Robert Smalls The Dreamer

We loaded barrels of salt pork, flour, and beans aboard the Planter at the steamboat landing on Edisto Island and headed down the creek with the tide, our ship ably piloted by none other than the famous Robert Smalls, who had commandeered this very vessel from under the noses of the Confederates in Charleston harbor. What better example of the courage and ingenuity of the colored race? My experience of the past few weeks had offered little to contradict my belief in these freed coloreds' abilities and potential. They were as fine a lot of soldiers as I had ever seen.

We steamed down the North Edisto River, through a landscape quite foreign. The river was wide, with expanses of green marsh grass spreading along the banks for miles. Beyond were deeply forested islands, only occasionally punctuated by a glimpse of a plantation house or outbuilding.

Moving across the water in the light breeze gave some relief from the oppressive, July heat. Boston can be stifling this time of the year, but there was something inescapable and crushing about this heat. The heavy humidity, the high angle of the sun, the incessant assault of blood-sucking insects, and the heavy wool of our uniforms were overwhelming.

We had a short run north up the coast to Stono Inlet and Folly Island, where the 54th was encamped, and where our supplies were quickly disembarked and delivered. Our camp was exotic there. White canvas tents ranged in perfectly straight files among the palm trees. The dunes were covered in waving sea oats. And there the black-faced troops drilled under the review of Colonel Shaw, their weeks of training in Massachusetts showing in the sharp precision of their movements.

Anticipation of action filled the air. An assault on Fort Wagner just to our north had failed a few days earlier. We had heard the roar of the battle, a few miles distant, with a mixture of delight and dread. We officers, all battle-hardened now after more than two years of war, knew well what we were missing. The sea breeze blew gently over us among the sand dunes. The troops wore the confused and pensive expressions of green troops on the cusp of battle. Though these were the best men selected from an overabundance of black volunteers, now that we were in the field the reality of what they had gotten themselves into was becoming clearer.

Some three days after I delivered supplies from Edisto Island, we were ordered to move north for another assault on Fort Wagner. After marching up the sandy, narrow island, we were ferried across the swift current of the inlet in small boats and took up our positions in trenches besieging the fort.

Fort Wagner was not an impressive sight. There was a palisade of sharpened palmetto logs ringing it, almost like a frontier fort in the wilderness. Behind that the sand had been piled into mounds some fifteen or twenty feet high, in the angular arrangement of a masonry fort. But the effects of wind and bombardment had rounded these walls into something resembling tall sand dunes. We could see the Confederates' flag and guns, and here and there the tops of their tents peeked over the dunes, but there was little else to take notice of from our position.

Between us and the fort, the island narrowed to a spit some sixty yards wide, squeezed in by ocean on the right and salt marsh on the left.

The bombardment started around noon. Six monitors closed within a quarter mile of the beach, and for the next seven or eight hours they unleashed a continual bombardment on the fort. Our guns on the left flank of our entrenchments joined relentlessly in the attack. There was no sign of the rebels. The shells exploded in their fort, spewing clouds of sand into the air. Over the course of the afternoon, the walls of the fort crumbled and spilled down their own slopes, like a sandcastle drying and crumbling in the sun. But what remained was still a high dune overlooking the palmetto palisade and the moat we would later find behind it.

After we spent an unbearably hot afternoon in the trenches watching this bombardment, the sun began to settle to our west over the marshes. I remember the beauty of that setting sun, crowning the anvil-shaped head of a thunderstorm in the distance. I don't know why that sight has stayed with me so during the years- looking down the trench at the faces of all those brave, black men, clutching their rifles, thinking the thoughts of men facing the terrible unknown, the most awful of fears, and above them, the sun sending forth a magnificent crown of rays among the towering storm clouds.

Colonel Shaw ordered us out of the trenches while it was still daylight. The 54th led the assault across that narrow isthmus, then pivoted to the left to attack the west wall of the fort. As our lines crowded into the isthmus, the brutal rebel firing commenced. I could see rebel troops massing now along the tops of the sand walls, emerging from the shelters where they had weathered the bombardment. Men began falling around me, their moment of heroism having lasted, in total, no more than a few minutes. The remaining brave troops pressed forward, notably more determined than any I had fought with before.

The rebel fire became intense as we pivoted to the west to begin our assault. We quickly were pinned down behind the palmetto log palisade. The hail of bullets and artillery was as terrible as any I ever encountered. It is difficult to remember this part of the battle. I think my mind, in an effort to heal itself, has erased much of this horror.

One isn't inclined to ruminate on warfare when one is in the midst of it, but in the years and decades that follow, one is haunted. There are two elements here: the memories of the men you knew in all their humanity, their strength, their fears, their weaknesses, their humors, their laughter. And then there is the memory of the slaughter by the buzzing bullets and exploding shells, the impaling on the sharpened spikes in the foul moat, the impaling (like Colonel Shaw) on the walls of the fort itself by rebel bayonets in the dark, that horrible, pitch-darkness of the night that fell, illuminated in flashing light that spewed from the rifle bores.

We fought to the top of that tall sand dune, the former sculpted wall of the fort. Then we tumbled in retreat back down it, across the moat, scrambling through the sand dunes, attempting to drag our wounded, being mown down by incessant fire. The screaming of the wounded and dying was horrible.

The heartbreak of this particular battle was the role I had played in recruiting these colored men to this fate. It had not been a hard sell. They wanted so desperately to fight for the freedom of their fellows in the South. They wanted so desperately to be fully considered as men.

One memory that plagues me was watching a group of half a dozen of our troops being taken prisoner along the top of the sand wall. I saw them with their hands held high as we scrambled back down the wall. I saw the rebels grab them roughly and throw them down into the darkness on the other side. I knew what awaited them. I had come to know these men. I had heard the stories of what so many of them had gone through to become free men in the North. And now I had delivered them again into the hell they had fled.

We retreated pell-mell across the isthmus and took to our trenches again. The firing stopped. The whole vicious fight had taken place in no more than a couple of hours, most of it in darkness, lit by cannon fire, rifle flash, and screaming rockets. Fort Wagner remained in rebel hands, still blocking our approaches to Charleston.

The next day, the rebels buried piles of corpses in front of the fort. It is not too much to say they buried a thousand bodies in one long, shallow, sand pit.

Over the next two months, our constant bombardment unearthed these rotting hordes of the dead. We watched them tumbling through the air, whole or in pieces, along with the sand spewing from each explosion.

By September, the stench had become so unbearable the rebels were forced to abandon their position. They evacuated Fort Wagner by boat in the dark of night. We moved in, buried the foul remains as best we could, rebuilt the rebel fortifications, and began our bombardment of Charleston.