Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

The South Atlantic Coast, 1861–1863 47
command of the Department of the South in June. The recently promoted Maj. Gen.
Quincy A. Gillmore, a man twenty-three years younger than Hunter, would lead the
land assault on Charleston. A West Point classmate of Saxton, Gillmore had distinguished
himself as chief engineer of the Port Royal Expedition in 1861 (when the escaped
slave Brutus taught him the geography of the Sea Islands) and in the siege of Fort
Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, during the winter and spring of 1862. 58
Gillmore gathered his troops. He recalled the 2d South Carolina from St. Simon’s
Island and put Montgomery in charge of a brigade of two regiments: his own and the
54th Massachusetts. The plan of attack was to land troops on Morris Island at the south
side of the entrance to Charleston Harbor. When they had taken Fort Wagner, near the
northern end of the island, Union artillery fire could reach and demolish Fort Sumter,
which stood on an island in the middle of the harbor entrance. Naval vessels could then
run past the remaining Confederate forts to bombard the city itself. 59
Brig. Gen. George C. Strong’s brigade of six white regiments would carry out
the landing. All were veterans of the original Port Royal Expedition in October 1861,
although the question of race undoubtedly was important in their selection, too. “I
was the more disappointed at being left behind,” Colonel Shaw wrote to Strong:
I had been given to understand that we were to have our share of the work in this
department. I feel convinced too that my men are capable of better service than mere
guerrilla warfare. . . . It seems to me quite important that the colored soldiers should
be associated as much as possible with the white troops, in order that they may have
other witnesses besides their own officers to what they are capable of doing.
The black regiments would play subsidiary roles in the attack. 60
While the main landing went forward on Morris Island, a division led by Brig.
Gen. Alfred H. Terry diverted the Confederates’ attention with a demonstration
against James Island, just to the west, and up the Stono River. Montgomery’s and
Shaw’s regiments were attached to Terry’s force. Higginson’s 1st South Carolina
was to ascend the South Edisto River, about halfway between Port Royal Sound
and Charleston Harbor, and cut the line of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad
by destroying its bridge across the river.
Higginson loaded two hundred fifty men and two cannon in three boats and
embarked on the afternoon of 9 July. By dawn the next morning, the expedition had
steamed twenty miles upstream through rice-growing country. Higginson’s cannon
routed a small Confederate garrison at Willstown with three shots; but a row of pilings
in the river blocked his boats long enough to cost them the tide, delaying further
progress till afternoon. Soldiers pulled up the pilings while Captain Rogers and a few
men set fire to storehouses of corn and rice and broke the sluice that provided the rice
fields with water. When the tide began to flow, the boats moved on, but two of them
ran aground. By the time they floated again, the Confederates had placed six guns
remained the basic law of war for American soldiers through the twentieth century. The text is in
OR, ser. 3, 3: 148–64 (quotations, pp. 148, 151, 154).
58 OR, ser. 1, 14: 464; Miller, Lincoln’s Abolitionist General, pp. 129–36, 141–46. Gillmore’s
reports of the siege of Fort Pulaski are in OR, ser. 1, 6: 144–65.
59 OR, ser. 1, 14: 462–63; vol. 28, pt. 1, pp. 6–7, and pt. 2, pp. 15–16.
60 Emilio, Brave Black Regiment, p. 49.