This day in Charleston
3 entries · 1863–1864
Officers relieved one another in the sap on roughly six-hour tours. Progress was slow but constant: the soil worked easily but averaged less than two feet down to water, so a strong parapet could not be kept closed up against the sap-roller. Three sappers were wounded. That night came the first attempt to destroy the New Ironsides by torpedo.
Major Brooks’ journal, OR I, 28, Pt. 1
The village of Legareville on John’s Island was burned. It had been fought over since 1862, when the Confederate guns hidden along the bank there took the USS Isaac Smith. Nothing of the village was rebuilt.
Official Records, Series I, Vol. 35, Pt. 1
The siege column for the four hundred and eighth day reported the night’s firing and named the “Swamp Angel” — the marsh battery whose first gun had burst on its thirty-sixth shot almost exactly a year before, and which the Federals had rebuilt and were using again.
Charleston Mercury, 20 August 1864, p. 2, “Siege Matters — Four Hundred and Eighth Day”
Entries are dated from the War of the Rebellion official records, the naval official records and contemporary Charleston sources. Browse the whole year.