Fort Howell is an earthworks fort built in 1864 during the American Civil War, located on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It was named in honor of Union Army Brigadier General Joshua B. Howell, and Its primary function was to protect Mitchelville, a Freedman's town located to its east.
It was named to the National Register of Historic Places on June 15, 2011. It was named as a site on the National Park Service's Network to Freedom, Underground Railroad. It is also a site on the Civil War Discovery Trail http://www.civilwar.org/civil-war-discovery-trail/ The Fort is owned by the Hilton Head Island Land Trust, Inc., a non-profit organization whose goal is to protect and preserve the Fort in perpetuity.
Current Condition Fort Howell, an essentially pentagonal enclosure constructed of built-up earth, is quite discernible despite natural erosion and the growth of trees and other vegetation over a period of almost 150 years. Today, it is an historic site that is open to the public with adjacent areas for parking and several interpretive signs. There is a kiosk with signage which explains the history surrounding the Fort. Metal figures representing soldiers and others, created by local artist, Mary Ann Ford, are placed about the grounds. Admission is free and the Fort is open from dawn to dusk. Additionally, guided tours are provided in partnership between the Hilton Head Island Land Trust, Inc.http://www.hhilandtrust.org/ and the Coastal Discovery Museum.https://www.coastaldiscovery.org/home/discover-and-learn/walkstalkstours/
History
Fort Howell is an earthworks fort built in 1864 during the American Civil War by the 32nd United States Colored Infantry Regiment (Union) from Pennsylvania and the 144th New York Infantry - regiments belonging to the Hilton Head District, Department of the South, United States Army.archive It was constructed from late August or early September to mid-October 1864, using shovels, spades, picks, and axes, and working under the supervision of Captain Patrick McGuire of Company A, 1st New York Engineers and the officers and enlisted men of several companies of that regiment. It was built as a semi-permanent fort designed to be manned by artillerymen serving a variety of garrison, siege, or "seacoast" artillery pieces. Intended to protect the approaches to the nearby freedman's village of Mitchelville, it was constructed on an open site just southwest of the settlement, likely on a recently logged site or a fallow cotton field.
The Fort was designed to hold as many as 27 guns, 16 of them grouped in barbette batteries firing from wooden platforms over the parapet wall, and 11 of them grouped in embrasure batteries firing through openings in the parapet wall. Intended to protect the approaches to the nearby freedmen's village of Mitchelville, it was constructed on an open site just southwest of the settlement, likely on a recently logged site or a fallow cotton field, and covers more than 3 acres of land.
While the Fort saw no action, it served as a testament to the excellent skills of Chief Engineer and Captain Charles Suter, and military engineering exhibited by the men of the day as a permanent and defensible earthwork fort.See, for a typical Civil War edition, Dennis Hart Mahan, A Treatise on Field Fortification: Containing Instructions on the Methods of Laying Out, Constructing, Defending, and Attacking Intrenchments, with the General Outlines Also of the Arrangement, the Attack and Defence of Permanent Fortifications (New York : J. Wiley, 1861). The exterior of the fort featured a moat and wooden palisade - sharpened logs driven into the ground to slow advancing troops. The area directly adjacent to the fort walls was further protected by guns mounted in bastions.
Construction
Two Federal regiments, one African-American (the 32nd United States Colored Infantry), and one white (the 144th New York Infantry), built this field fortification as a significant late-war addition to the defenses of Hilton Head, part of the Hilton Head District, Department of the South.
On 18 August 1864, the day after he ordered Suter to begin designing and building the fort near Mitchelville, Foster ordered Brig. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfennig, commanding the Northern District (Morris Island, Folly Island, and Little Folly Island) to send one of his white regiments “to go north,” and to send the 32nd United States Colored Infantry to Hilton Head Island.Foster to Brig. Gen. Alexander Schimmelfennig, Northern District, 18 August 1864, O.R. 35, pt. 2:238. The next day Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter, commanding the Hilton Head District, ordered Col. George W. Baird of the 32nd United States Colored Infantry to move his regiment “to a point just beyond Mitchelville and encamp on ground which will be designated by Capt. Suter Chief Engineer Dept. South near which a work is to be constructed under his direction.” Potter's instructions were specific: “The 32nd U.S.C.T. [United States Colored Troops] will be charged with the construction of this work and will furnish daily as large a detail for this purpose as the strength of the Regiment will permit. The working parties will report to the Engineer Officer superintending the construction.”Legg, et al, pp. 29-30, citing Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter, Hilton Head District, to Col. George W. Baird, 32nd United States Colored Infantry, 19 August 1864, National Archives Record Group 393, Records of United States Army Continental Commands, 1821-1920, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (Hereafter cited as National Archives RG 393.)
Fatigue details from the 32nd United States Colored Infantry, camped nearby at Camp Baird (named for their colonel) did most of the construction from late August or early September to mid-October 1864, using shovels, spades, picks, and axes, and working under the supervision of Captain Patrick McGuire of Company A, 1st New York Engineers (Serrell's Engineers) and the officers and enlisted men of several companies of that regiment.
The 32nd United States Colored Infantry numbered approximately 500 officers and men, with white commissioned officers and black noncommissioned officers and other enlisted men, as was standard practice with black regiments in the United States Army during the Civil War.
Its work on the fort was slowed and complicated somewhat by its officers’ apparent reluctance to assign sufficient men to the task, and by its soldiers’ apparent reluctance toward or inability to perform the hard labor necessary to complete it. It was common for Federal commanders to assign their black units to fatigue duty, and especially to employ them to build or improve of field fortifications. In this way they could “save” their white units for combat. Officers in the Department of the South were no exception.Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1956, reprint edition, The Norton Library, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1966), pp. 240, 242, 244-46; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged In Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: The Free Press, 1990), pp. 182- 85. Captain Joseph Walker of the 1st New York Engineers, who supervised black troops working on the fortifications of Morris Island in 1863, expressed a view typical of many Federal officers when he wrote that African-American soldiers “have great constancy. . . . Their status is mediocrity, and this uniformity and mediocrity, for military fatigue duty, I think answers best.”Captain Joseph Walker, Company I, 1st New York Engineers, 11 September 1863, replying to circular from Maj. T.B. Brooks, Assistant Engineer, Department of the South, 10 September 1863, O.R. 28, pt. 1:329-30.
The white officers and black enlisted men of the United States Colored Troops, however, often protested such treatment, sometimes informally, and sometimes in writing. African-American soldiers and their white officers often resented their being assigned to tasks that white units were ordered to do less frequently, and especially so in the case of building field fortifications, when the example of slaves being made to construct them for the Confederates was such an obvious parallel to their status as blacks, even as free men, in the United States Army.
One of the most eloquent protests over excessive fatigue duty was that written by Private Nimrod Rowley of the 20th United States Colored Infantry, serving in Louisiana, to Abraham Lincoln in August 1864. Rowley, weary of working in “one of the most horable swamps in Louisiana stinking and misery,” addressed his appeal to “My Dear Friend and x Pre” about the same time the 32nd United States Colored Infantry began building Fort Howell on Hilton Head Island. Rowley wrote Lincoln, we are treated in a Different maner to what others Rigiments is Both Northern men or Southern Raised Rigiment Instead of the Musket It is the Spad and the Whelbarrow and the Axe.Private Nimrod Rowley, 20th United States Colored Infantry, to President Abraham Lincoln, August 1864, in Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861-1867. Selected from the Holdings of the National Archives of the United States. Series II: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 501.