The Second Battle of Fort Wagner was fought on 18 July 1863 on Morris Island, at the entrance to Charleston Harbor. After a day of bombardment, Union troops stormed the Confederate earthwork at dusk, led by the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North. Its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed on the parapet, and the attack was beaten back with more than 1,500 Union casualties. Yet the courage of the 54th was widely praised, and Sergeant William Carney, who carried the flag back despite two severe wounds, performed the earliest action by an African American to be recognized with the Medal of Honor, although he did not receive it until 1900.1
As darkness fell on 18 July 1863, some six hundred soldiers formed up on a narrow strip of sand on Morris Island. Many people in the North doubted that Black men would fight. The men of the 54th Massachusetts were about to answer them, at the front of an assault on one of the strongest forts in the South.2
Part of The greatest battles of the Civil War · Before: The Siege of Vicksburg · Next: The Battle of Chickamauga
Charleston's guardian
In the summer of 1863 Union forces under Brigadier General Quincy A. Gillmore, who had taken over the Department of the South in June, tried to take Charleston, where the war had begun at Fort Sumter. With Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren's fleet, Gillmore planned to seize Morris Island and bring his guns to bear on Sumter from its northern tip, Cumming's Point. In the way stood Fort Wagner, a massive earth and sand fort that spanned the island from the Atlantic to a swamp.3
On 10 July Union troops under Brigadier General George C. Strong crossed from Folly Island and drove the Confederates back to Wagner. The next morning Strong assaulted the fort and was beaten off; the American Battlefield Trust counts 330 Union casualties against 12 Confederate. Gillmore decided that the next attack would be preceded by one of the heaviest bombardments of the war so far.4
The fort was formidable. The American Battlefield Trust describes walls of sand and earth rising some 30 feet above the beach, a water-filled ditch across the land face, buried mines and sharpened stakes, and a bombproof roofed with ten feet of sand that could shelter nearly a thousand of the garrison of about 1,700. The approach was a strip of beach that narrowed to about a hundred yards between the sea and the marsh, and Emilio, who fought there, describes the right-hand companies forced into the surf.5
The 54th Massachusetts
After the Emancipation Proclamation opened the Union army to Black recruits, Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts raised the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments of the war. Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists recruited for it, and men enlisted from across the North and from as far away as Canada and the Caribbean. Two of Douglass's sons served in its ranks, and Lewis Douglass was its sergeant major at Wagner.6
Its colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, the 25-year-old, Harvard-educated son of a Boston abolitionist family. Like all Black regiments it was commanded by white officers, and its men were offered less pay than white soldiers, 10 dollars a month with 3 deducted for clothing against 13 for a white private, a discrimination the regiment protested by refusing its pay until Congress granted equal pay in 1864. The regiment had its first fight on James Island on 16 July, two days before Wagner.7
The assault at dusk
The bombardment. Union land batteries opened fire at 8:15 in the morning of 18 July, and eleven ships of Dahlgren's fleet, among them the ironclad New Ironsides, soon joined them. Most of the garrison of Brigadier General William B. Taliaferro sheltered in the bombproof while the Charleston Battalion manned the walls. The sand absorbed the fire, and despite the fury of the shelling few defenders were killed.8
The 54th leads. General Strong offered the 54th the post of honor at the head of the column, and Shaw accepted. Emilio records about 600 enlisted men and two dozen officers present; the American Battlefield Trust gives 624 men. Shaw formed them in two wings on the beach and told them, in Emilio's account, that the eyes of thousands would look upon the night's work. At about 7:45 p.m. the regiment moved off down the sand.9
Into the fire. Two hundred yards from the fort, Emilio writes, Wagner became a mound of fire. The 51st North Carolina and the Charleston Battalion poured musketry into the column while guns swept the narrow approach. The survivors pressed on through the ditch and up the slope, and both flags were planted on the parapet. Shaw reached the crest, shouted “Forward, Fifty-fourth!” and fell dead. The fight on the rampart was hand to hand, with bayonets, musket butts and hand grenades, until the survivors were driven back.10
The second wave. Strong's other regiments followed. Men of the 6th Connecticut and the 48th New York broke into the southeast bastion, which the 31st North Carolina had failed to occupy, but flanking guns stopped the rest. Strong was mortally wounded. Colonel Haldimand Putnam's brigade came up late and fought its way into the bastion, where a confused mass of men from many regiments held on for nearly two hours in the dark, at one point under fire from the 100th New York behind them. Putnam was killed, General Truman Seymour, who commanded the assault, was wounded, and the third brigade never went in. By about 10:30 p.m. the last Federals had been driven out or captured.11
They charged a fortress at dusk to prove that they would fight, and much of the North took notice.
The flag never touched the ground
When the regiment's color bearer fell, Sergeant William H. Carney took up the flag, led the way to the parapet and planted it there, as his Medal of Honor citation reads. When the troops fell back he carried it off under heavy fire, twice severely wounded. He is reported to have said that the old flag never touched the ground. The medal was presented on 23 May 1900; his action is the earliest by an African American to be recognized with it.12
Aftermath
The cost was terrible. Emilio gives the Union loss as 1,515, including 111 officers; the American Battlefield Trust puts the Confederate loss at 36 killed and 145 wounded and missing, Emilio at 181 killed and wounded. The 54th lost 281 men in the Trust's count, and the National Archives writes that it lost two thirds of its officers and half of its men. Of the ten Union regimental commanders, Emilio notes, Shaw was killed, one was mortally wounded and five were wounded.13
Shaw was buried by the Confederates in a common trench with his men. The American Battlefield Trust writes that the defenders meant it as an insult; Emilio prints a Union surgeon's account of General Johnson Hagood saying as much, and Hagood's later letter disputing it.14
Gillmore had learned that Wagner could not be taken by storm. Nearly two months of siege work followed, and on the night of 6 September 1863 the garrison abandoned Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg. The 54th, Emilio records, served through the siege and went on to fight at Olustee and Honey Hill before returning to Boston in 1865.15
Why Fort Wagner mattered
The assault itself had failed, but the bravery of the 54th was reported across the North. The National Park Service writes that it helped erode Northern opposition to Black soldiers and inspired the enlistment of more than 180,000 Black soldiers; the National Archives counts about 179,000 Black soldiers in the Union army by the end of the war, about a tenth of its strength, with another 19,000 in the navy.16
The regiment is honored by the Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, opposite the Massachusetts State House. Augustus Saint-Gaudens worked on the bronze relief for nearly fourteen years; paid for by private donations, it was unveiled on 31 May 1897 and shows the regiment marching down Beacon Street to war. The 1989 film Glory, which the National Archives and the Trust for Public Land both cite, carried the story to a new generation. Eighty years later the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black pilots of the US Army Air Forces, carried the same fight into the air.17 › Tuskegee Airmen
Visiting today
Nothing of the fort survives. The sea has reclaimed Battery Wagner, the Trust for Public Land wrote in 2006, and an Associated Press report of the purchase of Morris Island by the City of Charleston, with the trust's help, describes the fort as washed away. The island, named in 2005 one of the most endangered battlefields in the country, is now protected from development, and the trust notes that many soldiers of the 54th still lie in unmarked graves beneath its shifting sands. The memorial in Boston is the place to see the regiment today.18 › The Battle of Fort Sumter, 1861
