“A Quiet Ocean-Side Backwater”
“Few lived long in the [South Carolina sea] islands without responding to the somber spell of the great live oaks with their festoons of Spanish moss. In the spring the islands became intoxicatingly beautiful, alive with lush greenery and the color and fragrance of yellow jasmine, roses, and acacia blossoms. In the fall the scarlet cassena berries gleamed along the roadside hedges. The creeks abounded in fish, oyster, and crabs; on the outer islands wild deer and game birds grew fat and plentiful. Beaufort, a pleasant little town on Port Royal Island, was the only community in the whole region above the size of a village. Beaufort’s round-the-year inhabitants hardly numbered two thousand souls, but in summer, when the wealthiest planters of the islands came to occupy their handsome houses, the population doubled. This quiet ocean-side backwater[‘s] place-names would soon become common newspaper property in the North.” ¹
Located midway between the more cosmopolitan cities of Charleston and Savannah among the sea islands of the southeast Atlantic coast, Beaufort South Carolina today retains much of the remote small town character that defined it at the outset of the Civil War. In 1860, the principal crops of the islands surrounding the Port Royal Sound were cotton, rice, and a southern aristocracy on a path toward secession.
A Proud Martial History
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Constitution of the United States, Amendment #2 (1789)
Beaufort and the surrounding sea islands can rightly boast of a rich military history. Long before nearby Parris Island became home to the United States Marine Corps recruit training center, it was the location of the area’s first European settlements. Santa Elena (Spain) and Charlesfort (France) were two of several founded and abandoned as the prospective frontiersmen battled the native Indians and each other. The British gained a tenuous foothold and chartered the Carolina Colony in 1711. Colonial fighting men like John “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell and Thomas Nairn presaged the proud martial spirit of the South Carolina Lowcountry.
Organized militias based in Beaufort have trained and protected settlers since before the Revolutionary War. Our fifth great-grandfather, shipbuilder and patriot James Black (1740-1780), served in the South Carolina Militia and was mortally bayoneted by a British Redcoat at the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779. James’ great-grandson Julius Bythewood Bell (1834-1897) was also called upon to defend his family and friends when rebellion again began to simmer three generations later. His militia was known as the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery (BVA).
Southern Aristocracy, Social Amusements, and the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery
The Beaufort Arsenal
The BVA was officially organized in 1776, though militias had been formed decades before to protect against Indians, Spaniards and pirates. In 1798 the first Beaufort Arsenal was constructed to serve as a headquarters and armory for the militia unit. The modern arsenal, a yellow-gray fortress-like building on Craven Street, dates to the 1850s and today serves as the Beaufort museum and visitor center. In the era preceding the Civil War, the BVA was administered and commanded by rich sea island cotton planters and other prominent local families. It became something of a social club – albeit with a martial purpose – for these influential families of the Beaufort District.
“Because of the wealth of the town, Beaufort was an unusually social community. The Agricultural Society had dinners and sponsored debates. The Beaufort Volunteer Artillery held ceremonial musters and parades and sponsored the annual Fourth of July banquet at Arsenal Hall. Joseph Barnwell recalled seeing Major John G. Barnwell, commander of the unit, preside over these festive events, calling the guests to order with a huge brass drum that sat by his chair.”³
The Parish Church of St. Helena
“On any Sunday through the summer the casual visitor might have seen in the St. Helena Episcopal Church, built in 1724, as high a concentration of aristocracy per pew as gathered anywhere. In the galleries above the gentry were their counterparts in the black world, their house-servants, the Negro aristocracy. These were the “Swonga people,” as the common field-hands called them. In this sequestered region lived the Heywards, Barnwells, Elliotts, Coffins, and Fripps, along with the eleven thousand Negroes without surnames upon whose broad backs and nimble fingers rested the cotton culture and the well-ordered but static society of the islands.”¹
Julius Bythewood Bell is our second great-grandfather. His son Joseph W. Bell is the father of our beloved maternal grandmother Mary Bell Grayson. In 1860, Julius was a 24 year-old unmarried clerk, the youngest child in his family. Though they were not counted among the wealthy planters, the advantageous marriages of two older brothers and the townhouse Julius’ mother and aunts inherited in Beaufort gave the Bells entrée into the margins of elite Beaufort society.
Storm Clouds Gather
“No district in the state had contributed more to the secession movement than the Beaufort District. No district in America was to lose more as a result.”
Secession fever had been bubbling up for some years, led nationally by the Bell’s elite planter neighbors. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, the dark clouds of revolution began to gather over the planters of South Carolina, making no distinction between the wealthy, the subsistence farmer, and those like the Bell family who resided somewhere in the middle. Like all southern militias, the BVA trained and recruited with greater haste and purpose. Meanwhile, the state legislature convened a Secession Convention in December 1860 in Columbia where the elite planters and intellectuals of Beaufort and the surrounding sea islands led South Carolina to become the first state to secede in December 1860. Historian Lawrence Rowland wrote that “No district in the state had contributed more to the secession movement than the Beaufort District. No district in America was to lose more as a result.”³
Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.
¹ Rehearsal For Reconstruction – The Port Royal Experiment by Willie Lee Rose ©1964 Oxford University Press pgs 7-8
²Beaufort’s Arsenal has long been a symbol of area’s strength,uniqueness – Beaufort Gazette Sept. 4, 2009: https://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/article33390972.html#storylink=cpy
³The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina Volume 1, 1514-1861 by L. Rowland, A. Moore, and G. Rogers ©1996 Univ. of South Car. Press pg 381,441
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