Mount Pleasant Magazine March/April 2013

72 / 82

72 | |
Remembering
“The CivilWar and itsAftermath
inMount Pleasant”
“Conflict”
Although historians and
novelists have written more about the Civil
War than any other period or event in our
country’s history, very little has been writ-
ten about Mount Pleasant. That’s not at all
surprising because no battles were fought
here; there was little, if anything, to make an attack on the
town militarily worthwhile. The one thing that made Mount
Pleasant different from similarly in-
significant towns was its location near
Sullivan’s Island, to which it was connected by a long, wooden
bridge. It was an ideal place from which to provide rear ech-
elon support to the troops at Fort Moultrie and elsewhere on
the island and those in the coastal areas to the North.
In 1928, Mount Pleasant historian Petrona Royall McIver
interviewed her great-uncle, Richard S. Venning, about his
wartime experiences and prepared a manuscript which appar-
ently has never been published in its entirety. It is among her
papers that are now in the South Carolina Historical Society
Archives in Charleston. McIver quoted her uncle as follows:
“My first company were the Coast Guards, state troops
drawn from Santee and Christ Church Parish. We had just
gotten our uniforms on the day of the shot on the Star of the
West – nothing fine, just brown mill cloth, unshrunk. After
Sumter surrendered, we went to Sullivan’s Island, crossing
from Kinloch’s Place to the back beach. We had to march
through marsh, and we were kept on the beach all night in
the wind and rain. There was plenty of booze and the next
morning, what with the effects of the rum and rain and the
shrunken uniforms, we were an awful sight.”
The Coast Guards, which on Jan. 19, 1861, had 76
volunteers, remained on the island about a month. Most had
joined the Confederate Army there, but 10 volunteered for
duty in Virginia. The bodies of three of them were sent home
about six months later. They had gone directly from a train
into the heaviest fighting during the first battle of Manas-
sas, or Bull Run, on July 21, the first great battle of the war.
(Many Civil War battles have two names because the South
gave them the name of the nearest settlement, while the
North named them after the nearest body of water.)
Among others who died there was Benjamin J. Johnson,
who had been a captain in the Coast Guards and promoted
to the rank of colonel in Wade Hampton’s legion while serv-
ing with the Palmetto Guards of Charleston. Gabriel Jervey,
who was about 60 years old, fell at Johnson’s side. Three of
Jervey’s sons would die while serving the Confederacy. The
third former Coast Guard to fall there was Harry S. Roux,
whose family home on Venning Street would become a
negro orphanage after the war’s end.
Soon after arriving in Charleston in March 1861 to pre-
pare for its defense, Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard telegraphed
requisitions to Confederate headquarters in Montgomery,
Alabama, and additional mortars arrived from Savannah and
Pensacola. He planned to make Fort Sumter the center of the
ring of fire, which would isolate it from the sea as well as re-
duce it to ruins. A new, two-mortar work in Mount Pleasant,
Battery Gary, which guarded the bridge to Sullivan’s Island,
closed the circle.
To be continued …
This is the fourth part in a series about Mount Pleasant’s role in the Civil War. It has been
offered to Mount Pleasant Magazine by former Post and Courier editor and writer
John L. All, who resides East of the Cooper and is passionate about preserving its history.
We hope you will enjoy this tale about Mount Pleasant’s past.
–The Editors
By JOhn L. ALL