The campaign, chapter by chapter

Gillmore opens not with the war but with the ground: a city at the head of its harbor on a peninsula between the Ashley and the Cooper, reached only across low sand islands, tidal creeks and marsh that would not carry a gun. The defenses facing him were of three kinds — natural, architectural and technological — and each had to be solved separately.

His object was narrower than the capture of Charleston, and he said so. Take Morris Island; reduce Battery Wagner; put breaching batteries where they could destroy Fort Sumter's offensive power; then let the Navy deal with the obstructions and the inner harbor. The Army's work was to create conditions the Navy could exploit.

• Charleston's defense was terrain, masonry, earthwork and ordnance acting together.
• Morris Island was the stepping-stone; Fort Sumter was the object; the city lay beyond both.
• The campaign opened as a deception and a labor problem, not as an assault.

The harbor mouth is formed by Sullivan's Island to the north and Morris Island to the south, each about three and a half miles long, with Fort Sumter standing between them on the south side of the main channel. Fort Moultrie held Sullivan's Island; Castle Pinckney lay closer to the city on Shute's Folly. All had been built for an older problem — stopping wooden warships with smoothbore guns in masonry forts — and by 1863 that problem had changed.

Two failures framed Gillmore's plan before he made it. Benham's repulse on James Island at Secessionville on 16 June 1862 had shown what a land approach from the south would cost. Du Pont's ironclad attack of 7 April 1863 had shown that the harbor would not be forced from the water: the Keokuk, hit some ninety times, sank off Morris Island the next morning.

The force Gillmore assembled was substantial but improvised — roughly 10,000 volunteer infantry, 350 heavy artillerymen, 600 engineer troops, Parrott rifles from 30-pounders up to 8-inch, siege and Coehorn mortars. None of it had been organized as a siege train.

• Charleston forced an attacker to solve a chain of separate problems before the city came into reach.
• The masonry forts had been absorbed into a wartime system of earth, sand and heavy ordnance.
• Gillmore inherited a harbor that had already defeated a major naval attempt.
• He had the guns for a siege and no siege train to put them in.

Fort Sumter was a five-sided casemated brick work designed for two tiers of guns in embrasure and one en barbette — about 135 pieces had it ever been fully armed. It never was, and it did not need to be. Its position governed the channel.

Behind it the defense ran deep: Moultrie strengthened with earth on Sullivan's Island, Castle Pinckney and Fort Ripley in the middle ground, Fort Johnson and the James Island works, Fort Pemberton on the Stono, rifle pits covering every landing place inside the bar, heavy guns on the city wharves, ironclad rams, and obstructions in the channels.

The Confederates had also made the geography work for them. Morris Island narrows to a neck of sand below Cummings Point, and Battery Wagner sat across it. A small garrison behind sand and bombproofs could stop a far larger force from reaching the ground that mattered.

• Charleston's defense was a system rather than a single fort.
• The James Island and Stono works closed the landward approaches.
• April 1863 had shown the harbor could not be forced by ironclads alone.
• Morris Island became the point of attack because its northern end could carry guns against Sumter.

The plan was sequential and unglamorous. Seize the south end of Morris Island. Reduce Battery Wagner. From the ground secured, establish breaching batteries against Fort Sumter. Then, with Sumter disabled and the obstructions open to attack, let the monitors move on the inner harbor.

Halleck's correspondence, quoted in the appendices, explains why the whole thing turned on Sumter: a renewed attack on Charleston had long been contemplated, and the reduction of Sumter was held to be the condition of a practicable naval attack. Gillmore was sent because he was an engineer.

The lodgment itself was to be got by three movements at once: the real attack from Folly Island, a demonstration up the Stono against James Island to hold Confederate troops in place, and a raid against the Charleston and Savannah Railroad to delay reinforcement from Savannah.

• Morris Island was wanted as an artillery platform, not as ground for its own sake.
• The campaign was built on sequential objectives, not a direct move on the city.
• Army–Navy cooperation was essential and never simple.
• Deception was part of the plan before the first man landed.

Folly Island was low, wooded and thick with undergrowth Gillmore called almost impassable — miserable ground to work in and perfect ground to hide in. Vogdes had already fortified its northern end, opened a road practicable for infantry and artillery, and concealed the communications.

Into that cover went a remarkable concentration of guns: 3-inch Wiard rifles, 20- and 30-pounder Parrotts, 10-inch and 8-inch siege mortars, field rifles and Requa batteries, all sited to sweep the Confederate positions across Lighthouse Inlet at the moment of the landing. Platforms were laid, magazines built and ammunition brought up by night, with every sign of the work masked before daylight.

This is the part of the campaign that usually goes untold, and it is the part that decided the landing. The batteries were not discovered until they opened.

• Folly Island was the concealed Federal base for the whole Morris Island operation.
• The hidden batteries combined field artillery, heavy rifles, mortars and Requa batteries.
• Night labor and secrecy, not surprise alone, made 10 July possible.
• Engineering here did not support the battlefield — it created it.

Strong's brigade — nearly 2,000 men — embarked in small boats on the evening of 9 July, worked down the east shore of Folly River, halted near Lighthouse Inlet and waited for light. When the masked batteries opened, the infantry crossed to Oyster Point and went up the island fast.

By nine in the morning the Federals held three-quarters of Morris Island and stood within musket range of Battery Wagner, having taken eleven pieces of heavy ordnance and the camp equipment with them. Terry's demonstration up the Stono had done its work, drawing Confederate strength away from the point of attack.

It was a genuine success, and it created the next problem immediately. The island narrows above the Federal line, and Wagner sat across the narrow part.

• The landing seized most of Morris Island in a morning.
• The concealed batteries suppressed the Confederate guns and covered the crossing.
• Eleven heavy guns were captured, including an 8-inch navy shell gun and a Whitworth on a siege carriage.
• The success brought the Federals up against Battery Wagner with no room to maneuver.

The attack at daybreak on 11 July failed, and Gillmore admitted the reason: Federal knowledge of the north end of the island was imperfect and the work was stronger than the reports had suggested. Wagner was not an outpost. It was a heavy sand-and-earth battery with bombproof shelter, sited across the narrowest ground on the island.

The second attempt, on 18 July, was preceded by hours of land and naval bombardment meant to dismount the guns and drive the garrison off the parapet. The effect was deceptive. Sand absorbed what would have wrecked masonry, and the garrison waited it out below. Fire had to be lifted as the column closed, and the defenders came up out of the bombproofs into the ditch.

The assault reached the work. Gillmore records that the southeast bastion was gained and held for nearly three hours before darkness, disorganization and the impossibility of reinforcing the lodgment forced a withdrawal. Strong, Chatfield, Putnam and Shaw were all killed or mortally wounded.

• The 11 July attack failed on bad information about the work's strength.
• Heavy bombardment did not reduce an earthwork with bombproofs in it.
• The 54th Massachusetts led Strong's assaulting brigade on 18 July.
• After 18 July, Gillmore gave up storming and went to regular approaches.

The First Parallel was established out of the ground already held by the right batteries, about 1,350 yards from Wagner, and made proof against a sortie with inclined palisading, parapets, bombproof magazines, siege mortars and Requa batteries. The Second Parallel followed on the night of 23 July, on a ridge some 600 yards in advance and about 870 yards from the fort.

The island forced improvisations that belong to no manual. Vincent's Creek on the left was closed with booms of floating timber against Confederate boats. Abatis, palisading and wire entanglement went out in front. The right flank ran down to low-water mark and ended in a crib work, and the Surf Battery — Requa batteries and field howitzers — swept the beach.

Gillmore is blunt about where the difficulty actually lay. The engineering was not the hard part. Moving and mounting heavy guns and carriages under constant fire was.

• After 18 July the campaign became a formal siege.
• Two parallels brought the Federals from 1,350 to about 870 yards of Wagner.
• Booms, abatis, palisading and wire entanglement show how far standard siegecraft had to be adapted to sand and tide.
• The heaviest labor was getting the guns forward, not digging the trenches.

Gillmore did not wait for Wagner to fall before going after Sumter. The breaching batteries were pushed out from the Second Parallel while Wagner, Gregg, Sumter, Sullivan's Island and James Island could all still reach the working parties. Brooks took charge of the work holding what he called pretty decided opinions about whether it could be done at all.

They mounted 8-inch and 100-pounder Parrotts, then a 200-pounder, and later a 300-pounder in Battery Strong, at ranges of roughly 3,400 to 4,300 yards from the fort — the outer edge of what officers of the day thought practicable for breaching. The gorge wall, facing Morris Island, was the target.

The first great bombardment opened on 17 August. Within a week Sumter's brick was cratered, its guns dismounted, and its value as a heavy-gun harbor work effectively gone. Confederate infantry held the ruin for another eighteen months, but the fort never fired on the channel again as it had.

• Sumter was the strategic artillery target because it governed the channel.
• The breaching batteries were built while Wagner still threatened them.
• Heavy Parrotts proved both powerful and fragile in sustained fire.
• Sumter was destroyed as an artillery work, not captured.

The Marsh Battery was built in the mud between Morris Island and James Island, ground Gillmore describes as black mud sixteen to eighteen feet deep, grown over with reeds and cut by deep, tortuous bayous. He calls the problem what it was — a complicated problem in practical civil engineering — and Serrell's engineers solved it with piles, grillage, sandbags and a platform designed to spread the recoil of an 8-inch Parrott across ground that would not hold a man.

The gun's target was not a fort. It was the city, at roughly four and a half miles. Gillmore sent Beauregard an ultimatum on 21 August demanding the evacuation of Morris Island and Fort Sumter, and opened on Charleston that night with incendiary shell.

The gun burst on its thirty-sixth round on the night of 23 August, throwing the breech off the carriage. Its practical life was two nights; its fame outlived every other gun in the campaign, and a tube identified as the Swamp Angel stands today in Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey.

• The Marsh Battery was an engineering feat rather than a decisive weapon.
• The platform had to carry a heavy rifle on marsh that would not bear weight.
• The gun fired on the city, which puts it in a different moral category from Wagner and Sumter.
• It burst on its thirty-sixth round after two nights' firing.

After 18 July the approaches simply kept coming. Parallels were advanced, batteries mounted and redirected, saps pushed forward under sap rollers, and the Federal line crept toward the ditch while the monitors kept up pressure from seaward. Every yard gained narrowed what the garrison could do.

Battery Gregg at Cummings Point mattered for the same reason Wagner did: the point faced Sumter and the main channel, and whoever held it could put guns where they counted. Wagner's defense was protecting Gregg as much as itself.

On the night of 6–7 September the Confederates evacuated both works, and Federal troops walked into them the next morning. Wagner had held the Federal army for nearly two months and cost it more than any other object in the campaign. It fell to engineering, not to assault.

• Wagner and Gregg were abandoned under siege pressure, not stormed.
• The final approaches made the position untenable rather than untenanted.
• Their evacuation gave the Federals the whole of Morris Island, Cummings Point included.
• The result vindicated the turn to regular approaches after 18 July.

This is the material that makes the volume permanently useful. The Charleston batteries put large rifled guns into prolonged service against sand, brick and long ranges, and the report records the results without flattery: burst tubes, eroded vents, strained carriages, irregular ammunition, and the plain fact that endurance and power are not the same property.

The heavy Parrotts carried the campaign — 100-pounders, 200-pounders and the 300-pounder in Battery Strong — and their effect on Sumter's brick was decisive. Whitworths appear as precision instruments rather than breaching guns. Mortars are assessed honestly: useful against field works and troops, much less so against casemated masonry at long range.

Gillmore goes further than most officers would and takes up the theory. He quotes Blakely on the failure of cast guns to transmit strain to the outside metal — which is exactly why a large Civil War rifle could be both powerful and fragile — and prints R. P. Parrott's own statement in defense of his system.

• The campaign was a proving ground for heavy rifled artillery under real service conditions.
• Parrott rifles gave range and power at a serious cost in reliability.
• Whitworths were precision weapons, not breaching weapons.
• Mortars, Requa batteries and captured Confederate guns belong in the same account.

Gillmore's own report is the narrative; the appendices are the proof. Turner covers the artillery arm — organization, emplacement, rates of fire, ammunition. Brooks's journal of the siege operations is the working engineer's view of the approaches to Wagner, and is one of the most detailed engineering documents produced in the war.

Serrell reports for the New York Volunteer Engineers on the roads, wharves, bridges and marsh work that let infantry and artillery stand where they otherwise could not. Suter and Michie cover surveys, magazines and traverses. Parker reports on the naval battery.

The correspondence with Halleck and with Dahlgren, and Parrott's statement on his guns, carry the volume past the beach and into Washington, the Navy Department and the West Point Foundry.

• The narrative rests on subordinate reports, not on recollection.
• Turner is the artillery backbone; Brooks and Serrell are the engineering one.
• The naval reports and correspondence document the joint dimension.
• The appendices are the best source for captions, diagrams and technical detail.

Neither service could finish Charleston alone. The Navy had the monitors and the only means of entering the harbor; the Army had the infantry, engineers and siege guns needed to take the ground from which Sumter could be reduced. April 1863 had already shown what happened when the ironclads went in with the forts intact.

Dahlgren relieved Du Pont on 6 July, four days before the landing, and his vessels supported the operation throughout: covering the crossing at Lighthouse Inlet and in the Stono, engaging Wagner, holding the flanks. The New Ironsides and the monitors were a permanent part of the Federal position on Morris Island.

The friction was real and worth stating plainly. Naval officers thought in channels, obstructions and turret ships; Gillmore thought in lodgments, parallels and breaching batteries. The goals overlapped; the instruments did not. This was cooperation between two nineteenth-century services, not a joint command.

• The April 1863 ironclad failure made the reduction of Sumter a precondition.
• The Army took ground and placed batteries; the Navy covered movement and threatened the harbor.
• Land siegecraft was the necessary preliminary to any renewed naval attack.
• The campaign shows both the necessity and the strain of joint operations.

Charleston did not fall in 1863. Measured against that, the campaign failed. Measured against what Gillmore set out to do, it did not: Morris Island was taken and held, Wagner and Gregg were given up, Cummings Point carried Federal guns, and Fort Sumter was destroyed as an artillery work.

The technical results outlasted the operational ones. Sand proved extraordinarily resistant to bombardment; brick did not. Heavy rifled guns could breach masonry at ranges nobody had attempted and could not be relied on to survive the effort. Marsh could be made to carry a 16,500-pound gun, once.

And the campaign was won and lost in labor — hauling, digging, revetting, platform-building, ammunition supply, the nightly movement of men and material under fire. The assaults are what is remembered. The engineering is what took the island.

• Morris Island was captured; Wagner and Gregg reduced; Sumter ruined as a gun platform.
• The campaign tested heavy rifled artillery and exposed its limits.
• Sand defended better than masonry, and the war learned it here.
• The lasting significance is the combination — engineering, artillery, infantry, navy, logistics and terrain.