Showing posts with label South Carolinians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Carolinians. Show all posts

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Captain William Thompson Lusk to Elizabeth Adams Lusk, December 10, 1861

Headquarters 2d Brigade,
Port Royal District, Dec. 10th, 1861.
My dear Mother:

I am still much busied — still find it difficult to cull even a few moments from multifarious duties, even to write my dear mother. I would like much to have a chance to write you a good long letter, yet must wait until more leisure shall fall to my share. We have the last few days been more than ever busy, owing to our formal occupation of Beaufort, where we are now pleasantly living. All sorts of comforts are at our disposal. The house occupied by the General is one belonging to Rev. (I think) Mr. Smith, an extremely elegant one. The portrait of Bishop Eliot looks down benignantly from over the mantel while I write.

I wish the owners were back in their old homes, notwithstanding they have relinquished all their old home luxuries to us. I do not, I think, possess quite enough of the Vandal spirit, for anything like predative warfare. I have spoken of the extreme pressure of duties, and this you will understand when I tell you I often ride thirty miles, visiting posts, arranging pickets, and in the examination of doubtful points, during the day, besides performing many other duties, such as may fall to my share. I must say night generally finds me weary and after evening work is done, disinclined even to write you.

All things seem to thrive with us so far. What we still need is a sufficiently efficient organization to enable us to strike with rapidity. Here we are, nearly five weeks in possession of this point, and as yet we have hardly been able to get the stores ashore, which we originally brought with us. And all this time too we read in the newspapers of the great zeal and activity displayed by Captain who has charge of these things. By this time we ought, considering the great fear that filled the inhabitants on our first landing, to have been able to follow up our first successes by a series of determined blows, placing the entire State at our disposal. Still we are young at war, and cannot hope to learn all these things at once. We have however done something. Immense quantities of cattle, corn, and provisions have been gathered into the commissary stores, Hilton Head has been securely fortified, and some cotton saved, though much of the latter has been burned by the South Carolinians to prevent its falling into our hands. I think Cousin Louisa's favorite, Sam Lord, is in the Army awaiting us on the mainland. At least I heard such to be the case from a negro driver on one of the plantations, who seemed to know him. The Pringles lived somewhere in this neighborhood too, so I am brought almost face to face with old friends.

Believe me,
Very Affec'y.,
W. T. Lusk.

SOURCE: William Chittenden Lusk, Editor, War Letters of William Thompson Lusk, p. 106-7

Major Robert Anderson to Colonel Samuel Cooper, March 9, 1861

fort Sumter, March 9, 1861.
(Received A. G. O., March 12.)
Colonel S. Cooper,
Adjutant-General. United States Army.

Colonel: I have the honor to report that we can see the South Carolinians engaged this morning strengthening and extending considerably what we supposed to have been intended for a mortar battery at Fort Johnson. Small parties are also working at Nos. 9 and 10, and a very heavy force at the bend of the island, this side of No. 1. Whether they are constructing another battery there or strengthening one that is already there I cannot tell. One of my officers reports that he has counted nine 24-pounders which have been landed at Cummings Point within a week. Yesterday he saw several shot or shells which appeared to be about eight inches in diameter. They are certainly busy strengthening the batteries already constructed, and probably adding others. It appears to me that vessels will, even now, from the time they cross the bar, be under fire from the batteries on Morris Island until they get under the walls of this work. I do not speak of the batteries which have been constructed on Sullivan's Island, as I am not certain of their positions. Fort Moultrie will, of course, be a very formidable enemy.

I am, Colonel, very respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
Robert Anderson,
Major First Artillery, Commanding.

colonel S. Cooper, Adjutant-General United States Army.

SOURCES: Samuel Wylie Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-1861, p. 281; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Volume 1 (Serial No. 1), p. 192.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Captain John G. Foster to Brevet Brigadier-General Joseph G. Totten, March 6, 1861

Fort Sumter, S. C,
March 6, 1861.

General: I have the honor to report that during the day, and especially towards night, unusual activity was observed among the South Carolinians around us; several steamer loads of men were landed on Cummings Point. The number was greater than the arrangements for shelter, apparently, for I observe quite a large number grouped about their bivouac fires this morning. Their suffering must have been considerable during the night, for the weather suddenly changed from the warm temperature of the preceding days to a high degree of cold, for this climate, the wind blowing fresh from the north.

I learn that portable hot shot furnaces have been furnished to several, and probably all, of the batteries. The mortar battery on James Island, south of Fort Johnson, is armed, but the number of mortars is not ascertained. The magazine in the flank of this battery is also finished. The mortar battery on Sullivan's Island, west of Fort Moultrie, is also armed. All the batteries on Morris Island are armed. The guns range from 32pounders down, with the exception of the iron bomb-proof, which is (I think, from all reports and observations) armed with 8-inch Columbiads — three of them.

The raft does not meet expectations. It is being covered with railroad strap iron instead of the T rail. This has a crosssection of about three-fourths or one inch by two inches or two and a half inches.

They are now ironing the top portion, the front not being yet commenced. Two 8-inch Columbiads are lying on the wharf ready to be put on board. I do not think this floating battery will prove very formidable.

We have not yet received the inaugural address of President Lincoln, although it is reported from town that it is coercive in its character, and that much excitement prevails.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
J. G. Foster,
Captain Engineers.
General Jos. G. Totten,
Chief Engineer U. S. Army, Washington, D. C.

SOURCE: Samuel Wylie Crawford, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-1861, p. 280-1

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Diary of William Howard Russell: April 30, 1861

At 1:30 P. M. a small party started from Mr. Green's to visit the cemetery of Bonaventure, to which every visitor to Savannah must pay his pilgrimage; difficiles aditus primos habet — a deep sandy road which strains the horses and the carriages; but at last “the shell road is reached — a highway several miles long, consisting of oyster shells — the pride of Savannah, which eats as many oysters as it can to add to the length of this wonderful road. There is no stone in the whole of the vast alluvial ranges of South Carolina and Maritime Georgia, and the only substance available for making a road is the oyster-shell. There is a toll-gate at each end to aid the oyster-shells. Remember they are three times the size of any European crustacean of the sort.

A pleasant drive through the shady hedgerows and bordering trees lead to a dilapidated porter's lodge and gateway, within which rose in a towering mass of green one of the finest pieces of forest architecture possible; nothing to be sure like Burnham Beeches, or some of the forest glades of Windsor, but possessed, nevertheless, of a character quite its own. What we gazed upon was, in fact, the ruin of grand avenues of live-oak, so well-disposed that their peculiar mode of growth afforded an unusual development of the “Gothic idea,” worked out and elaborated by a superabundant fall from the overlacing arms and intertwined branches of the tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a weeping, drooping, plumaceous parasite, which does to the tree what its animal type, the yellow fever — vomitoprieto — does to man — clings to it everlastingly, drying up sap, poisoning blood, killing the principle of life till it dies. The only differ, as they say in Ireland, is, that the tillandsia all the time looks very pretty, and that the process lasts very long. Some there are who praise this tillandsia, hanging like the tresses of a witch's hair over an invisible face, but to me it is a paltry parasite, destroying the grace and beauty of that it preys upon, and letting fall its dull tendrils over the fresh lovely green, as clouds drop over the face of some beautiful landscape. Despite all this, Bonaventure is a scene of remarkable interest; it seems to have been intended for a place of tombs. The Turks would have filled it with turbaned white pillars, and with warm ghosts at night. The French would have decorated it with interlaced hands of stone, with tears of red and black on white ground, with wreaths of immortelles. I am not sure that we would have done much more than have got up a cemetery company, interested Shilliber, hired a beadle, and erected an iron paling. The Savannah people not following any of these fashions, all of which are adopted in Northern cities, have left everything to nature and the gatekeeper, and to the owner of one of the hotels, who has got up a grave-yard in the ground. And there, scattered up and down under the grand old trees, which drop tears of Spanish moss, and weave wreaths of Spanish moss, and shake plumes of Spanish moss over them, are a few monumental stones to certain citizens of Savannah. There is a melancholy air about the place independently of these emblems of our mortality, which might recommend it specially for picnics. There never was before a cemetery where nature seemed to aid the effect intended by man so thoroughly. Every one knows a weeping willow will cry over a wedding party if they sit under it, as well as over a grave. But here the Spanish moss looks like weepers wreathed by some fantastic hand out of the crape of dreamland. Lucian's Ghostlander, the son of Skeleton of the Tribe of the Juiceless, could tell us something of such weird trappings. They are known indeed as the best bunting for yellow fever to fight under. Wherever their flickering horsehair tresses wave in the breeze, taper end downwards, Squire Black Jack is bearing lance and sword. One great green oak says to the other, “This fellow is killing me. Take his deadly robes off my limbs!” “Alas! see how he is ruining me! I have, no life to help you.” It is, indeed, a strange and very ghastly place. Here are so many querci virentes, old enough to be strong, and big, and great, sapful, lusty, wide-armed, green-honored — all dying out slowly beneath tillandsia, as if they were so many monarchies perishing of decay — or so many youthful republics dying of buncombe brag, richness of blood, and other diseases fatal to overgrown bodies politic.

The void left in the midst of all these designed walks and stately avenues, by the absence of any suitable centre, increases the seclusion and solitude. A house ought to be there somewhere you feel — in fact there was once the mansion of the Tatnalls, a good old English family, whose ancestors came from the old country, ere the rights of man were talked of, and lived among the Oglethorpes, and such men of the pigtail school, who would have been greatly astonished at finding themselves in company with Benjamin Franklin or his kind. I don't know anything of old Tatnall. Indeed who does? But he had a fine idea of planting trees, which he never got in America, where he would have received scant praise for anything but his power to plant cotton or sugar-cane just now. In his knee breeches, and top boots, I can fancy the old gentleman reproducing some home scene, and boasting to himself, “I will make it as fine as Lord Nihilo's park.” Could he see it now? — A decaying army of the dead. The mansion was burned down during a Christmas merrymaking, and was never built again, and the young trees have grown up despite the Spanish moss, and now they stand, as it were in cathedral aisles, around the ruins of the departed house, shading the ground, and enshrining its memories in an antiquity which seems of the remotest, although it is not as ancient as that of the youngest oak in the Squire's park at home.

I have before oftentimes in my short voyages here, wondered greatly at the reverence bestowed on a tree. In fact, it is because a tree of any decent growth is sure to be older than anything else around it; and although young America revels in her future, she is becoming old enough to think about her past.

In the evening Mr. Green gave a dinner to some very agreeable people, Mr. Ward, the Chinese Minister — (who tried, by the by, to make it appear that his wooden box was the Pekin State carriage for distinguished foreigners) — Mr. Locke, the clever and intelligent editor of the principal journal in Savannah, Brigadier Lawton, one of the Judges, a Britisher, owner of the once renowned America which, under the name of Camilla, was now lying in the river (not perhaps without reference to a little speculation in running the blockade, hourly expected), Mr. Ward and Commodore Tatnall, so well known to us in England for his gallant conduct in the Peiho affair, when he offered and gave our vessels aid, though a neutral, and uttered the exclamation in doing so, — in his despatch at all events, — “that blood was thicker than water.” Of our party was also Mr. Hodgson, well known to most of our Mediterranean travellers some years back, when he was United States Consul in the East. He amuses his leisure still by inditing and reading monographs on the languages of divers barbarous tribes in Numidia and Mauritania.

The Georgians are not quite so vehement as the South Carolinians in their hate of the Northerners; but they are scarcely less determined to fight President Lincoln and all his men. And that is the test of this rebellion's strength. I did not hear any profession of a desire to become subject to England, or to borrow a prince of us; but I have nowhere seen stronger determination to resist any reunion with the New England States. “They can't conquer us, sir?” “If they try it, we'll whip them.”

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 151-4