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Excerpt
from
"Carrying the Flag: The Story of Private Charles Whilden,
the Confederacy's Most Unlikely Hero."
by Gordon Rhea
A vast Union armada appeared outside Charleston's harbor
in early April 1863, commanded by none other than Rear Admiral
Samuel F. Du Pont, head of the Union navy. Confederate general
Pierre G. T. Beauregard directed the city's women and children
to leave, and the remaining townspeople prepared for battle.
"Ambulances were standing by on East Bay to carry the
wounded to the hospitals," recorded one of the city's
historians; "people were collected in groups, talking
in low voices; women were preparing lint for bandages; the
impoverished shops were still open." The attack came
on April 7, led by the ironclad Weehawken. Cannon from the
outer line of Confederate forts opened, and the roar of artillery
and the ringing sound made by shells ricocheting off of steel
hulls vibrated across the water. Citizens lined the battery
to watch as a gusher spit into the air from a mine exploding
near the Weehawken. More ironclads steamed up, only to be
disabled by fire from the forts. Shells from Union boats pummeled
Fort Sumter, blasting huge holes in the walls, but were ineffective
at silencing the rebel artillery. Watching the action from
aboard the New Ironsides - the massive warship sat too low
in the water to enter the harbor - Du Pont deemed the attack
a failure and ordered his ironclads to retire. The action
had lasted only a few hours. A Union general conceded that
Beauregard had repulsed "the most powerful and gallant
fleet the world ever saw." Charleston had much to celebrate
that evening.
Du Pont's failure to take Charleston did not deter the Federal
commanders, who decided next to focus their attention on Battery
Wagner, the rebel fort on Morris Island guarding the southern
approaches to Charleston Harbor. Their plan was to storm Battery
Wagner from the south with infantry and use the captured fort
to batter Sumter into submission, opening the way for the
Union armada to safely enter the harbor.
As spring turned to summer, 11,000 Federal infantrymen under
Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore fought their way to within
striking distance of Battery Wagner. Early on the morning
of July 11, as the Northerners charged across an open stretch
of sand, volleys from the fort slammed into them. Some of
the attackers managed to scale the ramparts, but reinforcements
failed to arrive, and supporting troops broke under withering
Confederate fire. The rest of the assaulting force retired,
coming again under heavy musketry and artillery fire as they
ran across the open sand. Almost three hundred and fifty Union
soldiers fell in the brief but bloody fiasco. "The troops
all fell back to their former positions of the day before,"
a New Englander who lived through the ordeal wrote, "with
the same accompaniment of hot sun, hot sand, hot shot, and
hot shell."
All the next week, artillery projectiles rained into Battery
Wagner from Union warships off the coast and from batteries
that Gillmore brought onto the southern end of Morris Island.
On July 18, in preparation for another infantry assault, Union
artillerists redoubled their rate of fire. General Beauregard
estimated that shells hit the fort at the rate of fourteen
a minute; the chief of Confederate artillery put the number
of enemy shells that day in the range of 9,000. "No one
would believe for a minute that a human being, or a bird even,
could live on that fort," a Northerner observed.
The cannonade stopped at dusk, and six thousand of Gillmore's
infantrymen started across the open expanse of sand toward
the fort. Leading was the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of
black troops commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a white
Bostonian and war hero. Raised in the early months of 1863
soon after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation,
these black soldiers had never seen combat. As they moved
forward, the rebel fort seemed to come alive in flame and
smoke, and musketry and artillery fire cut deep swaths in
Shaw's ranks. But the novices kept on, and in a burst of adrenaline,
the colonel led the survivors across a moat and onto the fort's
parapet, where he and most of his followers were killed. White
troops in blue also charged across the open stretch of sand
and met the same fate as the black troops. "Men fell
by scores on the parapet and rolled back into the ditch,"
a New Yorker who witnessed the scene recalled; "many
were drowned in the water, and others smothered by their own
dead and wounded companions falling upon them." Realizing
that this attack was as hopeless as the previous week's foray,
Gillmore ordered his troops to retreat, abandoning large numbers
of Yankees in the rebel battlements to be killed or captured.
Union losses totaled about 1500 men.
The approaches to Battery Wagner presented a grisly scene.
Bodies ground to mush by sheets of lead from close-in fighting
floated in muddy craters left from the Union artillery bombardment.
The victorious rebels pitched Colonel Shaw's body into an
open ditch, along with the corpses of his black troops. The
attack had failed, but the bravery of the 54th Massachusetts
went far to change opinions about the fighting qualities of
black soldiers. The performance of Shaw and his troops, a
northern newspaper observed, "made Fort Wagner such a
name for the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety
years for the White Yankees."
Having twice failed to take Battery Wagner by storm, Gillmore
decided to try a siege. Federal guns resumed their ruthless
shelling while Union infantrymen slowly advanced, digging
trenches and throwing up mounds of sand for protection. Conditions
were miserable for men on both sides, as the treeless expanse
offered no shelter from the baking sun, and the stench from
bloated, decomposing bodies was overpowering. Water was scarce,
and attempts to dig wells only produced foul pools polluted
by the effluence of corpses. Swarms of biting insects feasted
on Yankees and rebels alike.
As the summer ground on, Beauregard realized that Battery
Wagner must soon fall to the enemy, and the Confederates evacuated
the fort under cover of darkness, spiking their artillery
pieces so that the Yankees could not use the guns. Suspecting
that the rebels had abandoned the crumbling edifice, Gillmore
sent a contingent of troops inside. "Dead bodies long
unburied, heads, arms, feet (with the shoes still upon them)
lay strewn all around," a member of the scouting party
remembered, adding that the stench "was almost unbearable."
A Southerner who had just left the fort informed anyone who
would listen that he was "afeared of hell no more, it
can't touch Wagner."
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