USA > New York > The history of the Forty-eighth regiment New York state volunteers, in the war for the union. 1861-1865 > Part 11
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"An aid of General Seymour came to Colonel Guss with orders for the Ninety-seventh to advance, stating that Strong's forces had entered Fort Wagner, and were engaged in a hand-to-hand conflict with the enemy, and needed immediate help. The order claimed to have the sanction of General Stevenson; but, owing to the conflicting intelli- gence received from the front, and the perplexity attendant upon the extreme darkness of the night, it was impossible to be entirely satis- tied of the reliability of a verbal order from an aid not personally known to the officer receiving it." . . . Yet "the regiment was imme- diately advanced under a heavy fire of musketry. After marching about two hundred yards, meeting a large number of wounded soldiers
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FORTY-EIGHTH REGIMENT, N. Y. S. VOLS.'
struggling back, General Stevenson appeared at the head of the regiment, and then rode rapidly toward the fort. He soon returned, ordered a ' halt-about face,' and sent the regiment back to its former position. In a little while he sent another message to the regiment as follows : 'It is reported that our troops have effected a lodgment upon one angle of the fort and retain possession of it. You will move up and ascertain if this is correct, and, if true, you will open communi- tion with that force and render whatever assistance is required.'"
But they did not come : they claim to have marched for- ward, and meeting some rebel pickets, came to the conclu- sion that we had surrendered. Still later in the night (I quote from the same authority), "upon information being received by General Stevenson to the effect that many of our men still remained in possession of a portion of the fort, he ordered an officer and ten men to reconnoitre the work; they were compelled to retire, however, by the fire of the enemy." That acknowledgment of three separate commu- nications from the men who were holding the salient all through those dreadful hours, and that explanation of why their appeals were in vain, is absolutely the only record of it I have been able anywhere to find. It proves at least that those of our comrades who were sent to the rear for re- inforcements did not fail to apply for them to the General commanding the brigade in reserve, whose duty it cer- tainly was to have ascertained if their representations were true. It was not only pitiful to leave us there to our fate, as far as we were concerned, but it was fatal to the re- sult of that battle; for had that southeast bastion been thoroughly reinforced in the middle of the night, it could have been held against all-comers till morning, and then it would have commanded the rest of the work, and the great assault would not have been in vain. As it was, we were left to our fate, and now occurred within that captured sa- lient for the next three hours and more, as remarkable a scene of valor as can be read of in history.
The ground within that salient was piled with dead and dying in places three feet deep; the wounded cried for
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FORT WAGNER.
help ; our numbers had been greatly reduced, both by the fire from the rear and by the retirement one at a time, as best they could, of many who thought the attempt to hold the bastion was folly. After all had gone, however, there still remained, scattered along the inside of the superior slope, 140 men. They were mainly, as already said, of the Sixth Connecticut and Forty-eighth New York, although there was hardly any regiment that had participated in either of the three assaults, some of whose men had not forced their way into that bastion, and did not join that little stal- wart company who determined to defend it to the last. In the darkness they did not know each other : they only knew that they were lying on top of heaps of dead, and could tell from their own fire that they were well distributed, and that they had made a common resolve that they would hold what they had taken to the end. When their ammunition was exhausted, they robbed the dead for more; when they were assaulted at one point, they rushed together there and de- fended it: so at all points. They were actuated by the noblest spirit that ever prompted soldiers to valorous and desperate deeds ; they helped each other automatically, for there was no one to order them. They were not' like a single company or the remnants of a regiment, properly of ficered and ordered what to do, and yet they did not know until the next morning, when they looked into each other's faces in the prison, that there was not among them a single commissioned officer, that to a man they were private soldiers. Let it be remembered to their lasting renown, that the men who defended Fort Wagner for three hours after they had been abandoned, prompted thereto by their own brave hearts alone, were not " Generals" or " Colonels" or " Cap- tains," but "privates," not great soldiers, therefore, but only great spirits-the underlings of war, yet its supreme heroes-private soldiers. Moments passed-dreadful mo- ents of intense anxiety. What instant the rebels would rush down upon them in overwhelming numbers in the darkness, and at what point, they could not know. One
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FORTY-EIGHTH REGIMENT, N. Y. S. VOLS.
terrible assault upon them, led by Major Rion of 'the Charleston battalion, they successfully repulsed ; many minor assaults also. Thus hours passed, terrible hours of suspense, but of unrelenting fidelity. The heavens were black with clouds; not a single star would look on a scene of blood like that. The only light was the flash of the guns from Fort Sumter above, and the embrasures on either side. For more than three hours that defence of the fort within the fort was kept up. A mere handful of men did it. They were surprised the next morning, when they counted each other, to know that they had numbered only one hundred and forty. They became conscious towards midnight that they were being surrounded : they saw faintly in the darkness lines of rebels passing down the seashore in their rear, on the right; others that they did not see crossed the face of the curtain behind them on the left; 1700 men on their own ground had failed for more than three hours to dislodge 140 abandoned men from the mighty salient they had captured. But at midnight the Confederates, by suddenly rushing in upon them from front and flanks and rear, did finally overwhelm them ; then they surrendered. The writer never can forget the instant when the mass of rebels from all directions, yelling " Surrender ! Surrender!" rushed in upon us; he fired his last cartridge into one of them, then broke the little carbine he had been given at Pulaski upon the cannon by his side, and held up his hand and surrendered. He was at the time but a boy, and he claims now to have been but the least, and the least worthy, of that immortal band of 140 who defended that salient till midnight ; and it is an inexpressible sorrow to him to this day to remember that it was the unhappy fate of many of that 140 private soldiers who survived the carnage of that battle, to live to become idiots for their country, and to starve and freeze and die at last at Belle Island and An- dersonville, with the world's commiseration their only re- ward.
Not a man who participated in that heroic defence re-
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FORT WAGNER.
turned to the Federal lines to tell of it, and it appears to have been absolutely unknown. There is not a single line concerning it that the writer has discovered in any history of the event until Mr. Charles Cowley issued his sterling pamphlet, "Afloat and Ashore," and until the Confederate General Taliaferro wrote his account of the battle nineteen years after it occurred. Mr. Cowley is inaccurate in naming the regiments engaged, but in referring to the furious charge of the Sixth Connecticut and Forty-eighth New York, he says: " In spite of the most deadly fire, they leaped over the ditch, bounded upon the parapet, drove the Thirty-first North Carolina with the bayonet, and entered the southeast salient of the fort. It is a fact (though Northern his- torians omit to mention it) that these gallant regiments took possession of the south sea-angle of the fort, and held it for three mortal hours, but it cost a terrible sacrifice of life: the survivors fought with the dead bodies of their comrades lying three feet deep around them ; finally, for want of support they surrendered, few, if any of them, being able to get out." But far the best ac- count of it is from the pen of the Confederate General Talia- ferro. After acknowledging the capture of the salient, although he attributes it to the unfaithfulness of the regi- ment who should have defended it, he describes his at tempts to regain it in the following words :
" THE ASSAILANTS ASSAILED."
"The party which had gained access by the salient next the sea could not escape ; it was certain death to attempt to pass the line of concentrated fire which swept the face of the work, and they did not attempt it ; but they would not surrender, and in despair kept up a con- stant fire upon the main body of the fort. The Confederates called for volunteers to dislodge them-a summons which was promptly responded to by Major MacDonald of the Fifty-first North Carolina, and by Captain Rion of the Charleston Battalion, with the requisite number of men. Rion's company was selected. and the gallant Irish- man at the head of his company dashed at the reckless and insane men who seemed to insist upon immolatien. The tables were now sin-
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gularly turned : the assailants had become the assailed, and they held a fort within the fort, and were protected by the traverses and gun- chambers behind which they fought. Rion rushed at them, but he fell, shot outright with several of his men, and the rest recoiled. At this time General Hagood reported to General Taliaferro with Colonel Harrison's splendid regiment, the Thirty-second Georgia, sent over by Beauregard to his assistance, as soon as a landing could be effected at Cumming's Point. These troops were ordered to move along on the traverses and bomb-proofs, and to plunge their concentrated fire over the stronghold ; still for a time they held out, but at last they surrendered."
General Taliaferro closes his graphic and accurate story of that night by a quotation from an address by the Rev. Dr. Dennison : "The truest courage and determination was manifested on both sides on that crimson day at that great slaughter-house, Wagner."
Thus, only in a pamphlet in which a Northern lawyer has printed certain pages of his diary, and in a newspaper ac- count written by the Confederate commanding general nine- teen years after the event. has there yet appeared any acknowledgment of that extraordinary defence of "the fort within the fort " until midnight, by a handful of one hun- dred and forty private soldiers under the most terrible fires. heaped about with their dead and dying comrades, amid their cries of anguish and pain, without orders, or any one to order them, actuated only by a common determination to defend what they had taken to the desperate end-a deed of heroism, the writer ventures to declare, unsurpassed in all the records of war. It would be unfair to neglect to say that there had doubtless been others who had partici- pated in the defence for some time and who had succeeded in getting to the rear before the surrender : indeed, Lieutenant James A. Barrett, though severely wounded in the thigh, remained within the fort for a long while, encouraging the men to hold the banks, collecting ammunition from the dead and passing it to the living, and his word cannot be disputed that when he determined to go to the rear himself, he ordered all the men within sound of his voice to retire
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also. Such orders, however, were unheard high up on the bank where the firing was in progress ; and if they had been heard it is doubtful if they would have been obeyed. Noth- ing less than a delirium of patriotism actuated the defiant men, who would not surrender and would not retreat. Lieu- tenant-Colonel James M. Green of the Forty-eighth was shot dead after crossing the bastion, as he leaped on the inner parapet. He lay for hours on his back, on the side of the slope near by the writer; when the flash of the guns lit up the scene he could see his face: his long beard, that flowed down to his breast, was burnt by the fires of the bat- tle ; he was yet breathing but unconscious at midnight. Sergeant George Cranmer, who crossed the ditch and ran up the bank by the writer's side, pausing to fire a shot by the side of the first rebel cannon, fell dead upon its plat- form. The bullets struck that cannon as hail strikes a pane of glass. It was a night of terrors, never before (and never again) experienced in the history of the regiment. Captain Paxson, with both his legs shot through with canister, heaped about by the dead and the dying, was lying there bleeding to death ; and long into the night, and high above the sound of musketry and the crash of howitzers, was heard his dying call, " Die-no-mores, follow me." Every in- dividual had experiences which were peculiar to himself ; no one man can narrate the occurrences precisely as they appeared to another ; but as an example of the horrors of that night. I desire to quote from the diary of Melville R. . Conklin of Company K. He says :
"I had passed the first parapet and nearly gained the colors when I was struck by a bullet on my right cheek, about one inch from the edge of my jaw ; the bullet passed entirely through my head, coming out within an inch of my temple, forcing out my left eye ; it broke my upper jaw, and consequently tore out my teeth. My first feelings were as if I had been struck a severe blow, and it felt as if my head was all smashed in ; the next, I felt a sharp, stinging pain through my temple. and as I raised my hand to it, my eye fell into my hand, and I Cast it on the ground. I took but two steps farther. then fell down, and lay senseless possibly fifteen minutes, and in my first moments of return-
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ing consciousness managed to crawl behind a broken gun carriage to shelter myself from further danger; as I was unfit for further use here, I managed to get my hand under my head, and was lying upon my stomach to keep the blood from strangling me. I had a canteen full of water with which I kept washing my mouth out. Before I was able to crawl away I was struck by a piece of shell'on my left hip, passing entirely through me : this shot dispelled all thoughts of escape ; I had not strength enough to move. Reinforcements failed from some un- known cause to come up to the support of our men. . ... So passed the memorable night. I lay where I had crawled, with heaps of dead and dying around me, until daylight the next morning."
I quote that, not as an exceptional experience, but as a fair sample of what hundreds of other brave fellows suffered who were not killed outright. So ended the assault at Fort Wagner: it had lasted for four hours ; it. had been sig- nalized by deeds of daring unsurpassed in history ; and when the sun rose the next morning Fort Wagner was no nearer taken than it had been the morning before. Two thousand men had been sacrificed because of the darkness which came upon them as soon as they struck the fort, and which was so impenetrable that it made it impossible for them to proceed ; ten minutes more of daylight and the fort had been theirs. Whoever delayed the assault till eight o'clock made a fatal blunder; another had been made eight days before, when (on July 10th) it could have been taken with trifling loss : the third blunder was in the delay of Putnam's brigade in coming to the support of Strong's, and their firing into them. Stevenson's brigade also should have been pushed in to support Putnam ; but I suppose that the fall of both the division and the two brigade commanders could not have been anticipated, and after Seymour, Strong, and Put- nam had fallen there seems to have been no one to succeed to the command, when the presence of a commanding gen- eral was so imperatively required. Our gallant young bri- gade-commander, General George C. Strong, had been severe- ly wounded by a discharge from a howitzer, striking him in the thigh. Hle was immediately borne from the field and his wound was dressed ; subsequently he was taken to Hilton
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FORT WAGNER.
Head, and to his home in New York, where he died from lock-jaw, resulting from his wound, on the 30th of July, 1863.
How gladly would we stop to pay a fitting tribute to each one of the brave fellows who fell in front of Wagner! Lieutenant-Colonel Green had said that day, " I am going to sleep under that big gun to-night ;" and he did. Captain Hurst said, "Take a cigar, my boy ; I will see you in the morning." Captain Farrell said, " If I am killed to-night, what will become of my family?" Lieutenant Fox, as he lay dying in the ditch, said to one of the boys, "Settle my mess-bill ; pay my servant a month's wages ; there's a rest remaining." He was not yet twenty-one years of age, but he commanded Company A (the color company ) that night. He did not fall until wounded the third time. Sergeant Sparks, who bore the colors, had his hand shattered by the same shot that demolished the staff he bore. Colonel Barton's wound was a bad one : so were most of the others. Indeed, such was the character of the missiles that were hurled at us. that night that few of the men were slightly wounded, and the proportion of men killed was very great. Outside of our own regiment the most conspicuous soldiers who fell after General Strong were Colonels Shaw and Putnam. Both were young men about twenty-seven years of age. Colonel Shaw was a son of Francis George Shaw of Staten Island, N. Y., and a brother-in-law of Mr. George William Curtis. He was proud of his place as colonel of the first colored regiment raised in Massachusetts, at the head of which he fell. He was a man of refinement and gentle man- ners, and brave as a lion. They buried him " in a pit under a heap of his niggers ;" but they could not dishonor him. His name that night rose into high and lasting renown. Colonel Putnam of the Seventh New Hampshire was an equally brave and noble soldier. He was a graduate of West Point. Two medals were sent to each company of the regi- ment to be given to soldiers of conspicuous gallantry at the battle of Fort Wagner. Major Barrett says that Company HI proposed to send theirs back with the message that they
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" would not go around." They were. however, generally distributed to men who had lost limbs, and did not re- turn to the service. The one hundred and forty soldiers who defended the sea-face bastion until midnight were marched the next morning to Cumming's Point, put on board a little steamboat, and passing around Fort Sumter-already well-nigh battered down by Gillmore's batteries-landed at Charleston. It was a Sabbath morning, but they were cursed as they passed along the streets by an infuriated mob, and were glad when they were secure in the city jail.
FORT SUMTER AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT.
Beauregard summoned some of the prisoners before him. and tried to ascertain by questioning them what Federal forces remained on Morris Island. The writer when asked told him about twenty thousand. He threatened to punish the men of the Forty-eighth also for participation in the burning of Bluffton. His threats were not carried out. Three days afterwards the prisoners were sent to Columbia, S. C .. and remained there in prison for two months. In September they were taken to Richmond, first to Libby Prison, then to Belle Isle, and were soon scattered and lost
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FORT WAGNER.
amid the thousands of emaciated sufferers there. Subse- quently many of them were sent to Andersonville. Few ever returned. Their fate was a sad requital for the valor they had displayed on the ramparts of Wagner.
The writer has made two visits to Fort Wagner since the war : in October, 1874. and in April, 1884. As you approach Morris Island now, sailing down the bay from Charleston, it looks like a low line of sand against the southern sky. In the centre of it there is a little mound, overgrown with brush, that can be seen above the horizon from far up the bay : that mound is Wagner. At my first visit the " lazaretto" stood where our batteries had been at the foot of the ap- proach. The sand had drifted over bastions and embank- ments, but the same sea washed up the same beach, and the same wild-oat grew here and there in single spears; the bomb-proofs were filled with sand, but still the outlines of the great parapets were distinct, and the sea-face bastion, which was so long defended, and so heaped with dead, was easily traceable. No monument has been erected there ; not so much as a sign-board tells the passer-by to this day that any event of historic interest occurred upon that spot. Man has been unmindful and ungrateful, but God has remembered those dead heroes. Let it be borne in mind that the dead within that bastion were never decently buried, but the next morning were shovelled over with sand and left there as they fell, heaped together in indiscriminate glory.
On that October day of 1874, as the writer climbed again the drifted sand to stand once more upon those parapets and with uncovered head and in tears recall the memory of his comrades who on that spot had fallen, what was his surprise to find a bed of flowers blooming there. Upon that arid, sterile, sandy island, where nothing ever grew before, over the whole area of that bastion which had been so heaped with dead, and there only, there grew a blue flower-a wild species of .. forget-me-not" that blooms perennially. He made inquiries as to how the flowers came there, but no one could explain it. Somebody may have sown the seed ; but
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FORTY-EIGHTH REGIMENT, N. Y. S. VOLS.
those flowers doubtless sprang from the rich dust of the heroes who were so rudely sepulchred upon that spot-as if the great God, to rebuke the neglect of the Republic, had placed them there a monument. And what could be a no- bler one? Marble shafts will crumble, bronze will tarnish with time, granite will wear away with years, but flowers will bloom in their seasons forever.
And yet the day may come wlien opposing sections of a re- stored Union will unite to erect upon that mound of sand a monument to the heroes who fell there on either side. Let it be a noble shaft. typical of the brave spirits who loved their lives less than they loved their honor, and who died upon those sands, lifting them forever into undying renown. The hearts of the sailors as they enter and leave the port will swell within them at the sight, and it will mean forever that upon this spot died heroic men, who believed that they were fighting for the right. For the grim courage that rushed forward against , those fatal parapets was met by a courage not inferior that defended them. To appropriate the words of Thomas Starr King in describing the charge by Ney's cavalry at Water- loo, the assault and defence of Fort Wagner was " the beat of a fiery sensibility against a stony patience ; " it was " the old hypothesis in dramatic play of an irresistible in contact with an immovable. The irresistible was spent-the im- movable stood fast." The chapter upon Fort Wagner in General Beauregard's recently published work closes with this sentence: " It is a matter of history to-day, that the de- fence of Battery Wagner is looked upon as the most skil- ful, desperate, and glorious achievement of the war : it stands unsurpassed in ancient and modern times." The writer was indebted, on his first visit to the historic spot. to the courte- sies of Captain Gleason of the United States Army, then in charge of the Government works in Charleston Harbor. And no better illustration of the dreadful carnage of that fearful night can be found than the fact which he stated as we strolled together along the sandy beach-that although eleven years had passed since the assault, yet after every great storm he was accustomed togather up, upon that spot,
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FORT WAGNER.
a wagon-load of human bones which the waves of the sea had unearthed, and reinter them. It is a haunted beach. At the writer's second visit (1884) the fort remained unchanged, though the sea had washed across the island in its rear, making an inlet that now connects Vincent's Creek with the ocean at high-tide. The Forty-Eighth Regiment was des- tined yet to suffer in many battles, as whoever will patient- ly continue to read this history will learn, but never again so terribly as that night at Fort Wagner.
After the repulse of July 18th, Gillmore modified his plans, and undertook the slower but surer method of reduc-
SWAMP ANGEL.
ing Wagner by regular approaches. He erected also the famous "Swamp Angel," with which he threw shells into Charleston. He prosecuted the work with great vigor and skill, by night and day. By September 6th the sap had reached the south face of the fort, and on the morning of the 7th it was finally evacuated. Gillmore's congratulatory address to his troops on the 15th contains the following words : " You now hold in possession the whole of Morris Island, and the city and harbor of Charleston lie at the mercy of your artillery from the very spot where the first shot was fired at your country's flag, and the rebellion itself was inaugurated." He had at last succeeded in taking Morris Island the had also battered Fort Sumter into a heap of brick dust), but at what terrible cost !
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