EVACUATING MORRIS ISLAND. BY H. S. FULLER, MALVERN, ARK.
After the battle of Chancellorsville, Gen. Colquitt's Brigade, to which my regiment, the Twenty-Third Georgia Infantry, belonged, was ordered to Charleston, S. C., to form a part of the garrison at Morris Island. It was not a pleasant change for men who had been marching and fighting with the Army of Northern Virginia to be cooped up on a little sandy island
of not more than fifteen or twenty acres of land almost surrounded by a fleet of from fifty to sixty armed vessels carrying guns of the heaviest caliber, pouring their deadly missiles on us, and supported by land batteries of heavy artillery and mortars, to say nothing of their sharpshooters, who were ready and willing to pick us off if we ventured to show a hand above our fortification. It made the place almost intolerable day or night. During the day they would knock down so much of our fortifications, principally of sand, that it would require almost the entire force at the garrison to repair it through the night. Our walls were fifteen feet high and from twelve to fourteen feet thick, but their mortar batteries would throw their shells over in our midst, doing great damage, especially at night, when the detail of workers were repairing damages done during the day. On dark nights the lighted fuses to these shells would look like falling stars, and they would come sometimes in such showers as to appear that all the stars were falling at once. It was a veritable death trap, and it was a relief to us when we learned that the island was to be evacuated. On August 31, about 3 p.M., my regiment and a North Carolina regiment boarded a steamboat at Cummins Point, bound for Sullivan's Island, and the North Carolina regiment for James Island, on the opposite side of the harbor. For some reason, designedly or otherwise, the pilot of the boat took the wrong channel, and when about a mile and a half from land we came in range of the guns from Fort Moultrie, occupied by the enemy, and in a few moments they knocked our wooden steamboat into splinters, and she went down with a thousand or twelve hundred men on board. Fortunately, the channel was shallow at this point and the tide was out, which left the upper deck out of water, and we hung on to it through the night, anxiously looking for relief which did not come. We all knew what to expect when daylight would expose us to the fleets as well as the land batteries of the enemy, all of which were in easy range of us. The outlook was not made more hopeful by the fact that the tide had begun to come in and would soon sweep us off, except that it gave us the choice of either being drowned or shot to death by the enemy. Daylight came, and not a shot was fired at us; then sun-up, and still not a shot from the enemy. In the meantime our marine corps came to our relief, and in yawls and barges carried us over to Fort Sumter, landing the last of us about eight o'clock. The Yankees evidently saw our helpless condition and refrained from firing on us, for which I have always had the greatest respect for that particular command, but I've never understood why our marine corps was so slow in coming or attempting to come to our relief.
I wish to correct W. A. Day concerning his account of the charge on the Crater at Petersburg July 30, 1864, as it appeared in the August Veteran. I was an eyewitness to the charge. My brigade occupied the works not over three hundred yards east of the Crater, and on ground elevated enough for us to see all that transpired. The memorable charge in the evening was made by Wright's Georgia Brigade, Wilcox's Alabama Brigade, and Mahone's Virginia Brigade. If there were any Tennesseeans, South Carolinians, or North Carolinians engaged, it was at some other place than at the final assault made by the three brigades named.