The Waccamaw Light Artillery
Cousin Corrie provided this informal history of one Confederate unit in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
As the threat of war grew more ominous during the decade of the 1850s, communities throughout South Carolina began organizing and training local militias. Men in the city of Georgetown organized the Georgetown Rifle Guards.
As war neared, three wealthy brothers organized, outfitted, and supplied their own militia group here on the Waccamaw Neck. They called their company the Wachesaw Riflemen, after the name of one of their plantations.
These brothers were sons of Colonel Joshua John Ward, who had developed big grain Carolina Gold rice at Brookgreen Plantation earlier in the century that allowed him to become the wealthiest planter in the area. The three Ward brothers now owned most of the land on the Waccamaw Neck, from Brookgreen Plantation up to the Horry County line.
Not surprisingly, the Wachesaw Riflemen elected the eldest brother, Joshua Ward, who owned Brookgreen and Springfield Plantations, as their captain. They elected his younger brother, Mayham Ward, as their First Lieutenant. The youngest brother, Benjamin Huger Ward, even returned from his studies in Edinburgh, Scotland, to accept the post of Second Lieutenant for the group.
Passage of the Ordinance of Secession in December 1860 stimulated further growth of such military units. Georgetown rice mill engineer Thomas Daggett helped organize and fund a company called the Waccamaw Light Artillery. Its members promptly elected him captain.
When actual hostilities began in April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, local militia companies began reorganizing for state service. Captain Ward’s Wachesaw Riflemen became a part of Captain Daggett’s Waccamaw Light Artillery. When Captain Daggett took on the important job of Ordnance Officer for South Carolina’s whole northern coastal district, Joshua Ward took over command of the Waccamaw Light Artillery.
As Ordnance Officer, Captain Daggett, drawing on his engineering skills, immediately set to work organizing coastal defenses from Georgetown, on Winyah Bay, sixty miles up the coast to Little River, on the North Carolina line.
With the help of gentlemen from the Hot and Hot Fish Club and their workers, he first fortified a bluff on what had been Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill Plantation, recently acquired by wealthy North Carolinian Colonel Daniel Jordan. This fortification held two cannon and overlooked a strategic bend in the Waccamaw River. It was designed to prevent Yankee gunboats from steaming upriver and destroying rice plantations. It also protected the shipping route of boats carrying precious loads of rice downriver. To the Confederacy, rice represented both vital food supplies and a source of desperately needed hard cash when sold on the international market.
Early in the War, soldiers from the Waccamaw Light Artillery, like my father’s father, Zack Dusenberry, who served as Sergeant Major of the unit, manned this fortification. They must have had plenty of free time, perhaps days of boredom waiting for something to happen. I say this because a letter my grandfather sent home in February 1862 from Camp Weston, as they called their location, contained a long poem he had written for his young daughter. It included this touching verse:
It’s for the love I have for you
And all the boys and mama too,
That I am here with sword in hand
To fight and free our native land.
After completing the fortification at Laurel Hill, Captain Daggett designed and supervised the building of Fort Randall at Little River and Fort Ward at Murrells Inlet, both intended to protect their small but important harbors. He then drew on his connections with local planters to stock these forts with cannon, shot, gunpowder, rifles, and ammunition. Fort Randall, Fort Ward, and later, Battery White each boasted several artillery pieces and a small garrison of Waccamaw Light Artillery soldiers.
Captain Joshua Ward, and later his younger brother, Captain Mayham Ward, commanded the Waccamaw Light Artillery throughout the rest of the War. They patrolled the entire sixty miles of coast from Georgetown up to Little River, but concentrated their efforts mainly around their fortified positions.
My Grandpapa Zack’s section of the Waccamaw Light Artillery called themselves Ward’s Rangers and usually operated out of Fort Ward, here at Murrells Inlet. Their main job involved protecting blockade-running vessels tied up at the docks and the saltworks operating along the shore from ground invasion. The threat of their cannon also kept most Union gunboats outside the mouth of the inlet, too far away for the shells they periodically lobbed in to hit any targets accurately.
Only about twenty five men and officers made up Wards Rangers. Still, they managed to capture several parties of Yankee invaders, sometimes under rather strange circumstances. I’ll have to tell you about that one day.
As the war continued and Confederate casualties mounted, demands to replenish diminished forces in other areas drew the younger, more fit men away from the Waccamaw Light Artillery. Soon, only older men like my forty-four-year old grandfather or others limited in their fighting abilities for one reason or another remained.
Some general even decided that Charleston, or somewhere else, needed artillery pieces more than we did and ordered most of ours moved to other locations. Our desperate but clever soldiers then painted pine logs black and set them pointing out of their defenseless forts in place of the missing cannon. This fooled the Yankees for the longest time.
Near the end of the War, Joshua Ward resigned his position as captain and moved to England for the remainder of the conflict. His brother, Mayham Ward, then took command of the unit.
About that same time, the few remaining men of the Waccamaw Light Artillery were ordered inland to guard Yankee prisoners at Florence. Able-bodied men had become so scarce in the Confederacy by that time that my Grandpapa Zack took his fourteen-year-old son with him to Florence to help with the guarding duties.
The Waccamaw Light Artillery finished the War fighting in scattered skirmishes away from the coast. Nobody kept much track of what happened during that confused time, so I can’t tell you a lot about their final days.
After the War, all three Ward brothers returned to their plantations, operating them as best they could under the economic and social realities of Reconstruction. My Grandpapa Zack also returned to his home on the Waccamaw Neck. He went on to live a long and productive life, but that’s another story.