America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward the Civil War
Joseph Kelly, Overlook, 2013, $27.95
South Carolina was the heart of the secessionist movement, and Charleston was the heart of South Carolina, which makes Joseph Kelly’s America’s Longest Siege one of the most important books on the war published in a long time.
The Siege of Charleston by the Federal Army and Navy, lasting nearly two years, was the longest in American history—in fact, the longest modern siege in warfare until Adolf Hitler’s armies surrounded Leningrad in World War II. But Kelly’s book is much more than a military chronicle. It begins with the “unchecked greed” that “created slavery almost from the moment of [Charleston’s] founding in 1670.” By the 1840s and 1850s, Kelly maintains, “slavery had become a virtual ideology, spreading such repression until the American South…was little better than a police state.”
Kelly, a professor of literature at the College of Charleston and author of Our Joyce, a study of the writings of James Joyce, writes with passion, and his conclusions are a model of concision and clarity. He uses Charleston for a cutaway view of the South on the path to war. John C. Calhoun, raging against the Tariff of 1828 that hurt the South in general and South Carolina the most, was responsible for “the first articulation of the division that would lead to the Confederacy: North vs. South, where ‘the South’ includes Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.”
While complaints against the tariff had some legitimacy, it was also true that since the American Revolution, South Carolina and Georgia had pursued “an aristocratic way of life that they could not sustain on their own,” demanding “that the free states subsidize this unnatural, undemocratic arrangement”—an agricultural society built on slave labor.
Before the war, Kelly writes, radicals had swept away dissent: “The issue of slave ideology… became the single most important political issue.” As James Louis Petigru, South Carolina’s most vociferous defender of the Union, famously put it, South Carolina was “too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”
In the spring of 1863, citizens of Charleston, in their arrogance, thought their defenses were impregnable; the Union’s “Swamp Angel,” an 8-inch, 200-pounder Parrott rifle that could fire shells nearly five miles, proved them wrong—at least for a few days. When William T. Sherman toured the ruined city in 1865, he commented, “Anyone who is not satisfied with [this] war should go and see Charleston, and he will pray louder and deeper than ever that the country may, in the long future, will be spared any more war.”
But, Kelly cautions, “The siege guns still echo.” Firebrands like Calhoun “still walk our streets, and their voices are getting louder. If we let them go on pretending much longer that they are the voices of reason….The demagogues will divide one people in two.”
Originally published in the January 2014 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here.
