Civil War Round Table of the Mid

Aug 31, 2023

“Watch Meeting, December 31, 1862: Waiting for the Hour” by Heard and Mosely to illustrate anticipation for the Emancipation Proclamation. (Photo Provided)

PARKERSBURG — The Civil War Battle of Port Royal and its impact on the enslaved will be the subject of a presentation at 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Blennerhassett Museum of Regional History in Parkersburg.

Victoria Smalls, executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor National Heritage Area at Beaufort, S.C., will present “Unthinkable Outcomes from the Battle of Port Royal: The Civil War in South Carolina’s Low Country, It’s Impact on Former West Africans Enslaved There, and Their Long Fight for Freedom.”

Victoria Smalls is a Gullah Geechee native of St. Helena Island, South Carolina. She is Executive Director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Corridor Commission where she collaborates with local, national and international governments and partners to protect, preserve, interpret the history, traditional cultural practices, heritage sites and natural resources associated of the Gullah Geechee people who reside across the 12,000 square-mile National Heritage Area in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Smalls previously was commissioner on the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, a National Park Service ranger and education program coordinator at Reconstruction Era National Historical Park and the Penn Center Penn School National Historical Landmark District.

She was program manager at the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C. Smalls is a Leo Twiggs Arts Diversity Leadership Scholar and Riley Fellow in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Leadership at The Riley Institute at Furman University.

Victoria Smalls, executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, will be the main speaker at a meeting of the Civil War Roundtable of the Mid-Ohio Valley at 7 p.m. Sept. 14 at the Blennerhassett Museum of Regional History in Parkersburg. Admission is free. Her presentation is “Unthinkable Outcomes from the Battle of Port Royal: The Civil War in the South Carolina Low Country, Its Impact on Former West Africans Enslaved There and Their Long Fight For Freedom.” (Photo Provided)

Smalls graduated from Technical College of the Lowcountry and University of South Carolina at Beaufort.

She has spoken nationally and internationally on the art, history and culture of the Gullah Geechee people. In 2022, Smalls received the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest civilian honor awarded for volunteer service in the United States, by President Joe Biden.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln directed U.S. naval and military forces to implement the Anaconda Plan that called for the blockade of all southern ports and the occupation of strategic supply bases to support these operations. Port Royal Sound was identified by the U.S. Navy as the ideal deepwater port to support the blockades of Charleston and Savannah.

On Nov. 7, 1861, the Battle of Port Royal secured Port Royal Sound and Beaufort for occupation by federal forces. However, in the aftermath of the battle, 8,000 to 10,000 “contrabands” or former slaves were abandoned by plantation owners and managers who fled inland from the invasion forces.

Federal authorities, faced with providing for this population, constructed Mitchelville, a small town on Hilton Head, to house men, women and children.

An outdoor school room at Penn School on St. Helena Island, S.C. Penn School, founded in 1862, was among the nation’s first schools dedicated to the education of formerly enslaved people and is one of the most significant American education institutions in existence today. (Photo Provided)

Penn School on St. Helena Island was founded to educate Mitchelville’s residents. Missionaries came from throughout the North to teach the former enslaved to read and write. The 1st and 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Regiments, the first U.S. colored troops mustered into the Union Army, were organized and a plan to award former plantation properties to the former slaves was devised to foster their independence.

The events were later called the Port Royal Experiment that was a model for Reconstruction.

Smalls will discuss the events and the mission of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, an affiliate of the National Park Service.

The free Sept. 14 meeting, which is open to the public, also will feature a brief presentation on the 2023 South Carolina Heart of the Rebellion Field Trip on Nov. 8-12. The trip is sponsored by the Civil War Round Table and more information is available at https://www.cwrtmov.org/field-trips.

Light refreshments, including small samples of Gullah Geechee cuisine, will be served before and following the meeting. Donations will be accepted to defray a portion of the cost of the event.

The museum is accessible for those with mobility limitations and accommodations for other disabilities will be considered upon request.

The presentation is made possible by the Gullah Geechee Cultural Corridor Commission and a grant from the West Virginia Humanities Council.

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