Yet they moved onward. Volley after volley of musketry mowed them down, and the puny reaper in the neglected grain gave place to the grim reaper Death, all down that unwavering line of gray and brown.
They marched up to the Union breastworks, bayoneted the gunners at their work, planted their flags on the parapets, and, while the Federals converged from every point to this, exploding powder burned the faces of these contending hosts, who, hand to hand, fought each other to death, while far-away widows and orphans multiplied to mourn through the coming years over this ghastly folly of civil war.
Whole companies of the Confederates rushed as prisoners into the arms of their enemies, and the shattered remnant of the battered foe retreated from the field.
PRICE OF LIVING RUNNING
UP TO EIGHT HUNDRED AND NINE
HUNDRED DOLLARS PER DAY.
While all this was going on in Pennsylvania, Pemberton was arranging terms of surrender at Vicksburg, and from this date onward the Confederacy began to wobble in its orbit, and the President of this ill-advised but bitterly punished scheme began to wish that he had been in Canada when the war broke out.
In April of the same year Admiral Dupont, an able seaman with massive whiskers, decided to run the fortifications at Charleston with iron-clads, but the Charleston people thought they could run them themselves. So they drove him back after the sinking of the Kennebec and the serious injury of all the other vessels.
General Gillmore then landed with troops. Fort Wagner was captured. The 54th Regiment of colored troops, the finest organized in the Free States, took a prominent part and fought with great coolness and bravery. By December there were fifty thousand colored troops enlisted, and before the war closed over two hundred thousand.
It is needless to say that this made the Yankee unpopular at the time in the best society of the South.
General Gillmore attempted to capture Sumter, and did reduce it to a pulp, but when he went to gather it he was met by a garrison still concealed in the basement, and peppered with volleys of hot shingle-nails and other bric-à-brac, which forced him to retire with loss.