page_title: Battery White
section_title: Battery White
hierarchical_section_title: Battery White / Battery White
caption_attribution_description: English: James Heyward Trapier (1815-1865)
context_page_description: Battery White was an artillery battery constructed by the Confederates during the American Civil War. Built in 1862–63 to defend Winyah Bay on the South Carolina coast, the battery was strongly situated and constructed; however, it was inadequately manned, and was captured without resistance during the final months of the war.
  The battery is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is located on private land, but is open to the public.
context_section_description: Later in August 1862, Pemberton was promoted to lieutenant general and sent to the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, where he would eventually surrender Vicksburg.  He was replaced in the Department of South Carolina and Georgia by Beauregard, who assumed command on September 24, 1862.  The new commander supported the fortification of Winyah Bay: on October 8, 1862, he assured Governor Pickens that he had ordered the construction of a battery of five or six pieces of artillery at Mayrant's Bluff; on November 10, he wrote Colonel James Chesnut, Jr. that the battery was "armed and completed", and that he had sent a new regiment of the State Reserves to General James H. Trapier, in command of the Georgetown District.
  Trapier was less than pleased with the troops and artillery that he had been given.  The new regiment, he noted, arrived at the battery without arms and ammunition; and as Reserves, would only be in service for 90 days, not enough time to make effective soldiers of them even had they been armed.  He had also been given fairly light guns; what he wanted was Columbiads, suitable for defending the battery and the bay against incursions by ironclads.
  Despite the paucity of men and weaponry, the new battery proved effective.  On November 11, 1862, two Union gunboats entered Winyah Bay and began firing on the Mayrant's Bluff works.  The Second South Carolina Artillery, which had set up nine guns in the fortification, responded; and within a few minutes, the Federal vessels were forced to retire.
  In February 1863, Trapier reported that the Mayrant's Bluff fortification, now named Battery White, was occupied by only 53 men and nine guns.  Even this small force sufficed to stop Federal incursions up the rivers of Winyah Bay.  However, rice production in the Georgetown area did not recover: the raids had destroyed too much of the physical plant, carried off too many of the slaves, and created too much uncertainty for planters to return to anything near full production.
  The battery continued to lose manpower, despite Trapier's ongoing calls for more troops and guns.  In October 1864, a body of eleven deserters from the Confederate German Artillery reached the gunboat USS Potomska; they reported that there was great discontent among the troops, and that many would desert were they not so strongly guarded.  They also reported that there were ten guns at the battery; the captain of Potomska concluded that the bay was too well defended for him to render aid to prospective deserters.
caption: James H. Trapier
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