At dusk on 18 July 1863 Union troops stormed Fort Wagner, a sand fort on Morris Island guarding the approach to Charleston, South Carolina. The 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of Black soldiers under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, led the charge. Some of the attackers reached the parapet and fought hand to hand, but they were driven out with about 1,500 casualties, and Shaw was among the dead. The fort held until September, yet the regiment's courage helped persuade the North that Black soldiers would fight.
The road to Charleston
Fort Wagner stood on Morris Island, at the mouth of Charleston harbor, as part of the Confederate defenses of the city where the war had begun. Brigadier General Quincy A. Gillmore, who took over the Union Department of the South in June 1863, meant to take Morris Island and use it to bring his guns to bear on Fort Sumter and Charleston itself. His troops landed on the southern end of the island on 10 July, but a first assault on Fort Wagner the next day was beaten back.1
The historian Brian C. Pohanka, writing for the American Battlefield Trust, describes the fort as a fully enclosed earthwork of sand and logs spanning the neck of the island from the ocean to a swamp, with a bombproof that could shelter nearly 1,000 of its 1,700 defenders and a water-filled ditch along its land face. The National Park Service battle summary puts the Confederate force engaged at 1,800 against 5,000 Union troops.2
The charge at dusk
This time Gillmore prepared the assault with one of the heaviest bombardments of the war so far. According to Pohanka, Union land batteries opened fire at 8:15 in the morning and were soon joined by 11 ships of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren's fleet, but most of the garrison rode out the shelling in the bombproof.3
As the light faded, the 54th Massachusetts formed at the head of the attacking column. Brigadier General George C. Strong had offered Shaw the post of honor, and Shaw accepted it. The regiment advanced along a beach that narrowed to about 100 yards between the ocean and the swamp, and when the bombardment stopped the defenders manned their surviving guns and opened fire at close range. Men of the 54th crossed the ditch and reached the parapet, where Shaw was killed. Among them was the sergeant major, Lewis Douglass, a son of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, according to Pohanka.4
When the regiment's color bearer went down, Sergeant William H. Carney took up the flag. The U.S. Army's account of his action says he planted it at the base of the fort and held it upright despite several serious gunshot wounds, refusing to give it up. More regiments followed the 54th and some reached the fort's southeast bastion, but after brutal hand-to-hand fighting they were driven out.5
Defeat and its meaning
The National Park Service and the American Battlefield Trust both put Union casualties at 1,515 and Confederate casualties at 174. Pohanka's own figure for the garrison is 36 killed and 145 wounded and missing, and he gives the 54th Massachusetts the heaviest loss of any regiment: 281 men. Gillmore turned to siege operations, and after nearly two months the Confederates abandoned Fort Wagner and nearby Battery Gregg on the night of 6 September 1863.6
The assault had failed, but its reputation outlived the fort. The National Park Service summary calls it one of the occasions that proved to skeptics that Black troops would fight bravely if given the chance. The Boston African American National Historic Site says the 54th helped erode Northern opposition to Black soldiers and inspired the enlistment of more than 180,000 of them in the Union forces. Carney received the Medal of Honor on 23 May 1900, and the Park Service counts him as the first African American recipient. The full story of the regiment and the battle is in our article on the Second Battle of Fort Wagner.7
