Book News: The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Due to their relative scarcity, any new title covering some aspect of the war along the South Atlantic front is bound to at least attract my attention. Ron Roth's upcoming book The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry: How a Confederate Artillery Battery and a Black Union Regiment Defined the War (McFarland, 2019) looks to be in line with my reading interests.

From the description: "Some of the most dramatic and consequential events of the Civil War era took place in the South Carolina Lowcountry between Charleston and Savannah. From fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett's inflammatory 1844 speech in Bluffton calling for secession, to the last desperate attempts by Confederate forces to halt Sherman's juggernaut, the region was torn apart by war."

Recruited largely from the Beaufort County area of South Carolina's Lowcountry, the subjects of Roth's dual history study are the Confederate Army's Beaufort Volunteer Artillery and the U.S. Army's First South Carolina Volunteer regiment (later redesignated the 33rd USCT). While the 1st South Carolina has received significant attention of late, particularly in books from Stephen Ash and John Saucer, the Beaufort Artillery has never received a published treatment on this scale before (at least I am not aware of any in existence). The battery was involved in many understudied actions in the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.