America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, And The Slow March Toward Civil War

Joseph Kelly “America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, And The Slow March Toward Civil War” The Overlord Press, 2013, 321 pp.

The book begins with the 1862 funeral of James Louis Petigru, probably the only man in Charleston at that time against slavery.  The book then takes the reader back before the Revolutionary war and documents that at that earlier time it was not uncommon for people in South Carolina to oppose slavery.  Of course, the voting restrictions of that time left a small cadre of about 700 people in control of the entire state and opposition to slavery, not uncommon, was steadily squashed.

Charleston led the country into Civil War and in 1863 Union forces surrounded the city of Charleston in vice-like grip on the harbor and held the city hostage for nearly two years, becoming the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, not surpassed in length until WWII and Leningrad.  

In America’s Longest Siege, Joseph Kelly examines the nation’s long struggle with its "peculiar institution" through the hotly contested debates in Charleston, the city at the center of the slave trade. From the earliest slave rebellions to the Nullification crisis to the final act of secession that doomed both the city and the South as a whole.  Kelly also explores the dissenters who tried—and ultimately failed—to stop the oncoming Civil War.

My Notes:

Pg. 16:  Vicksburg suffered siege for forty-seven days before finally surrendering to Grant.  Petersburg in Virginia held out for an amazing nine months.  In the Crimean War, just ten years earlier, Sevastopol lasted eleven months.  But shells would burst over Charleston for 545 days before the city, finally in ruins, surrendered.  It was the longest siege in modern warfare until the Germans at Leningrad in WWII.

Pg. 99:  As late as 1790, when the new nation conducted its first census, whites outnumbered blacks in South Carolina by a considerable margin, almost three to two, and in 1782 the white majority would have been even higher.  (Many slaves had escaped or died during the Revolutionary war: two-thirds in Georgia and about a fifth in South Carolina).

Pg. 135:  Charleston’s economy so stagnant in the 1780s, thrived in the ‘90s, buoyed not only by the revival of the rice trade, but the expansion of a new cash crop, cotton.  South Carolina, in need of labor, again opened its ports to the slave trade, just five years before Congress would, as agreed at the Constitutional convention, ban foreign trade in slavery forever.

Pg. 221:  In August 1831, Nat Turner and a few of his followers went on a rampage they had been planning for months.  Armed with axes and hoes, they killed about sixty whites—many women and children—beheading many victims before being routed by the roused militias and slave patrols, whose own rampages against guilty and innocent blacks alike soon dwarfed the rebel outrages. 

Pg. 230:  It was not until the 1850s that southerners in states other than South Carolina would customarily proclaim that slavery ought to be perpetual.  It took about fifteen years for South Carolina to foist this ideology on the rest of the southern states.

Pg. 316:  Reconstruction was halted by Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican who owed his presidency to another devil’s bargain when he agreed to withdraw Union troops from the South if the Democrats agreed to not contest the votes in the contested Southern states.  Reconstruction had lasted 12 years.