The Fate of Charleston

WHEN word reached the North that the garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor had surrendered to Confederate military authorities on April 13, 1861, it caused a patriotic outcry that rippled through the Union states. Although news reports gave only hazy details, northerners soon learned that the fort’s defenders, under the command of Major Robert Anderson, had successfully evacuated Sumter, and the people of Charleston whipped themselves into a frenzy of congratulations for their first victory in the internecine war. On April 15, President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion of the seceded southern states. In Washington, a Patent Office worker, Horatio Nelson Taft, wrote in his diary about the excitement and fear that spread rapidly through the city, noting that “there seems to be a great war spirit up throughout the Country. Washington will soon be a great Military Camp.” The “utmost enthusiasm pervaded our city yesterday,” announced an Albany, New York, newspaper, “and the flag of our Union floated upon all the public buildings, armories and hotels, and from the windows of several private dwellings.” 1

A Boston newspaper suggested militant Charlestonians deserved that their necks be cut or stretched by a rope. In Morrisville, Vermont, a woman informed her brother that “the war seems to be inevitable. There is scarcely anything else thought or talked about here, men gather in the streets and a crowd is ever in the bar rooms talking hotly concerning the state of affairs.” The New-York Atlas believed that only action, not talk, would answer the audacity of southerners, particularly those who had fired on Fort Sumter and the flag of the United States. “The nation is at war—at war with the rattlesnake,” an editorial proclaimed. “The head of the reptile must be crushed, or the man will be eventually swathed and strangled in its folds, smothered with its hot breath, poisoned to death with its deadly fangs.”2

But retribution against Charleston and the Confederacy would take longer than northerners or anyone else could have imagined. Lincoln’s call for volunteers and his blockade of southern ports were two early steps toward that end, but the former caused four more states below the Mason-Dixon Line to join the Confederacy and the latter took months before it became effective in interrupting trade along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

After the fall of Sumter, celebrations throughout Charleston, in the streets and saloons, only increased the city’s air of patrician superiority and brought a smug assurance to all the Confederate states that this war would be short-lived. In the city, everything was pandemonium. On April 17, the Irish journalist William Howard Russell, working for The Times (London), arrived as the celebrations continued. “The streets of Charleston present some such aspect as those of Paris in the last revolution,” he wrote in his journal. “Crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets. The battle-blood running through their veins— that hot oxygen which is called ‘the flush of victory’ on the cheek; restaurants full, revelling in bar-rooms, club-rooms crowded, orgies and carousings in tavern or private house, in tap-room, from cabaret— down narrow alleys, in the broad highway. Sumter has set them distraught: never was such a victory; never such brave lads; never such a fight.”3

On June 13, the Reverend Doctor Thomas Smyth, an erudite Calvinist, prolific writer, and avid secessionist, gave a sermon titled “The Battle of Fort Sumter” to those gathered in the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston. It was a Day of National Fasting, Thanksgiving, and Prayer proclaimed by Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Smyth urged his parishioners to realize that “the glorious victory of Fort Sumter” was “a signal proof of the powerful providence of God; and … a pledge and promise of God’s continued providence and protection over us.” To those who heard him, and to others who read his sermon, his words later proved to be less than prophetic.4

For a while, Charleston remained mostly isolated from the shooting war, although the city did experience the loss of fathers and sons on other battlefields, and privations caused by the Union blockade of the harbor, which though begun on May 11, took a long time to become completely effective. Blockade runners—sleek, fast steamships—would slip into the harbor, providing goods of all kinds (at astronomically high prices) to the city’s residents and other Confederates. The blockade did, however, succeed in damaging Charleston’s commerce and trade, while eventually worsening the Confederacy’s entire economy.5

Smyth’s hope that God’s providence would protect Charleston in wartime was dashed not by battle or siege but by a different disaster. On the night of December 11, just eight months after Sumter, a fire broke out sometime before 10 p.m. and spread rapidly through the “Holy City,” a high wind spreading the flames across 540 acres and destroying everything in its path. One of the buildings to fall was Institute Hall, where South Carolina’s secession had been declared on December 20, 1860. The fire destroyed about 600 buildings, including the Circular Congregational Church and the Cathedral of Saint John and Saint Finbar. In a twist of history, Robert E. Lee—then in charge of overseeing Confederate coastal defenses along the South Atlantic seaboard—was staying in a local hotel, the Mills House. His staff whisked him to safety and other hotel guests rushed into the streets, not knowing where to go. The city’s fire department extinguished very little of the blaze because its water source, Charleston Harbor, was at low tide. Hundreds of residents panicked and evacuated their homes, many of which were destroyed. The severe winds of a nor’easter blew burning splinters and sparks high into the air, and the sky became a bright expanse of flaming canopies, rising and then disappearing out of sight. The city authorities ordered 14 houses on Queen Street blown up as a fire break, which did succeed in saving several important buildings. The Charleston Mercury called it “a night of terror and disaster.” By noon the following day the fire still sputtered and hissed, but the danger was over.6

There were no reported deaths, but city locals then, and later historians, reasonably speculated that an inferno of such magnitude surely must have taken lives in what is now called the “Great Fire of 1861.” The Mercury stated that one black woman had been burned to death. An eyewitness, Susan Keith, told her daughter that “such a scene of desolation and destruction I never beheld.” She was certain the fire had been “the work of our enemies,” although no one knew how it had started. After the war, a visiting northern journalist wrote that Charlestonians looked upon the fire “as one of the disasters of the war, although it cannot be shown that it had any connection with the war. When Eternal Justice decrees the punishment of a people, it sends not War alone, but also its sister terrors. Famine, Pestilence, and Fire.”7

In the North, the trauma of Fort Sumter’s surrender continued to torment people, including civilians and military leaders. It was still alive after the war, in a veterans’ history of the 11th Maine Infantry: “To capture Richmond would be grand, but to capture Charleston would be glorious—the birthplace of secession, where the signal gun of the rebellion had been fired. An ardent desire possessed the Northern mind to know that the flag was floating over Fort Sumter once more, and whoever would give them this vengeful victory would win glory and gratitude. And it seemed so easy to the uninitiated; just to run the ironclads in, batter Sumter down, let loose the infantry, and, hurrah!”8 But it was not to be that easy, which Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont— who had in November 1861 captured the strategic island of Port Royal, 75 miles southwest of Charleston— woefully discovered when, against his protests, he was ordered to attack Charleston with nine Union ironclads on April 7, 1863. The assault resulted in disaster. The ironclads could not maneuver well in the harbor, and the Confederate shoreline defenses, which had been upgraded by General P.G.T. Beauregard—the Confederate hero of the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, a victorious commander at the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861, and now the general in charge of Charleston’s defenses— seriously damaged five ironclads caught in a crossfire. Du Pont was forced to withdraw his gunboats before sunset back to Port Royal, and Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, cashiered him for the defeat.9

Frustrated by repeated failures to capture Charleston, the Union army, under the command of Major General David Hunter and later Brigadier General Quincy Adams Gillmore, tried to take the city by using various land approaches, all of which failed. Two of these assaults occurred at Secessionville, located on James Island near Charleston, on June 16, 1862, and against the Confederate Fort Wagner, located on Morris Island overlooking the harbor, on July 18, 1863 (which brought fame to the defeated African-American troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry). Visiting the broken city in November 1863, Jefferson Davis gave a speech to its citizens, trying to bolster their morale. He believed Charleston would not fall into Union hands. Usually a realist, Davis hit a discordant note by saying that each citizen had a duty to ensure that the Federal forces would occupy “one mass of rubbish” if they broke Charleston’s defenses. As reported by the Charleston Courier, Davis elaborated on his apocalyptic vision by expressing assurance that Charlestonians “could part from [their] property, if necessary, in this way without one tear or sigh of regret…. It is only a question whether you will leave it a heap of ruins or a prey for Yankee spoils. (Cries of ‘ruins, ruins.’) Such he believed to be the spirit of the land.” While Charlestonians seemed to prefer the heap of ruins, it’s doubtful that Davis’ speech lightened their frame of mind, given the growing siege mentality. Nevertheless, the citizenry, having long been possessed of zealotry, would not condone surrender. As one Charlestonian put it, “We intend to die hard.”10

Back following Du Pont’s April defeat and dismissal, Gillmore, a West Point engineer who graduated first in his class, was ordered to command the Union’s Department of the South and the X Army Corps. To his superiors, Gillmore exuded confidence but it exceeded his talent as a department and corps commander. Underestimating the Confederate defenses, he made plans to capture Fort Wagner and Morris Island in the harbor and to bombard Fort Sumter into submission, ventures that proved impossible. After two frontal assaults—including the one made by the 54th Massachusetts— failed to subdue Wagner, Gillmore adopted standard siege tactics by trenching ever closer to the fort. He reduced the range of his heavy artillery and bombarded his target. Two days before the assault by the 54th Massachusetts, Gillmore— frustrated by the lack of progress in taking Fort Wagner or forcing the evacuation of Fort Sumter— turned his attention and his heavy navy artillery toward Charleston.

At strategic locations on the harbor’s shore, Gillmore instructed his soldiers to construct battery bastions in preparation for a bombardment of the city. Then, in the early morning darkness of August 17, the Union heavy artillery, concentrating mainly on Fort Sumter, sent shells into the 50-foot-high brick curtain walls and over them into the fort’s courtyard in one of the war’s greatest barrages of shells and fire. The cascade of shells caused immense damage inside and outside the fortification. The Confederates replied, but their guns could not match the power and range of the Union batteries. In the harbor, ironclads—wooden vessels with iron plates and several monitors of the Passaic class all under the command of Captain John A. Dahlgren, pounded the earthworks of Fort Wagner. But Fort Sumter experienced the greatest damage, its walls crumbling at each strike of the Union shells and firepower. The walls were not only wrecked, they were reduced to rubble and in some places entirely breached, which allowed artillery fire directly into the fort’s interior. The devastation was so nearly complete, so utterly catastrophic, that the fort’s commander, Colonel Alfred M. Rhett, a son of the famous South Carolina Fire-Eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, exclaimed to a fellow officer: “O, they have ruined my beautiful fort! They have ruined my beautiful fort!” A bystander, hearing the commander’s distress, remarked that “he had taken such a pride in Sumter, and it had been so destroyed by the terrific bombardment that the poor Colonel was unmanned.”11

One of the Union shoreline bastions—built in the marshes primarily out of a grillage of logs two layers thick, thousands of sandbags, and sheet pilings— housed the “Swamp Angel,” an 8-inch bore, 16,300-pound Parrott rifled siege cannon mounted on an 8,000-pound iron carriage. The Swamp Angel’s effective range was 8,000 yards (4½ miles). Gillmore also set up “calcium lights” (bright, blinding floodlights) pointed toward Charleston. The city could be seen from the Swamp Angel’s bastion and Union artillerists used compass settings to aim the gun at the towering steeple of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.12

When the Swamp Angel was readied for action on August 21, Gillmore sent a message at 9:30 p.m. to Beauregard informing him that unless the Confederate strongholds of Fort Sumter and Morris Island (the location of Fort Wagner) were evacuated immediately, he would open fire on the city. Gillmore gave Beauregard four hours to comply with his demand. As a warning, he added: “All of my heaviest guns have not yet opened.” Gillmore’s letter did not arrive at Confederate headquarters until 10:45 p.m., when Beauregard was out reconnoitering his defenses. The Confederates saw that Gillmore’s letter had arrived unsigned, so they returned it. Gillmore signed the returned letter and sent it again to Beauregard. But it did not fall into the Confederate general’s hands until 9 a.m., August 22. By that time, all hell had broken loose.13

At 1:30 a.m., the Union guns, including the Swamp Angel, had opened fire on Charleston while most of its residents were asleep. Frank Vizetelly, a British journalist and artist, heard a whirring noise pass overhead outside his hotel, followed by an enormous explosion. “Looking out the window,” he wrote later, “I saw smoke and fire issuing from a house in which were stored the drugs of the medical purveyor.” Confused, he confessed that “at first I thought a meteor had fallen, but another awful rush and whirr right over the hotel, and another explosion beyond, settled any doubts I might have had: the city was being shelled.” Civilians ran helter-skelter into the streets. Church bells tolled a warning for the citizenry to wake and be alert. Women and children headed toward the city’s northern squares, where no shells were falling. Near the fires citizens stumbled along, dazed and bewildered, with no destinations in mind. It was chaos. The Swamp Angel alone lobbed 16 shells into the city, 10 of them containing “Greek Fire,” an incendiary dating to Byzantine warfare a millennium ago.14

Other heavy guns along the harbor’s shore opened fire. Although multiple fires from the shelling broke out in Charleston, reports indicated that the firestorm resulted in no casualties and only slight damage to structures, a claim that lacks credibility.15 Nevertheless, the guns kept pounding away with as much firepower as they could. For the second time in the war, and the second time in 1863 (the Siege of Vicksburg being the first), without direct orders from President Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, or General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck, Union forces deliberately took aim at a civilian population. But Gillmore’s superiors seemed not to consider the morality around targeting civilians; the subject appears not to have come up.

Beauregard cared, of course. On the morning of August 22, while the bombardment of Charleston continued, the Confederate general replied to Gillmore’s bellicose letter with a pugnacious one of his own. “Among nations not barbarous,” wrote Beauregard, “the usages of war prescribe that when a city is about to be attacked timely notice shall be given by the attacking commander, in order that non-combatants may have an opportunity for withdrawing beyond its limits.” He pointed out that “generally the time allowed is from one to three days; that is, time for a withdrawal, in good faith, of at least the women and children.” But Gillmore had given him only four hours, and Beauregard accused the Union general of knowing that his first letter could not possibly arrive at Confederate headquarters before the allotted time expired. Beauregard knew he held the moral high ground. He ridiculed Gillmore for wanting to capture Charleston by attacking its noncombatants because the Union forces, infantry and navy, failed to do so militarily by overrunning Fort Wagner or blasting Fort Sumter out of the harbor in a siege that had already lasted more than 40 days. With righteous indignation, he heaped derision on Gillmore: “It would appear, sir, that despairing of reducing these works, you now resort to the novel measure of turning your guns against the old men, the women and children, and the hospitals of a sleeping city, an act of inexcusable barbarity.” Beauregard bravely warned his Union counterpart that “if you fire again on this city from your Morris Island batteries without granting a somewhat more reasonable time to remove noncombatants, I shall feel impelled to employ such stringent means of retaliation as may be available during the continuance of this attack.” At the same time, he acknowledged he had begun “taking measures to remove, with the utmost possible celerity, all non-combatants, who are now fully aware of and alive to what they may expect at your hands.”16 But in fact few civilians evacuated Charleston, preferring instead to move to the northern part of the city, along the Ashley River, out of reach of the Swamp Angel and other Union heavy artillery.

For the moment, the battle for Charleston had devolved into a salvo of punctilious words. Gillmore did not reply to Beauregard’s letter until 9 p.m. that night; in it, he justified his actions by reminding his Confederate counterpart that Charleston, the city, was an armed camp susceptible, as a military target, to attack. He also believed it was “a well-established principle, that the commander of a place attacked, but not invested, having its avenues of escape open and practicable, has no right to expect any notice of an intended bombardment, other than that which is given by the threatening attitude of his adversary.” In other words, it was Beauregard who failed in his duty, not Gillmore. “From various sources, official and otherwise,” Gillmore told Beauregard, “I am led to believe that most of the women and children of Charleston were long since removed from the city, but, upon your assurance that the city is still ‘full of them,’ I shall suspend the bombardment until 11p.m. tomorrow, thus giving you two days from the time you acknowledge to have received my communication of the 21st instant.”17 Gillmore sent the letter to Fort Wagner, for forwarding to Beauregard. It did not arrive at the fort until midnight, August 23. Neither Gillmore nor Beauregard mentioned in their exchanges the discomforting Union calcium lights that turned night into day in Charleston.

In the meantime, Beauregard enlisted the help of foreign diplomats to dissuade Gillmore from resuming his bombardment. The Spanish and British consuls in Charleston sent notes to Gillmore explaining that large numbers of their countrymen inhabited the city. Gillmore, in reply, told them that he would delay any more shelling of Charleston until 11 p.m. on August 23 so that they could evacuate all noncombatants. During the hiatus, the Swamp Angel stood silent as Confederate batteries hammered away at the Union marsh bastion. In most cases, however, the Confederate artillerists cut their shell fuses too long, and the projectiles landed head-first in the mud and harmlessly exploded.18

As Gillmore had promised, the bombardment resumed at 11 p.m. on August 23. The Swamp Angel again threw shells armed with Greek Fire into the city, but the gun was starting to wear out from overuse. After firing a half-dozen shells, the breach band toward the rear of the cannon’s muzzle loosened, and several shells exploded inside the barrel. On the Swamp Angel’s 36th shell fired into Charleston, the artillery piece exploded, tossing iron shrapnel in every direction. The huge siege gun was soon replaced by a smaller Parrott rifled cannon, but eventually two mortars were positioned in the marsh bastion and aimed at the city.19

While reports by the Confederate and Union commanders, as well as in the press, seemed to agree that the shelling did relatively little damage to Charleston and inflicted no casualties, a different reality existed for those who visited the city after the war. A correspondent for the Boston Advertiser and the Chicago Tribune, Sidney Andrews, toured the city in the autumn of 1865 and reported that “ex-Rebel officers will tell you now that our aim was so perfect that we killed their sentinels with our Parrott guns; and go where you will, up and down the streets in almost any portion of the city, and you find the dumb walls eloquent with praises of our [artillery] skill.” At any rate, the Great Fire of 1861 and the very thorough bombardment of the city during the long siege had created an eerie landscape of charred ruins. What’s more, the calcium lights surely must have unnerved soldiers and civilians alike, making it seem at times that there was no night. For a while, in September and October 1863, Gillmore cared more about reducing Forts Wagner and Sumter and shifted his attention back to those targets. As a result, the number of shells that fell into Charleston declined precipitously. Some Confederate soldiers posted on islands around the harbor feared that the city would soon fall, although, as Major William H. Jones of the 48th Carolina Infantry predicted, the Federals “will have heavy work in taking Moultrie and Sumpter,” which proved to be the case.20

Despite devastation and constant fear, Charleston and many of its citizens refused to give up. Confederate civilians and soldiers endured a siege of unspeakable destruction. The damage caused by the Great Fire of 1861 and the Union artillery shells stretched across the peninsula from the Ashley River to the Cooper. In many cases, buildings that stood in ruins from the fire later crashed after being hit during the bombardments. Huge piles of stone and brick lay everywhere. Sidewalks led nowhere. Broken picket and iron fences surrounded pits of debris. Even where there were no obvious signs of damage, hotels stood empty without guests or staff, houses stood abandoned by their occupants, and few people could be seen in the center of the once bustling city. More than one-third of Charleston had been completely destroyed. On February 15, 1865, not two months before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Beauregard—his line of communication having been severed by William T. Sherman’s capture of the state capital, Columbia—ordered the withdrawal of all Confederate military from Charleston. Three days later, Mayor Charles Macbeth sent a delegation of alderman to meet Lieutenant Colonel Augustus G. Bennett, commander of the 21st U.S. Colored Infantry and the person in charge of Union forces stationed on Morris Island, who had demanded the city’s surrender. After an exchange of notes, the surrender was completed. When the men of Bennett’s regiment marched into Charleston, boldly singing “John Brown’s Body,” they were greeted by applause and cheers from the city’s free and formerly enslaved blacks gathered along the broad, torn-up streets.21

Refugees slowly returned to Charleston, but for many, their homes were gone, their livelihoods were destroyed, and their previous labor source—black slaves—were either missing or unwilling to work for their previous masters. Needless to say, many white Charlestonians found it difficult to accommodate themselves to life without slaves. A Charleston woman observed that returning residents seemed to be afflicted with “a confirmed melancholy.” They believed that freed slaves showed a proclivity toward laziness, “working as little as they possibly can.” A month after the Confederates vacated the city, its black residents organized a grand procession that marched down the main streets with bands, columns of black soldiers, and signs and placards that read “We Know No Masters But Ourselves” and “The Heroes of the War: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan … and the Private.”22

In photographs of the city’s ruins taken by George N. Barnard, a member of Mathew Brady’s studio who traveled with Sherman’s army, it’s evident how extensive the damage to Charleston was by the end of the war. Barnard’s photographs convey more than simply ruins of buildings and expanses of stone rubble everywhere. One image, for instance, is of Fort Sumter at low tide, taken from a sandbar. The fort is unrecognizable, a rectangular, low, jagged mound with no discernable features whatsoever. Between the start of the war and the surrender of Charleston, the fort was hammered, pounded, and pulverized into masses of broken gray stone and heaps of jagged red brick so that it looked like an empty barge anchored aimlessly in the harbor. On a bright sunny day, Barnard had captured the oddity of the ruins—an enigma to anyone who gazed at the image without first knowing what it was. The city was a sphinx sculpted by war. In a series of images, Barnard fixated on a scene in which a tall marble column in the foreground, nicked by shells or flying debris, reaches toward the sky, while the spire of the Orphans’ Asylum, visibly undamaged, stands in the background. Another image shows three black children sitting on the base of the column, one of them wearing a Union soldier’s kepi. In a third image, a black child wearing a blue jacket and kepi has joined the other three, and he holds a metal handle for a kettle, shaped in a half-moon. These black children were clearly among the victims of the city’s destruction. Barnard made sure they would be remembered. All of his photographs, which are plentiful, have a melancholy about them of lost grandeur and of a dead civilization; they are formidable reminders that with hubris comes a fall, that war transforms everything, and that nothing is truly immortal.23

Perhaps Sherman should be allowed the last word. After visiting Charleston in early May 1865, he wrote: “Any one who is not satisfied with war, should go and see Charleston, and he will pray louder and deeper than ever that the country may, in the long future, be spared any more war. Charleston and secession being synonymous terms, the city should be left as a sample, so that centuries will pass away before that false doctrine is again preached in our Union.”24

Glenn W. Lafantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History Emeritus at Western Kentucky University and the editor of The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

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LAFANTASIE (ed.): The Union Forever (2012)