Stephen R. Wise – författare

Known for sharply affecting the Civil War's outcome, the Charleston campaign of 1863 included the Battle for Battery Wagner, which featured the African American regiment portrayed in the film Glory as well as Red Cross founder Clara Barton. Stephen R. Wise vividly re-creates the campaign in Gate of Hell, and his retelling of the battle pits not only black against white and North against South but also army against navy. Wise contends that the significance of the campaign extends beyond its outcome, arguing that an understanding of the strategy used at Charleston is vital to understanding the very nature of the Civil War. Lasting almost two months and resulting in thousands of casualties, the campaign began as a joint army-navy operation. Wise continues to follow the campaign through the destruction of Battery Wagner and Fort Sumter to its final days, when the Confederates prevented Union forces from entering the port city. Wise describes the campaign as a major testing ground for African American troops and attributes Lincoln's expansion of African American recruitment to the admirable performance of the 54th Massachusetts. He ultimately concludes that the skill, and in some cases foolish theatrics, of the campaign's leaders determined the course of the campaign.

In Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1861–1893, the second of three volumes on the history of Beaufort County, Stephen R. Wise and Lawrence S. Rowland offer details about the district from 1861 to 1893, which influenced the development of the South Carolina and the nation. During a span of thirty years the region was transformed by the crucible of war from a wealthy, slave-based white oligarchy to a county where former slaves dominated a new, radically democratic political economy.This volume begins where volume I concluded, the November 1861 Union capture and occupation of the Sea Islands clustered around Port Royal Sound, and the Confederate retreat and re-entrenchment on Beaufort District’s mainland, where they fended off federal attacks for three and a half years and vainly attempted to maintain their pre-war life. In addition to chronicling numerous military actions that revolutionized warfare, Wise and Rowland offer an original, sophisticated study of the famous Port Royal Experiment in which United States military officers, government officials, civilian northerners, African American soldiers, and liberated slaves transformed the Union-occupied corner of the Palmetto State into a laboratory for liberty and a working model of the post-Civil War New South.The revolution wrought by Union victory and the political and social Reconstruction of South Carolina was followed by a counterrevolution called Redemption, the organized campaign of Southern whites, defeated in the war, to regain supremacy over African Americans. While former slave-owning, anti-black “Redeemers” took control of mainland Beaufort County, they were thwarted on the Sea Islands, where African Americans retained power and kept reaction at bay. By 1893, elements of both the New and Old South coexisted uneasily side by side as the old Beaufort District was divided into Beaufort and Hampton counties. The Democratic mainland reverted to an agricultural-based economy while the Republican Sea Islands and the town of Beaufort underwent an economic boom based on the phosphate mining industry and the new commercial port in the lowcountry town of Port Royal.

This third volume of The History of Beaufort County by Rowland, Lawrence S. and Stephen R. Wise encompasses the remaining 113 years of the 500-year chronicle of the legendary South Carolina Sea Islands. Bridging the Sea Islands' Past and Present, 1893-2006 begins with the devastating Sea Island Hurricane of 1893, one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The storm was followed by a hurricane of violence, political and social revolution, economic chaos, and ideological turmoil that battered twentieth-century Beaufort and the world. Paradoxically the twentieth century was also an epoch of nearly unbroken scientific and medical progress, technological innovation, cultural experimentation, and the expansion of democratic institutions throughout the world. Modern Beaufort County has been a testing ground for the reunion of North and South in the aftermaths of the Civil War, Great Depression, and defeated Jim Crow laws.The great exodus of African Americans away from Beaufort County and the post-World War II sunbelt immigration transformed Beaufort County from a majority black population in 1900 to a majority white population in 1960. Perhaps the county's most representative immigrant experience has been that of retirees and resort-home owners, a phenomenon that began in the late nineteenth century as wealthy northerners--financiers, industrialists, and industrial farmers--began purchasing former plantations and transformed them into private hunting preserves. The new Beaufortonians revolutionized lowcountry life and culture as they brought new forms of economic enterprise, social and cultural values, and worldviews different from those that had shaped Beaufort County for centuries. Monumental political events are fully addressed from an insider's point of view, but, amid all the frontiers, storms, and demographic revolutions, Rowland and Wise have also provided a business history of the American South. Enterprise and entrepreneurship, whether successful or failed, link together all the themes and unite all the actors found in this work.Here readers meet Robert Smalls, Thomas E. Miller, George Waterhouse, Niels Christensen, Thomas Talbird, Tillie O'Dell, Isabella Glen, William Keyserling, Kate Gleason, Harriet Keyserling, Charles Fraser, and Bobby Ginn--active agents of change in politics, business, and culture. Indeed Rowland and Wise have not only chronicled the lives and times of these people but have also been active participants in the stories they tell. Rowland is a Beaufort native with centuries-old lowcountry lineage. Wise, an Ohio transplant, is a scholar of the Civil War and the local history of his adopted home.