[51]
‘She waits the triumph or the tomb’: the bombarded graveyard of the central church at Charleston The event awaited by Timrod with faith and resignation is here directly illustrated. A sacred spot in the beautiful city of Charleston has been visited by Federal bombs. The tombs of its honored ancestors lie shattered where the ruins of fair mansions look down upon the scene. The cannonading that wrought this havoc was conducted by the Federal army under General Q. A. Gillmore after the failure of Admiral S. F. Du Pont's attack of April 7, 1863. The bombardment of the city was begun on August 21, 1863, by the famous gun, the ‘Swamp Angel,’ to enforce the evacuation of Fort Sumter. But Sumter, though reduced to a shapeless mass of ruins, did not surrender. On September 7, 1863, however, Gillmore succeeded in capturing Battery Wagner and Battery Gregg, on the northern part of Morris Island. One 30-pounder Parrott gun sent 4,523 shells toward the city, many of them landing within it destructively.
This text is part of:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.