Rivers Bridge

From Columbia, SC, due south on mostly two lane roads you follow the Southern and then the Savannah Highways.  They are basically the same road, the one a major portion of Union General Sherman’s army marched north on from Savannah, GA, as they chased Confederate General Johnson’s army into North Carolina.

We drove south through many small and picturesquely named towns like Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.  But no counties named Scandinavia.  As we drove south we began to see less leafy trees and more evergreens, and then palmettos and finally Mona shouted out, “There’s Spanish moss!”  Well, Mona does not shout out, but for her, it was a shout out. She was getting warmer just seeing the low country vegetation.

Libraries were on our morning list of things to do and we found several with books to sell.  None fit Mona’s books required list though.  But as she likes to say, “It’s the hunt, not the find, that’s most fun.”

On my agenda was a battlefield of one of the very last actions of the Civil War.  In January, 1865, Sherman took his 60,000 man Union Army north out of Savannah in a two pronged march that would take him to Columbia, South Carolina (see yesterday’s post) but the remaining veterans of Johnsons army, knowing Robert E Lee was still holding off  Grant’s superior Federal force in Virginia, were willing to do anything to hold back Sherman.

The most strategic location to mount a defense was along a shallow but wide and swampy river called The Salkehatchie. So the Rebel general who only one and a half years earlier had charged his corps against the Little Round Top at Gettysburg, Lafayette Mclaws, now placed his meager but determined 2,000 or so veterans to building a formidable series of breastworks and abatis (sharpened stakes and branches driven into the ground at the base of the earthworks to stop cavalry or infantry) and made the best use possible of the dark and water moccasin snake filled swamps on each side of the river.

On February 2^nd the first attack came.  A Union frontal assault that was hard fought but pushed back into the cold swamp water.  Union General Howard knew he would have to turn the flanks of McLaws works to win the fight.  And he had the 5,000 men to do it.

McLaws knew he could too, but if he could just give Johnson time to get the Rebel army around Columbia perhaps the South Carolina capitol city, and home of secession, could yet be saved from Sherman’s torch.

After a cold night which found many old time Union Veterans spending it knee deep in the swamp water, the attacks on McLaws flanks were coordinated.  The blast of men in blue at dawn came out of the woods on the Confederate right first and it was an almost immediate rout.  There were just too many Union soldiers.  But McLaws men fought with the passion of most men seeing their own homes burned and wives chased into forests in fear of life and chastity.

At the end of the second days fight about 100 dead, wounded and missing were counted by each side.  But the Confederates had no time to retrieve their men on the field as they retreated north.  The Union victors, buried them where found on the field, unknown but to God.

Two months later Sherman would surround Johnsons Army in North Carolina at a plantation known as Bennet Place.  Lee had already surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. The war was effectively over.

But down here in these woods and swamps along the Salkehatchie River, little changed today from 1865 except for the trails and markers on the battlefield, the now unknown Confederate dead moldered in their un-marked graves. Eleven years after the battle a group of men from the area developed a Memorial Organization to move the dead they could find to a place where people would gather annually on May 10, Confederate Memorial Day in North and South Carolina, to honor the fallen of ‘The 

                                                                        Cause’, from then on.

  

May 10 2014 was no exception. Following in the tradition of every generation since the bodies were re-interred, but now with only grandsons of veterans, not sons or the vets themselves. Hundreds gathered for the annual picnic, speeches, and firing over the graves at this, one of the last battlefields of the Civil War.

Scholars and hobbyists still ask why the Civil War had to occur, and why the men of the south, mostly non-slave owners themselves, wanted to fight at all.  The reasons may be unclear and confusing.  But one stands out above the others from most of the Southern Veterans in their own remembered or written words: States Rights.  Their states were their real home country, not the union of states called America. And once Lincoln sent armed troops to bring the seceded states back into the fold, after Southern guns had bombarded Fort Sumter, war to the bitter end was inevitable.

 

But at the first memorial day at Rivers Bridge Battlefield Memorial Park, and the one this year, the American flag was flown high above the Confederate battle flag in complete unity of purpose and home country. The old veterans and their families, almost to a man, would never acknowledge they were wrong in seeking state over national rights, but the war was over and they were Americans all once more. And they are today.

The South would rise again, and after WW 2 rise higher than she had ever gone before.  But as a vital part of the vital country founded by older veterans of an earlier war. Many of those 18^th century warriors gave their lives on Southern battlefields just a few decades before Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Rivers Bridge. At places like Cowpens, Kings Mountain, and Brattonville (see yesterdays post)

All pics from Rivers Bridge are on FACEBOOK

We left the battlefield and the memorial park but not before I got proof that I met all of Mona’s needs before traipsing off into the bush for two hours of my own time travel. That’s a women’s rest room behind the car.  I’d walked Shiloh battlefield  in South Central Tennessee for six hours without finding one so HAVE to not make that mistake again!

Frog was happily waiting for Toad, and for us to reload her and get ready to go.  We’re parked tonight in the full hookup lot at the Cummin’s diesel shop in Savannah and will probably find a Walmart to stay in for a couple of days as we explore the city, and the beaches, of North Georgia.  Then its south to St. Simon and Jekyll Islands, and beyond into Florida. We’re on the road again!

-Ken