August 21, 1863. |
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bombardment of Charleston, from which, as we have seen, the non-combatants had been requested by Mayor Macbeth to retire.1 Gillmore knew this, and hence the short time given for a reply.
Hearing nothing from Beauregard, he ordered the “Angel” to take some messages to the deeply-offending city.
Several were sent in the form of shells weighing one hundred and fifty pounds each.
Some of these fell in Charleston, and greatly alarmed the few people, but injured nobody.
It gave Beauregard an opportunity to attempt to “fire the Southern heart,” by a letter which he sent to Gillmore, and published in the newspapers, in which he denounced the course of his adversary as “atrocious and unworthy of any soldier,” 2 and said: “I now solemnly warn you that if you fire again on this city from your Morris Island batteries, without giving a somewhat more reasonable time to remove the non-combatants, I shall feel compelled to employ such stringent means of retaliation as may be available during the continuance of this attack.”
Gillmore laughed at this foolish threat, and the “Angel” continued its ministrations from time to time, until just as its thirty-sixth message was about to leave, the great gun burst and its labor ceased.
Fort Sumter being disabled, Gillmore now turned his chief attention to the reduction of Fort Wagner.
While the walls of the former were crumbling, and its barbette guns were tumbling from their platforms under the fire of the batteries and the squadron, he had completed
his fourth parallel to about three hundred yards from the fort on his front, and only one hundred from a ridge of sand dunes from behind which Confederate sharp-shooters greatly annoyed the workers.
These were charged upon and driven away at the point of the bayonet by General Terry, when a fifth parallel was established close to the ridge.
But the space there was so narrow that the concentring fire of the fort at short range, and enfilading ones from James's Island, not only made a farther advance almost impossible, but the position nearly untenable.
Gillmore now saw that another assault upon the fort was an imperative necessity.
The first work to be done in that direction was to silence its guns and drive its garrison to the bomb-proof.
For that purpose the light mortars were taken to the front, and the rifled cannon of the left batteries were trained on the fort.
Powerful calcium lights were made to blaze upon it at night, exposing every thing on the parapet, blinding the garrison to all that was going on within the Union lines, and enabling the National sharp-shooters to prevent the Confederates repairing at night the damage done to the fort by bombardment during the day, which was kept up moderately without cessation.
Finally, when every thing was in readiness, the New Ironsides, Captain Rowan, moved up to within one thousand yards of the sea face3 of the fort; and at the dawn of the 5th of September, his broadsides of eight guns, carrying
1 See page 202.
2 In his letter Beauregard said, that after an unsuccessful attack of more than forty days on the defenses of Charleston, and despairing of carrying them, Gillmore resorted “to the novel measure of turning his guns against the old men, the women and children, and the hospitals, of a sleeping city,” which he denounced as an act of “inexecrable barbarity.” To this Gillmore replied that it was a well-established principle of civilized warfare, that the commander of a place attacked and not invested, had no right to a notice of an intimation of bombardment, other than which is given by the threatening attitude of his adversary; and that it was the duty of such commander to see to it that the non-combatants were removed. In this instance, Beauregard, by his own admission, had had forty days in which to perform that act of humanity.
3 See page 195.
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