Forty-eighth Regiment New York State Volunteers - Chapter 7

"Battery Wagner," as it was called by the Confederates ("Fort" Wagner by the Federals), was located by General Pemberton in 1862, but it was greatly enlarged and strengthened by General Beauregard, who succeeded Pemberton in the command of the Confederate forces in the fall of that year. He added traverses between its land-guns, three heavy guns to its sea-face, and built the enormous bomb-proofs which so successfully sheltered its garrisons through several bombardments. Its precise situation was three quarters of a mile south of Cummings Point on Morris Island, and one and a half miles from Fort Sumter. It ran from the sea to Vincent's Creek across a narrow point of the island. It had a bastioned front, and was so strongly constructed that, in Beauregard's own words, "It successfully withstood during fifty-eight days the heaviest land and naval attacks known in history." Every device of skillful military engineering was resorted to to render Wagner impregnable. Its location was a stroke of genius, for it was not placed at the very narrowest point of the island, but some hundred yards back of it, so that it was many times wider than the narrowest point in its front over which our approaches had to be made; yet the earthwork crossed the entire island where it stood, with its flanks perfectly protected by a marsh and creek on its right and the sea on its left. It was provided also with a sluice-gate entrance to the ditch, which retained water admitted at high-tide. Its garrisons could receive reinforcements and supplies at all times from Cummings Point and Charleston. It was possible also, from the location of other Confederate forts and batteries, to bring to bear a concentrated and cross fire from six separate points upon the space in its front; and indeed it was through such a fire that both the great assaults were made, and despite it that Fort Wagner was ultimately taken by siege. Its front was protected against assault by a heavy line of palisading, by wire entanglements, torpedoes, and every device know to ferocious warfare. One of these contrivances of Beauregard's has properly been called "devilish." On the sides of the ditch he placed a hedge of lances and spears with long hickory handles, firmly set in the banks, close together, forming chevaux-de-frise of hooks and blades of steel. Also, along the bottom were laid thick planks, driven full of sharp spikes, whose points were two and three inches high, and were intended to impale the feet of the hardy assailants who might dare to cross the ditch. The fort itself was built entirely of sand, the only wood about it being the platforms and gun-carriages and the palmetto logs used for the roofing of the bomb-proof. It has been declared by competent military authority to have been an impregnable earthwork.
I am happy to quote the following additional description of it, from a Confederate authority (General Jones), and especially as it gives what is believed to be a reliable account of its armament and garrison upon that fatal day, July 18, 1863:

"Battery Wagner. "Battery Wagner was a field-work, made of sand and riveted with turf and palmetto logs. It extended across the island from the beach on the east to Vincent's Creek on the west, and presented towards the south a bastioned front of about two hundred and seventy-five yards. The parapets were very thick, and the ditch of depth. The space within the work was from east to west about two hundred yards, and from north to south varied from twenty to seventy-five yards. On this space to the west were quarters for officers and men, built of wood, bomb-proof, capable of sheltering from eight hundred to a thousand men, bomb-proof magazines, and heavy traverses.

"The Armament. "On the 18th of July the armament was one 10-inch columbiad, one 32-pounder rifle, one 42-pounder and two 32-pounder carronades, two naval shell-guns and one 8-inch sea-coast mortar --in all thirteen, and one light battery. Of those guns only the single 10-inch columbiad was of much effect against the monitors. The Federal land-batteries were beyond the range of nearly all of the other guns in Wagner.

"The Garrison At Battery Wagner. "On the morning of the 18th the infantry of the garrison consisted of the Thirty-first North Carolina, Lieutenant-Colonel C. W. Knight commanding; Fifty-first North Carolina, Colonel McKethen; and the Charleston Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Gaullard. The artillery was Captains W. T. Tatam's and Warren Adams' companies of the First South Carolina regular infantry, acting as artillery; Captains J. T. Buckner's and W. J. Dixon's companies of the Sixty-third Georgia Heavy Artillery, and Captain DePass' Light Battery --in all an aggregate of about seventeen hundred men. The Charleston Battalion and Fifty-first North Carolina were assigned to the defense of the parapet in the order named from the right along the south front to the gun-chamber opposite the door of the bomb-proof, which was on the left or sea-front. The Thirty-first North Carolina extended along the sea-face from the left of the Fifty-first to the sally-port towards Battery Gregg. A part of this regiment (the Thirty-first) was held in reserve on the parade.

"Outside The Work. Two companies of the Charleston Battalion, Captain Julius A. Blake commanding, were outside of the work guarding the left gorge and sally-port. Two of Captain De Pass' field pieces were also outside of the work on the traverse near the sally-port. Colonel E. B. Harris, Chief of Engineers, had that day placed a howitzer on the right of the sally-port, outside of the beach, to cooperate with the guns on the left. To avoid the delay, which in a sudden assault might prove fatal, of assembling the men and marching them in military order to their respective posts, every man was instructed individually as to the exact point which he should occupy, and which, on an order to man the parapets, he would be required to gain and hold. All of the artillery was under the general command of Lieutenant-Colonel J. C. Simkins, Chief of Artillery."

It was in the second and great attempt to carry this earthwork by assault on the night of July 18, 1863, that the Forty-eighth Regiment achieved immortality. There is a model of Fort Wagner prepared under the direction of General Gillmore after its capture, and now preserved in the museum of the Military Academy at West Point. Colonel Wheeler, Professor of Engineering, uses it still in teaching his classes of cadets As an earthwork, it was so perfect, that it has come to be a model. That model is harmless-looking as it stands in the museum on the banks of the peaceful Hudson, but the real Fort Wagner was not so: it was the scene of the deadliest onslaught of the war; of wild and pitiless carnage and blood and disaster, a scene of hate and fury, a spot which resounded with curses and shrieks and dying groans, a sea-shore along which to this day little children never stroll on summer evenings to gather shells, because of the ghastly human bones which every wave unearths and washes up.
It was on that strip of barren sand in front of this impregnable earthwork that we found ourselves ion the morning of July 18, 1863. We had been now for eight days on Morris Island. Five formidable batteries had been erected by out forces across the island in our front. The hour ws ready for the great bombardment, and early in the morning it began. Dahlgren moved his monitors, ironsides, and gun-boats close up to the fort, and, regardless of the fire both of Sumter and Wagner, all day long poured his heavy shells with terrific effect, into that bank of sand. The ships were the new Ironsides, the monitors Montauk, Weehawken, Patapsco, Nantucket, and Catskill, and the gun-boats Paul Jones, Ottawa, Seneca, Chippewa, and Wissahickon, with six mortar-boats. The land batteries opened fire at the same time with a hundred guns (without a moment's intermission through the day) concentrated their fire upon Wagner. General Beauregard's report says, "The enemy's firing was very rapid, averaging fourteen shots per minute, and unparalleled until this epoch in the weight of the projectiles thrown." Within eleven hours, more than 9000 shell were hurled at the grim fort. It was a magnificent spectacle as we witnessed it from the sand-hills on Morris Island. No one would suppose that a human being, or a bird even, could live for a moment upon that fort. The shells struck the great banks, exploded, and threw the sand high in the air. They beat the banks shapeless, and carried away nearly sixteen feet of sand covering the bomb-proof. After a few hours the guns were silenced, and the garrison driven back to their bomb-proofs under ground. The rebel fire from Fort Sumter was kept up, however, all the day.
A new problem in the science of war was destined to be solved that Saturday on Morris Island. It had been demonstrated at Fort Pulaski that walls of brick could not withstand modern projectiles; would banks of earth and sand successfully resist them? That was the crucial test of that fiery summer's day. The armament of the fort was of no moment. It was purely a question of passive resistance, and the banks of sand stood the test. The garrison at Fort Wagner on that day consisted of 1700 men --the Charleston battalion on the right, Fifty-first North Carolina in the center, and the Thirty-first North Carolina, in the great southeast bastion on the sea-front. They were under the immediate command of General William B. Taliaferro, one of "Stonewall" Jackson's veterans. We are fortunate in possessing from his own pen a graphic account of that day's battle, written and viewed, of course, from his standpoint. He calls the bombardment a "tempest of fire."

"About a quarter past eight in the evening the storm broke: ship after ship and battery after battery, and then apparently all together, vomited forth their horrid flame, and the atmosphere was filled with deadly missiles. It is impossible for any pen to describe, or for any one who was not an eye witness, to conceive the fatal grandeur of the spectacle. Within the narrow limits of Wagner the sand came down in avalanches. Huge vertical shells and those rolled over by the ricochet shots from the ships buried themselves and then exploded, rending the earth and forming great craters, out of which the sand and iron fragments flew high into the air. It was a fierce sirocco freighted from the glacis, from the exterior slope, from the parapet, as it was now almost in waves, over into the work, the men sometimes half-buried by the moving mass. Our chief anxiety was about the magazines. The profile of the fort might be destroyed, the ditch filled up, the traverses and bomb-proof barracks knocked out of shape, but the protecting banks of sand would still afford their shelter; but if the coverings of the magazines were blown away and they became exposed, the explosion which would ensue would lift fort and garrison into the air and annihilate all in general chaos. They were carefully watched, and reports of their condition made at short intervals...
The day wore on: thousands upon thousands of shells and round-shot shells loaded with balls, shells of guns and shells of mortars, percussion-shells exploding upon impact, shells with graded fuses, every contrivance known to the arsenal war, leaped into and around the doomed fort; yet there was no cessation. The sun seemed to stand still, and the long midsummer day to know no night. Some men were dead, and no scratch appeared on their bodies: the concussion had forced the breath from their lungs, and collapsed them into corpses...
The commanding officer was buried knee-deep in sand, and had to be rescued by spades from his imprisonment. The day wore on; hours followed, hours of anxiety and grim endurance, but no respite ensued. At last night came --not, however, to herald a cessation of the strife, but to usher in a conflict still more terrible. More than eleven hours had passed: the fort was torn and mutilated; to the outside observer it was apparently powerless, knocked to pieces and pounded out of shape, the outline changed, the exterior slope full of gaping wounds, the ditch half filled up; but the interior still preserved its form and its integrity. Scarred and defaced, it was yet a citadel, which although not offensive was defiant. It was nearly eight o'clock at night, but still twilight, when a calm came, and the blazing circle ceased to glow with flame. The ominous pause was understood: it required no signals to be read by those whom they were not directed to inform that the supreme moment was now at hand; it meant --ASSAULT.