1863 It was one of the most poignant engagements of the American Civil War. ‘Fort’ Wagner was really just a battery on a sandy, flea-infested island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. After it had been bombarded from land and sea, General Quincey Gilmore ordered the Union infantry to attack it, with bayonets fixed, along a narrow strip of beach, mined and stockaded and bounded by marshes on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. The outcome was inevitable. The bombardment had done little to weaken the battery, and there were still five cannons and over a thousand Confederate troops able to sweep the field with shells and massed musket fire. In all, over 1,500 Union troops were killed, wounded or captured, as compared to 174 Confederate casualties.
What redeems the event from the long catalogue of military blunders is the role played by the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of free African-Americans, commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, with Garth Wilkinson (‘Wilky’) James as his adjutant. The 54th led the assault and after bloody hand-to-hand combat actually gained a temporary foothold on the battery, where they planted the Union flag, but Shaw was killed and Wilky wounded in the side and foot. After a long convalescence in the James household, he survived, but limped and was in pain for the rest of his not very long life.
There was at least one good outcome of the fiasco. No one with any knowledge of the situation would ever doubt the fighting spirit of African-American troops again. As one of the black soldiers put it afterwards: ‘It is not for us to blow our horn; but when a regiment of white men gave us three cheers as we were passing them, it shows that we did our duty as men should.’1 The 54th had been ‘the pride of the Massachusetts abolitionists’, according to Henry James’s biographer, Fred Kaplan. Old Henry James Senior had watched the regiment’s proud march out of Boston, accompanied by ‘great reverberations of music, of fluttering banners’. Henry Junior was ‘helplessly absent’.2
Not far from the old man’s vantage point now stands an arresting bronze bas-relief by the Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, showing Colonel Shaw in profile alongside his proud regiment. Or as Robert Lowell put it in ‘For the Union Dead’ (1960):
Two months after marching through Boston,
Half the regiment was dead;
At the dedication,
William James [another brother] could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
In the city’s throat.
The Colonel is as lean
As a compass needle.
1 Private James Henry Gooding; see: http://www.awod.com/gallery/probono/cwchas/fedwag.html
2 Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992, p. 50.