The Battle of The Pineberry Battery (or Engagements at Pineberry, Willtown, and White Point) was a series of minor engagements, fought April 29, 1862, in Charleston County, South Carolina, during the American Civil War. The engagements proceeded from an attack by the Union Navy on a battery on John Berkeley Grimball's plantation on Edisto Island. After successfully destroying the battery, the ship was attacked twice by Confederate artillery forces before returning to its station. The attack was a part of Union efforts to secure Edisto Island, which housed a large colony of escaped African Americans and served as a launching point of a campaign against Charleston.
Edisto Island was largely abandoned by planters in November 1861 and in December 1861, escaped slaves began setting up their own refugee camps there. In January 1862, armed blacks from the island and Confederate forces clashed and a Confederate raid in reprisal killed a small number of unarmed blacks. In February, Union forces were stationed on the island to develop it as a staging area for future campaigns against Charleston, twenty-five miles away, as well as to protect the colony, which would eventually number thousands of blacks. As Union forces took control of the island, a number of skirmishes occurred, and Confederates withdrew. Pineberry Battery was further up the Edisto River from the island, which was one likely path for a land campaign against Charleston. Among the actions, on March 18, Pineberry Battery opened fire on a Union Naval reconnaissance. The Pineberry Battery was on the Pineberry plantation on Edisto Island owned by John Berkeley Grimball.
On April 29, a union expeditionary force in the gunboat USS E. B. Hale and with twenty-two men from the USS Crusader along with a flatboat and howitzer also from the Crusader travelled up the North Edisto River to the Dawhoo River to attack a confederate Battery on the Pineberry plantation. The attack was led by Lieutenant Alexander C. Rhind, who was anxious to show his mettle to Flag Officer Samuel F. Du Pont. The Hale was a freighter which had been converted to a gunboat and mounted four 32-pounder smoothbore cannon and was commanded by Lieutenant James H. Gillis. The ship arrived near the Confederate battery of two 24-pounder guns in the late afternoon and exchanged artillery fire. Commander Du Pont reported that the Confederates continued fire from their field guns while the Hale traveled down the windy river, but fled when the ship came close. Rhind sent Gillis ashore with 22 men who spiked the guns, burned and destroyed the carriages, and captured the powder. The engagement lasted about four hours.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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