By Tom Rubillo

The American Civil War ended in Georgetown, South Carolina on February 24, 1865. That was the day town officials surrendered control of local government to the United States Navy. In response to continued resistance by Williamsburg County’s determined home guard, a detachment of Marines came ashore to take control. Whites found the presence of armed Federal troops both alarming and reassuring.

Of immediate concern to Georgetown’s white population was the reaction former slaves might have to emancipation. Some 90 percent of the county’s population had been held in servile captivity for their entire lives. Fear of retaliation hung heavy in the air among the old ruling minority, all amplified by then held beliefs about the savage nature of their former captives.

Martial law was declared on February 28. Georgetown’s slaves were ordered to be freed and provided with a severance package of 60 days of subsistence rations from plantation warehouses. Nothing was certain after that.

In the weeks that followed, an occupying army of several thousand troops of the United States Army arrived in town. Most were encamped at the fortifications slaves had constructed for harbor defense, first during the Revolutionary, and then the Civil wars. Included among those troops were members of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Volunteers, all celebrated combat veterans. The arrival of armed black soldiers added to white anxieties.

General William T. Sherman had begun his march across South Carolina in mid-January, cutting a wide path of destruction across the midlands. Having started the war by firing shots at the United States Army base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina was to be the object of especially vengeful destruction by Sherman’s hardened veterans as they cut a wide path from Savannah to Columbia, Camden and then into North Carolina near the war’s end.

Early in Sherman’s South Carolina campaign, he dispatched patrols to each flank of his march in search of enemy troops and supplies. The patrol from the flank to his right reported back that railroad cars full of munitions and other goods were parked along the tracks of the Manchester and Wilmington Railroad.

On receiving this news, Sherman ordered the destruction of those military supplies and the rail lines on which they were being carried. The goods were intended to resupply Confederate General Joe Johnston’s surviving troops in North Carolina. Sherman assigned units then stationed in Georgetown to march from Georgetown to Camden to complete this task. What followed became known as “Potter’s Raid” after its commander, Brigadier General Edward E. Potter. For half-baked literary purposes, it can also be called “Potter’s March from the Sea.”

The march was to last 15 days. Sherman ordered that Potter’s men carry eight days of supplies with them and that they “forage” for the rest. He also instructed that all “contraband” [meaning enslaved people] they encountered along the way were to be set free. Among those assigned this mission was the 54th Massachusetts Colored Volunteers, a unit that had distinguished itself in combat during the war.

Beginning their march Georgetown, Potter and his 3,000 men headed west on the old Gapway Road out of town. What followed was described by Nannie Beaty in Recollections and Reminiscences, a book of the same name published by the Daughters of the Confederacy some years ago (and available at the County Library’s main branch on Cleland Street).

Ben Smith owned a farm outside of town. There, Smith’s sister Donie (who lived there) heard has been described as “a confused noise of geese and chickens squawking, turkeys yelping, the din of many voices and the tramping of hundreds of feet.” She ran to the window and there “saw a sight which struck terror to her heart.”

“Coming down the road was a motley array of negroes of all sizes and ages. About five hundred ignorant negroes; inflamed with ideas of their power, feeling that they could rob, pillage and burn with no fear of punishment now that the Northern army was victorious.

“This was known as Potter’s Raid. They had visited other plantations and taken whatever they wanted. The chickens, turkeys and geese had been taken on their progress through the county and carried along in wagons, also taken from their former masters.

“They came up to a plantation where there were only defenseless women and children, as at Ben Smith’s; took everything in the house or on the place that they wanted, went in the stables, got the horses or mules, hitched them to wagons or carts and, loading in all they had gathered, drove on with it to the next plantation, where they could commit any dreadful crime or burn the house and go unmolested”,

Another portion of Ms. Beaty’s recollection elsewhere adds:

“Well might Mrs. Smith and her young sister-in-law turn pale and tremble at the approach of such a hideous mob of blacks, drunk with their own power. They stood now at the window and watched them as they came on. A great crow of black negroes dressed in all manner of clothes, some walking, some riding stolen horses and mules. Wagons and carts loaded with squawking poultry, pigs squealing and cattle lowing; and adding to the din, the voices of those who drove the wagons of plunder and others of the five hundred who yelled and shouted to the hearts’ content.”

The Smith’s house was set back from the road. There was a grove of oak tress in front. The raiders came through the grove. Their leaders — a small black man “with a crafty, evil face” named Richard Grant, and his companion, a very tall, slim, jet black man called Sancho — came riding through the gate on two white horses. The ladies thought they recognized the mounts as being from the McDonald farm (today near McDonald Elementary School?) a short distance away.

“The weather was warm and the front door stood open. The two women in the house watched their approach with beating hearts …” Richard approached them “with scowling face and evil eyes” and demanded all the firearms in the house be turned over. Once those were surrendered, Sancho asked “Where is the ammunition? Bring it all. We mean to have it.” That too was given over.

With the women so disarmed, the crowd of invaders sacked the house, stripping it of blankets, linens and just about everything else. Coming across locked storage trunks, they demanded the keys.

Donie, her sister-in-law Sallie (Ben’s Wife), as well as Sallie and Ben’s baby son John were left personally unmolested. Ben returned later in the day to start to put his life back together. He had left before the looters came that morning to “see about some cows.” As far as has been determined, he was just a farmer and owned no slaves.

Donie married John Bourne when he returned home from the war. Bourne was Sallie Smith’s brother. During all the goings on during the looting of the farm, Donie had saved her lover’s gold watch by hiding it near her heart as the storage trunks were looted.

There were skirmishes with the Williamsburg County home guard as Potter’s men and the ever growing entourage of “contraband” made their way across Georgetown and Williamsburg counties.2 The home guard burned ferries at Brown’s Ferry, Potato(e) Bed Ferry (where gunfire was exchanged and three were wounded) and bridges into Kingstree (with injuries and casualties on both sides). Home guardsmen manned the same earthen redoubt at the South Bridge into Kingstree as had been used by their forefathers in repelling the British in an unsuccessful effort to capture the town.

During Potter’s march, the objective of the Williamsburg County home guard was to keep the looting invaders on the southern side of the winding Black River. Doing that would save life and property on the northern side of the waterway. Half a loaf … The home guard succeeded. Once they did, they followed Potter’s men inland, moving like a guerilla force harassing, delaying, and maintaining military pressure from the northern flank.

Potter’s men returned from their mission on April 29, 1865. During their march, numerous trains filled with all sorts of military necessities were found and destroyed. Tons of cotton were burned. Homes were ransacked. Civilian lives were threatened and several taken.

It was General William T. Sherman who said “war is hell.” Potter and his men were acting on Sherman’s orders. Those orders, as written, were a prescription for lawlessness and chaos, restricting, as they did, soldiers to half rations and ordering they forage for the rest. That, and making no provision for the “contraband” he ordered be freed. No food. No place to go.

More than 10,000 slaves were “freed” by Potter’s men and tagged along with their liberators. The same had happened when Sherman stripped Georgia on his way from Atlanta to Savannah and the sea during that campaign during the months immediately preceding. Understanding, as he did, that there would be growing numbers of people to feed, his “halfrations” order made the crimes committed at Ben Smith’s farm (and many, many others along Potter’s path inland) inevitable. The document would be strong evidence in a modem day trial for war crimes and other violations of human rights.

Among Potter’s men was Lt. Edward L. Stevens. During the march, he became the commanding officer of Company A, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Colored Troops. He kept a diary along the way. One evening, while sitting by a camp fire, he wrote

“I saw a great sight at dinner — while we were halting and the contrabands went by. I would judge 700 or 800 of them of all ages and both sexes. Little boys and girls of such tender ages, as at home would not be trusted outside the yards, yet these small children keep up with us marching 20 miles a day. Almost all the little children carrying a tub or something on their heads. The women are the greatest sights, some of them very pert pretty damsels, of all colors. Some attractive old women just alive. Some young women are like brutes almost with bosoms as large as a cow bag hanging down. Most of them have a child in arms, a child at the back and a child about to appear. Such a sight for an artist it is to see these poor people just liberated, going on happy, under such burdens as they bear, keeping up with veteran soldiers in the long wearisome marching. It is sad and yet encouraging to see the hope in their countenances and their perfect trust in us. What is to become of the race of uneducated, hopeful anxious people? What change has the war bro’t about!”

Stevens would not get to see what the future held. He was killed a few days later leading a charge against entrenched Confederates at Boykin’s Mill, S.C. He was shot by a 15-year-old member of the Boykin family and new recruit of the area’s home guard. Stevens was the last officer of the United States Army to die in the South Carolina campaign. According to extensive military records and personal accounts of Stevens, Company A of 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Colored Troops behaved honorably throughout the mission. The same cannot be said of the rest of Potter’s men, the large majority of whom were white.

During the next few years, a number of Georgetown plantations were burned. They included (but were not limited to) the house, mill and barn at Carmel Hill; the house and outbuildings at Hagley; the tower of the All Saints Parish Chapel; the mill and barns at Brook Green; the house at Wachesaw; the house at True Blue; the Belle River house on the Pee Dee; and the pounding mill and barns at Waymouth Plantation. This listing can be found in an old newspaper clipping among materials preserved by Georgetown’s first (and best by very far) mayor, William Morgan and maintained in the local history archives of the Georgetown Library’s main branch on Cleland Street.

As these events unfolded, increasing numbers of white families, along with their mulatto offspring and other favored house servants, fled to town for mutual aid and protection. The resentment of the people who had toiled in the fields was deep and dark. For now, the angry, resentful former chattel continued to occupy the surrounding countryside. Eight or nine to one. Long odds on one side. Short ones on the other. Very tense times.

After the 60 days of rations distributed locally on Georgetown’s Emancipation Day (February 28) ran out, things became a little more desperate for those without a home, money or means. In her recorded recollections, 99-year-old Ellen Godfrey of Georgetown said “When the freedom come, I was twenty-three — over the twenty-five.” Asked about the times, she exclaimed “Great God, have-a-mercy! McGill people have to steal for something to eat.”

It was a genuine humanitarian crisis. Fortunately for Georgetown (if fortune can be said to come from such a thing), the 10,000 people emancipated during Potter’s mission did not return to Georgetown with Potter’s men. Instead, these recently jubilant but increasingly confused and desperate souls of all ages and sizes were shipped to Charleston on rafts moored by the U.S. Navy along the Santee River. Many died there of hunger, disease and/or the combined effects of each in the months that followed.

At Virginia’s Constitutional Convention in July, 1773, George Mason had warned that slavery was a “…slow poison, which is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentleman here is born a petty tyrant. Practices in arts of despotism and cruelty, we become callous to the dictates of humanity, and all the finer feelings of the soul. Taught to regard a part of our own species in the most abject and contemptible degree below us, we lose that idea of the dignity of man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.” Few paid attention at the time. Instead, the lure of gold was a more powerful motive than the Golden Rule to many.

On June 17, 1869, the Georgetown Times offered the following editorial advice to white planters:

“John Chinaman … will steal; so will the negro. He will lie; so will the negro. But work, indefatigable, persistent labor, seems to be an inherent characteristic of the Chinaman. With the negro, it is, for the most part, compulsory.

“The labor is the cheapest in the world. They are capable of adapting themselves to any pursuit, being among the most ingenious people on the globe. They will ditch, dig, plough and attend to all the requirements of agriculture while they are useful in the factories. For rice culture, they would far excel Cuffee and Sambo, both in thrift and powers of endurance.

“We are certainly in need of such laborers, particularly so for our rice fields; and the time is not far distant when the Celestials will find their way to the cotton and rice fields of the South....

“As regards the political bearings of the subject, this is a problem for politicians to work out and we will soon see how the 15th amendment [voting rights for former slaves] will apply, but the present indications are that Asia will soon pour upon and over us, countless thousands of her superfluous, cheap-living, slow-changing, un-assimilating, but very useful laborers.”

So much for love thy neighbor.

Tom Rubillo used to practice law, but is now retired. He has held public office, taught government, ethics and law at area colleges and has published several books. The episodes written in connection with this project will be, at its conclusion, available in one volume, or at least that is his best laid plan.