South Carolina in the American Civil War

• 1. A State Apart

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  "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." Former congressman James L. Petigru delivered that verdict immediately after his state became the first in the Union to declare secession in December 1860. He was nearly alone in his skepticism. The state's newspapers were already calling the new entity the "Palmetto Republic." Its politicians had spent decades building toward this moment. And within months, the first shots of the American Civil War would be fired from South Carolina's own shores.

  What drove this single state to act before all others? What role did its soldiers, its ministers, and its enslaved population play in a war it helped ignite? And what did the war's end mean for those who survived it?

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• 2. The Slavery Declaration

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  In a January 1860 speech, South Carolinian congressman Laurence Massillon Keitt argued before Congress that slavery was not morally wrong but justified. He condemned the Republican Party as an "anti-slavery party" seeking to impose its views on the South. By December of that year, on the eve of secession, Keitt stated his position in plain terms: "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery."

  Alfred P. Aldrich, a politician from Barnwell, had already framed the choice starkly. He argued that if a Republican won the presidential election of 1860, secession was the only way to preserve slavery and limit the anti-slavery Republican Party's reach. The secession convention convened in Columbia on December 17 and voted unanimously, 169 to 0, to leave the United States. The convention then moved to Charleston to finalize the ordinance, which was adopted on the 20th of December 1860. South Carolina became the first slave state in the South to declare secession.

  The convention also drafted a Declaration of Immediate Causes. Its primary stated grievance was "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery." A repeated concern was the refusal of free states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts. The declaration quoted Article 4 of the U.S. Constitution on the return of escaped enslaved people and argued that without that provision, the Constitution itself "would not have been made." Because that compact had been "deliberately broken and disregarded," South Carolina was, in its own framing, "released from her obligation" to remain in the Union.

  Historian Harry V. Jaffa analyzed the declaration in his 2000 book "A New Birth of Freedom." He noted that South Carolina borrowed the structure of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But South Carolina's version omitted that all men are created equal. It removed the claim to unalienable rights. And it dropped any reference to governments drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed. Jaffa concluded that South Carolina "had an entirely different idea of what the ends of government ought to be." Its position, he wrote, held slavery to be "a positive good," not "a necessary evil."

  The day after the ordinance passed, a state convention address invited other slaveholding states to join a new confederacy. One South Carolinian newspaper editor described the enterprise plainly: "The South is now in the formation of a Slave Republic."

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• 3. Fort Sumter

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  Major Robert Anderson commanded the small U.S. garrison stationed in Charleston. Six days after secession, on the day after Christmas, he withdrew his men from the mainland to the island fortress of Fort Sumter in the harbor. South Carolina militia swarmed over the abandoned batteries on shore and trained their guns on the island.

  On the 9th of January 1861, the U.S. supply ship Star of the West approached to resupply the garrison. Cadets from The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, opened fire and struck the vessel three times. The ship turned back to New York.

  Virginia orator Roger Pryor arrived in Charleston with a direct message: the only way to bring his state into a southern confederacy was for South Carolina to strike the United States first. On April 10, the newspaper Mercury reprinted reports from New York that a Union naval expedition was heading south toward Charleston. With those ships approaching and time running short, Confederate commanders acted. At 4:30 in the morning on April 12, after two days of intense negotiations, the bombardment began. Edmund Ruffin is usually credited with firing the first shot. Students from The Citadel were also among those firing the opening rounds.

  Anderson's garrison held out for thirty-four hours. He then raised the white flag. His men marched out with colors flying and drums beating, saluting the U.S. flag with a 50-gun salute. During that salute, one of the cannons exploded, killing a young soldier. He was the first casualty of the war.

  In December 1861, a disastrous fire swept through Charleston. Georgia sent South Carolina $100,000 toward the recovery.

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• 4. Robert Smalls

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  Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. He became a skilled mariner working Confederate vessels in Charleston Harbor. On the 13th of May 1863, while the white officers of the Confederate transport CSS Planter were ashore, Smalls gathered his crew and their families and took the ship. He sailed out of Charleston Harbor under Confederate colors, passed the shore batteries, and steered into the Union blockade surrounding the harbor. He then piloted the vessel to the Union-controlled enclave at Beaufort, Port Royal, and Hilton Head. There the CSS Planter became a Union warship.

  Smalls's example and personal advocacy helped persuade President Abraham Lincoln to accept African American soldiers into the Union Army. After the war, he helped found the Republican Party in South Carolina. He was elected to the U.S. Congress five times.

  At a ceremony on the 21st of February 1865, the U.S. flag was raised once more over Fort Sumter. Smalls stood on the platform alongside two others: former fort commander Robert Anderson and the son of Denmark Vesey.

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• 5. Fort Wagner

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  The First Battle of Fort Wagner, on the 11th of July 1863, was a brief and lopsided engagement. The Union suffered 339 casualties; only 12 Confederate soldiers were killed. One week later came the assault that would enter the national memory. On the 18th of July 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry led the Union charge on the fort's earthwork defenses. The regiment was one of the first major American military units composed of Black soldiers. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led his men on foot as they charged and was killed in the assault.

  Shaw's death and the battle's wide coverage drove further recruitment of Black soldiers into the Union Army. That recruitment added to the Union's growing numerical advantage over Confederate forces. The Union besieged the position and pressed steadily forward. By August 25, Union entrenchments had advanced to within 240 yards of the Confederate advance rifle pits. The 24th Massachusetts Infantry carried those positions in a successful assault on August 26. After nearly 60 days of sustained shelling, the Confederate garrison slipped away on the night of September 6-7, 1863, taking with them all operable cannon.

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• 6. The Port Royal Experiment

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  In 1861, Union forces captured the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast. The white planters fled, leaving behind 10,000 enslaved people. Several private Northern charity organizations arrived to set up schools and assist the former slaves in building self-sufficient lives. What followed was described at the time as a model of what Reconstruction could have been.

  By selling surplus crops, the Sea Island residents accumulated small amounts of property. They assigned themselves daily cotton-growing tasks and cultivated personal gardens, fished, and hunted in their remaining hours. The abandoned plantations were confiscated by the Union Army and given to the African Americans who had worked them.

  The Sea Islands became what one account called the laboratory for Union plans to educate African Americans for their eventual role as full American citizens.

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• 7. Sherman's March and the War's End

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  Few major military engagements occurred within South Carolina's borders until 1865. General Sherman's army, having completed its March to the Sea at Savannah, turned northward into the state. His troops burned Columbia and numerous other towns along the march. Many of Sherman's soldiers carried a specific hostility toward South Carolina. One declared: "Here is where treason began and, by God, here is where it shall end." The destruction they inflicted on South Carolina was, by the accounts of participants, worse than what they had done in Georgia.

  South Carolina lost 12,922 men to the war. That figure represented 23% of the state's white male population of fighting age, the highest percentage of any state in the nation. As late as January 1865, the Charleston Courier dismissed suggestions that the Confederacy consider abandoning slavery to secure its independence. The newspaper called such proposals "folly."

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