Never Call Retreat (34 page)

Washington read the wrong meaning into Admiral Du Pont's repulse in the spring. Du Pont had lost hardly any men, his damaged ships had been easily repaired (except for sunken
Keokuk,
which had been a cipher to begin with) and it did seem that a sterner admiral might succeed; especially if the army reduced Fort Sumter, so that the navy could remove the mine field that clogged the harbor entrance. The sternest admiral within reach looked like Andrew Foote, who had worked so well with General Grant on the western rivers and who understood not only hard fighting but co-operation with the army, and so Foote was given Du Pont's place. At the same time the army named a new commander, Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, an engineer experienced in siege operations. He replaced Major General David Hunter, who was a hero of the abolitionists but whose other qualifications were not readily definable. This would team up a naval slugger with an army technical expert, which looked like a winning combination.

Unfortunately, Foote had never really recovered from wounds received at Fort Donelson, and he had been at home for a year trying to build up his health. Now, late in June, after the new appointment was announced, he died. In his place the navy chose Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, expert on naval ordnance, inventor of the big, bottle-shaped Dahlgren gun which was the navy's favorite heavy-duty weapon. Like Gillmore, he was more specialist than fighting man, and he was a square-cornered type not always easy to get along with; and in any case he hoisted his flag as commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron on July 6, and the joint operation against Charleston got under way.

It began smoothly enough on July 10 when the army crossed Lighthouse Inlet at the bottom of Morris Island and moved up toward Battery Wagner. An assault was made on the fort the next day and the Confederate defenders beat it off with ease, whereupon the army planted heavy guns where they would bear on the fort and the navy brought the monitors up the ship channel, and for the better part of a week there was a noisy, intermittent and rather ineffective shelling. On July 18 Gillmore was ready for a real attack. The navy came in closer, six ironclads and five wooden gunboats, the army's batteries added their own fire, and during the afternoon Battery Wagner received a pulverizing bombardment. The defenders took to the bombproofs for safety, Wagner's guns were silent, and from the Federal lines it looked as if the fort had been overwhelmed. After dark the firing was stopped and two Federal brigades formed line and moved up the sand to make the assault.

The infantry had been called on to do the impossible. Battery Wagner ran from side to side of the island, its parapet was protected by a deep dry moat, and in front of this the island narrowed so that the assaulting column had to pull in its flanks and form a compact mass that made an ideal target. The Confederates had suffered little from the long bombardment, and when they saw the infantry advancing in the starlight they ran to the parapet and opened a blistering fire of musketry and artillery. The Federals came on bravely enough, and some of them crossed the moat and scrambled up the sandy slopes and for a time there was hard hand-to-hand fighting in the night; then, at last, the infantry was driven away, the survivors drifted back to their starting point, and of some 5200 Federals engaged more than 1500 had been lost. The Confederate loss was comparatively unimportant, Battery Wagner was as tough as ever, and if the Federals wanted the place they would have to try something else.

One thing about this attack drew special attention. Among the leading regiments in the assault wave was the 54th Massachusetts, led by a well-born young Boston colonel named Robert Gould Shaw, and what made the 54th worth looking at was the fact that it was composed of Negroes, who were down here not only to take a fort but also to prove something about themselves. They took no fort, but it appeared that they did prove something, which is to say that they got up on the fort and stayed there until they were thoroughly shot to pieces, Colonel Shaw and his Negro orderly sergeant dying side by side on the parapet. A Confederate defender wrote that Shaw was "as brave a colonel as ever lived," and said that the men he led were "as fine-looking a set as I ever saw—large, strong, muscular fellows." Anti-slavery folk in the North came to feel that the whole affair had been no more than a fight between Negro soldiers and the Southern Confederacy, which led some of Gillmore's disgruntled Federals to insist that the fort would have been taken if the 54th had not given way at the crucial moment; and in any case a great many dead men of both races were given shallow graves in the sand just outside the fort, to illustrate that distressing idea of equality. A newspaper correspondent closed his account by saying that "there was terrible fighting to get into the fort, and terrible fighting to get out of it."
²

The assault having failed, the Federals must go by the book, and in a case like this the book called for siege warfare. So the Federals began to dig long trenches to edge nearer to the fort, setting up batteries by night, raining missiles on the fort all day long, digging more trenches after darkness came. Thousands of men cowered in shallow sand pits under hot sunlight, and sharpshooters on each side took a steady toll of men who did not crouch low enough. On the monitors, which came in day after day to hammer the fort, living conditions were all but unendurable, with hatches all closed and the foul air inside like that of an oven; Admiral Dahl-gren, who insisted on leading the monitors in person, was worn almost to the point of exhaustion and wrote despairingly that "the worst of this place is that one only stops getting weaker. One does not grow stronger." Day after day, members of his crews collapsed and had to be sent away, and the admiral was especially irritated when the Navy Department chose this time to forbid further issuance of the grog ration.

Inside Battery Wagner it was worst of all. Most of the garrison spent the day in the bombproofs, ill-ventilated cellars that were even hotter and steamier than the inside of the monitors, made still worse by the fact that they also served as hospitals for all of the wounded men. (Since most casualties were caused by artillery fire, some of the wounds were fearful.) Each evening when darkness brought an end to the firing the uninjured men would come out, look at the wreckage the shells had created, and conclude that the place could not be held any longer. Then, all night, they would work with shovels and sand bags, restoring parapet and rifle pits and traverses, so that by morning the fort once more would be defensible. The unending torrent of shells tore up the shallow sand pits where the men killed in the July 18 fight had been buried, scattering horrible fragments all over everything, and the air became almost too sickening to breathe; the shallow wells that were Battery Wagner's water supply became polluted and drinking water had to be brought by night in kegs from Charleston. Each day the garrison grew weaker and the Northern siege lines came closer, each day the fort looked less and less like a fort and more like an uneven mound of earth, and it went on week after week, from July into September, the bombardment growing worse each day, as if the whole war had turned into a struggle for possession of this poor sand hill.
⁸

Yet if the war had come to a focus here the focal point had been oddly chosen, for Battery Wagner ceased to matter long before it fell. As the Federal lines came nearer, Gillmore began to build new batteries for long-range Parrott rifles, arranging them so that they could fire past Wagner and strike Sumter itself, and as these came into action the lesson learned earlier at Fort Pulaski, outside of Savannah, was proved true: rifled guns of sufficient caliber could destroy any brick or stone wall ever built. Day after day the big rifles gouged into Sumter's walls, bringing the masonry down in rumbling cascades and raising a choking cloud of brick dust, pulverized mortar and powder smoke over the wreckage. Night after night Beauregard's engineers kept a working force busy making repairs, piling up tons of sand behind the rubble, taking guns ashore and filling in the casemates they had occupied, until at last the part of the fort that faced Morris Island was little more than a long rampart of earth and broken stone, forty feet high and twenty-five feet thick. There was a week of this, and then a week of bombardment by the monitors, and by the end of August Sumter had only one gun in action. Meanwhile Battery Wagner's torment continued. Gillmore mounted searchlights to play on the beaches at night so that Confederate reinforcements could be driven away. Twice the Federals tried to storm a low sandy ridge that seemed to "command" the Confederate battery, and twice they were driven back; then at last they took the ridge, all of the guns in Sumter were silenced, and the ironclads steamed up once more to pound Battery Wagner anew.

Soldiers and sailors on both sides had become servants and prisoners of their own guns. The war had come down to a routine rigorously followed as if it had some value of its own and was not expected to produce any lasting effect. By night men burrowed in the sand, brought up supplies, tried to carry their wounded to safety, and carefully nursed the guns so that firing could be resumed at dawn. By day they tended these guns, or hid in the earth while other guns were fired at them, or peered out to sea at the methodical evolutions of the fleet. From target-distance the monitors looked sluggish, almost harmless, seeming to be nothing more than round black boxes adrift on the tide; but at intervals of a few minutes fire would flash from a turret, and a 15-inch shell would come in, visible every foot of the way. If it passed overhead it sounded like an express train on the loose, and if it struck the parapet it shook the earth and sent up a high geyser of sand, and either way it was terrifying. One Confederate felt that it was even more unnerving to watch
New Ironsides,
which mounted fourteen 11 -inch guns and two long-range rifles. This craft never fired by broadside but let off one gun at a time, the fire rippling along her black side as if her gunners felt that they had all the time in the world.

It was little better for the besiegers than for the besieged. The narrow trenches in the sand caught and held all the heat, the heaviest shellfire did not seem to keep Wagner's sharpshooters under cover, and Gillmore's medical inspector presently warned that unless Wagner fell very soon most of the Federal troops would become unfit for duty from sheer exhaustion; Gillmore at last made up his mind to try to carry the fort by assault in the belief that this would cost fewer lives than would be lost by one more week of siege warfare. But Beauregard concluded that Wagner had served its purpose, and on the night of September 6 he pulled the garrison out. Federal patrols crept into the ruined fort, reported that "everything but the sand was knocked to pieces," and reflected that the summer's work had cost the Union army more than 2300 men, not counting a larger number disabled by sickness.*

They quickly learned that they had won nothing worth getting. They had done exactly what they set out to do—that is, they had taken Battery Wagner and Morris Island, and they had reduced Fort Sumter to a shapeless wreck—but they were no nearer to Charleston than they had been six months earlier. When Beauregard took the guns out of Fort Sumter he arrayed them in new batteries all around the inner harbor; on the north side of the entrance Fort Moultrie and its satellite batteries were still intact; altogether Beauregard had fifty-eight cannon bearing on the harbor entrance, and any naval craft that came in to sweep mines and remove other obstructions from the ship channel would get extremely rough treatment. The Confederate commander also had some good infantry lurking in the Fort Sumter wreckage, and when Dahlgren sent in a naval landing party on the night of September 8 the assault was a costly failure; of 450 men in the landing party only 127 were able to go ashore at the fort, and all of these were either killed, wounded or captured.

Federal army-navy rivalry by this time had got to the point where the two services were hardly speaking to each other. The army had made up a landing party of its own to attack Fort Sumter the same night the navy tried it, but there was no co-ordination whatever; when the soldiers saw what happened to the sailors they turned around and canceled their attack. Meanwhile, even though Fort Sumter had been ground to fragments the Yankees could not have it. The Confederate flag still flew there, and the one gun that remained in the place defiantly fired a sunset salute to the colors every night.
⁶

This ought to have ended it, but did not. There was a breathing spell for two or three weeks, while Dahlgren repaired his ships and Gillmore built new batteries on Morris Island, and then there were a few days of almost casual firing which accomplished nothing and apparently was not especially intended to accomplish anything; after which there were three additional weeks of idleness. Then, late in October, the army and navy together opened a tremendous bombardment that went on for twelve days; conducted, apparently, on the theory that the way to atone for a failure is to repeat the effort that has failed until sheer dogged persistence begins to make the process look admirable.

This immense bombardment, of course, was centered entirely on Fort Sumter, which had already been broken into fragments and which no longer mounted guns capable of doing anything more than salute the flag at sunset. In some ways this near-fortnight of firing was the most spectacular display Charleston had yet seen. The army had powerful Parrott rifles sited to strike what was left of Fort Sumter at almost point-blank range, and it also had a long array of immense siege mortars, and the navy came in with its biggest ships to fire 15-inch guns, and the great heap of sand and broken stones was flogged and torn apart and slammed together again, while defenders huddled in the bombproofs far down inside and waited for darkness to come so that they could go up for a whiff of air. Now and then a few of these defenders were killed. Otherwise, nothing at all was gained.

This had very little to do with winning the war. It was simply an exercise in the application of violence, as if to use the big guns and the fearful explosives had become an end in itself, owing nothing to anybody's desire for victory. It was appalling enough, and hideously impressive, and yet in a queer way not foreseen by its authors it was quite economical, at least as far as human life was concerned. For an entire summer the rivals fought here, using the most powerful weapons that had yet been invented. They threw thousands of tons of shell and solid shot at each other; they used their implements of destruction without the least restraint, trying for week after week to do the utmost that could possibly be done—and in the end, after four months of it, they had killed fewer men than died in a few July hours along Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg, where the apparatus of violence was far less impressive.