fire on Fort Sumter for 34 straight hours, until Anderson surrendered on April 13.

  In a classic example of why you should always be careful what you wish for, the secessionists had been too clever by half in pushing for the election of Lincoln. Far from prodding the North to sue for peace, the fall of Fort Sumter instead caused the remaining states in the Union to rally around the previously unpopular tall man from Illinois. Lincoln’s skillful—some would say cunning—management of the Fort Sumter standoff meant that from then on out, the South would bear history’s blame for initiating the conflict that would claim over half a million American lives.

  After Fort Sumter, the remaining four states of the Confederacy—Arkansas, Tennes
see, North Carolina, and Virginia—seceded. The Old Dominion was the real prize for the secessionists, as Virginia had the South’s only ironworks and by far its largest manufacturing base.

  War on the Coast

  In November 1861, a massive Union invasion armada landed in Port Royal Sound in South Carolina, effectively taking the entire Lowcountry and Sea Islands out of the war. Charleston, however, did host two battles in the conflict. The Battle of Secessionville came in June 1862, when a Union force attempting to take Charleston was repulsed on James Island with heavy casualties. The next battle, an unsuccessful Union landing on Morris Island in July 1863, was immortalized by the movie Glory.

  The 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an African American unit with white commanders, performed so gallantly in its failed assault on the Confederate Battery Wagner that it inspired the North and was cited by abolitionists as further proof that African Americans should be given freedom and full citizenship rights. Another invasion attempt on Charleston would not come, but it was besieged and bombarded for nearly two years (devastation made even worse by a massive fire, unrelated to the shelling, which destroyed much of the city in 1861).

  In other towns, white Southerners evacuated the coastal cities and plantations for the hinterland, leaving behind only slaves to fend for themselves. In many coastal areas, African Americans and Union garrison troops settled into an awkward but peaceful coexistence.

  While the ironclad USS Monitor gained fame for its sea battle with the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (formerly the Merrimac) farther north in Virginia waters, it was actually lost at sea off Cape Hatteras in December 1862. The underwater site is now a National Historic Landmark.

  In Savannah to the south, General William Sherman concluded his March to the Sea in 1864, famously giving the city to Lincoln as a Christmas present. While staunch Confederates, city fathers were wise enough to know what would happen to their accumulated wealth and fine homes should they be foolhardy enough to resist Sherman’s army of war-hardened veterans, most of them farm boys from the Midwest with a pronounced distaste for the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

  In North Carolina, Wilmington remained in Confederate hands until very late in the war, February 1865, acting as the South’s de facto main base for blockade runners due to the quick fall of New Orleans and the effective blockading of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah.

  Aftermath

  The only military uncertainty left was in how badly Charleston, the “cradle of secession,” would suffer for its sins. Historians and local wags have long debated why Sherman spared Charleston, the hated epicenter of the Civil War. Did Sherman fall in love with the city during his brief posting there as a young lieutenant? Did he literally fall in love there, with one of its legendarily beautiful and delicate local belles?

  We may never know for sure, but it’s likely that the Lowcountry’s marshy, mucky terrain simply made it too difficult to move large numbers of men and supplies from Savannah to Charleston proper. So Sherman turned his terrifying, battle-hardened army inland toward the state capitol of Columbia, which would not be so lucky. Most of Charleston’s outlying plantation homes, too, would be put to the torch.

  For the African American population of South Carolina, however, it was not a time of sadness but the great Day of Jubilee. Soon after the Confederate surrender, black Charlestonians held one of the largest parades the city has ever seen, with one of the floats being a coffin bearing the sign, “Slavery is dead.”

  As for the place where it all began, a plucky Confederate garrison remained underground at Fort Sumter throughout the war, as the walls above them were literally pounded into dust by the long Union siege. The garrison quietly left the fort under cover of night on February 17, 1865. Major Robert Anderson, who surrendered the fort at war’s beginning, returned to Sumter in April 1865 to raise the same flag he’d lowered exactly four years earlier. Three thousand African Americans attended the ceremonies, including the son of Denmark Vesey himself.

  Later that same night, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, D.C.

  Reconstruction

  A case could be made that slavery need not have led America into Civil War. The U.S. had banned the importation of slaves long before, in 1808. The great powers of Europe would soon ban slavery altogether (Spain in 1811, France in 1826, and Britain in 1833). Visiting foreign dignitaries in the mid-1800s were often shocked to find the practice in full swing in the American South. Even Brazil, the world center of slavery, where four out of every 10 African slaves were brought (less than 5 percent came to the U.S.), would ban slavery in 1888.

  Still, the die was cast, the war was fought, and everyone had to deal with the aftermath. For a brief time, Sherman’s benevolent dictatorship on the coast held promise for an orderly post-war future. In 1865, he issued his sweeping “40 Acres and a Mule” order seeking dramatic economic restitution for free blacks of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. However, politics reared its ugly head in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination and the order was rescinded, ushering in the chaotic Reconstruction era, echoes of which linger to this day.

  Nonetheless, that period of time in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands served as an important incubator of sorts for the indigenous African American culture of the coast—called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia. Largely left to their own devices, these insulated farming and oystering communities held to their old folkways, many of which exist today.

  Even as the trade in cotton and naval stores hit even greater heights than before, urban life and racial tension became more and more problematic. Urban population swelled as freed blacks from all over the depressed countryside rushed into the cities. As one, his name lost to history, famously said: “Freedom was free-er in Charleston.”

  It was during this time that some gains were made by African Americans, albeit with little support from the indigenous white population. Largely under duress, the University of South Carolina became the first Southern university to grant degrees to black students. The historically black, Methodist-affiliated Claflin College in Orangeburg was founded in 1869.

  While the coast and urban areas saw more opportunity for African Americans, tension remained high in the countryside.

  Largely with the support of white militia groups, in 1876 the old guard of the Democratic Party returned to power in South Carolina with the election of former Confederate General Wade Hampton III to the governor’s office. Supported by a violent paramilitary group called the “Red Shirts,” Hampton used his charisma and considerable personal reputation to attempt to restore South Carolina to its antebellum glory—and undo Reconstruction in the process.

  The Wilmington Insurrection

  Despite its laidback, friendly reputation, Wilmington was the site of one of the bloodiest racial incidents in American history, and by some accounts the only time a U.S. municipal government has ever been removed by force.

  In the late 19th century, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and had a reasonably well-functioning Republican-led government that featured the input of many free African American citizens. One was Alexander Manly, editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, at the time the only black-owned newspaper in the United States.

  On the morning of November 10, 1898, a mob largely comprising former Confederate soldiers attacked the newspaper office, motivated by Manly’s recent rebuttals against accusations that local African American men were guilty of raping white women. Manly left town in fear of his life as the mob burned the newspaper building down.

  Led by Alfred Moore Waddell, the mob then gave the elected city government, which included both white and black officials, an ultimatum: Resign or face a similar fate. Literally at gunpoint, the municipal government was dissolved and a new city council “appointed.” By four o’clock in the afternoon of the same day, Waddell was declared mayor.

  RENAISSANCE

  While the aftermath of the Civil War was painful, it was by no means bereft of
activity or profit. The reunion of the states marked the coming of the Industrial Revolution to America, and in many quarters of the South the cotton, lumber, and naval stores industries not only recovered, but exceeded antebellum levels.

  A classic South Carolina example was in Horry County, where the town of Conway exploded as a commercial center for the area logging industry. By 1901 the first, modest resort had been built on nearby Myrtle Beach, and the area rapidly became an important vacation area—a role it serves to this day.

  The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a major turning point for the South. For most Southerners, it was the first time since the Civil War that they were enthusiastically patriotic about being Americans. The southeastern coast felt this in particular, as it was a staging area for the invasion of Cuba. Charlestonians cheered the exploits of their namesake heavy cruiser the USS Charleston, which played a key role in forcing the Spanish surrender of Guam.

  A South Carolinian himself, Wall Street financial wizard and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch would make many Americans more familiar with the state’s natural beauty. After his acquisition of the old Hobcaw Barony near Georgetown in 1905, he hosted many a world leader there, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

  Charleston would elect its first Irish-American mayor, John Grace, in 1911. Though it wouldn’t open until 1929, the first Cooper River Bridge joining Charleston with Mount Pleasant was the child of the Grace administration, which is credited today for modernizing the Holy City’s infrastructure (as well as tolerating high levels of vice during Prohibition) and making possible much of the civic gains to follow.