The Confederacy knew full well that Port Royal might be a target for a Northern base, but they couldn’t be sure other sites weren’t also in the running and so were somewhat lackadaisical in establishing defenses for Port Royal Sound. For more than a dozen years cries for secession had risen from Beaufort, much of them led by its native son, rabble-rousing, fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, remembered as the “Father of Secession.” Having built their elegant Greek Revival mansions with ballrooms, chandeliers and two-story piazzas, planter families gathered here each summer to escape the heat and ague of their Sea Island plantations, as well as socialize and talk politics.
The town boasted not only a library of three thousand volumes but also some of the most erudite, educated men in the South. In 1861, Beaufort was one of the wealthiest, most cultured cities in America. If Confederate defenses didn’t hold, the town would have to evacuate in a matter of hours. Slave alike heard that an enormous Yankee fleet was massing off Point Royal Sound a mere ten miles away.
In the pews of Saint Helena’s in Beaufort, South Carolina, master and On the 157th anniversary of the Great Beaufort Skedaddle, it’s worth remembering that sometimes doubling down on one’s way of life brings about catastrophe from which there is no recovery. (The decade of Reconstruction was only a partial respite.) Even today, seven of the ten poorest states in the nation are former Confederate states. Instead, half a million Americans died in war, and the entire South, black and white alike, experienced violence, hunger, and massive destruction of property and infrastructure, to be followed by a hundred years of grinding poverty, during which many of the worst abuses of slavery–racism, segregation, confinement of blacks to the lowest economic strata, black disqualification from voting, and white control of the black population through violence–remained intact. If an orderly transition away from slavery, say over twenty years, had been negotiated between the North and the South, with a gradual introduction of Constitutional rights for former slaves, the great wealth of the antebellum South would undoubtedly have diminished, but much would have remained. A small, moneyed elite, who made most of the economic and political decisions for the region, feared loss of wealth. The American Civil War can be viewed through many lenses, but a perspective rarely employed is that of the South’s refusal to make what was essentially an energy transition–from slave labor to nascent fossil fuels.
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