Johnson’s defense
The Defense of Charleston Harbor
The engineer officer of Fort Sumter, writing in 1890 about the fort he spent two years keeping standing.
This is the account of the defense of Charleston written by the engineer officer who was inside Fort Sumter for fifteen months of it. John Johnson was in charge of the engineer work at the fort from the April 1863 ironclad attack until he was wounded on the ramparts in July 1864, and he came back to it. He kept his notes, his sketches, his diary, the engineer's official journal from 20 July to 2 September 1863, and copies of the reports he sent the chief engineer almost daily. The book is built on them.
It is therefore something the Charleston literature otherwise lacks: a technical account of a siege, written from within the work being besieged, by the man responsible for keeping it standing. Johnson can tell you how thick the scarp-wall was where a shell went through it, how many bags of sand came down from the city on a given night, what a wet cotton bale laid in sand does when an incendiary shell reaches it, and how many men it took, working in reliefs day and night for three weeks, to fill seventeen rooms of the gorge.
He is also a Confederate officer writing in 1890 for a Southern readership, and he does not pretend otherwise. The last chapter argues a case. What makes the rest of the volume usable is that Johnson argues from documents and says where they came from — and that he is as willing to record a Confederate failure as a Federal one.
Beauregard, endorsing the engineers' advice to hold the ruin, 26 August 1863:
“Fort Sumter must be held to the last extremity”
Johnson, p. 138
The volume
The Defense of Charleston Harbor
Including Fort Sumter and the Adjacent Islands, 1863–1865. With Original Papers in Appendix, Full Official Reports, Maps, and Illustrations.
John Johnson · Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., 1890
Twenty-eight plates and views in the text, thirteen plates of torpedoes, obstructions and fortifications after the appendix
Both copies read for this site carry the same title page, dated 1890, and the same pagination through the text — and they are not the same book. One of them has four leaves the other has not: a preface to the second edition, dated 4 December 1890, in which Johnson lists his own corrections to the first; and the portrait plate at the end of the text. The Harvard copy, accession-stamped October 1890, has neither. What that means for reading them is set out on the editorial notes page. Every page reference on this site is to the pagination the two copies share.
Why this book matters
It is written from inside the target
Gillmore's report is the record of the attack. This is the record of what those guns did to the thing they were aimed at, page by page, day by day — which arch came down, which magazine was nearly reached, which of the men were killed by it.
The numbers are counted, not estimated
The garrison kept a running count of every shot fired at the fort, and Johnson prints it: 46,053 projectiles, some 3,500 tons of metal, 280 days under fire, 319 casualties. Where his count and the Federal count differ he says so.
It corrects a story everyone repeats
The idea that Fort Sumter was protected by the rubble of its own destruction — that the more it was battered the stronger it grew — is one Johnson attacks directly. New material came in by boat every night, under fire, or the fort would have been lost.
It carries the documents
More than half the volume is appendix: Federal and Confederate reports, the Navy Department's confidential instructions for taking Charleston, Huguenin's journal of the last nights in Battery Wagner, and Johnson's own calendar of every operation on the coast from January 1861 to February 1865.
In this section
The author
The title page describes him only as formerly a major of engineers in the service of the Confederate States, and the portrait plate at the end of the text as Engineer in Charge Fort Sumter, 1863–65. The Library of Congress record gives his dates as 1829–1907. What else the volume itself establishes is this: he was engineer in charge at Fort Sumter from 7 April 1863, the day of the ironclad attack; he served there, as he puts it in the preface, for fifteen of the fort's most eventful months; and he was still there for the evacuation of the harbor.
He was wounded twice at the fort. On 17 August 1863, the first day of the first great bombardment, he is listed among the officers slightly wounded — a wound that became bad enough to take him off the island on 2 September, though he was back at his post by the night of 6 November. On 28 July 1864, before daylight, while he was inspecting work on the eastern angle of the gorge, a fragment of mortar shell struck him on the top of the head. He had then been on continuous duty at Sumter for eight months and twenty days.
The last chapter's judgments are his own and he says so — the merits and demerits of the defense require perhaps a less partial witness than the writer. The portrait plate records that the book was published at the unanimous request of the Survivors' Association of Charleston District, 25 July 1890. The introduction by W. S. Basinger explains where it came from: Beauregard, in the last weeks of the war, ordered a board of officers to preserve an authentic and detailed account of the defense from the Confederate side; the board was scattered before it could meet, and Johnson — one of its members, and the one with the closest connection to the defense — did the work alone.
About this edition
What is published here is the apparatus around the book, not the book: a guide to the fourteen chapters, Johnson's own calendar of events, the officers, the ordnance, the plates, a glossary of the vocabulary he writes in, and the editorial register. Johnson's own words are quoted, and they have been in the public domain since long before this site existed.
There is no transcription of this volume anywhere — no Project Gutenberg text, no Wikisource text — so everything here was read off scanned page images by machine, and machine reading of 1890 type is wrong often enough that one reading proves nothing. Two separate scans of two different copies are therefore carried, and no passage is quoted on this site that both of them do not read the same way, on the same printed page. The editorial notes page sets out the method and names the passages that failed it.
The copy every page citation here is settled against is the Harvard copy scanned by Google: books.google.com/books?id=Nu9lQ3uVC2YC, also at the Internet Archive as defensecharlest00johngoog. The second copy is WBNCAAAAIAAJ, at the Archive as defensecharlest01johngoog.