#uscivilwar

Confederate society was crumbling from the start.  Gangs of deserters and draft dodgers roam the countryside, stealing from anyone. Cadres of Southern Unionists meeting in secret.  Conscription officers looking to grab any likely-looking man.  Militias made up of the too-young and too-old avoiding big fights.  Militias made up of the well-connected or wealthy looking to avoid any kind of fight.  Clusters of fleeing slaves living in the woods and mountains.

It would be sheer hell - in a good RPG way - to navigate the area. Dodging the Confederate troops as they look to requisition anything not nailed down. Avoiding drawing attention from those loyalists hoping to sniff out Union sympathies. Dodging conscription teams looking to make quota. Trying to make it along crumbling roads as the railways had lost most of their engines to the military.  

The bridge is destroyed.  Was it Yankees?  Unionists? Confederates trying to slow the Yankees?  Bandits trying to slow the militias?  Who knows?  The woods are full of white deserters and escaped slaves.  Some of the slaves probably know the area well enough to show you a ford.  Can you convince them to trust you?  Can they trust you?

Lording over it all and trying to run the country with a rusted iron hand is an oligarchy of aristocrats.  The Lee’s of Virginia, the Rhett’s of South Carolina, the Mason’s of Georgia, the big families of the planter class swap around appointed positions in government and impose poll taxes to keep anyone else from voting.  Their domains are crumbling, their slaves are running off, the peons are starting to rebel, but they still control the government and their younger sons fill the militias.  

Lesson #107

"Good morning, sir! I've brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!"

In another "why on earth haven't they made a movie out of this person's life yet?" entry, we examine the fascinating tale of Robert Smalls.  Born enslaved on a plantation in 1839 Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls's childhood was, as one might expect, a never-ending horror show --the region was still grappling with the aftermath of Denmark Vesey's (planned) slave uprising, and local laws had decidedly amped up the oppression and the cruelty.  At the age of 12 Smalls's owner sent him to Charleston to work as a ship-rigger and sailor.  At the time all earnings went to the owner but Smalls managed to negotiate being able to keep 85% of the earnings by the time he was 18 --his plan ultimately being to buy his wife's and daughter's freedom.  During these years he learned everything there was to learn about seamanship and by the time the Civil War kicked off, Smalls found himself serving as a deckhand about the sidewheel steamer Planter, a supply ship tasked with delivering armaments to various Confederate forts, including the now-infamous Fort Sumter.

On May 13, 1862 at 2:30 a.m., Smalls changed the narrative a little. 

While the Planter was berthed in Charleston and all of her white crew (including its officers) were ashore, Smalls snuck his wife and children aboard her, and, along with twelve other secretly-recruited slaves from the city, commandeered the vessel and sailed her right past 5 other Confederate ships and other heavily-armed shore emplacements and forts --Smalls having mastered the coded whistle signals necessary to bluff his way past.  The Planter then approached the Union blockade and raised the white flag to hail a Union clipper ship, the Onward.  The Planter's entire store of munitions, plans, charts, and codebooks were turned over to U.S. Naval intelligence, and the ship itself became a Union warship.  Smalls quickly gained notoriety in the Union's cause and drew the attention of President Lincoln, which almost certainly influenced his decision to permit Black soldiers to enlist in the Union Army.

There is of course a great deal more to the story --not the least of which includes Smalls's commissioning as an actual U.S. Navy officer and formal instatement as the Planter's actual Captain.  He also piloted the Skipper, the Isaac Smith, and the ironclad Keokuk.  He supported Sherman's March to the Sea and was present for the Union flag-raising ceremony at Fort Sumter in April 1865.  His postwar story is equally compelling --including his purchase of his former owner's plantation house in Beaufort, and the founding of a school for Black children.  He lent support to the Freedmen's Bureau, started and published a Black-owned newspaper, the Beaufort Southern Standard , and then --perhaps most improbably of all-- in 1874 ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, won, and served in Congress a total of five terms (first in South Carolina's 5th District, then after gerrymandering, the 7th District).  His public role did not end in 1884 --he lived long enough into the twentieth century to witness the rise of Jim Crow and fiercely pushed back against Black disenfranchisement, which was being rewritten back into a great many state constitutions, including South Carolina's.  Smalls died of malaria in 1915, at the age of 75. 

A monument to Smalls at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort includes his 1895 statement to the South Carolina legislature: "My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."