Lowcountry Confederates
Rebels, Yankees, and South Carolina Rice Plantations
(More Tales from Brookgreen Series)
by
Lynn Michelsohn
Cleanan Press, Inc.
Roswell, New Mexico
USA
Copyright © 2014 by Lynn Michelsohn
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
Thomas Daggett, The Engineer of Laurel Hill
Historical Digression: On Rice and Rice Mills
The Legendary Feast, A Sad Tale from a Tragic War
Historical Digression: The Waccamaw Light Artillery
About the Storytellers
About the Author
Acknowledgements
A Selection from Gullah Ghosts
Other Books by Lynn Michelsohn
Extended Copyright
Preface
During the middle of the Twentieth Century, two charming “sixty-ish” Hostesses at Brookgreen Gardens—the lovely sculpture park created from four historic rice plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry near Myrtle Beach—told these stories. I hope you enjoy these tales from “Cousin Corrie” Dusenbury and “Miss Genevieve” Wilcox Chandler as much as I did.
Lynn Michelsohn
“Millstone”
Thomas Daggett
The Engineer of Laurel Hill Plantation
Millstones don’t figure prominently in the landscaping of Brookgreen Gardens, although several rest unobtrusively in out of the way spots. They make convenient seating here and there for weary Garden visitors. The gray brown of their rough channeled surfaces blends easily with the winding openwork walls and trailing Spanish moss.
As a child, I knew that these were not natural stones, but I just looked at them as decorative elements in the Gardens. Then one day a visitor asked about them.
Cousin Corrie explained that these stones had milled the rice grown in fields around us here at Brookgreen Gardens. As she explained it, each of the four plantations that now make up Brookgreen Gardens once had its own rice mill, with the largest one operating on Laurel Hill Plantation. The rice mill on Brookgreen Plantation stood where the Dogwood Garden stands today. The millstones now scattered throughout Brookgreen Gardens came from those four plantation rice mills.
Then, Cousin Corrie went on to reveal a surprising, if tenuous, connection between these millstones and one of the most dramatic events in the Carolina Lowcountry during the conflict between Union and Confederate forces.
As a true Southerner, I now smile secretly whenever I spot one of these rough stones, thinking of that fascinating connection and the last gasp of Southern defiance it recalls.
Nothing suggested approaching disaster on Wednesday morning March 1, 1865. The waters of South Carolina’s Winyah Bay rocked the Union warship USS Harvest Moon gently as it rode at anchor off the small city of Georgetown, a little north of Charleston. This superior and important vessel was serving as Flagship for Rear Admiral John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren, the equally superior and important Commander of the United States Navy’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron.
The fifty-five-year-old admiral had already enjoyed a long and distinguished military career. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy and an expert on naval ordnance—which is weaponry—he headed that department throughout the War.
One of his many inventions, a highly efficient, cast-iron, muzzle-loading cannon called the Dahlgren gun, had become a standard component of naval armament. It contributed greatly to the Union victory. Dahlgren’s inventions, as well as his writings on naval warfare, would earn him the enviable historical title of “The Father of Naval Ordnance.”
After taking charge of the Washington Naval Yard at the beginning of the War, the then-Captain Dahlgren became a close friend and advisor to President Lincoln. The admiring president soon promoted him to his current rank. When the new admiral took command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in 1863, he chose the Harvest Moon as his Flagship.
New England shipbuilders originally constructed this 200-foot-long, side wheel steamship to carry passengers in elegant style along the busy coastal route between Maine and Boston. During the War, the expanding United States Navy purchased it and hastily refitted it as a warship, as they were doing for any suitable vessel.
Admiral Dahlgren enjoyed the stylish comforts of his Flagship, as well as its trim, modern lines, and its impressive mechanical efficiency. Its vertical beam engine could drive the vessel at an astounding fifteen knots. Fitted with the latest naval armament, it carried his flag, his administrative staff, and his august personage southward to oversee the naval blockade of the rebellious Southern states.
Although new to his job as Captain of the Harvest Moon, thirty-three-year-old John Crosby performed crisply and efficiently in that post. He ran his ship just the way the Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron thought the Flagship of an admiral should be run.
In addition to Captain Crosby, ten officers and a crew of thirty seamen staffed the admiral’s flagship. It also usually carried a dozen or so recent recruits, mostly former slaves, as landsmen, the lowest rank in the Navy. They performed the menial, unskilled tasks of the ship. Just the day before, Captain Crosby had recruited another dozen “contrabands,” as Union forces called these men, as additional landsmen.
By the way, did you know that the Union Navy, unlike the Union Army or any Confederate forces, accepted black men as regular servicemen and paid them just the same as their white shipmates?
Anyway, on March 1, 1865, Captain Crosby and the Harvest Moon stood fully staffed and ready for any action.
Admiral Dahlgren woke slowly that cloudy Wednesday morning, clearly enjoying both his superiority and his importance. He lingered in his warm berth on his comfortable Flagship, thinking back over his victories of the past few weeks and contemplating additional glories soon to come. All was well in Admiral Dahlgren’s mind. He had accomplished his mission: the successful blockade of all Southern ports and their subsequent capture, one by one. Union forces would soon defeat the Southern Rebels, and Admiral Dahlgren’s effective blockade had played a major role in this anticipated victory.
The export of rice, cotton, timber, and naval stores had always fueled the economy of the Southern states. In exchange, the South imported most of the manufactured goods it needed.
Before the War, much of this trade took place with Northern states. Once hostilities began, however, Europe and islands in the Caribbean remained the South’s only trading partners.
This international commerce became vital to the Confederacy. The new country needed to sell its products in foreign markets to sustain its economy and it needed foreign manufactured weapons and medicines to succeed in its struggle for independence. South Carolina ports such as Charleston and Georgetown became indispensible to this flow of commerce, and thus, to winning the War.
The Union quickly recognized this economic and military reality. As a result, the United States Navy took on the goal of interrupting this flow of trade as its primary mission. Union commanders organized the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron to stop shipping into and out of all major and minor ports from Alexandria, Virginia, to New Orleans, Louisiana.
The operation soon became a game of cat and mouse, however, as blockade-runners took up the challenge. Really quite a story!
That March morning, Admiral Dahlgren felt great pride in finally having shut down Southern international commerce. All week he had been savoring the fruits of his successful campaign. The port city of Charleston had just surrendered to Union forces after years of devastating bombardment.
The conquering admiral especially enjoyed sailing his Flagship in
to Charleston Harbor, where impudent Confederates had fired the opening shots of the Southern Rebellion at Fort Sumter. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” he murmured triumphantly as he kicked his way through the rubble of the once proud city.
Two days later, Georgetown surrendered and Admiral Dahlgren steamed up the coast into Winyah Bay to supervise the occupation of that port city. He declared martial law, announced the emancipation of all slaves, appointed a military commander for the district, and watched imperiously as his sailors raised the Stars and Stripes above Georgetown’s red-brick Town Hall.
Then the admiral ordered a trip across the bay and up the Waccamaw River to survey its ruined rice plantations. He took delight in observing the charred remains of plantation houses, barns, and rice mills surrounded by desolate rice fields. He reveled in the heavy scent of burned timbers that still hung in the air.
The next day, the USS Harvest Moon and its escort tugboat steamed back down to Winyah Bay, stopping to allow Admiral Dahlgren and his party time to inspect the deserted gun emplacements at Battery White on Belle Isle Plantation just south of Georgetown. Confederate coastal troops had abandoned this last important gun battery several weeks earlier when commanders ordered them south in a last desperate effort to defend Charleston.
During the inspection, Admiral Dahlgren spoke with contempt of the defeated Southern people who had seemingly lost any spark of fight or spirit. He looked with disgust at the spiked cannons and the abandoned stores of shot and shells stacked behind earthen breastworks. But he did just wonder what had become of the gunpowder that must have once accompanied these munitions.
And now, as he lay in his comfortable berth on the Harvest Moon, these pleasant recollections of the last few days filled this career military man with satisfaction. He contemplated his triumphant return to Washington. He smiled thinking about the honors and accolades he would receive, all befitting his status as an unquestioned conqueror, of course.
Slowly, the admiral climbed out of bed. He dressed carefully, making sure his uniform appeared impeccable, so as to present a majestic figure to the Rebels he would review later in the day. Fully dressed at last, Admiral Dahlgren began to pace back and forth in his cabin. Where was his breakfast? How could they keep him waiting like this? How could that steward dare to be late?
Just at that instant, a deafening explosion shook the startled admiral to the floor! The walls of his cabin shattered inward, showering him with splintered boards and glass. The acrid fumes of burnt gunpowder filled his lungs. Sounds of shrieking and the hurried tramp of men’s feet echoed along crowded corridors.
Shaken but alive, Admiral Dahlgren struggled to the upper deck where he could survey the damage. Through a large, jagged hole extending down through several smoke-filled decks, he could see water gushing into the broken hull.
The triumphant commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron had found his missing gunpowder. His ship had struck a Confederate torpedo—a floating mine—filled with it!
The USS Harvest Moon slipped quietly beneath the waves of Winyah Bay in less than five minutes that cloudy Wednesday morning. With it went Admiral Dahlgren’s dreams of untarnished glory.
In those five minutes, John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren, “The Father of Naval Ordnance,” earned another—less enviable—place in U.S. naval history. He became the only admiral in the first 167 years of the United States Navy—from its founding during the Revolutionary War until the Battle of Midway in the Second World War—to lose his Flagship to enemy action.
Captain Thomas West Daggett, CSA, formerly the rice mill engineer on the now-ruined Laurel Hill Plantation that Admiral Dahlgren had surveyed so smugly just the day before, had constructed the torpedo that struck the Harvest Moon that morning. His “infernal machine,” as these devices were called, had sunk the admiral’s Flagship and the admiral’s reputation in one last act of Southern defiance.
~
Captain Daggett, the rice mill engineer who sank Admiral Dahlgren’s Flagship, happens to have been a cousin of mine, just by marriage though. He died in the same year as the Flagg Flood—the Hurricane of 1893—when I was still a little girl. I never met him but I did grow up knowing several little boys named in his honor.
Thomas Daggett became quite a celebrity around here, both for his sinking of the Harvest Moon during the War, and for his activities after the War, although some of them might be considered questionable. He turned out to be another one of those characters with a long and varied life, good for several dramatic tales, but I will only tell you about his engineering career for now.
Before the Revolutionary War, here on the Waccamaw Neck, which is that strip of land between the Waccamaw River and the ocean, a wealthy Charleston merchant named Plowden Weston acquired Laurel Hill, one of the plantations that make up Brookgreen Gardens. He purchased it from Gabriel Marion, brother of Revolutionary War hero General Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox.” Maybe you know about him and how he harassed Lord Cornwallis’ British troops, keeping them occupied in the South while George Washington built up enough of an army to defeat him in Virginia, and win our independence.
Anyway, Plowden Weston always maintained close ties with the Marion family. He so admired Francis Marion that he supplied the general’s troops with food raised on Laurel Hill Plantation during the Revolutionary War, and he named one of his sons “Francis Marion Weston.” He left Laurel Hill to that son when he died in the 1820s.
Francis Weston went on to build a huge rice growing empire on the Waccamaw River, centered at Laurel Hill. Of course, like most Waccamaw rice planters, he maintained both his elegant plantation house on a bluff overlooking the river and a mansion in Charleston for the February social season of parties, balls, and race meets.
At home on the Waccamaw Neck, Francis Weston and his family attended All Saints Episcopal Church near Pawleys Island. In Charleston, they attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, often called “The Planters’ Church.”
Jonathan Lucas, inventor of the rice mill, which revolutionized rice production, also attended St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Charleston. He and Francis Weston got to know each other there. Soon, Francis Weston commissioned Jonathan Lucas to build a water powered rice mill on his Laurel Hill Plantation. It sat high on the bluff overlooking the Waccamaw River, not far from the plantation house.
Large plantation owners such as Francis Weston often built rice mills on their plantations for milling their own rice. They also earned money by milling rice for their neighbors. Some even purchased small ships to carry their milled rice directly to the international market in Charleston rather than paying Georgetown ship owners to transport it for them.
As owner of the largest rice mill on the Waccamaw Neck in the mid 1800’s, Francis Weston soon began milling rice for most of the planters along his portion of the Waccamaw River. Before long, he converted his rice mill to run by steam power.
Like other rice mill owners, Francis Weston faced a serious personnel problem: finding a qualified engineer to keep his rice mill operating properly. After a long search, he hired a young engineer who had previously operated a steam powered sawmill in Georgia. This young engineer was Thomas Daggett.
Thomas West Daggett had been born in the seafaring town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He came from an old and respected Massachusetts family, but like so many young men of that era, Thomas travelled South to seek his fortune. He landed in Charleston at the age of sixteen and went to work in a machine shop where he learned to design, construct, and maintain mechanical equipment. He became what we would now call a mechanical engineer.
Francis Weston soon delighted in the services of his young engineer, who enjoyed the challenge of keeping the large rice mill operating properly while completing the other small mechanical tasks always cropping up on a large plantation.
When Thomas Daggett’s fame as the Engineer of Laurel Hill began to bring requests for his engineering skills from other planters, he began to contract with them for their projects. He
trained several Laurel Hill slaves in the mechanical work required to keep the rice mill operating smoothly and, after a few years, relinquished his day-to-day duties to these skilled workers, although he continued to supervise their work at the rice mill. Mr. Daggett then relocated to Georgetown, a few miles away, where he could easily take on other engineering commissions as well.
Thomas Daggett continued to oversee the operation of that rice mill even after 1854 when young Plowden C. J. Weston inherited Laurel Hill from his father, Francis Weston. When that Plowden Weston sold Laurel Hill to a wealthy North Carolina planter named Daniel Jordan just before the War Between the States, Mr. Daggett returned regularly to make sure that the slaves he had trained were able to keep Colonel Jordan’s mill operating efficiently. He also kept quite busy with other engineering projects throughout the area.
Mr. Daggett soon grew rich. After the deaths of his first two wives, he married my cousin Mary Tillman, bought a lovely old home on Front Street in the wealthiest section of Georgetown, and started to raise a family.
But Southern politicians began to speak increasingly of secession from the Union. Local sentiment supported this idea, even though it would likely mean armed conflict. As the threat of war increased throughout the 1850s, the men of Georgetown County organized a number of local militias including the Georgetown Rifle Guards and later, the Wachesaw Riflemen and Thomas Daggett’s own Waccamaw Light Artillery.
When South Carolina seceded from the Union in December of 1860, thirty-two-year-old Captain Daggett took on the important job of Confederate States Army Ordnance Officer for the coastal district centered at Georgetown. With his engineering skills, he set to work organizing coastal defenses from Georgetown on Winyah Bay, sixty miles up the coast to Little River on the North Carolina line.
As Ordnance Officer, Captain Daggett designed and built several fortified positions, stocking them with cannon, shot, gunpowder, rifles, and ammunition. These included Fort Randall at the mouth of the Little River, Fort Ward at Murrells Inlet, Camp Weston on the Waccamaw River at Laurel Hill Plantation, and later, Battery White in Winyah Bay just south of Georgetown.
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