Union Occupation and the Mansions That Survived

When the Union fleet captured Port Royal Sound in November of eighteen sixty one, the planter families of Beaufort did something that earned them a place in the town's most ironic stories. They ran. Most fled to the mainland so quickly that they left their silver, their furniture, and their possessions behind.

Some accounts describe planters who left dinner on the table. The mansions they abandoned were seized by the United States government for failure to pay federal taxes. Union commanders moved into the grandest houses on Bay Street.

The John Mark Verdier House is said to have housed Union offices. Beaufort College became a military hospital. Churches became barracks and warehouses.

Because Union forces occupied Beaufort so early and held it so firmly throughout the war, the town was never burned and never systematically destroyed. Confederate counterattacks attempted on the surrounding Sea Islands never reached Beaufort itself. The antebellum architecture that makes Beaufort famous today survived because Union soldiers were living in it.

Beaufort's downtown counts dozens of architecturally significant antebellum structures, and the entire historic core is a National Historic Landmark in recognition of what survived. That survival was not planned and not a tribute to anyone's good intentions. The planter class who built these houses fled in a panic, the Union army moved in and made itself comfortable, and the buildings stood.

A walk along Bay Street is a walk through the built landscape of a slave society preserved almost intact as an accident of military history, the occupiers too practical to demolish what they were already sleeping in.