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Days of Destruction
DAYS of DESTRUCTION

Augustine Thomas Smythe and the Civil War Siege of Charleston

Edited by
W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-770-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-61117-771-8 (ebook)
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Editorial Method
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
A Taste of War and New Duties
1862-May 1863
CHAPTER 2
Aboard the CSS Palmetto State
August 1863-November 1863
CHAPTER 3
Duty at Fort Sumter and an Engagement
December 1863-February 1864
CHAPTER 4
A Lofty Perch in St. Michael s
March 1864-November 1864
CHAPTER 5
Sherman Targets South Carolina
December 1864-March 1865
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS

Augustine Thomas Smythe, 1863
Thomas Smyth, D.D.
Margaret Milligan Adger Smyth
Second Presbyterian Church
Zion Presbyterian Church
Secession meeting at Institute Hall, 1860
Confederate Signal Corps Headquarters in Charleston
Federal artillery firing on Charleston
Louisa Rebecca McCord
Battle of Secessionville
1855 map of Charleston
Ironclad attack on Fort Sumter
Hibernian Hall and shell-damaged building
Map of Charleston Harbor
St. Michael s Church
The O Connor house on Broad Street
Old Exchange Building
Morris Island stockade prison
Charleston Orphan House
Citadel Square Baptist Church
Shell damage in Circular Church graveyard
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The fascinating Civil War story of Augustine Thomas Smythe is documented in a significant number of letters that he wrote to family and friends during the conflict. This correspondence has survived for more than one and a half centuries because Susan Smythe Bennett, Smythe s daughter and the wife of the Charleston Renaissance author John Bennett, realized the letters intellectual value and donated them to the South Carolina Historical Society. For several decades they have been preserved and made available to the public as the Augustine Thomas Smythe Papers at the Society s Robert Mills Fireproof Building. Recently the Smythe Papers and the majority of the Society s collections were moved to the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston. At this new location, researchers can delve into the lives of this Irish immigrant family, whose lives helped to shape the future of their city and state.
The publication of this volume would not have been possible without the assistance and support of a significant number of people. The editors would like to thank Faye Jensen and the Board of Managers of the South Carolina Historical Society for allowing these letters to be annotated and published and also for their previous support of the publication of other letters found at the South Carolina Historical Society, which appeared in two Civil War documentary editions that preceded this volume. Taken together, these three collections represent a very small but historically significant portion of the rich and vast collections of South Carolina Historical Society. The editors are honored to have had an opportunity to make these letters more accessible to the public. The editors also would like to thank their colleagues at the South Carolina Historical Society and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History for their assistance during this process. In particular, we are grateful for the efforts of Ehren Foley and Wade Dorsey, both of whom took time to read parts of the manuscript and provide their thoughts and suggestions. Many thanks are due to Nic Butler, Robert B. Cuthbert, and B. Powell Harrison (an Adger descendant) for helpful information and to George W. Williams, former historiographer of St. Michael s Church, for an interesting tour of the steeple. The editors also would like to extend a special word of thanks to Alexander Moore, acquisitions editor at the University of South Carolina Press, who played a pivotal role in the publication of this volume and of two previous collaborative editions produced by the editors. Alex Moore has been both an accommodating editor and a friend to the editors, and we are grateful for his support and words of wisdom. Finally, the editors would like to thank their families for their patience during this and previous editing projects. As with all projects of this nature, the efforts of many combine to produce a work that, it is hoped, will enlighten and withstand the scrutiny of future readers. The editors take complete responsibility for any errors or oversights found within this volume.
EDITORIAL METHOD

The editors transcribed the letters in this volume as they were written. No changes were made to spelling or abbreviations. Obvious mistakes are indicated by sic within brackets. The only significant changes made to the correspondence were to adapt names and dates within the dateline to a particular form for consistency. All omissions within quotations and extracts are indicated by ellipses. Words or brief passages that are bracketed represent the transcriber s best interpretations of the material in question.
Introduction

This photograph of Augustine Thomas Smythe is dated 1863. His letters of November 1863 and later mention having his photograph taken by Mr. Cook in Charleston. Courtesy of the South Carolina Historical Society.
O n June 2, 1864, a young lance sergeant in the Confederate Signal Corps penned a letter filled with the timeless hope and frustration of youth. To a close relative he confided that his experiences in the nation s bloodiest war, which had raged for more than three years, were a source of great disappointment and disillusionment. Aunt Janey you know I am ambitious it does gall me cut me to the quick to hear of my companions rising in rank, while I remain here wasting abilities which I know to be naturally good with no prospect of being any higher than I was when I entered the Corps over 18 months ago . I am not satisfied here, nor am I satisfied with my part in this war, so different from what I hoped or planned. 1
Sergeant Augustine Thomas Smythe s part in this war was different from that of his companions on duty in Virginia and undoubtedly different from anything he could have imagined when the war began. In fact, Smythe s duty station in June 1864 was dramatically different from that of all but a handful of participants in the American Civil War. It was not a place of death or destruction, although it provided a bird s-eye view of both. It was, instead, a place of stature and majesty. From the unique vantage of Smythe s post, he could witness the Union siege and bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina: the city of his birth, his youth, and his home even during a time of conflict.
As a sergeant in the Signal Corps, Smythe was destined to spend many days and nights in the 186-foot steeple atop St. Michael s Episcopal Church. There he and a handful of soldiers would pass signals to other posts located around Charleston Harbor. The steeple, however, was more than a signal station. It was an aiming stake (or reference point) and target for the Union artillery bombarding Charleston. William Gilmore Simms made this the subject of his war poem The Angel of the Church, in which he envisioned the church and the city as under the protection of the archangel Michael. From his lofty perch, Smythe could observe Union guns located on Morris Island as they fired round after round at the city. He could discern the smoke of the cannon fire and then watch as each round lofted toward Charleston. Most veered to the right or left of the steeple, but some fell short. After serving in the steeple for some time, he could discern the eventual impact point of artillery rounds on the basis of their trajectory as they approached his post. Eventually he came to view the Union rounds in an almost detached manner, even as they crashed nearby or onto the homes of family and friends on Meeting Street below him.
Smythe s letters are significant for their depiction of an unusual wartime perspective on the bombardment and destruction of much of Charleston. Smythe s viewpoint was the result of his service in the Signal Corps, a branch of the Confederate army that has received little attention in the seemingly endless trove of scholarship that historians have produced since the conclusion of our nation s most destructive conflict more than 150 years ago. The Confederate Signal Corps played a vital role in the defense of Charleston and its environs, and Smythe s letters, perhaps more than any other first-person account, detail the daily lives and service experiences of signalmen in and around the city during the war.
The letters that Smythe sent to family members also are notable for the picture they painted of the bombardment s effect on the city, in particular its lower sections and the society that dwelled there. One of the city s oldest and wealthiest communities, Smythe s neighborhood south of Broad Street was abandoned by the great majority of its residents for more than eighteen months. Smythe s letters provide the reader with an almost postapocalyptic perspective of the often quiet and frequently lawless street where he resided before and during the siege of Charleston.
More than one and a half centuries after they were first written, the letters of A