"Just at dark ten regiments of infantry were formed along the beach, one and a half miles below the fort, and the charge was at once undertaken. Quietly the column marched until its head had passed the line of our field batteries. No sooner had this taken place than one thousand six hundred men in Wagner and Gregg sprang to arms and opened on the advancing columns with shot, shell, and musketry, which called to their immediate assistance the armed energies of Sumter, Moultrie, and Beauregard, and all the batteries on Sullivan's and James's Islands. When we got within canister range of the fort there were added to this awful cataclysm double-shotted charges of canister from eight heavy guns directly raking our approach, each discharge equal to a double pailful of cast-iron bullets, three-fourths of an inch in diameter. Every moment some unfortunate comrade fell, to rise no more, but we closed up our shattered ranks and pressed on with such impetuosity that we scaled the walls and planted our banners on the fort. The Sixty-seventh, with heroic cheers, flung her flag to the midnight breezes on the rampart of Wagner, but only to bring it away riddled to tatters. Seven out of eight of the color-guard were shot down, and Color-Sergeant McDonald, with a broken leg, brought it away. Lieutenant Cochran went alone to headquarters, two thousand five hundred yards to the rear, for reinforcements, assuring General Gillmore that we could hold the fort, and then went back to Wagner and brought off eighteen out of forty men with whom he started in the column in that fatal charge. Two other lieutenants, with a dozen men, held one of the enemy's large guns for nearly two hours, over which they had hand-to-hand contests with the soldiers in charge of the piece.
"I was shot within a hundred and fifty yards of the fort, and so disabled that I could not go forward.... Two boys of the Sixty-second Ohio found me and carried me to our first parallel, where had been arranged an extempore hospital. Here a surgeon sent his savage finger-nail into my lacerated side and pronounced the bullet beyond his reach, and said I would not need his further attention. Like a baby I fainted, and, on reviving, laid my poor aching head on a sand-bag to recruit a little strength. That blessed chaplain, Henry Clay Trumbull, found me and poured oil of gladness into my soul and brandy into my mouth, whereat I praised him as a dear good man and cursed that monster of a surgeon, which led the chaplain to think the delirium of death was turning my brain, and he reported me among the dead of Wagner."
General Gillmore now resorted to regular approaches for the reduction of Fort Wagner. The first parallel was soon opened, and siege guns mounted, and the work was pushed as rapidly as the unfavorable nature of the ground would admit. By the 23d of July a second parallel was established, from which fire was opened upon Fort Sumter, two miles distant, and upon the intervening earthworks. As the task proceeded the difficulty increased, for the strip of land grew narrower as Fort Wagner was approached, and the men in the trenches were subjected to cross-fire from a battery on James's Island, as well as from sharp-shooters and from the fort itself. A dozen breaching batteries of enormous rifled guns were established, most of the work being done at night, and on the 17th of August all of them opened fire. The shot and shell were directed mainly against Fort Sumter, and in the course of a week its barbette guns were dismounted, its walls were knocked into a shapeless mass of ruins, and its value as anything but a rude shelter for infantry was gone.
The parallels were still pushed forward toward Wagner, partly through ground so low that high tides washed over it, and finally where mines of torpedoes had been planted. When they had arrived so near that it was impossible for the men to work under ordinary circumstances, the fort was subjected to a bombardment with shells fired from mortars and dropping into it almost vertically, while the great rifled guns were trained upon its bomb-proof at short range, and the iron-clad frigate New Ironsides came close in shore and added her quota in the shape of eleven-inch shells fired from eight broadside guns. Powerful calcium lights had been prepared, so that there was no night there, and the bombardment went on incessantly. At the end of two days, three columns of infantry were ready to storm the work, when it was discovered that the Confederates had suddenly abandoned it. Battery Gregg, on Cumming's Point, was also evacuated.
It is easy to tell all this in a few words; but no brief account of that operation can give the reader any adequate idea of the enormous labor it involved, the danger, the anxiety, and the dogged perseverance of the besiegers. It required the efforts of three hundred men to move a single gun up the beach. General Gillmore was one of the most accomplished of military engineers, and we present here a few of the more interesting passages from his admirable official report:
At the second parallel the "Surf Battery" had barely escaped entire destruction, about one-third of it having been carried away by the sea. Its armament had been temporarily removed to await the issue of the storm. The progress of the sap was hotly opposed by the enemy, with the fire of both artillery and sharp-shooters. At one point in particular, about two hundred yards in front of Wagner, there was a ridge, affording the enemy good cover, from which we received an unceasing fire of small-arms, while the guns and sharp-shooters in Wagner opened vigorously at every lull in the fire directed upon it from our batteries and gunboats. The firing from the distant James's Island batteries was steady and accurate. One attempt, on the 21st, to obtain possession of the ridge with infantry having failed, it was determined to advance by establishing another parallel. On the night of August 21st the fourth parallel was opened about one hundred yards from the ridge, partly with the flying sap and partly with the full sap. At the place selected for it the island is about one hundred and sixty yards in width above high water. It was now determined to try and dislodge the enemy from the ridge with light mortars and navy howitzers in the fourth parallel, and with other mortars in rear firing over those in front. The attempt was made on the afternoon of August 26th, but did not succeed. Our mortar practice was not very accurate. Brigadier-General Terry was ordered, on the 26th of August, to carry the ridge at the point of the bayonet, and hold it. This was accomplished, and the fifth parallel established there on the evening of the same day, which brought us to within two hundred and forty yards of Fort Wagner. The intervening space comprised the narrowest and shallowest part of Morris island. It was simply a flat ridge of sand, scarcely twenty-five yards in width, and not exceeding two feet in depth, over which the sea in rough weather swept entirely across to the marsh on our left. Approaches by the flying sap were at once commenced on this shallow beach, from the right of the fifth parallel, and certain means of defence in the parallel itself were ordered. It was soon ascertained that we had now reached the point where the really formidable, passive, defensive arrangements of the enemy commenced. An elaborate and ingenious system of torpedo mines, to be exploded by the tread of persons walking over them, was encountered, and we were informed by the prisoners taken on the ridge that the entire area of firm ground between us and the fort, as well as the glacis of the latter on its south and east fronts, was thickly filled with these torpedoes. This knowledge brought us a sense of security from sorties, for the mines were a defence to us as well as to the enemy. By daybreak on the 27th of August our sappers had reached, by a rude and unfinished trench, to within one hundred yards of Fort Wagner. The dark and gloomy days of the siege were now upon us. Our daily losses, although not heavy, were on the increase, while our progress became discouragingly slow, and even fearfully uncertain. The converging fire from Wagner alone almost enveloped the head of our sap, delivered, as it was, from a line subtending an angle of nearly ninety degrees, while the flank fire from the James's Island batteries increased in power and accuracy every hour. To push forward the sap in the narrow strip of shallow shifting sand by day was impossible, while the brightness of the prevailing harvest moon rendered the operation almost as hazardous by night. Matters, indeed, seemed at a standstill, and a feeling of despondency began to pervade the rank and file of the command. There seemed to be no adequate return in accomplished results for the daily losses which we suffered, and no means of relief, cheering and encouraging to the soldier, appeared near at hand. In this emergency, although the final result was demonstrably certain, it was determined, in order to sustain the flagging spirits of the men, to commence vigorously and simultaneously two distinct methods of attack, viz., first, to keep Wagner perfectly silent with an overpowering curved fire from siege and coehorn mortars, so that our engineers would have only the more distant batteries of the enemy to annoy them; and, second, to breach the bomb-proof shelter with rifled guns, and thus deprive the enemy of their only secure cover in the work, and, consequently, drive them from it. Accordingly, all the light mortars were moved to the front and placed in battery; the capacity of the fifth parallel and the advanced trenches for sharp-shooters was greatly enlarged and improved; the rifled guns in the left breaching batteries were trained upon the fort and prepared for prolonged action; and powerful calcium lights to aid the night-work of our cannoneers and sharp-shooters, and blind those of the enemy, were got in readiness. The coöperation of the powerful battery of the New Ironsides, Captain Rowan, during the daytime, was also secured.
| A BOMB-PROOF. |
|
MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM B. TALIAFERRO, C. S. A. |
These final operations against Fort Wagner were actively inaugurated at break of day on the morning of September 5th. For forty-two consecutive hours the spectacle presented was of surpassing sublimity and grandeur. Seventeen siege and coehorn mortars unceasingly dropped their shells into the work, over the heads of our sappers and the guards of the advanced trenches; thirteen of our heavy Parrott rifles—one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred pounders—pounded away at short though regular intervals, at the southwest corner of the bomb-proof; while during the daytime the New Ironsides, with remarkable regularity and precision, kept an almost incessant stream of eleven-inch shells from her eight-gun broadside, ricocheting over the water against the sloping parapet of Wagner, whence, deflected upward with a low remaining velocity, they dropped nearly vertically, exploding within or over the work, and rigorously searching every part of it except the subterranean shelters. The calcium lights turned night into day, and while throwing around our own men an impenetrable obscurity, they brilliantly illuminated every object in front, and brought the minutest details of the fort into sharp relief. In a few hours the fort became practically silent.
The next night, after the capture of Fort Wagner, a few hundred sailors from the fleet went to Fort Sumter in row-boats and attempted its capture. But they found it exceedingly difficult to climb up the ruined wall; most of their boats were knocked to pieces by the Confederate batteries; they met an unexpected fire of musketry and hand-grenades, and two hundred of them were disabled or captured.