August 29, 2004

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” Patrick Henry (March 23, 1775)

All wars are ugly, civil wars probably the worst of them — father against son, brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend, town against town.

Long years of desperate, grinding struggle among players just like these marked the American civil war — the war between the states — each side determined as only deep-rooted nationalism (or sectionalism, as was the case in the 1861-65 conflict) can make men determined, each side with its cause, locked inextricably, murderously together in an epic, Darwinian bloodletting, complete with every grisly entree on the menu of modern warfare: head-to-head clashes of powerful armies fighting to the death on horizon-to-horizon battlefields; endless siege warfare, complete with the disease, privation and wasting-away that always accompanies it; cities burnt to cinders or slow-bombed to rubble-piles in a wanton, almost casual way...

While the desperate, earth-shaking combats on the northern (and western) battlefields quickly placed a chokehold on much of the world’s prime newspaper space, the attention of both sides on the south coast settled down to the grim two-front fight they had started, each driven by that deep, gnawing inner hankering to show up a dogged, determined blood-enemy, and the sooner it could happen the better.

Two raging fronts, yes: Charleston, the cradle of the southern rebellion, must stand, must fall — take your choice. And then the other front — the dark and bloody death-struggle that exploded down along the quiet salt creeks and across the whispering green marshes, the alluring, pine and oak-shrouded islands and wide, Atlantic-gray tide-rivers of the south coast.

With the Confederacy ever on the defensive and navy-less, the coastal war was born of and always remained a part of that desperate craving for payback on the part of Union commanders and administrators. Triggered initially by a gut-ripping Yankee desire to whip the wealthy, arrogant Charleston bluebloods, the self-same mock-Shintoist, ancestor-worshipping Secesh radicals who had humiliated them so roundly and completely before the world in 1861, the coastal fighting took on its own methodical eye-for-an-eye character, slowly spreading like a tipped-over carboy of the vilest poison, searing and bubbling madly across three states, in the end tapping wellsprings of deepest hatred and fanaticism.

Any account of the coastal war must of course consider the drawnout Gotterdammerung played out during the course of the endless battle of Charleston (it cannot rightly be called a siege, since the city was never invested, only abandoned in the final days).

This presentation attempts to do that, keying on occurrences in Charleston as they affected or were affected by the coastal war to rack the focus on the astonishing series of events which unfolded in what the Yankees named the department of the south between 1861 and 1865, the “time when big gun shoot”, as the Gullah people called it, which only ended when crazy-like-a-fox old “Uncle Billy” Sherman came in massive, crushing force, with his leathery, seamed face, his tousled red hair, beaked nose, and wild, never-sleeping eyes...

Could it have ended sooner — or differently? The fighting at the “holy city” was never decisive — but it could have been.

Say there had been a breakthrough across the Coosaw River at any time by department of the south troops with strength and leadership enough to seize and hold a railhead on the Savannah-Charleston line — something often urged by the smarter Yankee generals.

It would have meant immediate disaster for Robert E. Lee’s embattled army of northern Virginia — legions of Blueback soldiers, moving in by steam transport from Hilton Head and Beaufort as their replacements poured in on ships from Hampton Roads and points north. With luck and skill and numbers, they more than likely could have reinforced the railhead, built a spur across the eight miles of swamp between Boyd’s Landing and the existing tracks, then spread up and down the line on rolling stock brought in by sea, pillaging the country, possibly capturing Savannah or Charleston or both from landward, then seizing more and more track northward, setting up strong points as they advanced closer and closer to the rear of the Confederate Army.

Or say the Confederates could have broken the blockade (and much hot rebel blood was stirred in January 1863 when it was claimed the two southern ironclads CSS Chicora and Palmetto state had done just that, briefly routing the US fleet in a middle-of-the-night firefight off Charleston bar), the south would have achieved a psychological victory of equal or superior magnitude to that of First Manassas, along with increased or at least less- inhibited commerce... This, historians say, as much as any Antietam or Gettysburg — or Appomattox — marked the death-throes of the southern Confederacy.

As a new nation, the Confederacy found itself in an odd position. Its leadership said it was fighting to maintain ‘rights’, but in order to exist, its people had to go through incredible, unthinkable change.

The civilian leadership — essentially a band of cronies who fell out with each other early in the war — embargoed their own cotton at the beginning of the fighting, when full-value cotton could have bought millions in munitions possibly even a small navy. The south’s leaders were to introduce conscription and impressments of property, from the slaves themselves to rail and ship cargo space. It was a leadership that suspended the writ of habeas corpus and expropriated many a private industry. It crudely attempted to ‘manage’ news. It failed largely to provide in any meaningful way for its fighting men and continued to foolishly waste their lives after the facts were spelled out in ankle-deep blood along the Sunken Road near Antietam Creek those balmy September days of 1862.

(Some history books list Antietam, or Sharpsburg, as the battle is often called in the south, as a victory for the Confederates, citing Union General George McClellan’s fumbling and hesitant tactics. But the fact is that General Robert E. Lee was retreating when he arrived at Antietam Creek and he was retreating when he left, with his forces then reduced by one-third. Several thousand other Rebel soldiers had deserted en route to Sbarpsburg, most of them from the Carolinas, saying they would fight to defend Dixie, but not mount attacks on what they thought of as southern soil — Maryland. Antietam showed the south was not philosophically unified, nor could southern forces defeat the Yankees in an offensive campaign on enemy soil, then occupy that soil, a prerequisite for victory in any conflict.)

For the record, the Lincoln administration, in seizing the national telegraphic network as it did in 1862, also made an attempt to control the spread of information. Disastrous news was also hidden or softened for northern readers, a case in point being the failure of the Federal ironclad fleet’s all-out attack in Charleston harbour on April 7, 1863. And the writ of habeas corpus was also suspended in Maryland, secessionist legislators and demagogues locked up indefinitely.

The south entered the war in 1861 with less than $30 million as a gold reserve. By just printing paper money, it held out against four-to-one odds for four years, in the end the authority of the Confederate nation travelling only on the glistening bayonets of Lee’s battered and shrinking army, more than $1.5 billion in ‘shinplasters’ blowing up and down the streets of the south’s devastated towns by the early days of spring 1865.

The south had some advantages at the outset. The Confederate government was as well as organized, if not better organized than the Union’s, which had just been voted into the hands of inexperienced Republicans. Confederate soldiers defended along interior lines with inferior, but adequate rail links at the start. Both Britain and France, along with many people in the north seemed disposed at the beginning to let the southerners have their independence.

When fighting began, about 300,000 of the four or five million white southerners owned slaves, about 100,000 of those holding ten or more slaves.

This tiny oligarchy had historically supplied almost 100 per cent of the south’s state and federal lawmakers, judges, bankers, administrators, and controlled courthouse patronage in much of the region. The Confederate soldier’s oft-repeated saying was rooted in the truth: “Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”. Only white men over the age of 21 who could or would pay the poll tax were allowed to vote in most southern states.

Historians estimate that about 10 per cent of the white southerners remained loyal to the United States, either in thought or deed. If it is assumed that most of the slave population favoured US rather than Confederate rule, then it can quickly be seen that the south entered the war with more than half its population opposed to Confederate victory, a gravely serious obstacle and of itself. (There is no question that many slaves remained loyal, if not to the idea of a Confederacy, at least to their masters, who supported and fought for it.) The rebel armies won about half the set battles in the war. In fact, the Butternut phalanxes were still winning at Honey Hill — and Doctortown — in the balmy, golden days of late fall 1864, when the tramp of Sherman’s combat veterans could be heard to the west.

Excerpted with permission from

Homemade Thunder: War on the South Coast 1861-1865
By T.D. Conner
Writeplace Press, POB 9704, Savannah, GA 31412, USA
277pp. Price not listed

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