History Behind the Story: Civil War in the Sea Islands

Laura Towne and Friends in 1863

Black Laborers on the Way to Work, 1863

My new book, Union’s Daughter, is set at a time and place unusual during the Civil War. The South Carolina Sea Islands, which came under Union control in November of 1861, saw little military action: there was no drama like the battle of Gettysburg or the siege of Atlanta. In the Sea Islands, a different kind of war was waged. In the words of the historian Willie Lee Rose, it was a “rehearsal for Reconstruction.”

The war in the Sea Islands, which was rarely violent but often intense, was a struggle over the definition of freedom. In the Sea Islands, the war created surprising opponents. It was fought between northerners, abolitionists before the war, passionate about the cause of freedom, and the newly free.

The northerners who came to the Sea Islands to realize their vision of freedom—through education and wage labor—found themselves at odds with the people they wished to help. The former slaves welcomed the chance to “get educate”, in the Sea Island idiom, but they balked at working for anyone else, paid or not. They wanted their own farms on the land they had been cultivating for decades, in the place they thought of as home. Northern entrepreneurs wanted efficient cotton plantations; former slaves wanted “forty acres and a mule.”

The men and women who struggled for freedom on the Sea Islands—sometimes with each other—were zealous, committed, and unusual. They included determined northern white women like teacher Laura Towne and physician Esther Hawks; free black abolitionists like writer Charlotte Forten and minister James Lynch; former slaves like nurse to the black regiment, the 1st South Carolina, Susie Taylor King and river pilot and contraband hero, Robert Smalls; and military leaders like Colonel Thomas Higginson, commander of the 1st South, and Harriet Tubman, who led a mission that liberated 800 slaves in the South Carolina low country. The Sea Islands were a fertile place, and a heady place, to think about freedom in every aspect of life.

Come with me. We’ll get our passports stamped at the New York Custom House, board the steamship at the docks, and we’ll go south.