Screwpiles: The Forgotten Lighthouses

Rocketts Landing, Confederate Naval Academy. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell, 1864. Library of Congress

The Civil War Comes to the James River – The Battle for the Lights In 1855, navigation aids were functioning in place just as a political storm was brewing that would sweep through the U.S. Lighthouse Service as well as the entire country. By the mid-1800s, the South’s river systems reached hundreds of miles inland and connected two-thirds of the United States to ports on the Gulf of Mexico. In 1860, cotton exports generated over half of the U. S. federal income while the South’s foreign trade supplied three-fourths of the federal budget. Control of navigational aids into ports and rivers was critical to economic survival. By 1859, screwpile lighthouses had replaced almost all of the lightships and lighthouses and Fresnel lenses had replaced all of the reflector lights. 25

South Carolina adopted her Ordinance of Secession on December 20, 1860. The lighthouses and lightships in Charleston went dark shortly after that. On January 22, 1861, the National Republican newspaper in Washington posted an article impugning Charleston for its actions. “The crowning act, however, of diabolicity and world-wide contempt and dishonor on the part of South Carolina, is the extinction of the lights at the lighthouses on her coast; an act which will inevitably bring upon her the execration of every nation and individual on the face of the earth, except a mad secessionist.” 26 By the spring of 1861, tensions between Southern and Northern states reached the breaking point. On April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries fired upon Fort Sumter in the Charleston Harbor, and on April 19, 1861, President Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports . 27

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