Unimaginable Consequences – The Battle of Port Royal Sound

“Most unimaginable of all were the consequences of defeat. For the planters of St. Helena, there would be no coming home from the War and rebuilding a life with elements of the past.”³

Beaufort, South Carolina, November 1861

Located midway between the more cosmopolitan cities of Charleston and Savannah along the southeast Atlantic coast, the “quiet ocean-side backwater”¹ of Beaufort South Carolina today retains much of the remote small town character that defined it at the outset of the U.S. Civil War. In the years leading up to that war, the principal crops of Beaufort and its adjacent islands were sea island cotton and a southern aristocracy on an unavoidable path toward secession.

The Bell Family of St. Helena Island

Living on the margins of that aristocracy was Julius Bythewood Bell (1834-1897), an unmarried twenty-six year-old clerk and a Corporal in the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery (BVA). Though she never met him, Julius is the grandfather of our beloved maternal grandmother Mary Bell Grayson (1909-2001). In the spring of 1861, a detachment of the BVA, probably including our ancestor, took part in the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. His parents John Bell (1792-1864) and Margaret Hingston Bythewood (1810-?) were planters with a modest plantation, one of some 151 of varying sizes on St. Helena Island.² “[S]and roads with intervals of wooden causeways over tidal drains and marshes connected the plantations to one another and to the institutions which serviced white society – the churches, general stores, Agricultural Society lodge, [militia] muster house, the [now defunct] village of St. Helenaville with its wharf, sand beach, summer mansions, parsonage, and small boarding schools.“³ St. Helena is the largest of a number of sea islands, barrier islands, and tongues of land surrounding Port Royal Sound in the Old Beaufort Judicial District of South Carolina, the seedbed of the secession movement. There lived Robert Barnwell Rhett, a “fire-eater” and the “Father of Secession” and the wealthy planter and poet William J. Grayson (no relation), the originator of the term “master race” and an apologist for “the peculiar institution” of slavery. The aristocratic planter society of St. Helena was separated not only from the Northern manufacturing culture but also from the rest of the slave-owning South by numerous bodies of water and sea island cotton, their unique staple crop, and the wealth it produced.

“Attack imminent…. Have requested…reinforce Hilton Head with 500 to 1,000 men.”²

Naval Blockade and Military Preparation

The 1861 sea-island cotton crop was described as “fair this year to be the largest most men could remember. In ordinary times, a reason for deep thankfulness…. But [this] was no ordinary time.”¹ For much of the summer, numerous Naval vessels of the Federal fleet stood sentry within sight of the planters on St. Helena Island, as was the case off much of the rebel coast, a cause for deep concern due to the uncertainty of how and when their crop would reach the buyers in England and elsewhere. In early November, their concern turned to alarm. “[F]orty-one vessels reported off Beaufort,” read the cable of November 5, 1861 to Charleston. “Attack imminent…. Have requested…reinforce Hilton Head with 500 to 1,000 men.”² Rumors had been flying in and around Beaufort for the previous week. The rector of the St. Helena Episcopal Church advised his parishioners to pack some belongings and pray. “Across town, trunks were packed, carts and horses were drawn up, and household servants began busily loading family possessions. For some slaves, it was the last act they were to perform for their masters.”²

Preparations for defending against a possible attack had been ongoing since May. Two forts were constructed to guard the entrance to Port Royal Sound; one at Hilton Head Island (Fort Walker) and the other at Bay Point on Phillips Island (Fort Beauregard). Julius Bell and the BVA were garrisoned at Fort Beauregard, where their commander, future Confederate Brigadier General Stephen Elliott was named artillery fire director. One of the BVA artillerymen stationed there later described the scene at Bay Point leading up to the battle of November 7.

“[T]he men lounged around camp in their blue flannel shirts and tucked up pants, or drilled and waited for the cock-sure fight….There were 125 men….Gen. [Thomas] Drayton took command at Hilton Head and Col. Doniphas was at Bay Point. [Percival] Drayton of the Federal fleet [commander of the gunboat Pocahontas then floating off Port Royal Sound] was a brother of our Drayton. The rifle shells of the one big gun at Fort Beauregard were all defective, every collar being out of fix….Next morning the great fleet tried the calibre of the forts and gave us good practice. Our 42’s were useless; they were ineffective at two miles. The fleet simply showered big shell from out of range and we had no reply except from one 10-inch Columbiad and one lame rifle. Still our gunners set two of their vessels afire. Finally the big rifle choked and then burst, disabling the gunners, wounding Capt. Elliott, James W. Hamilton, and Marion Fripp. Then the jig was up. Hilton Head was soon mashed to pie. Gen. Drayton exposed his militia and had them awfully cut up. Next came the retreat. The B.V.A. crossed the creek to the island and made for the main. A perfect rout of the population followed. They fled – some 1,500 families, leaving behind all they had of worldly goods. The enemy found meals untasted in most of the homes. Now the B.V.A. were out of doors but in sight of the old roof trees [sic], they were grim and on the hunt for more work.”⁴

No Coming Home

 “Nowhere else in the Old South was the system of landed wealth and power so resolutely dismantled. …Following the invasion of Port Royal, the [cotton] crop of St. Helena Parish was confiscated and shipped to New York, where it was ginned and sold, contributing $675,000 to the U.S. treasury. Thus the proceeds from one of the largest and finest Sea Island crops ever produced were used to finance the war against the planters.”³

On many plantations, those slaves that were left behind broke the cotton gins and made themselves at home in the big houses. Many federal soldiers joined them in looting and destruction until restrained by their officers.¹ The New York Daily Tribune of Nov 15 crowed about “the irony of South Carolina being attacked in the exclusive home of the most exclusive few of that most exclusive aristocracy.“¹ Some planters stealthily returned in a mostly unsuccessful effort to retrieve property and perhaps convince some of their former slaves to come with them. Some, perhaps most, would never return. John Bell was 70 years-old and his wife Margaret in her 50s when they joined the exodus. Up to this day, they are both lost to us. An unpublished family history ⁵ states that John Bell died in exile in Greenville SC in 1864. His final resting place is unknown. Where and when Margaret died is even less certain. There was to be no coming home or rebuilding their past lives. Theodore Rosengarten wrote that the cotton planters of St. Helena Island “lived long lives, with as much intensity and singularity as anyone. But they happened to live in the last years of the slavery epoch, in the only country where it took a civil war to throw off slavery, and their distinction lies in that fact.”³

Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.

¹Rehearsal for Reconstruction, The Port Royal Experiment by Willie Lee Rose © 1964 Oxford University Press pgs 3,7,8, 11, 18

²The 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 369, 444, 448

³Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter by Theodore Rosengarten ©1986 William Morrow and Co. pg 3, 25, 34, 55, 60

⁴ The B.V.A. in the Civil War: Bay Point – Waiting for the Inevitable – The Value of Heavy Guns in The Beaufort Gazette, July 30, 1903, pg 4

⁵ The Bells and Allied Families compiled by Maria Bell Locke, Columbia SC, 1953