The Battle for Morris Island: South Carolina’s most important Civil War battlefield is in danger

By Fergus M. Bordewich. Originally appeared as “A Civil Battle for a Civil War Battlefield” in Smithsonian Magazine in July 2005

 

AS THE CRIMSON light of sunset spread over the darkening waves of the Atlantic Ocean on July 18, 1863, six hundred and fifty African-American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers poised on the wet beach of Morris Island “like giant statues of marble,” an eyewitness remembered. Behind them, five more Yankee regiments stood at the ready. For nine hours, shells fired by a fleet of ironclads had pounded the Confederate garrison of Fort Wagner, a half-mile north of the 54th’s position. (The fort was named for Confederate Lt. Colonel Thomas M. Wagner, an officer who was killed the year before when a gun exploded during artillery practice.)

At 7:45 p.m., the regiment’s colonel, 25-year old Robert Gould Shaw of Boston, addressed his expectant men. He reminded them that the eyes of America would be watching them that night. “We shall take the fort, or die there!” he shouted. “Now I want you to prove yourselves men!” At his command, the two long blue ranks began to move forward across the sand.

The fate of the Confederacy hinged on the outcome of the battle to come. While great armies jockeyed for position in Virginia and the West, Federal forces were also attempting to strangle the South’s economy by enforcing a naval blockade from Virginia to Texas. Capturing Charleston— the South’s last major port, and the symbolic birthplace of secession—would drive a fatal spike into the heart of the Deep South. The linchpin of the city’s defenses was Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired against its Federal defenders in April, 1861. Sumter now bristled with Confederate cannon. If Union forces could capture it, they would be able to penetrate the harbor, seize the city, and strike inland.

Today a new battle for Morris Island is underway. This one may be bloodless, but its outcome is also uncertain, and crucial to the future of Charleston harbor. Current plans call for the construction of luxury homes that would destroy the island’s splendid isolation, and wreak havoc on the vestiges of the Civil War battle.

The effort to save Morris island has brought together preservationists, ecologists, surfers, Civil War buffs, and African Americans in a coalition of shared purpose that is all the more remarkable because it follows years of rancorous political strife over the Confederate battleflag, which was removed from the dome of the statehouse only in 2003. “This isn’t a Confederate versus Union issue,” says Jeff Antley, a local commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the gravesites of Confederate soldiers. “There were heroic deeds on both sides. We should protect the island because of the sacrifices of all the men who died there. It doesn’t matter who shot who anymore. We have an enormous opportunity to work together, and it will help us to work together in the future.” Adds Joe McGill, a Charleston-based program officer for the National Trust for Historic Places, and an African-American, “Both we and the Confederate re-enactors disagree on more than we agree on. But one thing we do agree on is the preservation of Morris Island.”

“That island is hallowed ground,” says Blake Hallman, a Charleston-born business professor who has leads the coalition. “Southern soldiers were fighting for their families, their country, and an economic way of life. Black troops wanted to prove themselves just as good as the whites. Young New Englanders who fought and died there made a sacrifice for the nation, for their beliefs, for the U.S. Constitution. This story deserves to be told, and it can only be told if the island is protected from development. Morris Island is an incredible jewel. The threat to it is serious and immediate.”

Under cover of darkness on that summer evening in 1863, the route to Charleston lay along the narrow beach upon which the 54th Massachusetts now marched with quickening tread. “Fort Wagner was the key to Morris Island, and Morris Island was the key to Fort Sumter,” says Stephen R. Wise, director of the Parris Island Marine Corps Museum, and author of Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor 1863. “Once the North captured it, they could place batteries there and destroy Fort Sumter, which controlled access to the harbor.”

The South was already reeling from two major defeats. Just two weeks earlier, Union forces had hurled Robert E. Lee’s army back at Gettysburg, and captured the Mississippi River port of Vicksburg, effectively cutting the Confederacy in two. Confederates saw the assault on Charleston in apocalyptic terms, comparing the Yankee threat to the Persian attack on Athens. “Should Charleston fall, life will no longer be worth living,” one local newspaper wailed. Lee recognized that the fall of Charleston might lead to the Confederacy’s collapse, and ordered its defenders to fight “street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand on.”

 

IF THE DEFENSE of Fort Wagner represented a matter of life and death for the Confederacy it also had a powerful symbolic meaning for black Americans. The 54th was no ordinary regiment. It was the first African-American unit recruited in the North, and the first black outfit selected to lead a major attack. By its side marched the hopes of countless African Americans, free and slave. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States,” the charismatic black orator Frederick Douglass had proclaimed. Two of his sons were among the first volunteers for the 54th.

Many white Northerners were skeptical that “docile” former slaves, or even free blacks, had the courage to face battle. Earlier in the war, President Lincoln also worried that arming blacks would push the slave-owning border states, like Kentucky, into the rebel camp. By 1863, however, faltering white enlistments impelled Lincoln to rethink his policy. Yankee officers had praised the 54th for its discipline, and it was said that there was less drunkenness in the 54th than in any regiment that had left Massachusetts. But no one yet knew how it would fight. “The eyes of the nation were on them,” says Wise.

For years, Morris Island remained something of a footnote to the grand narratives of Civil War history, which tended to focus on massive set-piece battles like Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. That suddenly changed with the release, in 1989, of the film “Glory,” starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Matthew Broderick. “Glory”, which recounted the story of the 54th Massachusetts, had an intense impact on African Americans, many of whom began to look at their ancestors in a new, heroic light. “It showed to me for the first time that we had a say in the outcome of the Civil War,” says Joseph McGill Jr., a program director for the National Trust for Historic Places, in Charleston. “There are very few places where African Americans can go and experience in a positive way what their ancestors did. Morris Island shows how we got out of slavery, and started to move forward. African-American Civil War re-enactors often ask me to bring me back sand from Morris Island when I go out there.”

            “The significance of the 54th's attack on Fort Wagner was enormous,” says James McPherson, who teaches at Princeton University, and is the author of Battle Cry of Freedom, and other works. “Its sacrifice became the war’s dominant positive symbol of black courage. It was the most publicized single example of blacks in combat during the war, and it gave the final impetus to the Lincoln administration's commitment to recruiting large numbers of black soldiers. In 1864, Lincoln publicly said that the Union cause could not prevail without the contribution of the more than 100,000 black soldiers then in uniform.”

 

MORRIS ISLAND TODAY is the last pristine barrier island in the Charleston area, devoid of development but for a 19th century lighthouse that punctuates its southern shore like an exclamation point. The island’s historical importance is indisputable, not only because of the 54th’s assault on Fort Wagner. The extended battle for the island, and for Charleston, also introduced a remarkable number of military innovations that foreshadowed future conflicts into the twentieth century, including trench warfare, long-range artillery, a forerunner of the machine gun, the use of wire entanglements and searchlights, and even aerial reconnaissance. Says Wise, “World War I was foreshadowed here.”  

A Charleston developer named Harry Huffman has proposed building twenty luxury homes on the 125 acres of Morris Island that are privately owned, including the site of Battery Gregg, a Confederate post that was associated with Fort Wagner.  (The rest of the island is owned by the State of South Carolina, which leases it to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.) In recent months, newspaper ads have appeared offering oceanfront properties on the island with 360 degree views at $500,000 an acre. In January, the entire 125-acre parcel was even offered for sale on E-bay. The developer offered to create a small “memorial park” to commemorate the battle of Morris Island. But preservationists were unimpressed. Says Hallman, “One of the houses is supposed to be built right on top of the site of a Union artillery emplacement.”

“Morris Island is the best Civil War site there is in Charleston, if not South Carolina,” says Civil War historian Gordon C. Rhea, author of The Wilderness Campaign, and other works. “The thought of it being turned into a subdivision makes me cry. Once you destroy it, you can’t ever get it back again.”

 

AS THE BLUE-CLAD SOLDIERS of the 54th Massachusetts neared Fort Wagner, the naval guns fell silent. Smoke hung over the fort’s sloping, shell-pocked earthen rampart. Nothing seemed to move. In all, 5,000 men would eventually be committed to the assault. The Federal command was counting on sheer numbers to overwhelm the enemy. Some believed the fort to be defended by as few as three hundred men. However, the Confederates had broken their secret code, and knew almost precisely when the assault was to begin. Reinforcements slipped into the fort under cover of darkness had beefed up the garrison to more than sixteen hundred men, many of them militia from the Charleston area. Most had barely slept for days, and they had spent the past eight hours concealed and suffocating in the fort’s bombproof bunker. “They were exhausted,” says Rhea. “But they had an excellent defensive position. They also had nowhere to go. They were defending hearth and home. And they certainly were not prepared to surrender to black troops.”

Six hundred yards from the fort, Colonel Shaw ordered the 54th to fix bayonets. At two hundred yards, Confederate cannon opened up. At one hundred yards, Shaw gave the order to charge, and the men broke into a run. At eighty yards, Confederate infantrymen suddenly appeared on the fort’s parapet. “The silent and shattered walls of Wagner all at once burst forth into a blinding sheet of vivid light,” a Yankee observer recorded. Grape shot and canister tore through the 54th’s ranks. “Our men fell like grass before a sickle,” a survivor later recalled.

Undaunted, the attacking troops plunged into the fort’s foot-deep moat. “A sheet of flame, followed by a running fire, like electric sparks, swept along the parapet” as the defenders fired down on them, recalled Captain Luis Emilio of the 54th. Like a sea of bayonets, they swarmed up the sloping earthen rampart, clambered over the bodies of the fallen, and leaped down among the cannon. Miraculously, Shaw himself managed to reach the parapet. “Onward, boys!” he shouted. “Forward, Fifty-Fourth!” He raised his sword, then toppled backward, shot dead. The Southerners fought with brutal ferocity. In the darkness made red by gunfire, men hacked at each other with bayonets and swords, and hammered with musket butts, gun rammers, and hand spikes.

Gradually the Confederates gained the upper hand. “Men fell all around me,” Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis would recall. “A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat.” The survivors edged back over the parapet onto the fort’s outer slope, where they hung on tenaciously against all odds. Confederate howitzers posted in the sand dunes now swept the front wall of the fort with a devastating crossfire, while the defenders rolled hand grenades and lighted shells down among them. In the words of one Confederate officer, the Southerners “drove back the enemy with frightful slaughter, whilst our guns discharging grape and canister into their shattered ranks completed their discomfiture.” Captain Emilio, the 54th’s last unwounded officer, ordered the survivors to withdraw. Although wounded in four places, Sergeant William Carney succeeded in bringing away the national flag, a feat for which he would later become the first African American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Meanwhile, two more Yankee regiments—the 6th Connecticut, and the 48th New York, both comprised of white soldiers—surged against the fort’s rampart, only to be beaten back again. A third wave of attacking Federals managed to penetrate the fort on its seaward side, where many of them were trapped and eventually captured. By 1:00 a.m. the battle was over. The 54th was the only Northern regiment to maintain its discipline after the repulse, forming a defensive line across the island, which allowed survivors from the other broken units to regroup without fear of a Confederate counterattack.

The dawn revealed a scene of stupefying carnage. White and black corpses lay entangled together. In some places, they lay three deep. One eyewitness never forgot the “pale beseeching faces” of the living “looking out from among the ghastly corpses with moans and cries for help and water, and dying gasps and death struggles.” Among them was the body of Col. Shaw of the 54th, which the Confederates—intending it as a disgrace—threw into a mass grave with his men. Of 5,000 Federals who took part in the attack, almost 1,500 were casualties, including 246 killed, 890 wounded, and 391 captured. The 54th lost a stunning forty-two percent of its men: 34 killed, 146 wounded, and 92 missing and presumed captured. Every regimental commander participating in the assault had been either killed or wounded. By comparison, the Confederates suffered a loss of just 222 men.

 

THE ASSAULT on Fort Wagner was a tactical disaster. The Charleston Mercury of July 20th hailed “the glorious and bloody defeat of the enemy’s bloody designs.” Indeed, to the paper’s fire breathing secessionist editor, Robert Rhett, the battle demonstrated for all to see how the war had “elevated” the true nature of the people of the Confederate states. “It has helped make them a great, warlike, civilized, and chivalrous people,” he wrote, while it had shown those of the United States “to be civilized savages—a huge aggregation of plunderers, liars, and fanatics.”

Despite their terrible losses, the battle of Fort Wagner was a triumph for the men of the 54th Massachusetts. Even Confederates could not deny their bravery. Lt. Iredell Jones, a member of the fort’s garrison, reported with a note of evident astonishment, “The negroes fought gallantly, and were headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived.”

The courage of the 54th changed the face of the war. “The 54th Massachusetts proved that blacks would fight,” says Wise. “Their sacrifice sparked a huge recruitment drive of black Americans. It also allowed Lincoln to make the case to whites that the people the North was in the war to help would carry their own weight in battle.” Before the war was over, almost 180,000 African Americans would wear Yankee blue, and at least another 20,000 would serve in the Federal Navy. Some 37,000 would die in the Union cause. A nation that had derided blacks as cowards when the “white man’s war” began, would award twenty-one black soldiers and sailors the Congressional Medal of Honor by the time it ended.  

The New York Tribune editorialized: “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 as a pioneer never would have been put into the field, or would not have been put in for another year, which would have been equivalent to protracting the war in 1866. But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.”

The men of the 54th Massachusetts also achieved another kind of moral victory over institutionalized racism. Confederate leaders faced an excruciating political dilemma: what were they to do with the eighty black soldiers they had captured at Fort Wagner? Armed blacks were the South’s worst nightmare, conjuring deep-seated fears of slave rebellion and race war. Moreover, to acknowledge blacks as soldiers was to admit that they were equal to whites, which would undermine the whole rationale for slavery, and much of the rationale for secession. According to Confederate law, captured black soldiers were to be disposed of by state law: the punishment in almost all the Southern states for “instigating slave rebellion” was either death or, for free blacks, enslavement.

Twenty four prisoners from the 54th, including four former slaves, were ordered to stand in Charleston, at the beginning of September. Their fate seemed preordained. A gallows was erected in the jail’s courtyard before the trial even began. However, President Lincoln had warned that for every Union soldier executed—black or white—a rebel would be executed, and for any one enslaved, a Rebel prisoner would be put at hard labor. “Our slaves are to be made our equals in our own country, fighting against us,” fulminated the Charleston Mercury. “If President Davis submits to this, it will argue that he determines we shall not carry on the war, and adopts the Yankee policy of ending it.”

Unexpectedly—probably under pressure from Confederate generals who feared the consequences of the anticipated executions for their own POWs in the North—the court caved in to Lincoln’s threat. It quietly ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the case, thus tacitly admitting that black soldiers were prisoners of war like any others, and had to be treated accordingly. “It struck at the very heart of the slave system,” says Wise. “They could no longer hold to the view that these were inferior people. The court’s decision made people realize that the whole edifice of pro-slavery ideology was going to come tumbling down.” The ruling was so potentially incendiary that the Mercury dared not even report it. Confederate authorities never again dared to put them on trial. However, surrendering black soldiers were sometimes cold-bloodedly executed on the battlefield, notably at the battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee in 1864. In April 1865, just weeks before the surrender of Lee’s army in Virginia, a desperate Jefferson Davis himself authorized the recruitment of black soldiers to the Confederate cause.

 

MEANWHILE, THE BATTLE for Morris Island continued. Union forces settled down to siege warfare. For besieged and besiegers alike, Morris Island was a hell-hole. The interior of the fort, in the words of Confederate Col. Charles C. Jones, “was little else than a charnal house. Its polluted atmosphere almost refused to support life, and its galleries were filled with the groans of the wounded and dying.” Temperatures soared over 100 degrees. Sand insinuated itself into men’s eyes and noses, their clothes, their food, and their equipment. Mosquitos swarmed everywhere. Fevers, scurvy, and dysentery took a growing toll. Day by day, the Yankee trenches zig-zagged closer to Fort Wagner, as the ironclads shelled Confederate defenses with impunity. The siege became a virtual laboratory for new military technology. Federal gunners, for example, experimented with so-called Requa batteries, forerunners of the machine gun, which consisted of 25 rifles arranged horizontally, which could fire up to 175 shots per minute. And at night, engineers aimed huge calcium lights at the fort to prevent the Confederates from rebuilding the day’s damage—the first use of searchlights in military history. Eventually, nearly every one of the fort’s fixed guns was blown from its position. Wagner’s defenders bowed to the inevitable, and on the night of September 5 they hastily fled to Charleston under cover of darkness. One Confederate was heard to say upon his safe arrival there that he wasn’t “afeared of hell no more—it can’t touch Wagner.”

Although the Confederates had lost Morris Island, they had nonetheless gained what Wise calls “a morally uplifting, strategic victory.” For fifty-eight days, a garrison that rarely numbered more than 1,000 men had held off a force of 11,000 armed with some of the heaviest artillery in existence, supported by a naval armada stronger than any previously seen along the coast. And Charleston still held. Fort Wagner’s defenders had bought time enough for Confederates to construct new defenses strong enough to keep the cradle of secession securely in their hands until February of 1865, two months before the end of the war.

“The battles of Morris Island saved Charleston,” says Wise. “If they had lost Charleston on the heels of their defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, it could have brought a rapid end to the war. The defense of Fort Wagner became a symbol of resistance served as an inspiration to the South to continue fighting. It kept the port open, and the Confederacy viable. Had they lost Southern morale would have collapsed, and foreign interest in the Confederacy would have evaporated.”

After Federal forces consolidated their position on Morris Island, Charleston became the target of the heaviest bombardment and the longest siege ever carried out in North America. Indeed, it as not surpassed until the German siege of Leningrad during World War II. In the course of 545 days, Yankee batteries on Morris Island—sometimes directed by spotters in balloons—hurled 22,000 shells at the city, five miles away across the harbor. Their guns simultaneously rained shells on Fort Sumter, reducing it to a useless but unconquered heap of rubble. It was the first bombardment of civilians in American history. Casualties were slight: only sixty-four civilians were killed. But the lower part of the city was virtually abandoned, as residents fled to the suburbs for safety. Near the war’s end, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman reported that the cradle of secession had become “a mere desolated wreck...hardly worth the time it would take to starve it out.”

The 54th Massachusetts remained part of Fort Wagner’s garrison until January 1864. It was then redeployed to a series of posts along the coast, serving with distinction in the battles of Olustee, in Florida, and James Island and Honey Hill, in South Carolina. By the end of the war, three members of the regiment had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant, the first black Americans to be commissioned as officers in the U.S. Army. In an ironic postscript that galled Charlestonians, after the city’s surrender in 1865, the 54th was billeted in the Citadel, the local military academy that had been established to train local whites for defense against a slave uprising. The regiment’s dead were left buried in the sands of Morris Island, close by the bodies of the Confederate soldiers who died there for what they believed. Whether they will remain there in peace depends a great deal on Blake Hallman.

 

BLAKE HALLMAN FIRST LEARNED of the development threat to Morris Island in his capacity as a board member of the non-profit South Carolina Battlefield Trust. “When I found out the island was in danger, it galvanized me,” the 41-year old Hallman says, in his soft Carolina drawl. He only had to look around to see the unbridled development that had devoured the other barrier islands around Charleston to take the threat seriously. “No one was standing up for the island. I said to myself, don’t just get angry—do something. I want to see the island preserved in its natural state for future Americans, so we can tell the story of these brave Americans, both white and black.”

The coalition that Hallman heads has so far managed to thwart the development plans. Existing law limits development to one home per twenty-five acres on barrier islands, which would limit the number permitted on the Morris Island property to just five. However, the developer has sought to have the island annexed by one of the neighboring islands, which have much more lenient zoning requirements. The coalition has successfully lobbied the surrounding town governments to oppose development. Meanwhile, letters from schoolchildren who have seen the film “Glory” have poured into state offices protesting the threat to the island. But the island’s fate is still far from assured.

 One recent afternoon, Hallman took me to Morris Island in a 23-foot fishing boat, the My Girl, that he borrowed for the day from a friend who owns a marina on the Ashley River. Hallman, who is rangy and amiable, and has close-cropped red hair and a slightly graying goatee, teaches Hospitality at Charleston’s Trident Technical College. As a child growing up on nearby James Island, he explored the harbor’s marshy islands and inlets in his own miniature catamaran. “The solitude of Morris Island always attracted me,” says Hallman. “I feel there that I’m a small part of history. It feeds my soul.” 

We sailed along the waterfront past rows of imposing neo-colonial homes, then past the Battery at the tip of the peninsula, still spiky with antique cannon, and eventually out beyond the low gray stone walls of Fort Sumter, now a national park. Finally Morris Island came into focus: a low shelf of sand speckled with scrub, marsh grass, palmettos, and wind-blown pines. 

Hallman ran the My Girl close in to shore. I jumped onto the wet beach, and dug one of the anchors into the sand while he heaved the other off shore. As we walked along the beach, Hallman explained that although Morris Island has shifted due to erosion, its appearance is close to what the opposing armies saw in 1863. Most of the area where fighting took place actually lies slightly offshore, making the site, curiously enough, the only underwater infantry battlefield in North America—if not the world. “This is where we think Fort Wagner used to be,” Hallman said, drawing an imaginary line with his hand from the surf to a low ridge of sand crowned by some spiky palmettos, and clumps of yellow grass. “We think one end of the wall is underneath that sand. There has never been any systematic excavation done here.” No one knows what archaeological riches may lay beneath the surf. Hallman bent down and plucked from the sand a seashell-encrusted lump of iron, a fragment of a cannonball. “Sometimes, the sea uncovers a whole field of debris,” he says. “Sometimes you can see lumps like this everywhere around you.” Recently Hallman discovered the distinctive oval embankments of a Yankee artillery emplacement hidden in the jungle of vines and fallen trees that occupies most of the interior of the island. “People say there’s nothing here. But they’re wrong.”

 

ARCHAEOLOGISTS WORRY that the island may never be excavated. “We believe there are cultural remains on the island, including the remains of both Northern and Southern soldiers,” John Tucker, the National Park Service’s director of the Fort Sumter National Historic Site, had told me. “Archaeology should have been done long ago. It’s a unique site.” Tucker asserted that, in his opinion, the ideal solution would be to place the island in protective ownership, to prevent any future development.

On Morris Island, time seemed to stand still. It was hard to believe that a city of 100,000 lay barely twenty minutes away by boat. Cream-colored terns swooped and dove around us in dizzying aerial maneuvers. Just beyond the beach, the fin of a dolphin or shark sliced the water. Farther out, a freighter breasted the waves where the Yankee monitors, the Doomsday Machines of their day, once hovered in flotillas, hammering Fort Wagner with shot. The zig-zagging trenches, the wire entanglements, the roar of cannon, the flags snapping in the breeze, the shouts and cries were long gone. I felt overwhelmed by the silence. The only sound was the rhythmic beat of the waves, like the inexorable tread of marching feet. “This island is hallowed ground,” says Hallman. —Fergus M. Bordewich