The enemy’s forces in the action, as reported by him, comprised the 14th and four companies of the 12th South Carolina, a section of Leake’s Virginia battery, and a detachment of cavalry, forty-two in number, who are commended as participating with their double-barreled shotguns and navy revolvers. Colonel James Jones, of the 14th, commanded. Besides these troops General Pemberton hurried forward from Pocotaligo a large part of a Tennessee brigade, under General Donelson, which met the retreating troops after the action was over.

The Union losses consisted of three men of the 8th Michigan killed, and one officer, Major Watson, and eight men of the same regiment, three men of the 48th New York, and two of the 50th Pennsylvania, wounded,—in all, seventeen.

The enemy acknowledged, in official reports, the loss of an officer and seven men killed, and an officer and twenty-three men wounded,—in all, thirty-two.

General Stevens warmly commended the conduct of his troops and the services of his staff, Captain Hazard Stevens, assistant adjutant-general; Lieutenants William T. Lusk and Benjamin R. Lyons, aides; Andrew J. Holbrook, volunteer aide; Henry S. Tafft and William S. Cogswell, signal officers; and Captain Charles A. Fuller, quartermaster.

This action was almost the first Union success achieved by the army since the disaster of Bull Run, and the thanks of the government were extended in general orders to General Stevens and his command for their victory, styled the battle of Port Royal Ferry.

CHAPTER LI
BEAUFORT.—CAMPAIGN PLANNED AGAINST CHARLESTON

After the action of Port Royal Ferry, General Stevens continued to hold Beaufort and the neighboring islands for five months, without the occurrence of any military event of importance, chiefly occupied in thoroughly drilling and disciplining his troops. Lieutenant Abraham Cottrell, of the 8th Michigan, was added to the staff as aide. A battalion of the 1st Massachusetts cavalry, under Lieutenant-Colonel H.B. Sargent, was added to his command; also another section of Battery E of the 3d artillery, Captain A.P. Rockwell’s Connecticut light battery, and a company of Serrell’s New York engineers, under Captain Alfred F. Sears, with a pontoon bridge equipment. His attention, moreover, was largely taken up with other matters, not military, but growing out of the peculiar conditions there. He caused the public library, which has already been mentioned, with several fine private libraries added to it, to be put in order, restored to the shelves and catalogued, and thrown open for the use of the troops. Corporal Joseph Matthews, Joseph Hall, and George Lispenard, of Company E of the Highlanders, were busy at this work for several months. He intended that the library, thus preserved, should be cared for and kept in the town where it belonged, and restored to the inhabitants when they resumed their allegiance and returned to their homes. But one day the treasury agent, Colonel William H. Reynolds, presented himself, and demanded the books as captured rebel property, to be sold for the benefit of the government,—a demand which General Stevens indignantly and peremptorily rejected. A month later the agent again appeared with a formal demand from the Secretary of the Treasury for the library, indorsed by General Sherman with an order to give them up. Even then General Stevens suspended the order, and wrote a strong protest to General Sherman, setting forth the vandal character of the proposed action, and urging him to represent the matter in its true light to the government, and secure the revocation of the order. But General Sherman was unwilling to take such a responsibility, and there was no alternative but to give up the books.

General Stevens disapproved the action of the government in sending such treasury agents into the field, with independent authority to gather up cotton and other property, as meddling with military operations, encroaching on the authority of military commanders, and opening the door for dishonest or over-zealous agents to plunder private property. Such work, he declared, should be done by the army through the quartermaster’s department, and the captured property then turned over to the Treasury Department.

Apprehensive that the numerous negroes within his lines might become vagrant and burdensome unless brought under control and made self-supporting, General Sherman issued an elaborate order, providing for teaching them the elementary branches, and inducing them to plant crops. The latter requirement General Stevens heartily approved, but he seriously doubted the propriety of the former, and wrote General Sherman, pointing out that to educate the blacks and raise hopes of freedom in their breast would make their condition doubly hard in case, on the suppression of the rebellion, they had to return to their masters, and that the order, manifestly looking to freeing the slaves, might alienate the support of the border States from the Union cause. This view now seems reactionary, but it should be borne in mind that the great mass of Union soldiers sprang to arms, not to free the slaves, but to preserve the Union. Lincoln himself guided his course by the same view of not alienating the border States, withholding his emancipation proclamation until the progress of public opinion made it expedient. Writes General Sherman in reply:—