Two Charlestonians at War ― The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist

An incredible and fresh contribution to the saga of the Civil War, Barbara Bellows 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 fateful 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. Despite all their obvious contrasts, each man’s life story—never before told—illuminates the other in this engrossing and masterfully written history.

Barbara L. Bellows is the co author of God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind and the author of Benevolence among Slaveholders: Caring for the Poor in Charleston, 1760–1860 and A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition.