Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Chapter 2
The South Atlantic Coast
1861–1863
Enforcement of a naval blockade was a mainstay of Lt. Gen. Winfield
Scott’s plan for subduing the Confederacy. Since the seceded states were almost
entirely rural and agricultural, it was necessary to prevent them from
selling their products—chiefly cotton—to foreign buyers in exchange for the
manufactured goods necessary to field Southern armies. Therefore, the North’s
first carefully planned offensive movement of the war was the occupation of a
Southern beachhead to sustain the U.S. Navy’s blockading fleet. Vessels cruising
off the coast of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas needed a depot for food,
fresh water, and naval stores and a dockyard for repairs. After considering half
a dozen landing sites, Union strategists settled on Port Royal Sound in South
Carolina. One of the finest harbors on the Atlantic seaboard, it lay between the
ports of Charleston and Savannah. Coincidentally, the planners had settled on
a region that was home to one of the South’s highest concentrations of black
people. More than 33,000 black residents—32,530 of them slaves—constituted
83 percent of the population on the sound and along the small rivers that emptied
into it (see Map 1). 1
Coastal South Carolina was plantation country. Around Port Royal, the
cash crop was Sea Island cotton, the long, silky fiber of which was even more
valuable than the short-fiber variety grown inland. The region’s population
consisted of a tiny minority of white planters and an enormous majority of
slaves. The slaves’ numerical predominance and the absence of their owners
during the unhealthy coastal summers allowed them some measure of independence.
The “task system” under which they tended Sea Island cotton left them
more time at the end of the day than the sunup-to-sundown “gang system”
practiced on the vast plantations on which cotton grew throughout most of
the South. After completing their daily assigned tasks, slaves in coastal South
1 Robert M. Browning Jr., Success Is All That Was Expected: The South Atlantic Blockading
Squadron During the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002), pp. 7–17; U.S. Census Bureau,
Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), p.
452. The Blockade Strategy Board’s report on three South Carolina harbors is in The War of the
Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in
128 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, 53: 67–73 (hereafter cited
as OR).