Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[437] calcium lights turned night into day, and brought the minutest details of the fort into sharp relief. For forty-two consecutive hours, seventeen siege and coehorn mortars unceasingly dropped their shells into the work while thirteen heavy Parrott rifles-100, 200, and 300-pounders-pounded away at short though regular intervals. Peal on peal of artillery rolled over the waters; a semi-circle of the horizon was lit up; an autumnal moon hung in the misty sky; and ear and eye were alike appealed to with emotions of sublimity and grandeur. The shock of the rapid discharges trembled through the city, calling hundreds of citizens to the battery, wharves, steeples, and various look-outs, where, with an interest never felt before, they gazed on a contest that might decide the fate of Charles ton itself.

On the night of the 6th September, Gen. Gillmore ordered an assault on Fort. Wagner at the hour of low tide on the following morning. The assault was to be made in three columns. About midnight a deserter reported to him that the Confederates were evacuating the island. The work of evacuation had commenced at nine o'clock that night, and was already concluded. All the garrison had got off upon the Chicora, an iron-clad gunboat of the Confederates, and fourteen barges. Fort Gregg had been equally abandoned. Morris Island was thus the prize of the enemy, who now possessed themselves of Cumming's Point, from which they could plainly see Charleston at a distance of four miles.

The Northern public at once jumped to the conclusion that Gillmore had the key of Charleston, and had at last opened the gate to the Monitors and iron-clads, which, at leisure, might ascend the harbour. Gillmore himself insisted that he had done his part of the work; that “Fort Sumter was a shapeless and harmless mass of ruins;” and he indicated that it only remained for Admiral Dahlgren, with his fleet, to enter upon the scene, and accomplish the reduction of Charleston. But from this view the Federal admiral dissented; he indicated that Gen. Beauregard had accomplished a new object by his long retention of Morris Island; that, in fact, he had replaced Sumter by an interior position, had obtained time to convert Fort Johnson from a forlorn old fort into a powerful earthwork, and had given another illustration of that new system of defence practised at Comorn and Sebastapol, where, instead of being any one key to a plan of fortification, there was the necessity of a siege for every battery, in which the besiegers were always exposed to the fire of others. He was unwilling, too, to risk the destructive defenses and infernal machines with which the passes were blockaded. The Confederates had given out that by no possibility could one of the gunboats escape these, and Dahlgren's squadron of iron-clads and Monitors did not dare venture far up the harbour past Fort Ripley and within range of the immediate defences of the city.

Gillmore claimed that he had reduced Fort Sumter; but the Confederate