Rivers Bridge

February 14, 2022

“Breathe in. Hold your breath. Breathe.” The CT spoke to me, as it always does, same orders, same tone. The nurse, Katie, was at the controls. She got me settled on the platform, slid me inside the donut, and cranked up the engine, the way I think of it. Actually she touched a key on a computer. In ten minutes she yelled “All done!” and I was out of there.

The radiologist sent his analysis late Thursday. All systems look good, or “unchanged”; the residual radiation lung damage is still there.  This was CT scan number 20 over three years. I’m on a streak of four encouraging ones. Next week the doc will tell me if he’ll stretch them to every six months. Sandy then will be getting a sonogram, purely exploratory, her doctor says. We’re a pair.

We talked about our next attempt to change the scenery. She mentioned Battle of Rivers Bridge State Park or Historic Site.  She said it’s the only South Carolina state park that memorializes Civil War action. Fort Sumter, where the war started on that infamous day, April 12, 1861, is a national monument, not a state park. I never heard of Rivers Bridge so I looked it up. It’s about 75 miles south of Columbia, one of the smallest state parks, a dot on the map.

Civil War history now reminds me of my OK/not-OK connection to the state. The Trump-flavored politics of state government tells us some folks here are still fighting the war. The Monument to the Confederate Dead in Anderson, erected in 1902, bears this inscription:

“The world shall yet decide, In truth’s clear far-off light, That the soldiers who wore the gray and died, With Lee were in the right.”

Many things have changed since 1902. But the Lost Cause is out there.

Still, we’re settled in, breathing the perfect air of the Blue Ridge foothills. We love the people we’ve met, young and not so young. We no longer shiver in the damp Mid-Atlantic winter. Our doctors have worked miracles, with compassion. Here we are.

So—in December 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, with 60,000 men in two armies, finished his rampaging march from Atlanta to Savannah. He then turned north into the heart of the Carolinas en route to meeting Grant near Richmond, the plan being to finish off Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by spring.

In early February 1865 Rivers Bridge had its hiccup of history: it’s where 1,200 exhausted South Carolina rebels tried to stop a force of 5,000 veteran Union soldiers hungry to end the war. The Yanks flanked the rebs and brushed them out of the way with about 100 dead and wounded on each side. They pushed on to Columbia, which surrendered February 17. Fires started either by accident or by one side or the other—no one knows—burned the city to the ground.

Around then rebel Major General Wade Hampton, once owner of 1,000 slaves and huge plantations, shows up prominently in state history. He fled his native Columbia as the Union Army arrived and ended up on the staff of General Joe Johnston, who surrendered his starving, tattered army April 18, nine days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

When the war ended Hampton, a Democrat, fought against Reconstruction as leader of the Redeemers, who worked to restore White state officeholders. He opposed President Grant’s pursuit of the Ku Klux Klan. Violence spread. In 1871 Grant suspended habeus corpus and sent federal troops to nine South Carolina counties to arrest and prosecute Klan members.

During Hampton’s 1876 campaign for governor he was supported by paramilitary “rifle club” Red Shirts, who attacked Blacks and White Republican voters. On July 4, 1876, the nation’s Centennial, a White mob murdered five Blacks in Hamburg, S.C., and pillaged the homes of every Black family. In October at least 17 Blacks and as many as 150 were killed by an armed mob in Ellenton.

Both parties claimed to have won the gubernatorial election. Six months later the state Supreme Court ruled Hampton the winner. The election of Republican President Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction, but anti-Black violence continued throughout the South. Hampton later served two terms in the U.S. Senate. Schools, parks, and roads all over the state are named after him.

The Hampton story isn’t unique. In Charleston, tourists line up to admire the Nathaniel Russell House built by wealthy Charlestonian Nathaniel Russell (1738-1820). The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and described in the brochures as an “architectural marvel.” Russell made his millions as a slave trader. The brochures call him a “prominent merchant.”

Am I being persnickety to wonder about this infatuation with rich slaveowners? We find lovely plantation homes all over the South, many, maybe most built by slaves. Sure it was another time, folks had different values and priorities. “States rights” was more important in the South than national unity. But owning human beings, buying and selling them, whipping them, breaking up families, hunting them down when they escaped? That’s why we had the Civil War.

The association of “class” with money isn’t an antebellum Southern eccentricity; some folks admire rich people regardless of how they got rich. Failed real estate salesman Trump has lots of fans. When the Civil War started Hampton, who had no military experience but wanted to command soldiers, financed his own cavalry regiment.

Historic bigotry wasn’t only a Southern tragedy. I recall the racial ugliness and violence of busing in Boston and other Northern places even in the 1970s. We look around our Southern environs, life is different. The Klan still exists in the shadows among other fringe groups, but has been in long decline.

I drive on Wade Hampton Boulevard almost every day and often pass Wade Hampton High School. We have a fifteen-foot-high statue of Hampton in uniform on his horse in Columbia. He once was called “the savior of South Carolina.” Hampton’s plantation home, Millwood, which occupied 13,000 acres, and his two other estate homes in Columbia were destroyed in the February 1865 fire, so not available for tours, although the ruins are on the National Register of Historic Places.

I wonder about Rivers Bridge, commemorating a Civil War footnote, a one-day skirmish of no strategic importance. In 1876 the Confederate dead were reburied in a mass grave, an annual ceremony is held. In 1945 the site became a state park. Like Russell’s house and Hampton’s ruin, it made it onto the National Register. We may go, or not.