Review - "Holding Charleston by the Bridle: Castle Pinckney and the Civil War" by Roberts & Locke

[Holding Charleston by the Bridle: Castle Pinckney and the Civil War by W. Clifford Roberts, Jr. & Matthew A.M. Locke (Savas Beatie, 2024). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxviii,206/287. ISBN:978-1-61121-714-8. $32.95]

It certainly wasn't for want of trying, but every Union effort to carry Charleston harbor by direct land and naval assault and finally seize the Cradle of Secession failed. Instead, Charleston's fate would ultimately be determined by outside forces. In February 1865, the city and its surrounding forts, outflanked and isolated by General William T. Sherman's inexorable inland advance up through the Carolinas, were evacuated by their defenders.

So how did Charleston hold out for so long when so many other Confederate fortresses and cities were unable to cope with the Union's vast superiority in combined operations technology and strength? One major factor was the harbor's extensive defense in depth, which consisted of mutually supporting forts and batteries, torpedoes, and fixed obstructions, all backed by a small but powerful ironclad flotilla. That combination proved so effective that even the perimeter, which consisted principally of forts Sumter, Moultrie, and Johnson, successfully resisted both heavy enemy land forces and the Union Navy's greatest concentration of ironclad warships. That maintenance of the harbor's outermost cordon of defense meant that interior posts were left relatively untested throughout the conflict and their own stories largely neglected in the military history literature. As just one example, the wartime history of Castle Pinckney, a Second System fort situated on Shute's Folly Island that oversaw both the mouth of the Cooper River and the city of Charleston's commercial waterfront, has been completely overshadowed by those of the outer forts (Sumter in particular). Ably bringing that topic to the forefront is W. Clifford Roberts, Jr. and Matthew A.M. Locke's Holding Charleston by the Bridle: Castle Pinckney and the Civil War.

Roberts and Locke's study touches upon the entire length of Castle Pinckney's existence, even addressing its Colonial-era antecedents. During the Early Republic period, much of the nation's military spending went into coastal defense, and the need for more modern fortifications on Shute's Island was well recognized by local, state, and national planners. That recognition resulted in Castle Pinckney being built over the remains of the old Fort Pinckney. With its guns capable of hitting Charleston itself, the Second System fort figured prominently during the Nullification Crisis, and the harbor post also served as a holding facility for Second Seminole War prisoners (which would not be the last time the fort doubled as a prison). Throughout the book the authors do a fine job of selecting which aspects of the fort's long history to emphasize, and both of those events are discussed. However, as time went on the Shute's Folly fort's utility as a first-line military position was overtaken by the nation's new Third System of coastal defense, which addressed major advances in engineering and technology (in particular, more powerful and longer range artillery).

Appropriately, perhaps half the book covers the Civil War-era, with Pinckney gaining early distinction as the first fort in the harbor seized by hastily organized southern militia. Throughout its history, Pinckney's security and relative isolation made it useful as a multi-purpose facility, and during the Civil War it also housed prisoners (the first batch being those captured at Manassas in 1861). In addition to detailing that part of its story, Roberts and Locke also recount at length the continual defensive improvements made to the fort, which included massive sand revetment, armament upgrades, wall reinforcement to hold up the increased weight, and new enclosed field works to address the vulnerability of the fort's open rear. Their text also offers numerous insights into the personalities and daily lives of the fort's rotating series of defending units and leaders. While increasingly massive Union rifled siege artillery gradually pounded Sumter into rubble from 1863 onward, the more distant Pinckney did not escape occasional shelling. Nevertheless, that threat was never far from the minds of its defenders and much of the text serves as a highly informative case study of the many ways in which the Confederates responded to the enemy's steadily growing edge in heavy artillery capabilities with effective military engineering countermeasures of their own.

The volume is filled with historical maps, engineering drawings, and both period and modern photographs. Those complementing the narrative's exploration of Pinckney's Civil War history are especially helpful in making more intelligible the many physical alterations made to the fort as the war progressed. Enhancing the reference value of the book is its extensive appendix section, which is filled with a series of prisoner list and defending unit rosters along with a bevy of additional historical documents.

After the Civil War, federal Reconstruction governments used Castle Pinckney as a place to confine prisoners convicted by martial law's military commissions. These were their own soldiers as well as southern civilians held there for various crimes. Existing island infrastructure as well as enough area for new construction also made Pinckney suitable as a lighthouse system supply depot, and that peacetime role is also detailed in the text.

For the next hundred years, as recounted in the book, governmental entities at all levels (local, state, and federal) struggled to determine how or if to preserve Castle Pinckney. During that time responsibility for the fort passed through a series of historical associations and government departments, with some of the latter doubting its historical value as being worthy of expensive, long-term restoration and maintenance. Aptly describing Castle Pinckney as a "hot potato" alternately maintained and neglected by various responsible parties, the authors, also citing the fort's archaeological treasures unearthed during recent excavations, make a strong case for Pinckney being still worthy of both study and preservation. Regular harbor channel work, which has resulted in Shute Island's near complete erosion into the sea, continues to threaten the fort's delicate existence, but the Castle Pinckney Historical Preservation Society remains determined to both save it and keep its historical memory alive for future generations. This fine book can certainly aid in that worthy mission.