Confederate Gold and Silver (3 page)

A few days after Donna retired they made the decision to put their Connecticut colonial style home in Southbury up for sale, believing it would not sell for several months in a depressed housing market. Mistakenly they thought they would have plenty of time to find a home in South Carolina. However, soon after putting their house up for sale they found a buyer and within two days of receiving the initial offer a deal was finalized. It happened all too fast for Donna’s liking. Now they had the pressure of not only having to move out of their home and moving away from their two boys, but they also had the added pressure of trying to find a new home to live in eight hundred miles away.

In the weeks after reaching a deal to sell their home, Paul and Donna made three trips to South Carolina to look for a new place to live. Paul had found a Century 21 real estate agent, Sara Zimmer, to work with and between emails, phone calls, real estate books, virtual home tours, and visits south, they looked at many homes. After looking at over one hundred homes in one manner or another and not finding anything which interested them, they resigned themselves to the possibility of having to delay their move. Then on the last day of their last visit, they found the one they had been looking for. They quickly signed off on a home they would soon come to love.

Their new home, within the Blue Dunes Country Club in Murrells Inlet, sat on a quiet cul-de-sac within a private community. It had a great view of both the golf course and a large nearby pond. Within minutes they could be sitting at the community pool or lounging on the beach. During the process of buying their new home, they soon learned several families living on the street where their home was located were also retirees from Connecticut. Life was going to be good.

Paul was an avid golfer, but had not played very much over the last three years because of work and family commitments. With his retirement came plans to play more often and far better. When he finally told friends back home where they were moving to they had kidded him about moving to a golfing community, but the real reason for moving had not been for golf, it was about the weather. He had grown tired of the cold New England winters and the many years of having to work and drive in the snow. The weather was the real reason Paul wanted to move, he hated the cold.

Besides the warm weather and the golf he looked forward to playing, Paul also looked forward to starting to fish again. He also wanted to learn how to hunt for crabs in the salt water marshes that lined the shores in and around Murrells Inlet. He planned on putting a big dent in the crab population as soon as he got settled.

Paul had also developed a strong interest in the Civil War several years prior to his retirement. He had read many books on the war and had visited several Civil War battlefields. With his move south, he now hoped to visit many more battlefields in and around North and South Carolina. He had also accumulated many books on the war and now looked forward to reading them as he sat at the beach enjoying his new life. He never could have foreseen what his interest in the Civil War would soon involve him in.

After finding what they had been looking for, Paul and Donna soon started the process of buying their home. Donna’s banking connections led them to start working with the Murrells Inlet National Savings and Loan to secure a mortgage. After finally signing all of the necessary paperwork with the bank, they spent the remaining part of their last day at the beach enjoying the sun before flying home the next afternoon. During an early lunch, a walk on the beach, and later during dinner at one of their favorite restaurants on the Grand Strand, they talked about their upcoming move to South Carolina and the dreams they had for their new life.

While Paul had been the driving force behind the move to South Carolina, Donna had been a somewhat reluctant partner. She became even harder to convince this was the right move for them to make when she received a phone call as they drove home from Bradley International Airport, in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. The call had come from one of her brothers and he sadly told her their father had suddenly succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting for the past two years.

Over the next five weeks, a distraught Donna coped with the loss of her father, helped to plan his funeral, dealt with the closing of his estate, and retired from her job at the bank. While all of those issues were difficult to deal with, the really hard part was mentally preparing for the move away from her two boys, selling a home she had dearly loved, and moving away from her tight circle of good friends. It was almost too much for one person to bear. She spent the weeks which followed both in tears and doubting whether she should have agreed to help Paul fulfill his dream.

But by late June, just after her fifty-fifth birthday, Paul and Donna, accompanied by Sean and his fiancée, Lauren Nester, and by a large moving truck which held the sum of their thirty-five years together, slowly moved south on Interstate 95 to begin the dream Paul had imagined for them.

The discovery Paul would soon make after they arrived in South Carolina would change their lives in several ways. They just had no way to see it coming.

Spring,
1863

2
War
Begins.
 

“I
am
loathe
to
close.
We
are
not
enemies,
but
friends.
We
must
not
be
enemies
 . . .”
President
Abraham
Lincoln
in
his
first
Inaugural
Address

The original thirteen of us had started out so well together. Despite the usual differences between us, differences sometimes caused by the actual geographic distance between some of us or because of differences caused by our different ways of life, we still managed to rally together to fight a common enemy. Despite our differences, we fought together and we fought well, and despite fighting a giant who many others thought we could never beat, we did. We won because we were united in our cause and because we were we became the United States of America.

Then a few scant decades later, with several new members being added to our original group and despite developing a constitution which provided for so many of the individual freedoms we had fought hard to win, we now grew at odds with each other. Now we threatened to go to war against each other, against our very own constitution, and against our own beliefs that defined who we were. While it was not a constitution everyone thought was perfect, it was one far better than anything else we had lived under. Most importantly, it was ours. The arguments over the wording of our constitution, as well as the arguments between the states, would last for years.

Looking back it seems like we began arguing about several issues and collectively agreeing on very few of them. We argued about what our constitution did and did not allow for regarding the rights of the individual states, and we argued about the power of the federal government and what control, if any, it had over the individual states. Then we began arguing over whether states could secede or simply resign from the Union. As the rift between the North and South grew wider, many Southern states began interpreting the constitution as merely being a type of compact between the states and not an actual binding document which had created a centralized federal government. If that was not enough, then we argued vehemently about the slavery issue and whether states had the right to maintain the institution of slavery or not. Then to complicate matters even more, we argued about whether new states admitted to the Union could or could not be considered a slave state. The arguing over the slavery issue had existed for many years; it soon would become an issue that many men would die fighting over. We argued, it seemed, about everything.

With all of those issues and others being argued about, as well as the states threatening each other with force to defend their individual rights and beliefs, it was easy for many people, then and now, to question how we ever had gotten together to fight for our own independence.

When the arguing became too strong to settle with negotiations and compromises, we then banded together regionally. The Northern states, determined to keep the Union together, threatened the Southern states with sanctions. The Southern states, most decidedly at first the states in the Deep South, threatened the Northern states with talk of secession from the Union, partially because of their belief that slavery was an issue, and a way of life in the South, which the federal government had no jurisdiction over. We argued with each other some more, threatened each other some more, and talked about a war between the states, but early on it was just that, just talk. While each side had the hawks who wanted war, each side also had the doves who tried to avert war from occurring and who urged for cooler heads to prevail. Early on, if war was to occur, it also appeared that each side wanted the other side to fire the first shot as they knew it would help their cause if they were drawn into a war where they had not been responsible for firing the first shot. Political posturing had occurred even back then.

But the arguing continued too long and like a family reunion gone bad the arguing soon led to clear threats of violence being made against each other. Then the threats led to actual acts of violence and, sadly, acts of violence led us to war between the factions of our family. It was a family of individual and separate states who had valiantly fought alongside each other to achieve a common goal, our freedom from an overseas monarchy.

Now it was up to the individual states to either fight against or to defend our own monarchy, the federal government we had created. The arguing had started even before President Abraham Lincoln had been elected to office in November 1860, but now his election accelerated the talks of secession and of war. What had started as talk, talk about secession from the Union, now became a reality in February 1861 when several Southern states passed secession ordinances. Among those states leading the way was South Carolina. Soon other Southern states followed their lead. The states that had not seceded soon did after South Carolina and the Confederacy clashed with the federal government over a small island where an even smaller Union military fort was located. When Major Robert Anderson, the commanding officer of Fort Sumter, surrendered his post to the Confederacy the war was on and turning back was not an option.

Fort Sumter sits in Charleston Harbor, guarding the entrance to Charleston, South Carolina, and sits close to where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers meet along the banks of the city. Charles Towne was initially created as a colony in 1670 and then, as a city no longer tied directly to England due to our victory in the Revolutionary War, changed its name to Charleston in 1783. Despite its rich history, its busy harbor, and its success as a thriving colonial era city, Charleston, as was the rest of the South, was active in the slave trade. It had even faced down a slave uprising in 1822 that became known as the Denmark Vesey rebellion. Perhaps prior to as well, but certainly after the rebellion was quelled, the issue of slavery in Charleston and across the rest of the Southern states became a very hotly contested issue.

Despite that issue Charleston was a bustling Southern city with a deep port, successful businesses, and many large prosperous plantations. Several of Charleston’s sons had been framers of our country as they had been signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Another son, Francis Marion, the
‘Swamp
Fox’
, was legendary for his feats against the British, tormenting them with his daring raids during our fight for independence. For war to come amongst us was difficult to comprehend, for it to start in a city with such a strong role in our fight to establish ourselves as a free and independent country was even more difficult to comprehend.

Both sides, at least in principle, and depending on your interpretation of their efforts, tried to avert war. But their actions in attempting to avert war from occurring often seemed to push the other side closer to it. At times it almost seemed like they dared each other to start the war.

The South had tried to avert war from occurring by sending delegates to a Peace Convention in Washington in February, 1861. But the convention accomplished little as none of the states which had seceded by then sent any delegates to attend; nor had several Northern states. When further efforts to meet with President Lincoln were ignored, with Lincoln finally sending only Secretary of State William Seward to meet with them instead of doing so himself, the South viewed the meeting with Seward as a snub by the North. While the two sides still tried to avert war, the first unofficial act of the war had already occurred. It occurred when Confederate guns fired upon the
Star
of
the
West
, an unarmed merchant ship trying to resupply Fort Sumter with much needed supplies.

The North had tried to avert war as well, to some degree, when they promised South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens their efforts to resupply Fort Sumter would not include providing the fort with additional troops, ammunition, or weapons, but merely with food. When the South later learned of the North’s plans to send a total of eight ships to Fort Sumter, ships containing both additional cannons and soldiers, the South viewed the act as a direct threat and they prepared themselves for war. The fact that a federal fort sat in Charleston’s harbor had long been a point of irritation for the South, especially to South Carolina. That irritation helped to make Fort Sumter the logical place for war to start.

As the South viewed the Union’s attempt to resupply Fort Sumter with additional soldiers as a direct threat, correspondence which occurred between Washington and the fort’s commander, Major Anderson, seemed to indicate Washington was certainly expecting war to occur. A Union loyalist despite being born in Kentucky, and despite having a wife who had been born in Georgia, Anderson also knew war was soon to come. A line in a letter to Anderson seemed to reveal Washington’s position on the expected conflict.
“Whenever,
if
at
all,
in
your
judgment,
to
save
yourself
and
command,
a
capitulation
becomes
a
necessity,
you
are
authorized
to
make
it.”
While it is quite unlikely Washington wanted the fort to fall into the hands of the newly formed Confederacy, history will always question whether Washington wanted the fort to fall to aid their position in declaring war against the South.