South Carolina in 1865

by Karen Stokes

Overview

The year 1865 brought an end to the war in America, but it also ended a civilization that had existed for nearly two centuries in South Carolina. Plantations, churches, farms, factories and whole villages and towns were pillaged and burned by General William T. Sherman's army, and a once thriving and wealthy state was reduced to poverty. While Columbia burned, besieging Union troops swept in and occupied the undefended city of Charleston, which Sherman called "a mere desolated wreck," and then launched raids into the surrounding countryside, including the rich plantation lands of Berkeley County. The surviving records of this period are numerous and revealing, and author Karen Stokes presents many of the eyewitness accounts and memoirs of those who lived through it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439674239
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	01/03/2022
Series:	Civil War Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Karen Stokes has been an archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston for more than twenty-five years. Her special area of interest is the Confederate period, and she has authored and edited numerous books and articles on the subject, including three History Press publications, South Carolina Civilians in Sherman's Path (2012), The Immortal 600: Surviving Civil War Charleston and Savannah (2013) and Confederate South Carolina: True Stories of Civilians, Soldiers and the War (2015). Her most recent scholarly books, published by Mercer University Press, are An Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861-1865 (2019), and Incidents in the Life of Cecilia Lawton: A Memoir of Plantation Life, War, and Reconstruction in Georgia and South Carolina (2021).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction 7

I Letters North and South

Josephine LeConte's Harrowing Tale 10

Private Grundy's Letter 18

The Middleton Ladies in Columbia 20

Alfred Huger's Letter 31

II The Burning Of Columbia

Lieutenant Platter's Diary 38

William B. Yates's Nightmare 40

Ilium in Flames 42

Mrs. Lee's Fiery Ordeal 80

Edwin J. Scott's Columbia Diary 91

III 1865 in the Lowcountry

Contemplating Desolation: Occupied Charleston 104

The War in Berkeley County: Frederick A. Porcher's Account 119

Epilogue 131

Notes 135

Bibliography 141

About the Author 144