The defense, chapter by chapter

Johnson opens by refusing the obvious subject. He does not cover the first two years of the war at Charleston — the Star of the West, the bombardment of April 1861, the surrender of Anderson — and says plainly that the limitation is a necessity with the author, referring the reader to Roman's Military Operations of General Beauregard and Crawford's Genesis of the Civil War instead.

What he gives instead is the ground. The harbor between the Cooper and the Ashley; James Island, accessible from the sea through Stono Inlet, and therefore the key to Charleston; Folly and Morris Islands strung along the ocean side, separated from the interior by two miles of impassable marsh. Then the works, one at a time, with dates of construction and materials: Fort Sumter, begun in 1829, five faces, walls forty feet above high water and five feet thick backed by casemate arches; Fort Moultrie of 1811; Batteries Bee, Beauregard and Marshall on Sullivan's Island; Fort Ripley on the shoal; Castle Pinckney; Fort Johnson; the James Island lines resting on Fort Pemberton and on Fort Lamar at Secessionville; and on Morris Island, Battery Gregg at Cumming's Point and Battery Wagner across the narrowest part of the island.

The last third of the chapter is the harbor's defensive machinery and its garrison returns. Piling across the Middle Ground; the heavy timber boom that the tideway broke twice and destroyed; the rope obstruction — cables ratlined together like the shrouds of a ship, with streaming lines to foul propellers and beer-barrel floats — which the Federal navy took for a field of torpedoes. Then Lee's spar torpedo, the boiler torpedo sunk off Battery Wagner, the two ironclad rams built at Charleston, Beauregard's staff, the four military districts, and the guns and men in every work on 1 April 1863.

• Johnson's subject begins in 1863; the first two years are deliberately left to other writers.
• James Island, not Morris Island, is presented from the first page as the way into Charleston.
• The rope obstruction was not a torpedo field, and there were no torpedoes in front of it in April 1863.
• Fort Sumter mounted 85 guns and 7 mortars that spring, of which Johnson reckons only 24 could be effective against armored vessels.

The chapter sets the attack up as a technical problem and then reports it as one. Du Pont's squadron was three classes of vessel — seven monitors of the Passaic class, the two-turreted Keokuk, and the seagoing New Ironsides — carrying thirty-two guns in all: twenty-two XI-inch and seven XV-inch smoothbores and three 8-inch Parrott rifles. Against them Fort Sumter had eighty guns of which, Johnson has already said, two dozen were worth firing at armor.

The action lasted two hours and twenty minutes and was decided by things that are not gunnery. The lead monitor Weehawken lost an hour and a half at the start when her anchor chain caught in the grapnels of Ericsson's torpedo raft; she then declined to push the raft against the obstructions it had been built for. The flagship New Ironsides stopped a mile out, drifted, fouled two of her own squadron, and signalled the rest to disregard her movements — while sitting, unknowingly, over the boiler torpedo off Battery Wagner, which Langdon Cheves tried and failed to fire. The Nahant had her turret jammed and her steering shot away; the Keokuk, closest of all, was hit ninety times and sank the next morning.

Johnson's tabulated returns are the point of the chapter: the forts fired 2,206 rounds, the vessels 139. Seven of the nine vessels had no casualties at all. He credits the accuracy to the gunners and the powder — Rains's works at Augusta — and closes with Swinton, who watched from the fleet, calling the day the opening of an epoch in ironclad warfare.

• Five of the eight engaged vessels were disabled in under an hour; one sank.
• The forts fired sixteen shots for every one the squadron fired.
• The armor worked and the guns did not: the vessels' defensive advantage cost them their offensive power.
• Du Pont refused to renew the attack, was supported by every captain who had been engaged, and was relieved on 3 June.

The Keokuk went down off the southern end of Morris Island in eighteen feet of water, her turrets showing at low tide. The Federal navy tried to blow her up with Ericsson's raft, failed, and left her. Two Confederate naval officers who examined the wreck pronounced the guns positively impossible to recover.

Johnson names the men who recovered them anyway. Adolphus W. LaCoste, a rigger in the employ of the ordnance department, was put in charge by Beauregard; his gang — his brother James, Asa Butterfield, Jack Baker and Edwin Watson (colored), Philip Petrina, Laurence Brionwitch, Thomas Loftus, James Dugan, Edward and John Garden, with soldiers detailed from the Fort Sumter garrison — worked no more than two and a half hours a night, in the dark, with no light allowed, standing waist-deep inside the turret. Two weeks went on cutting through the roof plating and girders and freeing the first gun from its carriage.

The lift itself is the chapter's set piece, and Johnson tells it as one. An old lightship, weighted at the bow with fifteen hundred sandbags to reach the level of the submerged gun, outriggers rigged for tackle, the Confederate rams standing guard in the channel: the breech comes up, the muzzle jams against the edge of the turret, the blocks are two-blocked, the sandbags are shifted aft one by one, and the dawn begins to show. What frees the gun is a wave. The second gun came out three nights later. Both went back into the harbor's defenses — one at Fort Sumter, then Battery Ramsay at White Point Garden; the other in Battery Bee, where it stayed to the end.

• The whole enterprise ran about three weeks, and cost no casualties at all.
• The Federal navy had abandoned the wreck as worthless and the Confederate navy had called the guns unrecoverable.
• The two XI-inch Dahlgrens were the heaviest serviceable guns in Charleston harbor for the rest of the war.
• The chapter also carries Beauregard's discovery of the Federal signal key, and what the Confederates read with it before the 18 July assault on Battery Wagner.

Between April and July the fort was rebuilt around its weaknesses: sand filled twelve lower and thirteen upper casemates on the sea face, the upper magazines were abandoned and the lower ones cased in brick and stone, and an experiment with wet cotton bales hung over the parapet failed when they dried and caught fire from the muzzle blast. Meanwhile Beauregard's department was stripped of troops by Richmond over his written protest — from 30,040 effectives on 7 April to 15,318 by 10 July, leaving 5,861 in the whole First Military District.

The Federals used the interval better. From 14 June, screened by scrub, low dunes and a ruse involving a stranded blockade runner, they built batteries for forty-seven guns and mortars on Little Folly Island, within a thousand yards of the Confederate works, and were not discovered. Ripley reported as late as 29 August that up to the 8th or 9th of July the enemy had constructed no works there. Gillmore relieved Hunter on 12 June; Dahlgren relieved Du Pont on 6 July.

At five o'clock on the morning of 10 July the batteries opened. Three hours later Strong's brigade came across Lighthouse Inlet in boats, carried the rifle pits at Oyster Point, and took battery after battery up the island; the Confederate loss was 294, the Federal 106. At dawn on the 11th the first assault on Battery Wagner was made and broken in less than half an hour, largely by the Savannah Volunteer Guards in the salient, who held fire until the column was within a hundred yards. Federal losses for the two days were 436; the Confederate loss in the assault was twelve.

• Forty-seven guns and mortars were built within a thousand yards of the Confederate outposts without being discovered.
• Johnson does not spare his own side: the defense of 10 July was not so vigorous as it might have been.
• Had the island been assaulted that evening, he says, the whole of it might have fallen.
• Two feints — on James Island and up the South Edisto against the Charleston and Savannah Railroad — went with the descent; the second failed outright.

The assault of 18 July is given from inside the work. Taliaferro had about thirteen hundred men on the north end of the island; the Charleston battalion held the right, the 51st and 31st North Carolina the centre and left, with the artillery under Lieutenant-Colonel J. C. Simkins. From noon some sixty-four land and naval guns fired on Wagner for eight hours, closing to three hundred yards at the top of the tide. Johnson records the countermeasures that made the difference: embrasures stopped with sandbags, light guns buried to save them, and above all the magazine kept safe.

The attack came at 7.45. Strong's brigade, headed by the 54th Massachusetts, broke at the ditch under the first volley and carried the regiments behind it away in the rout; Shaw was killed on the parapet. Putnam's brigade got into the south-eastern salient — which the 31st North Carolina should have been holding, and which was empty because the men could not be got out of the bombproof — and held it more than an hour before Putnam was shot dead and the position was retaken. Stevenson's brigade never moved. Johnson puts the Federal loss at close to 2,000; the Confederate loss was 174.

The rest of the chapter is preparation. Gillmore now changed his plan twice over: Wagner would be besieged by regular approaches, and Fort Sumter would be demolished from ground he already held. The first breaching battery was begun on 23 July at 4,200 yards. At the fort, twenty guns and mortars were shipped away, seventeen rooms of the gorge were filled with wet cotton bales laid in sand by three hundred men working in two reliefs for three weeks, a new sally-port and wharf were cut through the western wall, and twenty thousand bags of sand were brought down from the city by night — about a third of what the work needed.

• The salient that Putnam's men held for an hour was empty because its assigned regiment stayed in the bombproof.
• Johnson records both facts: the Federal courage in the salient and the Confederate failure that let them into it.
• The breaching batteries could have been built a fortnight earlier, and both assaults on Wagner avoided.
• The filling of the gorge rooms was, in his judgment, the single measure that saved the fort.

This is the chapter the book exists for, and Johnson writes it out of the engineer's journal, day by day: guns engaged, shots fired, shots striking inside and outside, casualties, and what came down. He prints Turner's table of the breaching batteries — Brown, Rosecrans, Meade, the Naval Battery, Hays, Reno, Stevens and Strong — with the armament and range of each: two 80-pounder Whitworths, nine 100-pounder Parrotts, six 200-pounders and one 300-pounder, eighteen rifled guns throwing a ton of metal at each discharge from 3,428 to 4,290 yards.

The damage is recorded in inches. A bolt that opened a crater three feet across and drove three feet four inches further into a five-foot wall. Three shells at the parapet that took thirty feet of it out of service. A crack a quarter of an inch wide running the full forty feet of the western scarp, which Johnson explains by the vibration of the gorge being arrested against untouched masonry. A shell that could not get through the wet cotton and sand of the gorge, and a fuze plug that went where its shell could not.

By the seventh day the fort had one gun in good condition. The magazine had been searched in reverse by monitors firing at night on the 22nd, and three hundred loaded shells were rolled into the water on the commanding officer's order. The Marsh Battery opened on the city on the night of the 21st–22nd, at 7,900 yards, and Johnson's footnote follows the Swamp Angel to the pedestal in Trenton, New Jersey, where its inscription records that it burst on the thirty-sixth round.

• Total firing over the seven days: 5,009 rounds.
• Casualties over the same period: one killed, forty-two wounded.
• Gillmore reported the fort demolished on the 24th; Johnson agrees it was demolished and denies it was silenced.
• The Swamp Angel's burst on its thirty-sixth round is recorded here from the gun's own monument.

The firing slackened and the work went on. Over fifty-six thousand pounds of powder and large quantities of shell were taken out of the fort by boat at night. The artillery garrison was withdrawn company by company and replaced with infantry — a decision Beauregard had made at the start of the bombardment and kept secret so as not to reflect on Rhett's regiment. And on the night of 27 August, John Fraser Mathewes began throwing the fort's own heavy guns down forty feet of ruined wall onto cushions of sandbags at the water's edge, to be floated off to the inner harbor. More than twenty-five guns and mortars were recovered that way.

Johnson uses this chapter to attack the story that the ruins protected the fort. The wasting of material was enormous, he writes, and nothing but new material brought for repairs could replace it. He is equally blunt about a Federal failure: the communications to Cumming's Point could have been cut at any time by two flotillas working at night, Gillmore urged it repeatedly, Dahlgren agreed it was practicable, and it was never done.

The bombardment ended in the water. On the night of 1 September six monitors and the New Ironsides closed to between seven hundred and fifteen hundred yards and fired for five hours. Every casemate on the eastern side was breached; three shells searched the last working magazine. The fort did not fire once — its last two serviceable columbiads had gone over the wall the night before, and the Keokuk gun was blocked out of gear.

• Sixteen days of bombardment ended with Fort Sumter silent and holding.
• Beauregard's decision on 26 August, endorsing the chief engineers against the officers who advised abandonment, is what kept it held.
• The debris did not save the fort; material brought in by boat, night after night, did.
• Johnson names the failure that would have ended the siege early: nobody cut the boat traffic to Cumming's Point.

Rhett's artillerymen were relieved on the night of 4 September and Major Stephen Elliott took command with the Charleston battalion. Wagner's last bombardment began the next morning: some sixty to seventy guns and mortars, land and naval, against twelve effective guns, for forty-two hours. A boat attack on Battery Gregg on the night of the 5th was beaten off. When the sap entered the ditch, Harris advised evacuation, and Keitt got the garrison off the island between nine at night and two in the morning, losing forty-six men in three boats. The siege had lasted fifty-eight days.

Dahlgren demanded the fort on the 7th and got Elliott's answer back the same day. Then the monitor Weehawken grounded in the channel between Sumter and Cumming's Point, and the squadron came in on the 8th to cover her: the New Ironsides and five monitors at 900 to 1,400 yards off Fort Moultrie for nearly three hours, in what Johnson calls the severest naval engagement in American history to that time. The heaviest Confederate loss of the day came from one XV-inch shell from the stranded monitor, which exploded a pile of loaded shells in Moultrie and killed sixteen men.

The assault came at one in the morning. Elliott had been expecting it, had drawn hand grenades and fire balls from the city, and had his companies assigned to particular breaches. Two of the five divisions of boats landed; the men who got ashore found the breaches they had been told were open filled with twenty feet of sand, and were dislodged with grenades, fire balls and lumps of the fort's own masonry. It was over in twenty minutes. The Federals lost 124, including a hundred and two men captured. Not a man in Fort Sumter was hurt.

• Elliott's reply to Dahlgren's demand is the best-known sentence in the Charleston literature, and this is its source.
• The naval column and the army column were preparing separate assaults on the same night, and never combined.
• The gorge, where a practicable slope existed, was the side nobody attacked.
• Johnson's verdict on the assault: it was feeble, and it confirmed the Confederates in holding on.

Six weeks of quiet came first, and both sides used them. The Federals renamed and rearmed the captured works — Battery Wagner became Fort Strong and Battery Gregg became Fort Putnam, though page 168 prints the two names the other way about, and Johnson corrected it in his second edition — and mounted twenty-nine guns and mortars for the next effort, including sixteen mortars, which had not been used against the fort before. Fort Sumter used the same weeks to put three heavy guns into the lower casemates of the north-eastern face, the three-gun battery, protected from reverse fire by a mass of sand and later by a cribwork of pine and palmetto on the exterior.

The bombardment opened on 26 October and ran without a break, day and night, until 5 December: 18,677 rounds by the fort's own count, with the monitors crossing the land batteries' slant fire with square blows on the sea face. The upper casemates came down; the debris made, for the first time, a practicable slope for assaulting boats on the sea face as well as the gorge. Thirty men were killed and seventy wounded — thirteen of them at once, before daylight on 31 October, when a shell brought down a floor onto a detachment sleeping on their arms.

This is also the chapter of the fort's night life: the obstructions of spiked plank, wire entanglement and fraises set on the slopes at dusk and recovered before daylight, and the man who did it, Private John H. Houston of the engineer detail; the boom of logs and chain; the calcium light from Cumming's Point; the loopholing of the interior against an enemy who might get over the walls; the Whitworth rifles with telescopic sights firing back at Morris Island at thirteen hundred yards; and six separate occasions on which the flag was shot down and put up again under fire, each with the names of the men who did it. Captain F. H. Harleston was killed on 24 November, inspecting the obstructions the sea was tearing away.

• 18,677 rounds in forty-one days; 30 killed and 70 wounded.
• Mortars entered the bombardment here, and the night firing became constant.
• The engineer's working force was a hundred laborers and ten white mechanics, relieved fortnightly, and it took the casualties of the repairs.
• The three-gun battery the whole bombardment was meant to destroy came through it serviceable.

At half-past nine on the morning of 11 December, with no Federal gun fired for days, the small-arms magazine at the south-western angle blew up. Eleven men were killed and forty-one wounded; the commissary store next door, crowded with soldiers drawing rations, took the blast, and then caught fire. Everyone who could have said what caused it died in it.

The fire was worse than the explosion. It ran through the passages and up the spiral stair-tower into the casemates where companies were quartered, could not be barricaded, and was left to burn itself out. The lower casemates stayed too hot to enter for two days, the commissary room for ten. Brick in the stair-tower was burnt friable an inch and a half deep from bottom to top; the scarp-wall had started an inch away from its piers; every pier arch of the lower tier was cracked. Johnson says flatly that the extent of the injuries had never before been made public, and that a week of heavy Federal fire at that moment would have forced the fort to be abandoned. He counts it the second of the defense's three crises.

The rest of the chapter is repair and reorganization, and it is where the ruin becomes a fortification. A new magazine built inside the burnt commissary room. Three flights of stairs rebuilt and roofed with six feet of sand. A gallery two hundred and seventy-five feet long mined through the compacted ruin of the northern casemates — through masonry, gun carriages and crushed arches — to connect headquarters with the three-gun battery. A shallow well and a pump to drain the parade. A second armed battery, the West Battery, on the city front, which cost the fort its evening gun, the one 32-pounder that had been fired at sunset for seven or eight months and was for most of that time the only gun fired in Fort Sumter.

• Eleven killed and forty-one wounded, by accident, with no enemy fire that morning.
• Johnson names this the second of the three crises of the defense.
• The 275-foot gallery driven through the ruins is the work that made the fort habitable.
• Elliott left in May 1864 having turned a silenced brick fort into an earthwork with six heavy guns and quarters for three hundred men.

Captain John C. Mitchel of the 1st South Carolina Artillery took command on 4 May. Gillmore went north; Foster — who had been the engineer officer at Fort Sumter under Anderson in 1861 — came to take the harbor he had left three years before. Dahlgren put the question of attacking Sumter to his captains on 10 and 12 May and was told no, seven to two.

Foster's plan for the harbor was good and its execution was not. Five parts moved at once in the first days of July: a diversion on James Island, a column of six thousand on John's Island, gunboats against Battery Pringle in the Stono, an expedition up the North Edisto against the railroad, and the real blow — a thousand men in barges against Fort Johnson before dawn on 3 July. The barges lost two hours, arrived at daylight, and most of them turned back; the men who landed were beaten by a garrison of a hundred and thirty. A hundred and forty prisoners were taken, including the colonel commanding, and Yates had more Federals in his bombproof than Confederates in his fort until the Citadel cadets arrived to guard them.

The third great bombardment opened on 7 July. Foster's stated intention was to breach the wall along a horizontal line and then float torpedoes against it — a plan, Johnson observes drily, formed against a wall that no longer existed. What the guns did do was strip material off the gorge faster than it could be replaced, until a working force was restored. On the fourteenth day Mitchel went up the stairway of the western angle to watch the fleet, and was struck down by a fragment of a mortar shell that burst eighty feet above the water. He lived about four hours.

• Dahlgren's captains voted seven to two against attacking the ruin of Fort Sumter.
• Fort Johnson was the one Federal plan that came close to deciding the fate of Charleston, and it failed at the water's edge.
• Foster's despatches describe demolishing walls that had already been battered below the level of the lower embrasures.
• Mitchel was twenty-four, had been recommended for promotion, and never received it.

Captain Thomas A. Huguenin took command three hours after Mitchel died, and was met with a heavy shelling that sank two supply barges at the wharf. The firing worked round the fort: the gorge, then its western angle, where the old crack in the scarp had visibly widened and where a cribwork of heavy timber was raised from the water to the lower embrasures to catch the collapse when it came.

Foster's inventions belong to this chapter. Three powder rafts were floated against the fort — 21 July, 28 July and 31 August — and all three failed; the second exploded off the western face and did nothing but throw mud on the wharf. He also described to Washington a fleet of row-galleys of fifty oars a side, with towers for sharpshooters and gang-planks fifty-one feet long worked by machinery. Meanwhile the fort was quietly getting stronger: whenever the fire slackened for want of ammunition, the working parties built by day as well as by night.

The bombardment ran sixty consecutive days and ended on 7 September with 14,666 rounds fired, 16 killed and 65 wounded. A ninth-day minor bombardment followed and then, on 19 September, Foster reported his fire stopped for want of ammunition. After that nothing of military consequence was fired at Fort Sumter again. The chapter closes away from the harbor: the victory at Honey Hill on 30 November, where seventeen hundred Confederates broke a Federal column of five thousand and kept the railroad open; the Coosawhatchie fighting; and Hardee's evacuation of Savannah on the night of 19–20 December.

• Sixty consecutive days, 14,666 rounds, 81 casualties.
• Fifty-one heavy rifled cannon were worn out or burst on Morris Island across the two Federal commands.
• Three powder rafts were floated against the fort and none of them touched it.
• Honey Hill kept open the line of retreat that Hardee's army would use two months later.

The end came from inland. Beauregard left Hardee full instructions before being called to Alabama; Sherman rested at Savannah and then moved on Branchville with seventy thousand men against fewer than fourteen thousand on the coast. On the water there was one last Confederate success and it was accidental in nobody's favor: the monitor Patapsco, covering the boats that were at last examining the obstructions Dahlgren had never surveyed, was blown up by a torpedo eight hundred yards below Fort Sumter on the night of 15 January, with sixty-two lives lost.

Two demonstrations closed the account. On James Island on 10 February, Major Edward Manigault held the rifle pits at Grimball's for four hours with a hundred and thirty-one men, until a third of them were down and he was wounded and captured; the position was carried and then abandoned the same evening. At Bull's Bay a landing force with seven gunboats spent four days failing to find a place to land against Captain E. L. Parker's four Napoleons and two small companies of infantry.

Johnson gives the last night at Fort Sumter hour by hour. The order came on the 16th; the sick, the engineer department's laborers and the officers' baggage went up that night; a new battle flag was hoisted on the morning of the 17th and lowered at sunset with the last evening gun. Even then the obstructions were set on the slopes as they had been every night for seventeen months, and the howitzers were run up to the crest. About ten o'clock two transports came for the garrison of some three hundred men; Huguenin relieved the sentinels himself, walked the fort with his engineer and his adjutant, cast off the lines, and stepped aboard. By orders, everything was left intact.

• The torpedo that sank the Patapsco was found by boats doing, at the end of the war, the survey Johnson says should have been made in 1863.
• Battery Wagner had been destroyed on evacuation; Fort Sumter was left standing and in order.
• The fort was under fire on 280 days and was never assaulted successfully and never surrendered.
• Two hundred and fifty cannon fell into Federal hands with the harbor.

The last chapter is ten numbered heads, and they are not all of the same kind. The first two are a Confederate apologia written in 1890, and should be read as such. The rest are the most useful summary in the book.

Johnson's technical case is that Charleston forced both sides into a new era at once — heavy rifled breaching guns and ironclad squadrons on one side, sand fortification and torpedo defense on the other — and that the obstructions stopped the Federal navy more effectively than the guns did. He lists the fort's original defects, chiefly in the siting of its magazines; he insists again that foresight and labor, not accumulating rubbish, preserved it; and he sets out the three crises of the defense: September 1863, when the question was whether to hold a fort that could no longer fire; December 1863, after the explosion and fire; and July–August 1864, when the sea face was worn to its thinnest and was never attacked.

Then the arithmetic, and then the comparisons: Port Royal, Fort Pulaski, Fort McAllister, Fort Morgan, Fort Fisher, the allied fleet at Sebastopol in 1854, and the siege of Strasburg in 1870, each with its armament, its attackers, its duration and its result. It is the passage a reader wanting one page of this book should read.

• 46,053 projectiles fired at Fort Sumter; an estimated 3,500 tons of metal.
• 117 days under the three great bombardments, 40 under the eight minor ones, 280 days under fire in all.
• 319 casualties in all — and the volume's own two statements of how they divide do not agree. See the editorial notes.
• 18,491 projectiles at Battery Wagner over a 58-day siege; 318 casualties in the garrison.