A Thousand Words a Battle: Morris Island

Battery Wagner, Morris Island, Charleston, S.C.
July 18, 1863

The Second Battle of Charleston Harbor—also known as the Battle of Morris Island and the Siege of Fort Wagner—took place during the grueling heat and humidity of late summer, 1863. No blue-clad soldier was safe from southern guns, aimed at them twenty-four hours a day, and the beaches surrounding the Confederate emplacements were set with landmines.

The catastrophe of death and dishonor that was Charleston Harbor’s Morris Island demanded as much relief effort as the Union could give. Bad water, illness, trench warfare, dirty wounds, fleas, sand, temperatures above 100 degrees—it all moved Miss Clara Barton, the future founder of the Red Cross, to do her utmost for the soldiers stationed there. Barton worked alone, and while living in a single tent, she distributed food, wrote letters for her soldiers, and helped the army surgeons wherever she was needed, including operating tables. Finally, she too became extremely ill. Because she was a civilian, she was evacuated to Hilton Head, a more habitable island south of Port Royal Sound. While she recovered there, she wrote:

I am singularly free,—there are few to mourn for me, and I take my life in my hand and go where men fall and die, to see if perchance I can render some little comfort as the wife or mother would if she could be there.—I know nothing of hospitals,—nothing of security, nothing of permanency, nothing of remuneration, but give all I have of time, strength, and means—and give it directly to those who need, and reserve nothing to even help sustain an assistant if I had one. My own living on Morris Island all the time I was there and will be again when I return was what the soldiers call “salt junk”—old beef of such hardness and saltiness as you never dreamed of, lean bacon, and hard crackers, both buggy and wormy—there was not a potato or other cookery vegetable on that island for weeks,—I sent General Terry one day, on hearing that he was sick, a tin dish of stewed dried peas and half a loaf of soft bread, which had been sent me from Hilton Head, and he was so grateful that he came as soon as he could walk alone to thank me for them.—Genl Gilmore the day before I came away sent his waiter to me with a cracked tea cup to know if I could let him have a little white sugar—he was dangerously ill and could take no nourishment even if he had it.

Vessels come constantly, but they could only bring guns, ammunition, and timber, while the men work sixteen hours in twenty four in the midst of fire and death to hold the enemy back,—twenty four hours, that he could not raise his head erect once, could only be relieved under the cover of darkness, and all this with a little piece of salt meat and four wormy crackers in his pocket and a canteen of warm water—and when wounded and brot in if I had a mouthful of soft or palatable food to give him, it looked brighter to me than gold, and no mouthful of it passed my lips—or even could until there was enough for all.[1]

Barton soon returned to her work on Morris Island. By late August, conditions had worsened to the extent that official inspectors felt that staying there would result in more casualties than an attack unless an attack began almost immediately. The intense planning and regular bombardments of batteries Greg and Wagner did not go unremarked by the Confederate command. On September 4, General P. T. G. Beauregard started evacuation plans for Morris Island. By September 8, after a heavy bombardment, Battery Gregg, Battery Wagner, and Morris Island were under Union control.

Combat changed after Morris Island. The use of ship-to-shore bombardments, coordinated amphibious actions between army and navy, and the value of trench warfare reinforced the lessons for success begun in other places. Barton had been in the thick of it all for weeks, tending the soldiers, regardless of rank or color. Amid the victorious hurrahs and the flag-waving, she found time to write a short, sad journal entry:

We have captured one fort—Gregg—and one charnel house—Wagner—and we have built one cemetery—Morris Island. The thousand little sand-hills that in the pale moonlight are a thousand headstones, and the restless ocean waves that roll and breakup on the whitened beach sing an eternal requiem to the toll-worn gallant dead who sleep beside it.[2]

— Meg Groeling

Part of a series.

[1] Stephen R. Wise, Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor-1863, (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1994), 186-187.

[2] Ibid., 218.