Two Charlestonians at war : the Civil War odysseys of a Lowcountry aristocrat and a black abolitionist
Barbara L. Bellows (Author)
This book follows the parallel lives of two soldiers from South Carolina--a white aristocrat and a black artisan turned abolitionist--that intersect only once in a wartime prison on Morris Island. Prior to their meeting in October of 1864, Captain Thomas Pinckney, a rice planter and scion of one of America's founding families, fought for the Confederacy in hopes of reclaiming an idealized agrarian past. Sergeant Joseph Humphries Barquet, a free man of color and brick mason, fought for the Union with the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, the first black regiment raised in the northern states. Native sons of Charleston, they were born in the seat of secession during the 1820s, the squall line of history where one world was dying and another coming into being. They were both shaped by the multiple cultures that shared--not always comfortably--in the narrow peninsula that had once been a cosmopolitan capital of the Atlantic world
Print Book, English, 2018
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2018