For one month after the hurricane struck South Carolina, locally organized relief committees attempted to manage the distribution of donations that poured in from around the country. Disaster compounded disaster, and the Lowcountry was in danger. The region’s wells and cisterns had been inundated with salt water. The resulting poor sanitation fomented illness. Hunger, thirst, and exposure further weakened people still reeling from the hurricane’s blows. A dizzying array of logistical challenges faced the politicians, businessmen, landowners, and pastors who volunteered to join the relief committees.

When the hurricane struck in 1893, there was no centralized federal or state authority that could manage the field of relief after a major disaster. While a few cities had recently established semi-permanent committees that could assist after a disaster, those in the Lowcountry were ad-hoc. Local officials could make requests of the state and federal governments to appropriate funds or provide tax relief, but that was not guaranteed. Indeed, in the case of the Great Sea Island Storm, the state government provided nothing but defrayed taxes for a year. The federal government, despite the efforts of white and Black politicians, gave over only a few boats for transporting supplies and some seeds for planting.

Portrait of Robert Smalls, South Carolina legislator, 1870-1880, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

While relief committees proliferated in South Carolina, two dominated in the amount of donations received and distributed: the Charleston Relief Committee and the Sea Island Relief Committee, the latter based in Beaufort. Joseph Barnwell, former mayor of Charleston and a Confederate veteran, headed the Charleston committee, which was comprised of well-to-do, well-connected white men like himself. One visitor to the city “found [Barnwell] a man apparently not much in sympathy with the negro” and noted that Barnwell thought that “accounts [of hurricane destruction and suffering] were exaggerated.” In many ways, Charleston’s committee represented the political norm in the rest of the state. In contrast, the Sea Island Relief Committee was comprised of white and Black members representing a broader swath of the area’s leadership. For example, Robert Smalls, the famous African American Civil War veteran who led a daring escape from Charleston Harbor to U.S. lines and later represented the Lowcountry in the US Congress, was a prominent member. He was joined by several businessmen and civically engaged local citizens: Beaufort mayor George Holmes, merchant William Lockwood, Union veteran and businessman Niels Christensen, merchant Thomas F. Walsh, railroad employee E.F. Convonsieur, and Beaufort National Cemetery superintendent George W. Ford.