It was named in honor of Union Army Brigadier General Joshua B. Howell, and Its primary function was to protect Mitchelville, a Freedman's town located to its east.

[4] Fort Howell, an essentially pentagonal enclosure constructed of built-up earth, is quite discernible despite natural erosion and the growth of trees and other vegetation over a period of almost 150 years.

Gen. Edward E. Potter, commanding the Hilton Head District, ordered Col. George W. Baird of the 32nd United States Colored Infantry to move his regiment “to a point just beyond Mitchelville and encamp on ground which will be designated by Capt.

[14] Captain Joseph Walker of the 1st New York Engineers, who supervised black troops working on the fortifications of Morris Island in 1863, expressed a view typical of many Federal officers when he wrote that African-American soldiers “have great constancy.

One of the most eloquent protests over excessive fatigue duty was that written by Private Nimrod Rowley of the 20th United States Colored Infantry, serving in Louisiana, to Abraham Lincoln in August 1864.

Rowley, weary of working in “one of the most horable swamps in Louisiana stinking and misery,” addressed his appeal to “My Dear Friend and x Pre” about the same time the 32nd United States Colored Infantry began building Fort Howell on Hilton Head Island.

The present garrison of Fort Seward will help dismount and load the guns, and will then rejoin their regiment.”[20] By mid-October the 32nd United States Colored Infantry was split up, with its companies ordered to various points on Hilton Head Island and elsewhere in the Department of the South.

The works on the fortifications are being pushed forward as rapidly as possible.” On 8 November, he reported, “everything remains in a quiet state, the troops being occupied in strengthening and improving the defenses and drilling.”[22] Fatigue details from the 144th New York Infantry, which had been ordered to report to the “camp for instruction for colored troops” on Hilton Head Island on 9 June, completed the fort from mid-October to late November 1864, also under the supervision of the 1st New York Engineers.

[23] Fort Howell never saw action, for by the time it was completed near the end of 1864 the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida lacked the forces to offer much of a significant threat to the Federal presence on Hilton Head Island—or elsewhere in the state, for that matter.

One of the last engagements of any real note in the South Carolina lowcountry occurred on 30 November 1864 at Honey Hill, in present-day Jasper County, when a Federal expedition—including both the 32nd United States Colored Infantry and the 144th New York Infantry—attempted to cut the Charleston and Savannah Railroad but was repulsed by Confederate defenders.

Fort Howell is one of the most intact and best preserved Civil War field fortifications in South Carolina, and is particularly significant as a fine example of a sophisticated Federal earthwork built in an area occupied by the United States Army for an extended period.

[24] This fort is an outstanding example of the larger semi-permanent earthworks designed by United States Army engineers and intended to be significant defensive positions, usually standing alone but sometimes built in conjunction with and cooperating with a system of linear field fortifications manned by infantry.

Mahan's A Complete Treatise of Field Fortifications, first published in 1836 and revised and reprinted several times before and during the Civil War, was based in part on European models, most of them French, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.