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Two Charlestonians at War - The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist (Hardcover)
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Two Charlestonians at War - The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist (Hardcover)
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Total price: R996
Discovery Miles: 9 960
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Tracing the intersecting lives of a Confederate plantation owner
and a free black Union soldier, Barbara L. Bellows' Two
Charlestonians at War offers a poignant allegory of the fraught,
interdependent relationship between wartime enemies in the Civil
War South. Through the eyes of these very different soldiers,
Bellows brings a remarkable, new perspective to the oft-told saga
of the Civil War. Recounted in alternating chapters, the lives of
Charleston natives born a mile a part, Captain Thomas Pinckney and
Sergeant Joseph Humphries Barquet, illuminate one another's motives
for joining the war as well as the experiences that shaped their
worldviews. Pinckney, a rice planter and scion of one of America's
founding families, joined the Confederacy in hope of reclaiming an
idealized agrarian past; and Barquet, a free man of color and brick
mason, fought with the Union to claim his rights as an American
citizen. Their circumstances set the two men on seemingly divergent
paths that nonetheless crossed on the embattled coast of South
Carolina. Born free in 1823, Barquet grew up among Charleston's
tight-knit community of the ""colored elite."" During his twenties,
he joined the northward exodus of free blacks leaving the city and
began his nomadic career as a tireless campaigner for black rights
and abolition. In 1863, at age forty, he enlisted in the 54th
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry- the renowned ""Glory"" regiment
of northern black men. His varied challenges and struggles,
including his later frustrated attempts to play a role in postwar
Republican politics in Illinois, provide a panoramic view of the
free black experience in nineteenth-century America. In contrast to
the questing Barquet, Thomas Pinckney remained deeply connected to
the rice fields and maritime forests of South Carolina. He greeted
the arrival of war by establishing a home guard to protect his
family's Santee River plantations that would later integrate into
the 4th South Carolina Cavalry. After the war, Pinckney distanced
himself from the racist violence of Reconstruction politics and
focused on the daunting task of restoring his ruined plantations
with newly freed laborers. The two Charlestonians' chance encounter
on Morris Island, where in 1864 Sergeant Barquet stood guard over
the captured Captain Pinckney, inspired Bellows' compelling
narrative. Her extensive research adds rich detail to our knowledge
of the dynamics between whites and free blacks during this
tumultuous era. Two Charlestonians at War gives readers an intimate
depiction of the ideological distance that might separate American
citizens even as their shared history unites them.
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