Second Battle of Fort Wagner

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Battle of Fort Wagner was fought on the 18th of July, 1863, and what happened in the hours between dusk and 10:00 p.m. that night would reverberate far beyond the beaches of Morris Island, South Carolina. A strip of sand no wider than 60 yards. Marsh on one side, ocean on the other. And at the end of it, a Confederate fortress bristling with guns, shielded by a moat laced with spiked planks beneath the waterline and sharpened palmetto logs along its edge. Into that corridor marched the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, a regiment of African-American soldiers, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. What would become of them, and what their conduct that night would mean for the war, are the questions this story sets out to answer.

• 2. The Fortress on the Narrow Island

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  Fort Wagner sat at the southern end of Morris Island, controlling the approaches to Charleston Harbor. The Confederates called it Battery Wagner, and they had built it to be nearly impregnable. The island was so narrow that any attacking force could only send one regiment at a time down the strip of beach toward its walls. Upon clearing that bottleneck, an attacker faced the fort's 250-yard south face, stretching from Vincent's Creek to the sea. The moat surrounding it was shallow but rigged with obstacles: sharpened palmetto logs driven into the riverbed, an abatis of felled branches, and spiked planks submerged just beneath the water on the seaward side. On the night of July 18, the fort's armament included a 10-inch seacoast mortar, two 8-inch shell guns, a 42-pound carronade, and several howitzers, among other weapons. Company A of the 1st South Carolina Artillery had also positioned two additional guns outside the fort's southern face, aimed to deliver enfilading fire into anyone who made it through the approach. Brigadier General William B. Taliaferro commanded the garrison, which was composed of the 1st South Carolina Artillery, the Charleston Battalion, the 31st North Carolina, and the 51st North Carolina.

• 3. The Bombardment That Failed

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  Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore had tried once before. In the First Battle of Fort Wagner on July 10 and 11, Union troops had been repulsed with heavy losses from artillery and musket fire. This second assault was supposed to be different. Before sending infantry, Gillmore ordered an eight-hour artillery bombardment on July 18, joined by naval gunfire from six monitors that pulled to within 300 yards of the fort. The bombardment was relentless, but Fort Wagner's sandy walls absorbed the punishment rather than crumbling under it. When it was over, the defenders had lost only about 8 men killed and roughly 20 wounded, having sheltered in a bombproof interior during the shelling. Gillmore had also ordered a feint at the Battle of Grimball's Landing on July 16, hoping to distract Confederate attention before the main assault. None of it had softened the target enough. At 7:45 p.m., the infantry moved forward anyway.

• 4. The 54th at the Parapet

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  Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led the 54th Massachusetts at the front of the assault, attacking westward toward the curtain of Wagner as the rest of General George Crockett Strong's brigade moved against the seaward salient on the south face. When the 54th Massachusetts came within about 150 yards of the fort, the defenders opened fire with cannon and small arms. The 51st North Carolina fired directly into their ranks while the Charleston Battalion hit them on the left flank. Despite those losses, the 54th reached the parapet. Hand-to-hand combat followed. Colonel Shaw was killed upon the parapet early in the action; Confederate reports later claimed his body was pierced seven times, with the fatal wound from a rifle bullet to his chest. The regiment was eventually forced back, but the ground they had covered under that fire was extraordinary. Sergeant Major Lewis Henry Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass, survived the battle and wrote about it in a letter to his future wife. Only 315 men were left in the regiment when it was over. Thirty were killed in action, including Shaw and two of his captains, Russel and Simpkins, and they were buried together in a single grave.

• 5. Collapse and Aftermath

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  Behind the 54th Massachusetts, the broader Union assault unraveled. The 6th Connecticut pressed into the southeast of the fort, where the 31st North Carolina had failed to take its position in the bombproof shelter, creating a gap. General Taliaferro scrambled to fill it. The 48th New York also reached the slopes of the bastion, but three Confederate howitzers firing canister into the flanks of the remaining regiments in Strong's brigade brought them to a halt before they could follow. Colonel Haldimand S. Putnam's second brigade committed roughly 100 to 200 men from the 62nd and 67th Ohio to the bastion, but reinforcements from General Stevenson's reserve never came. The Confederates attempted two counter-attacks, both beaten back when the officers leading them were shot down. Then Brigadier General Johnson Hagood arrived with the 32nd Georgia Infantry, transported to the island during the fighting. That fresh regiment swept the bastion, killing or capturing the Union soldiers still holding it. By 10:00 p.m. it was over. General Strong was mortally wounded in the thigh by grape shot while trying to rally his men. Colonel Putnam was shot in the head and killed while giving the order to withdraw. Colonel John Lyman Chatfield of the 6th Connecticut was also mortally wounded. Total Union losses came to roughly 1,515 killed, captured, or wounded, though General Hagood reported burying 800 bodies in mass graves in front of the fort. Confederate casualties numbered 174.

• 6. Medal, Policy, and Prisoner Crisis

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  William Carney, an African-American sergeant with the 54th Massachusetts, recovered the regiment's United States flag during the assault and returned it to Union lines. He is considered the first Black recipient of the Medal of Honor for that act. The broader impact of the 54th's conduct spread quickly. Their performance under fire strengthened the case for wider Union recruitment of African-American soldiers, deepening the North's numerical advantage in a way the Confederacy could not answer. That asymmetry carried real consequences for the rest of the war. It also triggered a legal and moral crisis over prisoners of war. The Confederate Congress had passed a law in May 1863, building on an earlier declaration by President Davis, that excluded Black soldiers and their white officers from exchange. When some of the Black Union prisoners taken at Wagner were not exchanged alongside their white comrades, President Lincoln responded with General Order 252, halting all prisoner exchanges. That policy is often wrongly credited to General Grant, but it originated directly from the events of July 18 on Morris Island.

• 7. The Siege That Followed

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  After the assault, Hagood's brigade reinforced the garrison during the night of July 18-19, and Hagood assumed command the following morning. He was later relieved by Colonel Laurence M. Keitt. In his memoir, Memoirs of the War of Secession, Hagood described conditions inside Wagner during the weeks that followed as almost unbearable. The constant Union bombardment unearthed large numbers of the dead buried after the July 18 assault, and the smell, in his account, made the fort nearly impossible to occupy. Soldiers killed during the siege were buried in the walls of Wagner, only to be exhumed again by the next round of shelling. After 60 days of bombardment, with provisions running short and Union siege trenches drawing close, the Confederates abandoned Fort Wagner on the 7th of September, 1863. The island's significance survived long after the battle. In May 2008, a coalition that included the Trust for Public Land, the South Carolina Conservation Bank, and the Civil War Trust purchased Morris Island on behalf of the City of Charleston for $3 million, heading off development plans that had first surfaced in 2003.