Edisto Island, 1861 to 2006: Ruin, Recovery and Rebirth

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2008 by Charles Spencer

All rights reserved

Front cover image: Painting by Cecil B. Wescott, courtesy of William H. Lawson.

First published 2008

Second printing 2008

Third printing 2011

Fourth printing 2011

Fifth printing 2012

e-book edition 2013

Manufactured in the United States

ISBN 978.1.62584.457.6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, Charles (Charles Sackett), 1938-

Edisto Island, 1861 to 2006 : ruin, recovery and rebirth / Charles Spencer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-59629-185-0 (alk. paper)

1. Edisto Island (S.C.)--History. 2. Edisto Island (S.C.)--History--Pictorial works. 3. Natural history--South Carolina--Edisto Island. 4. Plantation life--South Carolina--Edisto Island--History. 5. Edisto Island (S.C.)--Social life and customs. 6. Edisto Island (S.C.)--Race relations. I. Title.

F277.B3S67 2007

975.7’91--dc22

2007044281

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

To the memory of

Mary Murray Spencer

who started me early on local history.

And to

Sheila Lane Beardsley

who believed I could write it.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. The Civil War on Edisto

Secession At Last.

The Drums of Not-So-Distant War.

The Calhoun Artillery and the Rebel Troop.

The Blockading Fleet Arrives.

Evacuate the Islands!

The Black Republic of Edisto Island.

The Confederate Expedition of January 1862.

The Union Army Occupies Edisto.

The Battle of Little Edisto.

Results of the Battle of Little Edisto.

Garrison Duty on Edisto Island.

Federalized Plantations on Edisto in 1862.

The Empty Island, 1862–1865.

The Capture of the Nine Edisto Scouts in 1863.

Chapter 2. Edistonians in the Civil War

The Rebel Troop.

Edisto Men in Other Confederate Units.

General Micah Jenkins and Captain Cato Seabrook.

Two Confederate Surgeons from Edisto Island.

General Saxton’s U.S. Colored Troops.

Edisto Men in the Union Army.

Chapter 3. Edisto’s Planters Return Home

General Saxton’s Dilemma.

The Edisto Planters Petition President Johnson.

A Change of Policy in Washington.

Restoration of Possession: The Edisto Plantations and Churches.

Chapter 4. Edisto’s Freedmen: The First Years

Edisto’s Freed People Return from Exile.

The Freedmen’s Bureau on Edisto.

The Freedmen’s Land Certificates.

General Howard’s Visit to Edisto Island.

Edisto’s New Economic Policy.

The 1866 Labor Contracts.

1866 Outcomes.

The End of the Freedmen’s Land Titles.

The 1867 Labor Contracts.

Economic Conditions on Edisto in 1867 and 1868.

Law and Order on Edisto Island.

The First Freedmen’s Schools on Edisto.

Permanent Freedmen’s Schools.

Chapter 5. Reconstruction and Beyond on Edisto

Edisto’s Economy from 1865 to 1920.

Race Relations During Reconstruction.

Townsend Mikell: The Indispensable Man.

New Leadership in Edisto’s African American Community.

Island Transportation.

Bailey’s Store and the Old Post Office.

Five Hurricanes and an Earthquake.

Edisto’s White Churches Retrench and Survive.

Edisto’s African American Churches Grow and Multiply.

Edisto Evolves a Segregated but Comprehensive School System.

Edisto in State Politics after the Civil War.

Chapter 6. After Cotton: Reinventing Edisto

The Dawhoo Bridge and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Sea-island Cotton: The King Is Dead.

What Comes After Cotton?

Whatever Happened to the Old Places?

The Birth (and Rebirth) of Edisto Beach.

Edisto Beach in the Lybrand Era.

Edisto Beach Becomes a Year-Round Community.

Oysters and Shrimp: Edisto Acquires a Seafood Industry.

Perry’s Store.

Parker Connor, Erline Jenkins, Marian Murray and the Edisto School.

Edisto as a Haven for Artists and Writers.

McKinley Washington Jr.

Postscript

Population Density.

Open Land.

Water Quality.

Governance.

Historic Preservation.

A Sense of Community.

Notes

Selected Bibliography

PREFACE

One book or another about Edisto Island has been writing itself in the back of my mind for at least thirty years, while I labored in Washington and traveled on five continents on the taxpayers’ business. For me, Edisto is that place that each of us holds as an anchor deep inside, the place one’s thoughts return to at odd moments in Cairo, Quito or Anaheim, as if to reassure oneself that this, too, shall pass, that you’ll get through it somehow, and some things will always be there, will never change. (Would it were so.)

The opportunity and the need for this book came together in a conversation with Sheila Beardsley, founding curator of the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society (EIHPS), on Edisto Beach in 2000. I recognized my opportunity because my family’s nest was empty, as a retiree my time was my own and I no longer needed to work for a living. Sheila talked about the serious need for a full-length, documented history of the island and the beach. For some time she had been on the lookout for a qualified researcher, perhaps a graduate student, who would write the book and get a thesis out of it. Would I help her find such a person?

Well, did she think I could do it? Of course, she thought I could do it. And the rest is (you guessed it) history.

The intellectual and financial sponsorship of this project by EIHPS were critical. The society recruited volunteer researchers, opened private archives and enlisted the help of scholars and librarians who expedited the work. Large sums of the society’s money, contributed by enthusiastic members and friends, reimbursed me for out-of-pocket research expenses I never could have afforded otherwise. I am very grateful for this help, and I deeply regret the frustration I caused successive presidents and staff of EIHPS as the project’s completion stretched on from three years, to four, to five and now to six. I can only plead good intentions and inexperience, never before having undertaken a book-length project for publication. I hope the result will serve the purposes that Sheila first had in mind.

From the outset I made clear that any history I wrote would deal explicitly and frankly with slavery and racism; this was not going to be just about the plantation owners. I intended to relate, as factually as I could, the story of all communities whose history is inextricably intertwined on our beloved island. EIHPS, to its credit, said it would have it no other way. I have worked hard to do that. I hope that both white and African American Edistonians, their descendants and their friends and relatives in the Edisto diaspora will find here a deeper understanding of their shared history, a deeper appreciation of the unique contributions of each community to the fragile fabric we call Edisto. I am more convinced than ever that each community has produced admirable legacies, remarkable leaders, courageous heroes and creative men and women who deserve our respect. As one reminder of the huge disparity between the power and wealth of the white and black races on Edisto during much of its history, the term Golden Age always appears in quotation marks in this book.

This book, as it happens, turned out to be two books. My manuscript (essentially finished in January 2005) was far longer than any commercial or academic publisher would normally issue for what is, after all, a local history. Would I be willing to cut it down almost by half? I would not. I was tired of working on it by then, and the full manuscript satisfied my obligation to EIHPS. I was ready to give up on publication and get my life back. Then The History Press generously offered to publish it in two volumes, and here it is. I am very grateful to them for that decision. Without The History Press, this book very likely would not have found an audience larger than those who already were acquainted with Edisto Island and familiar with EIHPS.

Even with two volumes, a large chunk of my research did not fit. I transcribed several long sets of documents about Edisto Island and her people, African American and white, that I thought would be useful to readers who wanted to pursue further research on a specific family, place or event. I carefully edited and reformatted several other document sets, already transcribed by others, to maximize their accuracy and accessibility and to supply context and identifications. All these original documents, some 150 pages in all, I hoped to append to these books. But we had to leave them out to hold the books to a commercially viable length. Instead, EIHPS has arranged to issue those supplemental papers as a separate volume called Documents on Edisto Island History. It will be available in printed or digital format. For further information, visit the EIHPS website, www.edistomuseum.com, or write to them at 8123 Chisolm Plantation Road, Edisto Island, SC 29438.

This book disappoints me in one major respect. The African American community on Edisto Island does not make a significant enough appearance in my book, especially in the twentieth-century chapters. I believe I have discovered and used enough published and archival material on Edisto’s African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to begin to make their experience come alive for those who do not share their history and to try to balance the treatment of the white community up to about 1900. To continue to build that balance through the twentieth century would have required extensive interviews with African American family historians and community leaders living today. That did not happen. I think I understand why. Still, it is a serious shortcoming of this book, which is most evident in volume two. The African American families and their lives on Edisto Island, especially in the twentieth century, is a story yet to be told systematically and in depth. I sincerely hope that someone will take up the task soon. We all need to hear it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of several persons who know a lot and care a lot about Edisto’s history, and whose generous help is reflected in this final product:

JACK BOINEAU made available his amazing ten-year collection of Edisto Island maps and plantation plats, and helped me for days at a time to piece together the mosaic of early land history.

DAVID LYBRAND made available to me his now-completed master map of Edisto plantations in the 1850s (Chapter 3), and was always available to consult when I was stuck.

NORMA ARMSTRONG repeatedly located needed materials in Charleston libraries, archives and land records when I was five hundred miles away in Virginia and discovered holes in my data set.

RICHARD PORCHER generously sent me whole chapters of The Story of Sea Island Cotton while it was still in manuscript, to save me the effort of parallel research on its history and production.

STEPHANIE SPENCER edited my final manuscript of both volumes, and formatted them to the publisher’s specifications, while working a full-time job. Greater love hath no daughter.

BETTY MURRAY BRYAN gave me free use of a vacation cottage on Edisto Island, at any time and for any length of time, for four years, as a base of operations for in-state research. What can I say?

Several published authors gave me moral support and reassurance when I most needed it. First and foremost was SHEILA BEARDSLEY, as noted above. Another was NICK LINDSAY. And another was HARVEY TEAL. If they think you can do it, who are you to doubt yourself?

The research for this book has been a true community effort. Dozens of persons responded to my appeals and gave me copies of privately held documents, or steered me to valuable sources of which I was unaware, or both. They include:

BILL ALBERGOTTI

PETER ANDREWS

ARTHUR BAILEY

BILLY AND PINCKNEY BAILEY

BOB BAYNARD

JACK BOINEAU

GARY BRIGHTWELL

PATRICK AND RHODA BUTLER

FRAN CARDWELL

AMY CONNOR

BILL COOPER

JOHN CULBERTSON

JANE DARBY

SARAH FICK

MARY FLOYD

LEWIS FRAMPTON

ELAINE FREEMAN

P.C. GRIMBALL

WARING HILLS

YATES HAZLEHURST

FRANCES HORSLEY

GORDON HOUSTON

ALICE AND HARRY HUTSON

FLORENCE KIZER

CHUCK KLOTZBERGER

BILL LAWSON

NICK AND DUBOSE LINDSAY

DAVID LYBRAND

CLARA MACKENZIE

ROBERT MACKINTOSH

PAT MARTIN

JANE MCCOLLUM

LINDA MCLAIN

TERRY MEGGETT

MARION MITCHELL

CHICK MORRISON

MARION NORWOOD

OLAF OTTO

NANCY PEEPLES

TED POCKMAN

JANN POSTON

GARY RAKE

PAM SANTO

BEN SKARDON

BUD SKIDMORE

DANIEL SPENCER

STEPHANIE SPENCER

DOTTIE THOMAS

LISH THOMPSON

MARY TOWNSEND

REGGIE WASHINGTON

BUDGE WEIDMAN

CURTIS WORTHINGTON

I have no doubt that errors have crept in despite all the help I received. The errors are all mine.

My MURRAY cousins on Edisto Island—GERRY and OKIE, JIM and LINDA—took me into their homes and their families whenever I was around, no questions asked. There is no better way to relax from the grind than to hang out with family—and eat delicious seafood. Thanks, you all.

Finally, LUCY NORMAN SPENCER endured seven years of marriage to a novice author who bit off more than he imagined. She stood by me longer than I deserved, and I am very grateful for her support.

CHAPTER 1.

THE CIVIL WAR ON EDISTO

The war came late on Edisto Island, as the chill, wet winds in November 1861 began to blow across the marshes. By then the cotton crop—a good year for cotton, ironically—was mostly picked and partly ginned, baled and waiting in the barns for shipment to Charleston by steamer. The planters were pushing their slaves hard. They wanted that money in the bank, and they knew time was not on their side. The war had bypassed them for seven months, but they must have realized it could not do so much longer. Even so, when the war came home, the way it came was a shock.

SECESSION AT LAST

The Edisto delegate, Colonel Joseph E. Jenkins, a white-bearded old curmudgeon, had stood up in the Secession Convention in Charleston and said, If South Carolina won’t secede, Edisto Island will.¹ This was not just rhetoric; it was a threat. Secession sentiment was not unanimous among planters on Edisto, but it was overwhelming, and most thought the state government had waited far too long already.

One famous holdout was former Governor William Aiken, the rice planter on Jehossee, owner of some seven hundred African slaves and wealthy beyond most people’s comprehension.² People like him had no love for the Yankees but doubted the South could win a war, and he was willing to test Mr. Lincoln’s implied promise: if the secessionists would give him time to work something out, he would not touch slavery in the Southern states.

South Carolina’s politicians, in the end, needed no prodding from Joseph Jenkins. On December 20, 1860, they voted overwhelmingly to secede, followed shortly by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.³ Despite secession and theoretical independence from the United States, life on Edisto proceeded for eleven months with only surface changes.

THE DRUMS OF NOT-SO-DISTANT WAR

One thing led to another in slow motion after secession. Charleston eventually proved to be not only a hotbed of fire-eaters leading the way to secession, but also the tinderbox needed to start the conflagration.

U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson commanded the small Federal garrison at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. Feeling beleaguered and vulnerable there, he moved his men under cover of darkness in late December 1860 out to Fort Sumter, an isolated island in the harbor. The South Carolinians promptly stopped his local supply boats. By early April, the Sumter garrison was very low on food but Major Anderson still refused to come out. Confederate General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, a Louisianan commanding in Charleston, finally gave the Federals an ultimatum: surrender Sumter, or he would force them out with artillery fire. They wouldn’t, and he did.

Most Edisto planters and their families cheered when Citadel cadets and other batteries fired on Fort Sumter and when, after a brave but brief resistance, the Federal garrison surrendered on April 13, 1861.⁴ Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina seceded after Fort Sumter.

On Edisto Island that summer, farming proceeded as usual. Owners and overseers rode horseback from field to field, day after day, checking on progress and urging greater activity. Corn, potatoes, yams, rice and other provision crops were harvested as usual. In August, the cotton bolls began to split open and whole fields began to show white.

THE CALHOUN ARTILLERY AND THE REBEL TROOP

War preparation had not remained entirely static on Edisto, of course. One local unit had been in existence ten years already, and only needed fleshing out with some more men, some new equipment and some training to be ready to defend what they considered sacred soil. William Meggett Murray of Jack Daw Hall, a successful Edisto planter and Presbyterian elder now in his fifties, had founded the Calhoun Artillery in 1851 and named it for his political hero, John C. Calhoun.⁵ The unit had a couple of brass six-pounders⁶ and knew how to fire them.

Governor Francis W. Pickens activated the Calhoun Artillery into state service in January 1861. Captain Murray was promoted to major. With slaves doing the actual work, the artillerymen dug emplacements for their artillery pieces in log and sand structures on Botany Bay Island, determined to fire on any Yankee ship that dared show itself within range of their guns. General Beauregard himself came down once from Charleston and inspected their works, but he remained mostly silent.⁷ Some time that fall the Confederate army expanded and improved the fort on Botany Bay Island and built three others nearby: at Bay Point on Edisto Beach, on Otter Island in St. Helena Sound and on Fenwick Island at the mouth of the Ashepoo River. Union forces occupied all four forts later, but none of them ever saw significant military action.⁸

Figure 1. Two sand forts on Edisto beaches, abandoned by Confederates in 1861. Each sketch faces seaward from inside the fort. M means powder magazine. U.S. Coast Survey, Plans and Views of Rebel Defences, 1862, National Archives, RG 23.

In the fall of 1861, most of the Edisto young men resigned from the Calhoun Artillery to join the Rebel Troop, a new unit of mounted rifles just being formed that they hoped would see some real action. (Other men, including Murray’s younger son, Whitmarsh, joined mainstream South Carolina regiments that soon would go to Virginia, where the real war was already underway.) The mounted rifles were recruited by the handsome and energetic John Jenkins of Old Hill Plantation. At thirty-six, he was the oldest brother of Micah Jenkins, already the colonel of a South Carolina regiment campaigning in Virginia (Chapter 2).⁹ John Jenkins was also a son-in-law of Major Murray, having married Murray’s daughter Marcelline. The Rebel Troop camped and drilled both on Edisto and on the mainland. As winter approached, General Beauregard relied on them heavily as scouts, couriers and mobile troubleshooters in the vicinity of Edisto Island. Esprit must have been high.¹⁰ Their names and experiences are related in Chapter 2.

THE BLOCKADING FLEET ARRIVES

President Lincoln’s strategists worked all summer and fall of 1861 on a plan to blockade the entire Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the Confederacy. By fall, the U.S. Navy had partially bottled up major ports like Charleston and Savannah. The missing piece of the Anaconda Plan was a deep-water port in the Southeast from which the U.S. Navy could operate unimpeded to resupply, repair and man the blockading squadrons. The strategy board chose Port Royal Sound, just twenty-five miles below Edisto Island, for this new naval base, but kept the target a secret to keep the Confederates guessing until the last minute. Seventy-four warships and troop transports under U.S. Captain (later Admiral) Samuel F. DuPont sailed from Norfolk in October and blasted through the Confederate defenses at Port Royal on November 7. From the Confederate viewpoint, the fox was now inside the chicken coop.¹¹

General Robert E. Lee had come down from Richmond during the fall to assess and strengthen Confederate defenses on the Carolina-Georgia coast, and he was still there on November 7. He had concluded it was impossible to defend the sea islands, and had drawn a line that he believed he could hold farther inland along the shore of solid high land. That decision also had been kept quiet, as debate continued inside the Confederate command.

Not everyone agreed with General Lee that the sea islands were indefensible. One dissenter was Colonel Ambrosio Jose Gonzales, a dashing Cuban exile, son-in-law of a prominent Lowcountry planter and now Governor Pickens’s inspector of coast defenses.¹² On September 21, 1861, Gonzales wrote a long letter to President Jefferson Davis in which, using Edisto as an example, he strongly advocated a vigorous defense of the sea islands. But little came of Gonzales’s proposals.¹³

Few if any Edistonians guessed what was coming until it happened. When Port Royal fell to the Federal fleet on November 7, General Beauregard’s command in Charleston quickly implemented Lee’s defensive plan.¹⁴ The war had finally arrived on Edisto Island.

EVACUATE THE ISLANDS!

The evacuation order was dated November 9, 1861. A Colonel Drummond delivered it to the white citizens of Edisto. It said the loyal people of the sea islands not only must leave, and leave quickly, but they must also take their slaves with them and they must destroy all cotton that had not been shipped, all crops still in the fields and all livestock they could not get off the island. In brief, they must leave nothing behind of value to the enemy, for the enemy would surely take it and use it against them.¹⁵

Figure 2. Colonel Gonzales’s sketch of Edisto Island. Lettering on beach says ten miles of hard beach and ten miles of sand hills. Note absence of beach inlets and marsh. War of the Rebellion, ser. I, vol. 6.

The Edisto planters and their families were stunned, but they complied. Their evacuation was orderly and quick, but it must have taken place amid a frightening atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and confusion.

Marie Adelaide Whaley had grown up at Old House Plantation on Edisto and was twelve years old in 1861. Her father was Edward C. Whaley, cotton planter and state senator. Her mother was in poor health, and Marie was the oldest of five sisters. This is what she remembered of the evacuation some sixty years later:¹⁶

Several steamers were sent up for us, and with only a couple of hours notice. It was in November, the fields were white with cotton, and filled with pickers, the sheets were left in the field partly filled, they had been picking some hours. The negroes picked up a few clothes and were sent down to the boats, leaving all their little possessions, pigs, chickens, ducks…We left the carpets down, my mother’s picture, a handsome painting, on the wall, just sent by the painter Flagg for which two hundred dollars had been paid. Table silver and clothes were all we could carry. Later some scouts went over and carpets, silver and some pictures were taken to Adams Run and identified by the owners, but my Mother’s Portrait was never seen again.