The Burning of Darien

WORDS BY BUDDY SULLIVAN ILLUSTRATION BY HAILEY MACISSAC

“In the end, nothing was left of Darien. Darien, Georgia, is amongst the things that was. Those beautiful mills, houses and stores are no more. All that remains of a once beautiful town is one mass of smoldering ruins one of the effects of civil war.”

The burning of Darien was one of the most controversial events of the Civil War. Historian Merton Coulter called the destruction of Darien by federal troops on June 11, 1863, a “barbaric act and one of the best examples of wanton vandalism of the entire war.”

The fullest account, by historian Spencer B. King, is Darien: The Death and Rebirth of a Southern Town . In his book, King labeled Union commander Col. James Montgomery as a “destructive vandal ranking on a scale somewhere between Hitler and Attila the Hun.”

Paradoxically, as significant as this event is to the town’s history, the story of Darien’s burning on that warm day in 1863 is only vaguely familiar even to people who have lived there their whole lives, despite a proliferation of books and articles about the incident.

On June 11, four federal gunboats transporting troops of the 54th Massachusetts and the 2nd South Carolina volunteer regiments departed from their base on occupied St. Simons Island, and attacked Darien. The units were composed of Black troops and White officers, recruited both in the North and the South largely for the purpose of staging raids on civilian targets such as Darien.

The operation was under the overall command of Montgomery. His immediate subordinate was Col. Robert G. Shaw, the 25-year-old commander of the 54th Massachusetts who had recruited and trained his regiment in Boston.

Darien was largely a deserted town when the four Union vessels landed their troops on the waterfront. After naval raids on the nearby plantations the previous year, virtually the entire population of Darien had departed, seeking refuge in other parts of McIntosh County. Also, Darien was undefended. No Confederate troops were nearby, thus making it difficult to establish a rationale for the looting and destruction of Darien.

An argument could be made that the burning was a precursor to the concept of “total war” as it came to be understood. In later wars, human conflict became more than simple confrontations between armies on a battlefield or fleets at sea. Total war entailed destruction against civilian populations and infrastructure, whether such actions affected the course or outcome of a war.

Darien had little strategic importance to merit the attention of either the Confederate or Union war efforts in 1863. The town had lost much of its former significance as a seaport and cotton market after the railroads bypassed Darien in the late 1830s, with inland cotton going to Savannah for export. By 1860, Darien had no economic or military value.

Clues to the rationale behind the destruction lie in the letters of Shaw, both from the official records and to his family. It is fortunate that Shaw committed his concerns to paper in the immediate aftermath of the raid, for he was killed in action only a month later while leading the 54th Massachusetts in an unsuccessful attempt to take Battery Wagner near Charleston, an incident vividly depicted in the 1989 movie Glory.

Writing to his wife Annie the day after the burning, Shaw noted, “… About noon we came in sight of Darien, a beautiful little town. Our artillery peppered it a little as we came up, and then our three boats made fast to the wharves, and we landed our troops. The town was deserted, with the exception of two white women and two negroes…after the town was pretty thoroughly disemboweled, Montgomery said to me, ‘I shall burn this town.’ He speaks always in a very low tone and has quite a sweet smile when addressing you. I told him I did not want the responsibility of it, and he was only too happy to take it all on his shoulders. So the pretty little place was burnt to the ground, and not a shed remains standing. Montgomery fired the last buildings with his own hand. One of my companies assisted in it, because he ordered them out, and I had to obey.”

Shaw continued, “You must bear in mind that not a shot had been fired at us from the place…all the inhabitants had fled on our approach. The reasons he gave me for destroying Darien was that the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old. In theory it may seem all right to some, but when it comes to being made the instrument of the Lord’s vengeance, I myself don’t like it.” Then he says, ‘We are outlawed, and therefore are not bound by the rules of regular warfare.’ That makes it none the less revolting to wreak our vengeance on the innocent and the defenseless … no good reason can be given for doing such a thing …”

The match that lit the blaze that leveled Darien actually went further back than Montgomery.

E.M. Coulter, noted that General David Hunter, commander of Union forces at Hilton Head from which the 54th and the 2nd South Carolina departed for St. Simons, wrote a letter to Governor

John Andrews of Massachusetts that is revealing. Hunter indicated to Andrews on June 3 that the Darien expedition was “but the initial step of a system of operations which will rapidly compel the Rebels to lay down their arms and sue for restoration to the Union… leaving desolate the most fertile and productive of their counties along the seaboard.” Hunter, in fact, had already ordered similar raids on several South Carolina rice plantations.

However, Hunter apparently had second thoughts about the proposed destruction of Darien, giving Montgomery amended instructions on the eve of departure from Hilton Head. Coulter notes, “Hunter said that even in light of the Confederate government’s attitude toward negro troops, in order to give the Confederates as little excuse as possible for charging atrocities to the United States, Montgomery should use the utmost strictness ‘in avoiding any devastation which does not strike immediately the right of war. Though unquestionable in certain extreme cases, is not to be lightly used … All household furniture, libraries, churches and hospitals you will of course spare.’”

Montgomery decided to interpret these revised instructions to conform to his personal views and destroyed Darien anyway, in contradiction of his superior’s orders.

The troops ransacked most of the houses and businesses in town and loaded their vessels with their loot before putting the match to the community. Included were items as disparate as household furniture, books, public records, farm equipment, crockery, cookware, and all manner of other assorted plunder.

Darien was then burned as groups, primarily comprising the 2nd South Carolina, went throughout the town putting the torch to individual structures, including businesses, private homes, public buildings, and churches. The last areas to be set ablaze were the commercial structures and warehouses along the waterfront, some of which were storage facilities for highly-flammable naval stores, such as rosin, pitch, and lumber.

All that survived were the exterior walls of a two-story store on the upper bluff, a portion of the Methodist Church and three other small buildings.

Samuel Boyer, a naval surgeon attached to one of the Union warships blockading nearby Doboy Sound, accompanied the raid. He later wrote: “At 3 p.m., the Army troops, i.e. Colonel Montgomery’s regiment of contrabands, set fire to Darien, and in a short time the whole place was one mass of flame. The sight was beautiful. Whether it was proper and pat to burn the place I know not, but I do know that the place was reduced to ashes…We did not ascend the river all the way to Darien on account of our vessel being too large a craft. Consequently, we have nothing to do with the burning of Darien, being merely spectators… Darien, Georgia is amongst the things that was. Those beautiful mills, houses and stores are no more. All that remains of a once beautiful town is one mass of smoldering ruins — one of the effects of civil war.”

“In the end, nothing was left of Darien,” wrote another eyewitness. “Darien is nothing but a blackened pile of ashes. The invaders even shot the cattle in the streets and left them there… There is not a living soul in the town.”

History has not been kind to Shaw in the Darien affair. Inexplicably, it was Shaw who was accorded most of the blame for Darien’s destruction, when it was actually Montgomery who planned the raid and ultimately decided to burn Darien. Shaw was only carrying out Montgomery’s orders, under protest as noted earlier, reporting to his superiors his displeasure with Montgomery, and disavowing any responsibility for the destruction.

Shaw came from an aristocratic abolitionist Boston family. After the war, Shaw’s mother, defending the memory of her late son, provided a financial contribution toward the building of the St. Andrews Episcopal Church’s new chapel at the Ridge, which preceded by several years the rebuilding of the destroyed church on Vernon Square. For the remainder of her life, Mrs. Shaw worked to clear the reputation of her son who had protested the burning of Darien precedent to, and following, the events themselves, yet was incorrectly accorded much of the blame by locals for the incident.

As for Darien, the story of how the enterprising little town rose from the ashes and made an economic recovery is a familiar one. Darien rebuilt, its commercial resurgence based on a flourishing timber economy that lasted well into the 20th century.

An oppressive swelter engulfs the late summer marsh.

A fish jumps. Splashes. Grasses rustle.