Vital rails: the Charleston & Savannah Railroad and the Civil War in coastal South Carolina

2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (05) ◽  
pp. 46-2874-46-2874
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
John R. Kelso

In this chapter, John Russell Kelso narrates the events that occurred between April and July 1861 as the Civil War broke out. He recalls how his school closed a few weeks earlier than usual following the intense excitement generated by the firing upon Fort Sumpter by the secessionists of South Carolina. He considers his decision to stand by the Union as it prepared to fight the Confederate States to be the most critical step of his life. During a grand meeting called in their town, addressed by Peter Wilkes and other speakers from Springfield, Missouri. Kelso joined with others to form military companies called Home Guards. He was the first man to volunteer into this service. Kelso shares his early experiences as a Union soldier fighting the Confederate rebels.


2021 ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Peter Irons

This chapter is almost entirely in the words of two very different groups of people: the first is four White men, all distinguished in state and federal offices, who defended slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War; the second is composed of thirteen former slaves, in accounts of their lives recorded and transcribed in the 1930s by a New Deal agency, the Federal Writers Project. The four slavery defenders are John Calhoun of South Carolina, a former vice president, who predicted an eventual breakup of the Union over slavery; George Fitzhugh, a lawyer who claimed that Black slaves were “happy” and well-cared-for by their masters; Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who resigned from the Senate in 1861 to become president of the Confederacy; and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who served as Davis’s vice president. Countering the myth of the “happy slave,” its victims recounted the brutality they endured, the breakup of slave families by selling wives from husbands and children from parents, and the “breeding” of “big black bucks” with multiple women to produce more slaves.


2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Valentine A. Nzengung ◽  
Ben Redmond

AbstractThis paper describes the recovery, on-site nondestructive mechanical breaching, and chemical neutralization of munitions recovered from an underwater environment. The munitions were recovered during salvaging of the scuttled confederate states ship (CSS) Georgia, as part of the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP). The CSS Georgia was scuttled on December 20, 1864. The CSS Georgia wreck site is on the Georgia and South Carolina border and covers an approximate area of 350 × 200 feet at a depth of about 36 feet. Because the CSS Georgia shipwreck site would obstruct the SHEP, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) entered into agreements to salvage some artifacts, including the munitions, for conservation. Due to the historical significance of the artifacts and the munitions among the CSS Georgia wreckage, the USACE required that the munitions be neutralized in the safest and least destructive manner possible. The munitions on board the scuttled CSS Georgia consisted of two types of civil war era projectiles, often described as cannon balls. A total of 185 munitions were removed from the CSS Georgia site in 2015. The majority of the recovered projectiles (170) were mechanically breached, and energetics were safely neutralized using MuniRem, an innovative chemical reduction reagent for explosives. After the black powder was completely flushed and neutralized, fuzes were unscrewed, if it could be done safely; otherwise, the explosive ordnance disposal technicians drilled into the fuzes at an angle. The contents of the fuze were neutralized in a solution of MuniRem before reattachment to the projectile. The neutralized black powder solids and wastewater were disposed as nonhazardous wastes. This project constitutes the largest on-site chemical neutralization of recovered confederate and underwater disposed military munitions from the U.S. civil war era.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 824-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott P. Hippensteel
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Anne Sarah Rubin

Sherman’s March, more accurately known as the Georgia and Carolinas Campaigns, cut a swath across three states in 1864–1865. It was one of the most significant campaigns of the war, making Confederate civilians “howl” as farms and plantations were stripped of everything edible and all their valuables. Outbuildings, and occasionally homes, were burned, railroads were destroyed, and enslaved workers were emancipated. Long after the war ended, Sherman’s March continued to shape American’s memories as one of the most symbolically powerful aspects of the Civil War. Sherman’s March began with the better-known March to the Sea, which started in Atlanta on November 15, 1864, and concluded in Savannah on December 22 of the same year. Sherman’s men proceeded through South Carolina and North Carolina in February, March, and April of 1865. The study of this military campaign illuminates the relationships between Sherman’s soldiers and Southern white civilians, especially women, and African Americans. Sherman’s men were often uncomfortable with their role as an army of liberation, and African Americans, in particular, found the March to be a double-edged sword.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Stephen Levey ◽  
Gabriel DeRooy

We reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semi-literate correspondence, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL), rich in non-standard grammatical features. The primary focus is on a comparison of morpho-syntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861 and 1865 by Civil War soldiers originating from Massachusetts and Alabama. Key findings include the elevated rate of was-levelling, particularly in the Alabama letters; the variable effect of the type-of-subject constraint on the selection of non-standard was; and the scarcity of WH-relativizers in restrictive relative clauses. Contextualization of these findings in relation to an ongoing quantitative investigation of grammatical variation in four additional states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina) represented in the CACWL provides further evidence of structured heterogeneity in Civil War correspondence as well as the sensitivity of variable grammatical processes to regional differences. Taken together, our findings demonstrate how judicious use of the CACWL can leverage new insights into nineteenth-century American English.


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