AS MOST OF THE FIFTY-FOURTH, EXHAUSTED FROM THE LONG night’s march through the swamps, sprawled under pine trees in search of shade and soaked hardtack in their coffee on the morning of July 18, a handful of men climbed atop a sandy rise on Folly Island to watch the distant bombardment of Battery Wagner. “A fresh breeze blew that day,” Captain Luis Emilio recalled, “at times the sky was clear; the atmosphere, lightened by recent rains, resounded with the thunders of an almost incessant cannonade.” The beachhead fortress was an impressive feat of engineering and a formidable impediment to the capture of Charleston. By definition a battery rather than a fort—the latter having complete walls on all sides—Wagner was a sprawling stronghold. One hundred yards deep and 250 yards wide, the battery stretched north from Vincent’s Creek and south to the waves of the Atlantic, so that it completely spanned that section of Morris Island. Initially named Neck Battery, the fortress had been rechristened the previous November in honor of Lieutenant Thomas Wagner, a Charleston slaveholder who had been killed when his cannon exploded during artillery practice at nearby Fort Moultrie. Its rear wall, facing Charleston Harbor, was nothing more than a low rampart, but its sloping front wall rose more than thirty feet from the beach. Built of packed sand and earth and fortified by palmetto logs, Wagner’s pitched front was crowned with sharpened stakes, while a canal designed to fill at high tide provided a watery barrier for attackers and their siege works.1
This bird’s-eye view of Charleston’s defenses published in Harper’s on August 15, 1863, reveals the formidable task faced by the U.S. Army. On Morris Island, to the north of Battery Wagner, Battery Gregg and Fort Sumter guarded the southern side of the harbor, and across the narrow opening Fort Moultrie (right) and a series of batteries helped keep the U.S. Navy at bay. Courtesy Harvard University.
The battery boasted fourteen cannon, including a ten-inch Columbiad, which was aimed toward the Atlantic to keep the U.S. squadron at bay. Six guns faced landward, and the beach in front of Wagner lay within range of the cannon at Fort Sumter and Battery Gregg, which sat on the northeastern tip of Morris Island. General William Taliaferro commanded roughly 1,700 infantrymen, artillerymen, and cavalrymen within Wagner, including the Thirty-first and Fifty-first North Carolina, as well as the Charleston Battalion and two companies from the First South Carolina Infantry. During times of heavy bombardment, the soldiers retreated into what one journalist on Folly Island described as “capacious bomb-proof apartments [that] can shelter thousands of men.” Gazing at Wagner’s imposing sand walls, Shaw again had a foreboding premonition. For the second time in as many days he remarked to Ned Hallowell that he felt sure he would not survive his next battle.2
Despite these shadows, Shaw remained determined that the Fifty-fourth would be included in what everybody suspected was to be an imminent attack on Battery Wagner. Still anxious to prove the value of black troops, he had feared that the assault would take place while his men were relegated to the feint on James Island. He was nearly right. Shortly after the failed attack of July 11, shore and naval batteries began to fire on Wagner each morning like clockwork, with the second assault on the battery initially planned for July 16, at which time the Fifty-fourth was in the thick of battle on James. But the “heavy rain storms materially interfered with the progress of our works,” Gillmore later reported. “Nearly all the batteries were submerged and much of its powder spoiled,” so that the attack was delayed until July 18. Even then, Gillmore hoped to move “at the break of day,” but this goal was pushed back so that his gunners could shift their mortars closer to the battery. Despite these postponements, Gillmore had every confidence that his cannon could pound Wagner into submission, and that the land forces would encounter little opposition once they reached its walls.3
The handful of journalists on Morris Island were equally confident. “We seem to have come to the era of triumph,” crowed one Amherst newspaper. “Meade’s at Gettysburg, Grant’s at Vicksburg,” and “affairs at Charleston are progressing very favorably.” Gillmore’s shelling of Wagner gives “every prospect of success,” the paper added, and once “Wagner falls, Sumter and Charleston will soon follow.” On July 18, the New York Times reported that “everything [was] working well” in the siege, with “Charleston and the forts completely besieged.” In fact, the Times assured its subscribers, “the grand and final attack” had probably already taken place, as it “was assigned for Tuesday,” July 14. Common soldiers were less sure. Lorenzo Lyon, a white private with the Forty-eighth New York, wrote home that they needed “more forces in this Regt & hope that Govt will see the necessity thereof & send them now.” Lyon had gotten hold of a Charleston newspaper that warned that if the Confederate forces “lose Wagner, Charleston is give[n] up.” The Confederates well understood the critical role that Wagner played in the defense of their city, Lyon cautioned his father, and “at any time the Rebels may choose to let chime the cast iron dogs of war.”4
Although General George C. Strong believed that several days of shelling had reduced the interior of Wagner to rubble, the battery’s enormous bombproof—capable of sheltering nearly 1,000 of the garrison’s 1,700 men and topped by a beam-covered ceiling and sandbags piled twelve feet high—provided ample protection for its defenders just prior to the Fifty-fourth’s assault on July 18, 1863. Here, members of the Fifty-fourth stand before the fort after its capture that fall. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
The weaponry at Gillmore’s disposal was extraordinary. Starting on the afternoon of July 13, American gunners constructed four batteries of forty-two guns and mortars. Gillmore placed the batteries as close to Wagner as possible, ordering that they be hidden behind dunes “where they will not be seen by the Enemy.” Five wooden gunboats and one ironclad joined in the shelling, driving the Confederates into their bombproofed enclosure. Taliaferro’s men heaped protective sandbags atop the cannon, and twice his flagstaff was shot away. Watching from their end of Morris Island, U.S. soldiers cheered as the flag fell, believing that the defenders were about to surrender, but a handful of men rushed out of the bombproof to raise their colors again. Deep underground, the Confederates listened to what a defender believed to be one of “the most furious bombardments of the war.” The combined shore and naval batteries “poured forth their missiles of death for ten long hours on our little fort,” another Confederate remarked, while the huddled Confederates “quietly awaited the time when they would be afforded an opportunity for taking revenge.” Watching through field glasses, Northern officers believed the entrances to the bombproofs to be choked with sand, the guns disabled, and the battery itself practically dismantled.5
During the shelling, Gillmore discussed the attack with his senior staff. He believed that George Strong should lead the charge, and General Truman Seymour, who remained chief of staff despite the departure of David Hunter, agreed. Journalist Edward Pierce had warned Governor Andrew that Seymour was a racist, and the general confirmed that suspicion by commenting: “Well, I guess we will let Strong lead and put those d——d niggers from Massachusetts in the advance; we may as well get rid of them one time as another.” Gillmore, however, was willing to allow the Fifty-fourth to show the nation what they could do. He sent word to Admiral John Dahlgren that he “intended to storm the work about sunset,” and that the shelling should continue for the next several hours. By twilight, Gillmore presumed, the stretch of land in front of Wagner “might not be distinctly seen from the James and Sullivan Island batteries and from Fort Sumter.” Because of a marshy bog on the northern side of Morris Island, Strong’s brigade would have to advance in two columns along a sandy, twenty-five-yard-wide strip of land. The order of attack, Gillmore determined, started with the Fifty-fourth in the lead, supported by the Sixth Connecticut and the Forty-eighth New York, with the Third New Hampshire, the Ninth Maine, and the Seventy-sixth Pennsylvania held in reserve. Owing to a combination of sickness and battlefield casualties, Gillmore added, the “regiments were all small,” but the fact that none of them as at full strength little worried the general.6
At around two o’clock in the afternoon, Shaw and Wilkie James crossed over from Folly Island and went in search of Strong in hopes of receiving new orders. The general informed them that Gillmore planned to storm the battery that evening. Strong had been impressed by what he had heard of the fighting on James Island, and as he later remarked, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, he also wished to place the Fifty-fourth in the forefront of the assault so that the honors that would fall to them could be all the greater. “You may lead the column if you say ‘yes,’” Strong offered, knowing that Shaw neither could nor wished to disobey the command. “Your men, I know, are worn out, but do as you choose.” Shaw’s face brightened, and by way of answer he turned to James and instructed him to return to Folly Island, locate Hallowell, and bring up the regiment. When the news arrived, the men struggled to their feet and boarded a steamer to carry them across the inlet to Morris Island. Strong’s headquarters sat halfway down the island, and the soldiers arrived at his camp around six. Edward Pierce was present as a guest of the general’s, and he thought the men “looked worn and weary.” Strong too noticed that the men were fatigued and hungry, not having had rations in two days and nothing to eat since the soggy hardtack that morning. Strong wished there were time for “food and stimulants,” but twilight was rapidly approaching.7
WHILE SHAW CONFERRED WITH GENERAL STRONG, NED HALLOWELL led the 650 active-duty soldiers of the Fifty-fourth forward. “We were marched up past our batteries,” James Henry Gooding remarked, “amid the cheers of the officers and [white] soldiers.” When they reached a wide span of low ground, the companies spread into battle formation of two columns. Mindful of what the sudden silence of U.S. artillery meant, Confederate gunners frantically began to unpack their cannon. “About dusk the dark and dense columns were seen moving slowly down the beach,” one Confederate observed. At three-quarters of a mile away from the battery, the black soldiers fell within musket range, but those inside Wagner held their fire and instead sent but a few solid balls sailing over the heads of the regiment. Worried that the national colors and the predominantly white Massachusetts state flag were drawing fire, the flag-bearers began to roll them onto staves. Captain William Simpkins drew his sword and pointed at the fort, shouting: “Unfurl those colors,” and to cheers, the bearers did so.8
Then began the waiting. Behind the lines, Shaw and Strong enjoyed a hasty meal in his tent, where they were served by Harriet Tubman. After thirty minutes, the two officers mounted up and began to ride to the front. Rob turned suddenly and rode back to where Edward Pierce stood. Leaning down, he handed the journalist his yet-unmailed letter to Annie of the previous day, along with a short note to his father, dated that morning. “I enclose this letter for Annie, which I didn’t intend to send you,” Rob wrote in the latter, “because it is impossible to tell whether I can write again by this mail.” As he galloped up toward Hallowell, Luis Emilio could not help noticing that Shaw was as brushed and dressed for the solemn moment as battlefield conditions allowed. His “close-fitting staff-officer’s jacket” was set off by the polished eagles on each shoulder, and a “fine narrow silk sash was wound round his waist.” An expensive officer’s sword of English manufacture hung from his belt, and on one hand shone an antique gem set in a ring. His gold watch, like his sword etched with his initials, was tied in place by a gold chain. Prudently, he retained his pocketbook, in case his body later had to be identified. Emilio observed that Shaw’s “bearing was composed,” but his cheek had somewhat paled and he was grinding the cigar clenched between his teeth. He dismounted, handed the reins to sixteen-year-old drummer boy Alec Johnson, and walked to where Hallowell waited. “I shall go in advance with the National flag,” he told Ned. “You will keep the state flag with you; it will give the men something to rally round.”9
Most of those in the front, Companies I and C, were also doing their best to remain composed. There “was a lack of their usual light-heartedness,” one soldier remarked. Another ball split the air above them, and two of the men shifted nervously, drawing a rebuke from Hallowell. “I guess they kind of ’spec’s we’re coming,” a soldier said aloud. Gazing up the beach toward Wagner, few of the officers were any less anxious. “We have the most magnificent chance to prove the value of the colored race now,” Lieutenant James assured a fellow officer, just before spoiling the sentiment by accidently discharging his pistol into the sand, nearly hitting his own foot. Shaw glared in his direction. “I would not have had that happen for anything,” an embarrassed Wilkie later admitted.10
Strong pulled up in front of Shaw and Hallowell, speaking to the men without dismounting from his gray mare. “Gen. Strong asked us if we would follow him into Fort Wagner,” Gooding recalled, with “every man” shouting that they “were ready to follow wherever we were led.” Strong too wore his dress blues, with a yellow handkerchief tied around his neck. “Boys, I am a Massachusetts man, and I know you will fight for the honor of the State,” he shouted. “I am sorry you must go into the field tired and hungry, but the men in the fort are tired too. There are but three hundred behind those walls, and they have been fighting all day.” Confident that they would face little resistance, Strong instructed the men not to fire their muskets “on the way up, but go in and bayonet them at their guns.” Then, pointing to Sergeant John Wall, the flag-bearer, Strong asked: “If this man should fall, who will lift the flag and carry it on?” Taking his cigar from his lips, Shaw answered quietly, “I will.” As those around Rob hoorayed, Strong rode off and prepared to give the order to advance. Caught up in the moment, Shaw failed to reflect that the Vermont-born Strong had never lived in the Bay State. Also, what no one in the ranks yet knew was that the general’s estimate of Confederate strength was off by 1,400.11
In the final moments before the advance, Shaw adopted a far less formal approach, walking slowly along the line, speaking soft “words of cheer to his men.” Corporal Gooding had always judged his colonel to be a fair but tough taskmaster, yet now he was struck by how Shaw chatted with “the men very familiarly and kindly.” His manner was friendlier “than I had ever noticed before,” Gooding remarked, yet he observed also how tense Shaw was. His “lips were compressed, and now and then there was visible a slight twitching in the corners of the mouth, like one bent on accomplishing or dying.” Shaw reminded one group “how the eyes of thousands would look upon the night’s work,” gently insisting: “Now, boys, I want you to be men!” As Shaw walked by one private, the soldier impulsively shouted: “Colonel, I will stay by you till I die.” Shaw nodded and smiled back.12
The signal to advance over the roughly 1,300 yards of sand came at 7:45. Shaw drew his sword, the monogrammed steel scraping against the scabbard’s throat. Shaw led the right column, with Hallowell taking the left. The attack coincided with low tide, which afforded the soldiers a wider pathway of firm sand. At low tide the water in Wagner’s protective moat would also be lower, between two and three feet. Even so, as the men held formation, the two companies on the right were pushed into the waves, with some of the men wading knee-deep into the ocean. “Move in quick time until within a hundred yards of the fort,” Shaw shouted, “then double quick, and charge!” Darkness was coming on fast, but the men could see flashes of light to their front as gunners in Sumter and on Sullivan’s Island began to fire. As they reached the widest part of the marsh to their left, soldiers on the edge of both wings were forced to slow and fall back. Only those in the center had a clear path, and they moved smartly behind Shaw and the flag to within 200 yards of the battery’s front wall.13
Close behind Shaw were Companies I and C and the New Bedford men, including Gooding, William Carney, and brothers John and Charles Harrison. “Fort Wagner is the Sebastopol of the rebels,” Gooding later wrote, thinking of the Crimean naval port, “but we went at it.” Suddenly, as the gap between the soldiers without and within narrowed, the dark sky exploded. It seemed to Gooding that Wagner’s long front wall “became a mound of fire, from which poured a stream of shot and shell.” For one too-brief moment, Luis Emilio noted, there was a brief lull as the gunners reloaded, but then came a “deafening explosion” as the cannon fire resumed, “mingled with the crash and rattle of musketry.” A sheet of flame, almost “like electric sparks, swept along the parapet” as the Fifty-first North Carolina, lying atop the bulwark, opened fire. The charge up the beach had taken roughly seven minutes. Gooding and those in the lead splashed through the ditch, waded up the sandy wall, and shoved through the wall of spikes at the top of the wall, engaging “the foe [with] the bayonet,” but the company was “exposed to a murderous fire from the batteries of the fort.” The color-bearer of the regimental flag went down. Shaw seized its staff and forged ahead.14
Only then did they realize how wrong Strong had been on the numbers inside Wagner. The earlier bombardment, Hallowell later admitted, which “seemed sure to tear out the very insides of the fort,” had “in fact, simply excited a lively commotion in the sand.” As hundreds upon hundreds of Wagner’s defenders swarmed out of the safety of the bombproofs, Confederate artillery from Battery Gregg and James Island began to rain shells down onto the beach. Racing at the head of Company F were Sergeants Douglass and Swails. “The grape and canister shell and Minnie swept us down like chaff,” Douglass swore, but “still our men went on and on.” Shells crashed into their ranks, chewing up huge spouts of sand and dust and tearing holes in the columns. “Men fell all around me,” Douglass remembered. “A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, [but] our men would close up again.” Douglass scrambled up the sloping front wall, waving his sword and screaming: “Come on, boys, and fight for God and Governor Andrew.” Grapeshot coming from his left blasted off his sheath and hammered pellets into his pelvis and thighs. “If I die tonight,” Lewis thought, as men from his company followed him into the fort, “I will not die a coward.”15
Dashing toward the fort with the left column, Captain Wilkie James tried to remain only a few paces behind Ned Hallowell and the state flag. Even under what he described as “that mountain of fire,” he recalled Governor Andrew’s reminder that those “colors had never been surrendered to any foe.” As he neared the ditch a shell fragment tore into his side, but in “the frenzy of excitement it seemed a painless visitation.” James splashed into the shallow moat, and just when he began to think that reaching the parapet was not “out of the question,” he received a second wound, a canister ball in his foot. Stunned, he fell to the ground. His men swept by him and flooded up the walls. Defenders hurled hand grenades down into the lines of the attackers. Somewhere ahead of him in the smoke and din, Hallowell reached the top of the wall. He took a bullet to the groin and rolled back into the ditch, where he received two more wounds. Bleeding profusely, Ned began to crawl away from the fort.16
To Hallowell’s right, Shaw was one of the first to scale the wall. “With another cheer and a shout,” the men from Companies I and C scrambled up beside him and engaged the Confederates in hand-to-hand combat. Shaw was waving his sword and shouting, “Forward, my brave boys!” when a bullet caught him in the breast. He was hit five or six more times before he dropped. Gooding saw him fall, as did Private Thomas Burgess, a young carpenter from Pennsylvania. Although badly wounded himself, Burgess tried to drag Shaw with him as he scuttled down toward the ditch. But Burgess could see that “there appeared to be no life in him,” and those trying to retrieve his body, Gooding reported, were themselves “either shot down, or reeling in the ditch below.” Twenty soldiers fell close about Shaw, with “two lying on his own body.”17
Advancing directly behind the Fifty-fourth were the Sixth Connecticut and the Forty-eighth New York. Raised by the Reverend James Perry, the latter regiment had tried to recruit only pious soldiers, and the unit was nicknamed “Perry’s Saints.” After reaching the ditch, the New Yorkers attempted to swing about and overrun Wagner’s seaward wall. “Up the beach we went amidst the iron hail,” Private Lorenzo Lyon wrote. “I can’t tell you the moans & shrieks of the dying.” Confederate canisters hurled spreading cones of bullets into the Forty-eighth. To his left, Lyon could see the Fifty-fourth struggling up the slanting walls, while the “rebels fired everything they could, mowing down a Co. at a time.” Facing the Forty-eighth was an iron artillery piece whose eight-inch mouth had been used against the U.S. Navy; filled with grapeshot, the howitzer spewed enough metal to make Lyon feel as though “an entire Blacksmith shop” was flying through the air. The white regiments took heavy casualties, and although Lyon “had made up [his] mind to give all [he] had,” the night sky “filled with all the weapons of death that could be invented.” Resigning himself to God’s “righteous will,” he slowly pushed on, even as he thought he “saw hundreds dropping” all about him.18
For nearly an hour, soldiers from the Fifty-fourth and the Sixth Connecticut were able to hold the southeastern bastion of the battery. Some of the men lay against the sloping wall, shooting up through the spikes at Confederates; one black soldier, who had lost the use of an arm, piled cartridges atop the parapet for seventeen-year-old Lieutenant Edward B. Emerson to use. Some Confederates shouted, “No quarter,” and aware of the fate of those taken prisoner on James Island, no black soldier tried to surrender. Private George Wilson, a laborer from Hudson, New York, was shot in both shoulders but refused to retreat until ordered to do so by his captain. Neither side had time to reload their muskets in the melee, and the attackers, one officer recorded, took “wounds from bayonet thrusts, sword cuts, pike thrusts and hand grenades; and there were heads and arms broken and smashed by the butt-ends of muskets.”19
Unaware until too late how many Confederates had waited out the shelling deep within the bombproof, Strong and Seymour held back the final three regiments from the assault. Gillmore later suggested that more soldiers would only have congested the chaotic battlefield, and that “the darkness and the [Confederates’] perfect knowledge of the interior” of Wagner “rendered it necessary to relinquish it.” Whatever the reason, the assaulting forces were badly outnumbered. Hallowell later complained that a common “characteristic” of Union officers was that they rarely ordered “sufficient numbers to push the advantage gained to complete success.” Lewis Douglass also believed that had they “been properly supported we should have held the fort.” But “the white troops could not be made to come up,” and so “the consequence is we had to fall back.” Neither man, however, expressed anything but praise for the white soldiers who fought beside them along Wagner’s wall; they claimed only that decisions made by senior officers cost them their prize. With Shaw dead and Hallowell down, and with so many older captains killed or wounded, it fell to Captain Luis Emilio to order the retreat. The son of Spanish immigrants, Emilio had bluffed his way into the army in 1861 by claiming to be eighteen, his actual age on the night of the attack. Both captains from Company K had died on the northern portion of the parapet, one of them in Swails’s arms; the black sergeant led the company’s survivors in retreat. Still slashing at defenders atop the parapet, Douglass joined the withdrawal down the beach, “dodging shells and other missiles” as he ran.20
Nor did the Fifty-fourth willingly abandon the Stars and Stripes. Sergeant John Wall, a twenty-year-old Oberlin College student, initially carried the national flag up the beach but became mired in the ditch. During the chaos, Wall shouted for help, but his company poured by him as they fought their way up the barricade. Sergeant William Carney threw aside his gun, grabbed the flag, and pushed his way to the head of the column. “I found myself alone, struggling upon the ramparts,” Carney later recounted, “while all around me were the dead and wounded, lying one upon another.” He planted the banner in the sand atop the parapet but was immediately hit in the right arm and leg. Just as the retreat commenced, Carney took a third ball, this one to the chest, with a fourth cracking his left hip. He fell to the ground, still holding the flagstaff. After a struggle, Confederates seized the state flag. But despite the wounds in both legs, Carney crawled down the beach on his knees toward the lower end of Morris Island, keeping one hand pressed to his chest wound while the other carried the flag. He had covered nearly half a mile when he was sprayed in the back of the head by grapeshot, but he nevertheless reached Company D, which had stopped close to where the march began hours before. Seeing the American flag, the soldiers, “both black and white,” began to cheer. As Carney presented the flag to a lieutenant, he promised: “Boys, I did my duty; the dear old flag never touched the ground.”21
Captain Emilio rallied about 100 men along the beach, near to where Carney had crawled. The soldiers remained within firing distance of the Confederates, but they hoped to use the cover of darkness to rescue the wounded, who otherwise might be captured if Wagner’s defenders chose to search outside its walls. When General Strong rode forward to “try and rally stragglers,” he was struck in the thigh by canister shot. Although a bit of metal passed all the way through Strong’s leg, a journalist found him in the hospital tent on Morris and was happy to report that “the wound was less dangerous than was anticipated.” As the surgeons worked to stem the flow of blood, Strong lay on a stretcher, worried only about “the poor fellows who lay uncared for on the battlefield.”22
Among those still on the field was Wilkie James. Wounded in two places, James made it to the water’s edge, hoping to find cover behind a ridge of sand. The Confederates within Wagner maintained a “terrific fire,” but James reasoned that he would rather die where he lay than be taken prisoner, given Jefferson Davis’s “manifesto, ordering the white officers of the 54th Massachusetts hung if captured alive.” At length, several soldiers from the Fifty-fourth bearing stretchers found James and began to carry him to the rear. Wagner’s guns fired again, and “a round shot blew off the head of the stretcher-bearer to [James’s] rear, producing a horrible and instant death.” The second soldier dragged James behind a dune, where rescuers found both the next morning. Wilkie was one of the lucky ones. Lorenzo Lyon of the Forty-eighth New York later recalled that even after it was clear that U.S. forces could not renew the attack, “the Rebels kept up with grape & everything, I think on purpose to keep” Union soldiers from “taking off any wounded.” As the waves flowed in, George Stephens told the Weekly Anglo-African, “dozens of our wounded were drowned.” Due to the ongoing fire from Wagner, “before we could secure our dead and wounded the tide came up,” Stephens mourned, “and such as could not crawl away were drowned.”23
Harriet Tubman listened to the distant rumbling from her post by Strong’s tent. The deeply religious woman, who began to experience visions and revelations from God after being hit on the head by a heavy metal weight while a young slave, described the faraway battle in elegiac terms: “And then we saw the lightening, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was the dead that we reaped.”24
SUNDAY MORNING BROKE GRAY AS THUNDERSTORMS AGAIN ROLLED in. A correspondent for the Charleston Courier reported that hundreds of corpses lay atop Wagner’s front wall, sometimes piled two and three bodies deep, with others floating in the canal’s high tide. The black troops had “received no tender treatment during the skirmish,” a reporter for the Charleston Mercury added, “and the marsh in one place was thick with their dead bodies.” Many of the soldiers had been blown to pieces. “Probably no battlefield in the country has ever presented such an array of mangled bodies in a small compass as was seen on Sunday morning,” the Courier ventured. General Gillmore wrote to General Taliaferro, requesting “permission to receive and bury the dead of my command left upon the battle field last Evening.” Under a flag of truce, Gillmore rode up the island to confer with his counterpart, both as to the bodies of the dead and the care of the wounded, but also to discuss an exchange of prisoners. Gillmore was especially anxious to press the point “that the officers and men of the colored regiment were to be treated like all others.” Taliaferro replied that such determinations were made in Richmond, and he promised only to submit the “question for the consideration of his superiors.”25
The stormy morning of July 19, as depicted by Harper’s. In the foreground, Generals Quincy Adams Gillmore and William Taliaferro discuss the care of the dead and wounded as well as possible prisoner exchanges. To the left, the southern wall of Wagner is covered with dead bodies, which can also be seen in the watery ditch. In the distance, lightning strikes above Charleston. Courtesy Harvard University.
Gillmore also hoped to discover whether Shaw was dead or had been wounded and then taken prisoner. That it was even a question was due to the fact that just after the fighting, Confederate private Charles Blake found Shaw’s body and, together with several men, carried him into the bombproof, where they stripped him down to his undershirt and trousers. Blake made off with Rob’s watch and chain, while others grabbed his sword and sash. One of those who knew his fate was not then in a position to alert Gillmore. The U.S. naval surgeon John Luck had been captured that morning while looking after the wounded, and he saw Shaw’s corpse lying within the fort. When he later asked General Johnson Hagood, who arrived just that afternoon to replace Taliaferro, what they had done with Shaw’s body, Hagood sneered: “We have buried him in the trench with his niggers.” Had the young colonel “been in command of white troops,” Hagood admitted, he would have granted “him an honorable burial.” Hagood had no idea whether the black soldiers who lay beside Shaw were freemen or runaways, but the planter and future South Carolina governor believed that white men who led black regiments had demeaned themselves, and so Shaw deserved to be buried “in the common trench, with the negroes that fell with him.”26
After two assaults in quick succession, Confederates had no reason to suspect that the attack of July 18 would be the last. Hagood was understandably wary of allowing sharp-eyed U.S. soldiers into the battery itself to carry away their dead. Given the intense July heat, he ordered the deceased buried as quickly as possible, and as was becoming all too common in the war, that meant that dozens of bodies were piled together in hastily dug pits. There was no time for coffins, and in this case the Union dead—black and white alike—were not even wrapped in blankets. Just in front of the battery, Confederates dug long trenches about six feet wide and four feet deep. Hagood later insisted that they had no leisure to do more than drag bodies to nearby pits, and so “each officer was buried where he fell, with men who surrounded him.” In reality, by tradition Confederate soldiers buried white captains with other officers; Rob Shaw, Pen Hallowell later alleged, “was the only officer buried with the colored troops.”27
On July 24, the Confederates sent out a flag of truce, and Gillmore ordered General Israel Vogdes to ride forward to confer with Hagood. By the time of the parlay, the U.S. surgical corps had already begun moving wounded soldiers from the tent infirmary on Morris to the army hospital in Beaufort. The number of men in hospitals in Hilton Head and Beaufort rose to 144. “A few others died on the boats” as they sailed down the coast, a Worcester journalist noted. Those officers whose bodies could be recovered or who died while under the surgeon’s knife were given proper burials after the army shipped their bodies home in “large sized water casks.” Vogdes and Hagood discussed an exchange of wounded soldiers, and Vogdes requested, unsuccessfully, the body of Colonel Haldimand Putnam of the Sixth Connecticut. In later years, Hagood insisted that Vogdes did not inquire about Shaw’s body, or even his condition, but that was surely untrue; James Henry Gooding wrote later that day that General P. G. T. Beauregard, perhaps at Vogdes’s request, sent word to the parlay that Shaw was not being held prisoner in Charleston. Hagood, a graduate of the Citadel, Charleston’s military academy, was increasingly embarrassed about his lack of martial courtesy and did not wish to admit to a career officer that he had unceremoniously dumped Shaw’s body into a sandy pit.28
Word of Shaw’s demise spread quickly around the camp. “We have since learned by the flag-of-truce that Colonel Shaw is dead,” Gooding reported that afternoon to the Mercury. Like Private Burgess, Gooding had seen Shaw fall, and he never had much confidence that his colonel could have survived his wounds. But in the confused aftermath of July 18, faith often proved stronger than dreadful truths. Lewis Douglass initially assured his parents that “Col. Shaw is a prisoner and wounded,” although Douglass had not been near Rob in the fort. The grim news reached Charles Russell Lowell on July 26, at his camp just outside of Washington. “I see that General Beauregard believes Rob Shaw was killed in the fight on the 18th,” Effie’s fiancé wrote his mother. “I hope and trust he is mistaken.” As he sought to avoid the truth Lowell rationalized that as Rob had missed serving with “the old Second” at Gettysburg, he would forever escape harm: “I had always felt of Rob, too, that he was not going to be killed.” An Amherst newspaper flatly reported on July 30 that “Col. Shaw of the 54th Mass. was taken prisoner, but is not dead.” Closer to the front in Beaufort, Charlotte Forten prayed “that our colonel, ours especially he seemed to me, is not killed.” But on the evening of July 24 she received “the news of Col. Shaw’s death is confirmed. There can no longer be any doubt.” Rob’s was surely “a glorious death,” Forten reflected. “But oh, it is hard, very hard for the young wife, so late a bride.”29
Neither side’s military employed a branch to inform families of a loss, so parents and spouses relied on newspaper listings of soldiers killed, wounded, or missing. After the publication of numerous and contradictory reports regarding Shaw’s fate, Annie’s father cabled his son not to allow Annie or the rest of the family to see any newspapers until he could obtain definitive word on whether Rob was dead or alive. Courtesy New York Historical Society.
The heartbreaking news proved hardest, of course, for those who resided in Massachusetts and New York. Annie’s father, Ogden Haggerty, abandoned all hope by July 24, but he counseled his son Charles not to allow Annie or the Shaws to know that “until the rumor is verified.” “Do not let news papers of tomorrow be seen,” he added in a terse cable. Governor Andrew had yet to receive official confirmation of Shaw’s death, but on July 30 he forwarded the Haggerty family a letter he had received from Edward Pierce’s wife, together with an account of the attack from the Richmond Enquirer. “Candor compels me to say that I have no reason to believe that he survives,” Andrew cabled, signing his name with “the deepest sympathy for you and your family.” Black editors across the North received word from their soldier-correspondents on Morris Island, and Manhattan’s Weekly Anglo-African reported on July 26 that “as we go to press the telegraph brings us the sad news of the death of Robert G. Shaw.”30
Memorials and testimonials poured in, from the Massachusetts and abolitionist press and also from the officers who had served with Shaw. “If the reports of his death are true,” observed the Worcester Massachusetts Spy, “his regiment will have lost an able commander and a devoted friend, while the state will mourn the loss of another of her gifted sons.” The Boston Transcript added that “when record is made up of those who nobly fought and died to save our free nationality, shining high and bright upon it will be the name of Col. Robert G. Shaw.” General Gillmore tendered his “heartfelt sympathy & condolence” to the “friends & relations of those brave and gallant men” who perished at Wagner, and Pen Hallowell later insisted “that in the great war with the slave power the figure that stands out in boldest relief is that of Colonel Shaw.” Rob, thought his old classmate, “was the fair type of all that was brave, generous, beautiful, and of all that was best worth fighting for in the war of the slaveholders’ Rebellion.” From Beaufort, General Rufus Saxton sent “a tribute” to the Liberator, enjoining William Lloyd Garrison’s readers to “cherish in their inmost hearts the memory of one who did not hesitate to sacrifice all the attractions of a high social position, wealth, and home, and his own noble life, for the sake of humanity.” Writing only three days after the conference with Hagood confirmed Shaw’s death, Saxton thought that the “truths and principles for which he fought and died still live” and would be vindicated “by the ditch into which his mangled and bleeding body was thrown.”31
Saxton was hardly the only person to be offended by the theft of Shaw’s personal possessions and the dishonorable treatment of his corpse. As early as July 24, survivors of the battle began to pool their meager resources—they had still not gotten paid—to locate and send their colonel’s body home. The men “all declare that they will dig for his body till they find it,” Gooding reported. Evidently embarrassed by their behavior, Confederates in Charleston began to claim that Rob had not been buried with his soldiers, but “was put into a separate grave between two other Union officers.” The site might easily be found after the war, one officer maintained.32
Frank Shaw was having none of it. On August 24, in what became a widely republished letter, he wrote to Gillmore, observing that any attempt to recover his son’s body was undesired by the Shaw family. Transforming a calculated slight into a moral triumph, Frank observed that he believed “that a soldier’s most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen.” He hoped that the general “will forbid the desecration of his remains or of those buried with him.” The general agreed. “Had it been possible to obtain the body of Col. Shaw immediately after the battle,” Gillmore noted, he would have done so. But now that option had passed. “Surely, no resting-place for your son could be found more fitting than the scene where his courage and devotion were so conspicuously displayed.” Gillmore assured the Shaws that “on no authority less than your own shall your son’s remains be disturbed.”33
The black press, even as it mourned Shaw, reminded Northern readers that it was not merely white officers who had streamed toward Wagner’s guns. Manhattan’s Weekly Anglo-African listed Shaw’s name at the top of its column “Casualties at Fort Wagner,” but the paper methodically recorded the name, rank, wounds, and hometown of each dead or injured soldier. The numbers were sobering. Of the 650 men of the Fifty-fourth who marched up the beach, 272, or 42 percent, were listed as casualties. Of the 34 men immediately killed in action, 23 were officers leading the charge; only eight white officers emerged unscathed. The William Henry Harrison who hailed from Michigan lay among the dead. Among the 146 soldiers who were wounded was James Krunkleton, the only one of the four Pennsylvania brothers not to be killed or wounded two days before on James Island. The categories of killed and wounded merged after five later died of their injuries. Private George Washington, for instance, breathed his last on August 3, eight days after his fellow Syracusean Charles Reason died in the hospital of wounds. As Robert Hamilton, the editor of the Anglo-African, was quick to point out, since the federal government continued to deduct $3 each month for uniforms, even after the regiment had refused payment, “every man who died in battle, or by disease, died actually in debt to the government.” The sad truth was that “the men who gave their lives to the country,” Hamilton observed, were “brought in debt on the Quartermaster’s accounts for the uniforms which the rebels stripped from their bodies after death.”34
The white soldiers who supported the Fifty-fourth also paid a heavy price. Of the 540 men in the Sixth Connecticut who engaged in the assault, 15 died, with total casualties of 138. The New Yorkers fared worse still. Their active-duty roster was smaller, at 420, but 54 men from the Forty-eighth died, and their total casualties of 242—or 57 percent of the regiment involved in the July 18 action—was only 30 fewer men than the losses suffered by the Fifty-fourth. In the course of one long night, U.S. forces suffered casualties of 1,515. Within the battery, Confederate losses amounted to 36 killed and 133 wounded.35
Northern readers worried not only about the wounded and the families of the dead but also about the 73 soldiers from the Fifty-fourth reported missing or captured. Northern blacks, and especially those parents who had emigrated out of the South early in their lives, had little confidence that Confederate officials would draw a neat distinction between runaways in blue and their sons who had been born free in the North. Lincoln’s administration, one Pennsylvania newspaper insisted, “should at once demand from the rebel ringleaders an explicit guarantee of the same treatment that all our soldiers in their hands receive.” Among those wounded and carried into Charleston were Nathaniel Hurley, a Douglass family friend from Rochester; Robert Lyons, yet another of the small Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, contingent; and Sergeant Robert Simmons, whose young nephew had been clubbed to death in the Manhattan riots. His arm shattered by a ball, Simmons was moved to a Confederate hospital. Surgeons amputated his arm, but he died in Charleston sometime that August.36
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE ASSAULT ON WAGNER, PEOPLE ACROSS THE North and South took stock of just what the July 18 battle meant against the backdrop of the broader conflict. As the men of the Fifty-fourth had understood as they dashed up the beach, their trial of July 18 was not merely a single battle. It had the potential to shape public opinion. The official Confederate response to the battle, particularly among politicians and senior officers, was a curious mixture of elation that the battery had held and revulsion over the use of black troops. “Praise be to God,” Beauregard cabled General Joseph E. Johnston and three other Confederate generals. “Anniversary of Bull Run gloriously celebrated.” In a lengthy report on the U.S. assaults of July 11 and 18, General Roswell S. Ripley praised “the brave officers and men” who defended Wagner and condemned Gillmore for putting “the poor negroes, whom they had forced into an unnatural service, in front, to be, as they were, slaughtered indiscriminately.” Unable to conceive of a world in which black men actually volunteered to serve their country, Ripley at least took solace in the fact that “the colors under which they were sent to butchery by hypocrisy and inhumanity fell, dragged in blood and sand, in the ditch.”37
As Southern gentry who defined their sense of self and honor by what they were not—which is to say, black or poor or under the authority of another—Confederate officers regarded having to fight against African American soldiers who saw themselves as equals on the battlefield to be especially demeaning. The editor of the Charleston Courier was indignant that Confederate troops had to fend off “a mongrel set of trash.” A correspondent for the New-York Tribune, who had been permitted to attend the officers’ conference of July 24 and overheard Hagood’s dismissive remark about Shaw’s body, chatted briefly with several Confederates. “We are gentlemen,” one complained, “and here you are sending us your negroes to pollute our soil.” As South Carolina was home to roughly 100,000 more blacks than whites on the day of its secession, the officer’s objection had nothing to do with the blackening of his state and everything to do with having to fight black sergeants and corporals. Even army surgeons shared that attitude. When one of the captured U.S. officers grumbled about being housed in the same hospital ward with privates, the doctor sneered “that if they put themselves on a par with negroes as soldiers, the same relation must be maintained under all circumstances while they are in our hands.”38
The Southern soldiers who actually faced the Fifty-fourth during those July days had a differing opinion, at least of their adversaries’ abilities as fighting men. William Ball, a wealthy Carolinian who first encountered the regiment on James Island before being transferred into Wagner on the evening of the assault, was so “despondent” after the battle and sure that his friends within the fort “were all to be destroyed” that his mother begged him not “to give up entirely, before the black servants particularly.” William Scott, serving on Morris Island with the Ninth New Hampshire, wrote to tell his parents of a Confederate prisoner he had spoken to on the day after the second assault. The captured soldier “said that he had been in all the battles in Virginia and had never seen any [of] our troops fight as we did.” Lieutenant Iredell Jones of the First South Carolina told his father a very similar tale. “The negroes fought gallantly, and were headed by as brave a Colonel as ever lived.” After the battle, Jones spoke to a number of the prisoners, and he admitted that the “negroes were as fine looking set as I ever saw—large, strong, muscular fellows.” Aware that his own clothing was badly worn and tattered, he could not help noticing that “they were splendidly uniformed.” Even the habitually fiery publisher of the Charleston Courier conceded that the Fifty-fourth performed with enormous courage, although he grumbled that their “bravery was worthy of a better cause.”39
In the North, the abolitionist and Republican press was ecstatic in the face of defeat. Garrison’s Liberator crowed that while many “had prophesied that the colored man would not stand fire,” the bravery of the Fifty-fourth forced those doubters to “finally yield in his favor.” “Fresh honors crown the colored troops,” editorialized the New York Evening Post. Their relentless march up the beach into “a stream of fire,” the Post maintained, was a “severe test, which would have tried even veteran troops.” The reliably progressive Boston Transcript contrasted the “heroic conduct” of the regiment with the “ruffians and assassins of the New York mob.” The editor hoped that there was no longer “a person in the loyal States” who had read of the battle “without feeling his prejudices insensibly giving way before such examples of fortitude and daring.” Echoing Lewis Douglass’s portrayal of the skirmish on James Island, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, a Republican newspaper, reported that the black soldiers at Wagner had “fought with the desperation of tigers.” The Manchester Daily Mirror offered grudging praise, remarking that “the Mass. 54th is composed of good stuff, [even] if they are colored.” The most effusive editorial to appear in a pro-administration newspaper, however, was published in Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. The battle, Greeley supposed, “made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to white Yankees.”40
Pennsylvania was less firmly ensconced in the Republican camp than was New York, yet Pennsylvania’s Washington Reporter was every bit as lavish in its praise as Garrison or Greeley. At a time when black men could not vote in the Quaker State and white “prejudices have hitherto kept [them] at every conceivable disadvantage,” the editor remarked, black Pennsylvanians had not only marched up to Readville to enlist but comprised, the editor bragged, the largest state contingent in the regiment. “The experiment has begun,” he added, and at Wagner the Fifty-fourth were “magnificent for their steadiness, impetuosity, and dauntless courage.” Were all Union troops “as single hearted as these soldiers, our difficulties would disappear.”41
If a few conservative journalists continued to harbor doubts about black soldiers, they were politic enough to remain silent in the weeks after Wagner. Although no Democratic journal published a formal retraction or apology, one by one they commended Shaw’s regiment and called for more black troops. “Not myself a believer in the arming of negroes, free or contraband, as soldiers,” one New York correspondent admitted, “I must do this regiment the credit of fighting bravely and well.” He reported that some of those who died had the opportunity to become Confederate prisoners, but “they declined in every instance.” Far from running from the melee, “several fell pierced by many bullets while fighting singly with half a dozen rebels.” The men of the Fifty-fourth were “evidently made of good stuff,” the correspondent concluded, “and no better fighting can be asked for than they did on James Island when so furiously attacked.” One Democratic paper in Ohio conceded that the men had shown “undaunted bravery” in the fight, while the New York Times admitted that such courage under fire proved that black soldiers were “entitled to assert their rights to manhood.” In a lengthy editorial, the Chicago Tribune, a longtime Lincoln critic, acknowledged that public opinion was evolving rapidly on the question. “Opposition to make a soldier of the negro has nearly ceased everywhere,” the editor recognized. The “government and the people have woke up to the importance of negro soldiers in the conduct of the war.” Thanks to the events of July 16 and 18, the “thing, therefore, is now settled—the negroes will fight.”42
With that sentiment, white soldiers agreed. During the first two years of the war, senior officers, particularly those from the Midwest, had routinely insisted that it debased Northern soldiers to have black men anywhere in the Union ranks and that, at the first sign of black enlistments, whites would desert in droves. Junior officers from New England were the first to dissent from that view, but even in that Republican stronghold, Governor Andrew’s experiment had hardly been enthusiastically embraced. One lieutenant claimed that while he had never doubted that “Massachusetts and her colored troops” would perform admirably if given the chance, “other regiments declare their surprise, and state that they do not wish better nor braver soldiers” than the Fifty-fourth. Dr. Lincoln Stone, the regiment’s head surgeon, had obviously believed in Andrew’s cause enough to sign on, but his post-Wagner communications with Boston editors were surely not mere wishful thinking. “I really think they showed themselves very brave, true soldiers, in both of the engagements they have been in,” Stone reflected. Two serious fights within the span of two days, he thought, “has gone far to remove whatever prejudice may have existed in this department against colored troops.”43
Captain Charles Russell Lowell had never hidden the fact that he regarded Shaw’s willingness to accept the colonelcy of the regiment a fool’s errand. Despite his fondness for Rob and love for Effie, Lowell always doubted that African Americans could make capable soldiers. After Wagner, Lowell converted, and not merely because he mourned the man who was to have been his brother-in-law. “Since Rob’s death I have a stronger personal desire to help make it clear that the black troops are the instrument which alone can end the rebellion,” he admitted. “I did what little I could to help the Fifty-fourth for his sake and for its own sake before,” a somewhat guilty Lowell pled, “but since July 18th, I think I can do more.” Lowell hinted that he would be “very glad to assist in the organization of a black cavalry—if I am wanted,” and told another correspondent that since Shaw’s death he had developed “a personal feeling in the matter to see black troops made a success,” in part as he wished to “justify the use (or sacrifice) made of them at Wagner.” Even Charles Francis Adams Jr. dropped his earlier opposition to the use of black troops. “The negro regiment question is our greatest victory of the war so far,” he assured his father, adding that “in the army, these are so much of a success that they will soon be the fashion.” Writing from Virginia just four days after the battle, Adams had already encountered several senior officers who once held “a conservative’s prejudices against their use,” but now were “confident that under good officers they will make troops equal to the best.”44
Remorse was common among white soldiers and officers. Long nights between battles gave even the least reflective soldiers opportunity to examine long-held opinions on black inferiority. Noticing that the camp newspaper was in the habit of routinely “calling all negroes boys,” one Ohio soldier realized that it had never occurred to him to question the practice, yet suddenly it “sounds rather strangely.” The curious timing between the Manhattan draft riots and the heroism of the Fifty-fourth led another, Private Wilbur Fisk, to understand that his fellow white Northerners had to collectively confront their racism. By mindlessly accepting “wholly wrong, unnatural and unjustifiable” discriminatory practices and laws, he and his neighbors had kept “the souls of the Africans” almost as enchained as did white Southerners. Now, Fisk believed, Northerners had to repent and face up to their “fearful responsibility” in reforming their country. Carlos Lyman, another Ohioan, confided to his sister that many in his regiment had come to believe that the protracted conflict was a compulsory atonement for his state’s biased past, and that the only way to justify the carnage was to demand “the equal freedom of all men in this country regardless of color.”45
These anecdotes perhaps reveal a general change of heart, or at least the beginnings of one. But the immediate, dramatic changes brought about by the success of the Fifty-fourth were readily apparent. Writing to Senator Henry Wilson from Beaufort, Colonel Augustus Hamlin, the medical inspector for the U.S. Army, swore that racist “slander will not affect the reputation of that regiment in the two battles in which they have taken part.” A Maine Republican and the former surgeon general of that state, the colonel had powerful connections in Washington; his uncle was Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, an early advocate of the use of black troops. Even more influential was the advice of Major General Ulysses S. Grant, fresh from his July triumph at Vicksburg, Mississippi. “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support,” Grant assured President Lincoln on August 23. The use of black troops would be the “heavyest blow yet given the Confederacy,” Grant believed. By “arming the negro we have added a powerful ally,” he added. “They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion [that] they strengthen us.” The assault on Wagner, while a military disaster, quickly became a political victory.46
LINCOLN REQUIRED NO FURTHER PERSUASION. BY EARLY AUGUST, Lincoln announced plans to enlist “at least a hundred thousand” black soldiers. As Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, put it to Secretary Edwin Stanton that same month, “The tenacious and brilliant valor displayed by troops of this race has sufficiently demonstrated to the President and to the country the character of the service for which they are capable.” Now that official Washington was on board, Garrison enthused, both Northern states and the federal government—in the case of Southern units—were in the process of organizing twenty-five new black regiments. A second, Garrison bragged, was already “in the field,” an allusion to the Massachusetts Fifty-fifth, which by that date had already debarked on Morris Island to assist in the next campaign against Wagner. Although some of these new regiments hailed from free states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Rhode Island, others were being raised in Baltimore, at Fort Monroe in Virginia, in Tennessee, and in North Carolina, with one regiment from the nation’s capital “ready for service” and a second one “nearly half full” at 500 recruits. By year’s end, as recruiter Martin Delany reported to the War Department from Chicago, the number of USCT regiments would reach 60, well on the way to the final tally of 175 units, or roughly one-tenth of all the manpower in the American army. One of those recruits would be Delany. His son Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany had survived the fighting on James and Morris Islands; the elder Delany would be commissioned as a major, the first African American to become a field officer in the U.S. Army.47
Their numbers did not merely bring fresh muscle to a bloodied army and a war-weary Northern public. Black soldiers fought for more than reunion, and certainly for more than sectional restoration; as Frederick Douglass often remarked, they fought “for nationality and for a place with all other classes of our fellow citizens,” as many of the home states of the Fifty-fourth had resolutely refused to recognize them as such. They joined up, as one editor observed, understanding that there must be no further “union with slavery. One or the other must die, Slavery must perish!” Rob Shaw, “sleeping in that Southern swamp, beneath twenty-five negroes—all have said it. The negro himself, when he charged on Fort Wagner, said it.” And now, because of them, the journalist added, the “Government and the Administration have said it.” As black abolitionist and historian William Cooper Nell commented as he introduced John A. Andrew to a conference held in Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church the next summer, when scholars came to write the “history of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” they would have to describe “that memorable and historic scene of daring and gallant service at Fort Wagner.” At a time when U.S. forces were preparing to launch major offensives that were likely to bring about both heavy casualties and a renewed working-class opposition to the draft, tens of thousands of young black recruits would help to turn the tide in the coming years.48
At the conclusion of the conflict, Horace Greeley gazed back at the events of 1863. “It is not too much to say that if this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand colored troops for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field,” he wrote in the Tribune. The war then might have dragged into 1866. “But it did not falter,” and so both the war and the nation changed forever. As a father of two soldiers, Frederick Douglass was more lavish yet in his praise. After Battery Wagner, “we heard no more of sending Negroes to garrison forts and arsenals, to fight miasma, yellow-fever, and smallpox,” he later observed. “After the 54th and 55th Massachusetts colored regiments were placed in the field, and one of them had distinguished itself with so much credit in the hour of trial, the desire to send more such troops to the front became pretty general.”49
Having played a role in the creation of the regiments, Douglass had every reason to be proud. But first he had more pressing concerns. In hopes of putting his parents’ minds at ease, Sergeant Lewis Douglass had been less than honest about escaping Wagner without a scratch. In truth, he had been stricken with gangrene and typhoid fever and was deathly ill. As had too many white households across the country, black families from New Bedford to Philadelphia, and from Manhattan to Detroit had received dreadful news from the Southern front in the wake of James Island and Wagner, and they were about to receive far more.