Lowcountry Confederates Read online

  Captain Daggett’s job as Ordnance Officer required him to remain on the coast throughout the entire War, even when other local troops left for deployment elsewhere. Happily, this also allowed him to continue living with his family in their fine home in Georgetown. His duties consisted of overseeing the supplying of munitions and the upkeep of Confederate weaponry for all the coastal defenses in our area.

  As the War dragged on, hopes for a Southern victory diminished. The triumphs of First and Second Manassas turned into the defeats of Gettysburg and Atlanta. One by one, Southern cities fell. Mounting casualties depleted Confederate armies.

  The War had not yet ended, however. Robert E. Lee’s forces still opposed General Grant in Virginia. South Carolina’s own Tenth Volunteer Infantry Regiment continued to engage General Sherman in sporadic battles, falling back before him as he marched north, pillaging and burning his way through Georgia, then South Carolina, then North Carolina.

  By the last months of the War, deployment of troops to other locations left Georgetown and the Waccamaw Neck almost entirely undefended. The few remaining Southern troops and supplies had been needed elsewhere.

  Still, those scant Confederate officers and men who remained in our area continued the struggle, even though their limited numbers reduced them to using the guerilla tactics that had served their great-grandfathers so well against Cornwallis’ British troops in this same location nearly one hundred years earlier.

  When the scarce remaining artillery forces along our coast joined the last defense of Charleston, they abandoned Battery White, the last gun emplacement near Georgetown, and spiked the cannons to keep them from falling into enemy hands. After that, no guns of any real size remained to fight the enemy on our part of the coast.

  But Captain Daggett, area Ordnance Officer, still had the gunpowder he had removed from Battery White, and he still had his engineering skills. He decided to combine these to construct torpedoes to attack the Union ships he knew would soon be steaming into our waters.

  Thomas Daggett had a friend in Georgetown named Steven Rouquie. Mr. Rouquie had been a prosperous Georgetown merchant before the War broke out in 1861. The excellent location of his store on the riverfront in Georgetown—right next door to the Town Hall on Front Street—had contributed greatly to this prosperity.

  When war clouds threatened, Mr. Rouquie helped organize and equip the Georgetown Rifle Guards. In spite of his business commitments and his wife and three children, when the Georgetown Rifle Guards entered state service as Company A of the Tenth South Carolina Volunteers, thirty-two-year-old Stephen Rouquie stayed with the unit as a Lieutenant under Captain Plowden C. J. Weston’s command. As such, he became one of those who attended Captain Weston’s Legendary Feast at Hagley Plantation early in the War, but that’s another story.

  Unfortunately, Lieutenant Rouquie soon had to resign his position because of illness. He came back to Georgetown and tried to keep his hardware and dry goods business going, although this became awfully difficult. By the end of the War, his business had declined so much that he rented out most of the space in his building to store Confederate supplies. He also served with the coastal defenses from time to time as his health permitted. So, when Captain Daggett needed a place to construct his torpedoes, Stephen Rouquie readily offered his building and his assistance, in spite of the danger.

  Therefore, on the same day Georgetown busied itself surrendering to Admiral Dahlgren’s Union forces, Captain Daggett busied himself constructing his torpedoes. His workspace? The second floor of Lieutenant Rouquie’s store, right next door to the Town Hall where Admiral Dahlgren’s sailors were tearing down the Stars and Bars and raising the American flag.

  As he set to work, Captain Daggett first selected a sturdy wooden keg for each torpedo. He waterproofed each one by covering it inside and out with tar. He then filled each keg with one hundred pounds of gunpowder and sealed a pressure sensitive contact fuse into its bunghole. Lastly, he attached tapered wooden cones to each end of the kegs, both for buoyancy and so that water would flow around them more easily.

  When night fell, Captain Daggett and his assistants rowed out into the channel of Winyah Bay, southeast of Georgetown. They attached anchors to the keg torpedoes with ropes. Carefully, they slipped their torpedoes over the side of the rowboat and adjusted the ropes to leave each keg floating just below the water’s surface, with its contact fuse facing upward.

  Captain Daggett had no fear that Confederate ships might hit the contact fuses and explode the torpedoes. No Confederate ships remained in these waters.

  The next morning, when the Harvest Moon struck one of Captain Daggett’s torpedoes, down went the admiral’s Flagship. Only one of the ship’s crewmen died in the explosion. The vessel sank in shallow water and the accompanying tugboat easily rescued the rest of its personnel.

  Stories do still circulate sometimes about the ghost of an unknown stowaway who haunts the wreck. Maybe you’ve heard them. For most of the crew though, the sinking of the warship represented more of an inconvenience, or even an adventure, than a terrifying experience.

  That wasn’t true for poor Captain Crosby, however, perhaps because the Harvest Moon wasn’t the first ship under his command to be torpedoed out from under him. Sometime I’ll tell you that story; it involves the world’s first submarine attack. They say the unfortunate captain never quite recovered this second loss, but I don’t really know.

  I do know what happened to Admiral Dahlgren. He escaped that day with only the uniform he was wearing, the one he had adjusted so fastidiously earlier that morning. The rest of his belongings, along with his prestige, went down with his Flagship. He did manage to hang on to his naval career after the War, however, and later commanded the South Pacific Fleet, and even the Washington Navy Yard once again in his later years.

  The sinking of the Harvest Moon represented more of a psychological victory for the Confederacy than a practical one, but it certainly did represent that. Many Southerners enjoyed the same thought that Admiral Dahlgren had recorded only a few days earlier, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!” And over the next few years, any number of parents in Horry and Georgetown Counties named their baby boys “Daggett.”

  ~

  After the War, Captain Daggett tried to return to work as a rice mill engineer, but jobs were scarce. The days of the rice plantations were numbered. He certainly could not return to Laurel Hill Plantation to operate its rice mill. Union troops had burned the mill to the ground, leaving only the brick chimney. That chimney still stands here at Brookgreen Gardens today, one hundred years after its construction, to remind us of a way of life long gone, and of the Engineer of Laurel Hill who used his skills so successfully for Lowcountry rice planters, both in peace and in war.

  You can still see another reminder of Captain Daggett’s engineering skills in Winyah Bay, south of Georgetown. The smoke stack of the USS Harvest Moon still sticks out of the water, even at high tide. The rest of the ship lies buried under sand and silt below the smoke stack off Battery White, where it came to rest on March 1, 1865. Since the Intracoastal Waterway was completed through this area in the 1930s, charts have marked it as a hazard to navigation. Those who pilot their commercial barges or pleasure craft up to New York or down to Florida probably don’t know that particular hazard’s story, but local people certainly remember Captain Daggett and the sinking of the Harvest Moon.

  Admiral Dahlgren is also remembered, at least in naval circles, although not in the way he had hoped. Naval officers recall him, not so much as the commander of the successful Southern Blockade that helped win the War for the Union, or as the Father of Naval Ordnance, but rather as the first United States Navy Admiral ever to lose his Flagship to enemy action.

  By the way, Captain Daggett’s exploits did not end with the sinking of the Harvest Moon. After the War, he moved his family to Conway. That’s on the Waccamaw River about thirty miles north of Brookgreen Gardens, in Horry County. There he became prominent in local politics
. He’s even credited with devising the scheme that stole Horry County for the Democrats in the underhanded Wade Hampton election of 1876, but that’s definitely another story!

  Captain Daggett also continued his engineering work. He designed the gallows used in Conway for many years and the earthquake rods that have held the Horry County Courthouse—now the Conway City Hall—together ever since the Great Earthquake of 1876.

  However, the final twist to the Harvest Moon story, and the most curious of all to me, came a few years later. In the 1880s, the United States Coastal Service needed a captain for the government dredge boat that kept the Waccamaw and Pee Dee Rivers clear of snags and silt. Who did they choose but Thomas Daggett!

  For many years, Captain Daggett and his government dredge boat cleared obstructions from those two rivers. His efforts allowed riverboat and coastal schooner traffic to reach from Georgetown as far upstream as Conway, which helped us rebuild our shattered economy here at the end of the last century.

  How is that for a turn of events! The United States Government ended up hiring the man who sank the United States Admiral’s Flagship to keep its waterways safe for navigation! Quite an ending to this story of the Engineer of Laurel Hill and the millstones of Brookgreen Gardens.

  Historical Digression:

  On Rice and Rice Mills

  Miss Genevieve often needed to explain the role of engineers and engineering in the rice industry in South Carolina to Garden visitors.

  To understand the importance of the job of rice mill engineer, I need to explain some of the details of growing and processing rice, the crop that supported the entire plantation economy in the Carolina Lowcountry for over two hundred years.

  Growing rice is a long and complicated process involving the periodic flooding and draining of rice fields. In the 1600s, settlers in South Carolina raised small amounts of rice as an upland crop, depending on sometimes-uncertain rainfall for the flooding. Later they developed a more reliable method of growing rice in the inland swamps.

  Finally, about the middle of the 1700s, the planters (or some say, their African slaves) devised a much more efficient way to grow rice by using the tidal flow in the coastal rivers to flood and drain the rice fields. The process was complicated but suddenly rice planters could grow huge quantities of rice (always remembering that the slaves really did the actual work, of course). Processing the rice for market was a different story, however!

  In the early days, once the workers had grown, harvested, and threshed the rice—that is, had removed the rice grains from the stalks—they stored the rough rice in the rice barn. At that point, the risky part of the harvest had ended. The year’s crop was safe from ricebirds—which we call Bobolinks today—windstorms, freshets—which are floodings caused by rains upstream—and the hurricanes that could destroy a whole year’s crop in a single day, and unfortunately commonly came during the harvest season.

  Most planters declared a holiday for their workers as soon as the rice crop was in the barn. Feasting, singing, dancing, and all forms of entertainment celebrated the successful harvest. But once the celebrating ended, the tedious task of processing the rice for market began.

  A rough, inedible husk covered each rice grain. In the first step of processing, the “first pounding,” workers pounded the rice with a wooden pestle in a large wooden mortar to remove that husk. You can still see an old mortar and pestle on display in the Old Kitchen here at Brookgreen Gardens.

  To make this pounding equipment, workers hollowed out a cavity about one foot deep in the top end of a two-or three-foot-long section of tree trunk for the mortar. They also shaped a four-foot-long pestle from a smaller tree trunk. It had a bullet-shaped foot-long head that fit into the hollow of the mortar and a central shaft about as big around as an oar, so that the worker could grip it solidly.

  To use the mortar and pestle, the worker placed a small amount of rough rice in the hollow. Holding the pestle vertically, he or she then used the heavy end of the pestle to pound the rice in the cavity, knocking the husk off the rice kernel by moving the pestle up and down, up and down, with a twisting, rolling motion. Not only was this time consuming, but pounding, pounding, up and down, hour after hour was tiring.

  After knocking the husks off the grains of rice in the mortar, the worker transferred the mixture of rice and loose husks to a flat fanner basket two feet wide for winnowing. To winnow the rice, the worker tossed the grains of rice and husks into the air with a quick flip of the basket, while a helper fanned the basket to create a breeze. The breeze carried away the lighter husks, while the heavier rice grains fell back into the fanner basket.

  In later years, planters built winnowing houses on stilts. Then, after the first pounding, workers carried the mixture of rice grains and husks up into the winnowing house and dropped it through an opening in the floor on a breezy day. Even later, large fans turned by animals or workers created the breeze to blow away the husks while the heavier rice fell straight down.

  Even after winnowing, the rice grains were not yet ready for market. Brown bran and germ layers still covered the inner kernel. Although these layers contain healthy vitamins and minerals, they spoil rapidly in storage. Therefore, the next step in processing required removing these brown bran and germ layers. So, back to the mortar and pestle went the brown rice for the second pounding or “polishing.”

  Polishing took much more skill and care than the first pounding. At this stage, the rice needed to be pounded just hard enough to remove the outer brown layer but not hard enough to break the rice grain itself. Only whole grains of rice could be sold on the world market. A skilled worker, using a tapping and rolling motion, could polish almost all of the grains of rice without breaking them. A poorly skilled or tired worker broke as many as half of the grains.

  Once pounded the second time, the rice went back into the fanner basket or to the winnowing house where the same fanning process again separated the heavier rice grains from the lighter bran and germ. These layers became animal feed. Workers then sent the polished white rice grains through sieves to sort them into three separate piles: the whole polished grains, the larger broken grains called “midlins,” and the small broken pieces and flour called “the fine.”

  Workers packed the whole polished grains of rice, which hopefully made up most of the crop, into barrels and barged them down the river to Georgetown or shipped them to Charleston for sale on the international rice market. Planters sold the midlins locally or ate them themselves. Slaves received the fine as part of their weekly food ration.

  As you can see, hand methods for processing rice took a lot of time and effort, even more than clearing and maintaining the rice fields and growing the rice. In fact, once the tidal flow system of production gained widespread use in the Carolina Lowcountry, plantations began producing far more rice during the growing season than their workers could process throughout the rest of the year.

  As you can imagine, great efforts went into developing machines that could process the rice more quickly and efficiently than the hand method. Inventors continually experimented with different machines and techniques, with what has been called “a remarkable lack of success.”

  Finally, in the late 1700’s, a South Carolina engineer named Jonathan Lucas invented a rice mill system that revolutionized the rice industry in the same way that the invention of the cotton gin revolutionized cotton production.

  Mr. Lucas’ first rice mills used millstones driven by waterpower to separate the husks from the rice and thus eliminate the first pounding. A hand mortar and pestle were still needed for the second pounding, or polishing, to remove the bran and germ layers from the rice.

  However with further work, Mr. Lucas discovered how to adjust and refine his invention so that mechanical mortars and pestles turned by river currents or tidal flow were able to complete the polishing as well. At last, rice processing was able to keep up with rice production.

  Before the turn of the century, Mr. Lucas constructed several wa
terpowered rice mills at plantations on the Waccamaw and Pee Dee Rivers. He built his first steam-powered rice mill in Charleston in 1817. During the first half of the 1800s, Mr. Lucas’ rice mills helped rice planters in the Carolina Lowcountry become the wealthiest men in the United States.

  A rice mill required an expert engineer to keep it working properly. Not only did the mechanical machinery need to be in good operating condition, but the millstones and other parts had to be kept in proper alignment and just the right distance apart to accomplish their tasks without crushing the rice grains.

  Additionally, by the middle of the 1800s when steam powered most rice mills, the engineer needed to keep the steam-generating equipment in good repair. Boiler explosions commonly caused property destruction and loss of human life in any equipment they powered, whether it was railroad locomotives, sawmills, or steamboats. So, a good engineer not only kept the rice mill operating efficiently, but also kept the rice mill workers alive.

  “Joseph Asbury Sarvis, CSA”

  The Legendary Feast

  A Sad Tale from a Tragic War

  Mid-Twentieth Century visitors to Brookgreen Gardens often asked, “What happened around here during the Civil War?” Cousin Corrie’s reply always included a bit of local history and this tale long told in our family. She always started her story with a discussion of the name of that sad conflict, however.

  “Some people call it the Civil War. I’ve seen it called the War of Southern Rebellion and the War of Northern Aggression. Some call it the War for Southern Independence. When I was a child, genteel ladies too refined to refer to such things directly even called it The Recent Unpleasantness. We, in our family, have always called it the War Between the States.”

  December 25, 1864. The last Christmas Day of the War Between the States. That evening, my great-uncle, Captain Mose Sarvis, and the few ragged remaining soldiers of the Tenth South Carolina Volunteers huddled together, cold and miserable, under bare, dripping tree branches along a rain-swollen river somewhere in Tennessee.