Second Battle of Pocotaligo: Cutting the Confederate Lifeline

The Charleston and Savannah Railroad was the Confederacy's nervous system along the South Carolina coast. A single-track line running one hundred miles between the two most important Southern port cities, it carried troops, supplies, artillery, and communications. Cutting it was a Union priority from the earliest days of the war.

In October of eighteen sixty-two, Brigadier General John Brannan set out to do exactly that. On the night of October twenty-first, forty-five hundred Union soldiers sailed up the Broad River aboard transports under cover of darkness, guided in part by enslaved men who knew the waterways and volunteered as pilots and scouts. The plan was to land, march inland to the railroad bridge over the Pocotaligo River, destroy it, and sever the Confederate supply line before the defenders could respond.

They got most of the way there. Union forces fought through Confederate skirmish lines and reached the approaches to Pocotaligo, but approximately two thousand Confederate defenders under Colonel William Walker stopped the advance before the railroad bridge could be reached. After several hours of fighting, Brannan ordered a withdrawal to the river, and the Union force re-embarked.

The tactical ledger was painful: forty-three Union soldiers killed, two hundred ninety-four wounded, three missing, against Confederate losses of about one hundred sixty. The bridge stood. The railroad kept running.

The fight at Pocotaligo would be repeated in various forms over the next two years, as Union commanders repeatedly probed this same corridor in attempts to sever the Charleston-Savannah line. Each time the Confederates managed to hold, protecting a railroad that both sides understood was worth fighting over.