The Bombardment of Charleston: 1863–1865

By W. Chris Phelps

“This heavily researched and insightful volume shines a bright light into a dark corner of Civil War history: the glaringly unnecessary pulverizing of civilian targets in Charleston, carried out solely to punish the city for instigating secession.”

—Richard N. Côté, author of Mary’s World: Love, War, and Family Ties
 in Nineteenth-century Charleston

“The Bombardment of Charleston: 1863-1865 vividly describes the Union army’s terrible artillery war against Charleston, ‘the nursery of disunion’ and ‘the cradle of the rebellion.’ Phelps expertly fills a gap in the Civil War history of Charleston.”

—Robert N. Rosen, author of Confederate Charleston

The Union army’s bombardment of Charleston lasted 545 days, a record not exceeded until the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) during World War II. First-time author W. Chris Phelps uses letters, diaries, and other primary documents to describe life inside the target city. By referencing military archives, he also supports the widely held contemporary belief that the shelling was prolonged by the North’s desire for terror and revenge against the civilian population, and had no military purpose once the initial strategy had failed.

The Bombardment of Charleston: 1863-1865 also discusses the unprecedented technological advances that allowed Union artillery to fire effectively from as many as five miles outside the city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 31, 2002
• ISBN: 9781455601417

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To my son, Tucker, and his Confederate ancestors

Preface

Excluding the events leading up to and immediately following the secession of South Carolina from the Union on December 20, 1860, Charleston's Civil War experience encompassed the four-year period between the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 and the city's evacuation during the night of February 17, 1865. These four years of war are nearly divided in half by the Morris Island campaign, a two-month continuous fight that took place in the late summer of 1863 pitting the full weight of the Union army and navy against the thinly defended Confederate works guarding the entrance to Charleston harbor. By September of 1863 this fifty-eight-day battle had developed into a costly, drawn-out siege seemingly without end, and the war—along with public attention— moved on to the more dynamic campaigns in Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia.

The Morris Island campaign has been thoroughly dissected by scholars and experts for decades. The advancements in technology and the innovations in tactics employed in the struggle on Morris Island were later refined on the battlefields of Europe in World Wars I and II. The resulting siege of Charleston, which exceeded that of Vicksburg and Petersburg combined, has also been well documented. However, one element of the campaign and siege still remains relatively unexplored—the bombardment of Charleston.

The bombardment began during the Morris Island campaign and continued throughout the siege until Charleston was evacuated in February of 1865, changing forever the lives of those subjected to it. Yet in almost every written work relating to the city during the Civil War, little if any time is spent discussing the particulars of the bombardment. The Union bombardment was implemented as an innovative military means to reach the desired Federal end: the occupation of Charleston. After its failure in that regard became obvious, the bombardment became nothing more than an instrument of terror to carry out the wanton destruction of private property and the persecution of a civilian population. As the shells continued to rain down throughout 1864, and on into 1865, other military reasons were offered as justification, such as the masking of Federal troop withdrawals from in front of Charleston for operations elsewhere, or disrupting the railroad and its movement of Confederate troops to other theatres. But the real reason, revealed all too often in Northern reports and communications, seemed to be nothing higher in purpose than to make Charleston pay for her sins.

On the eve of the American Civil War, the most talked about and studied use of artillery in warfare was the recent Allied siege and bombardment of the Russian-held city of Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Beginning on October 17, 1854, this bombardment continued intermittently for eleven months, ending with the city's capitulation on September 11, 1855. Only one decade later, in 1865, the bombardment of Sevastopol had been dwarfed by the bombardment of Charleston.

Throughout the forty-seven-day siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi in the late spring and early summer of 1863, Federal guns on land and on mortar schooners in the Mississippi River had lobbed shells just a short distance into the heart of town, but for the most part, their fire was directed at the Confederate fortifications. By all accounts the damage to the town was superficial. It was noted, however, that not a single windowpane remained intact, all having been shattered by the concussions. On a smaller scale, during the nine-month siege of Petersburg, Virginia, 1864-65, a solitary Union mortar nicknamed the Dictator threw only 218 shot and shell into the city just two miles distant.

Until just prior to the bombardment of Charleston, never before in history had such powerful weapons existed, let alone been brought to bear on a civilian population in the hopes of deciding a military campaign. Never before had artillery pieces thrown their projectiles such great distances, nearly five miles, and for such an extended period of time, 545 days. Not until the German bombardment of Leningrad in World War II, which lasted more than 800 days from the fall of 1941 until January 1944, would the Union bombardment of Charleston be surpassed.

Walking through the streets of Charleston today it is hard to imagine that, well into the twentieth century, much of the city's now-splendid lower section remained in a neglected condition. This was due, in part at least, to the damage inflicted on the city by nearly two years of continuous bombardment.

There seem to be no photographs of Charleston taken during the war and paltry few prior to the conflict. Of the latter, most are portraits of individuals and not outdoor scenes. There are, however, hundreds of postwar photographs of Charleston taken by Northern photographers who arrived in the city between late March and late April of 1865, well after the city's occupation by Federal troops. Because the war was not yet over when the city fell, Charleston was used as a base for Union forces operating in the area and for those maneuvering in cooperation with General Sherman's drive through North Carolina. To militarily occupy a large city, use it as a base, and keep the peace, the streets must be passable, so cleaning up the debris was the first order of business. There was also a genuine health concern. With shell holes filled with stagnant water, and plant growth hiding mosquitoes, the upcoming disease season might devastate Northern soldiers, who were less acclimated. By the time photographers arrived to film Charleston, many of the city's main streets had already been cleared of obstructions such as rubble, shell craters, and plant growth that had accumulated during the period of bombardment. The scenes of desolate rubble-strewn streets, choked with chest-high weeds, are recorded largely in the memories, diaries, and manuscripts of those who lived in the city during the shellfire and witnessed the destruction.

One part of lower Charleston affected by the Union shells was the intersection of Meeting and Broad streets, truly the municipal and spiritual heart of the city. At this one intersection are located City Hall on the northeast corner, built ca. 1801, and to the west, across Meeting Street, the eighteenthcentury County Courthouse. For much of the nineteenth century the police station sat on the southwest corner, present-day site of the ca. 1890s Federal Courts building. To the east stands St. Michael's Episcopal Church, the oldest surviving church structure in the city, dating to the 1760s and the point first used by Federal gunners to aim their weapons at Charleston.

Rifled technology made the bombardment of Charleston possible, and as daily Federal research and experience improved this technology, the enemy fire was gradually able to reach farther north and west, scouring the upper neighborhoods, which were once thought to be out of range. However, because of the intersection's location on a peninsula, to the south and slightly east of center, a large percentage of shells continued to land around it and in the neighborhood adjacent to the north and east.

Today a portrait gallery is located at Meeting and Broad inside the Council Chambers of City Hall. In the gallery hang two portraits of Confederate general Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard, commander of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida during much of the bombardment, with his headquarters in Charleston. One painting is of the general in his old U.S. Army uniform and the other shows him in Confederate gray. Also on display is the general's sword, given to him by the ladies of New Orleans in the spring of 1861 in honor of his victory at Fort Sumter. In Washington Square Park next door stands a monument to Beauregard in memory of his defense of the city throughout its bombardment. Along the eastern edge of Washington Square runs a row of shrubs with a masonry wall behind it. Towards the center of the wall, and just a few feet out from it, stands the Beauregard Arch, erected in 1904 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy; its weathered inscription reads:

P. G. T. Beauregard

General

Commanding Confederate Forces

Charleston, South Carolina

Held This City And Harbor

Inviolate

Against Combined Attacks

By Land and Water

1863. 1864. 1865.

Not until February of 1865, when Union general William T. Sherman drove through the interior of the state to the capital at Columbia, flanking Charleston and forcing Beauregard to order its military evacuation, would the Union soldiers outside of the city be allowed to travel that last furlong and enter the place. Indeed, Sherman's decision to move on Columbia instead of Charleston was based on the knowledge that the latter had been reduced to rubble by the bombardment. Sherman had confided to Grant that the city was a mere desolated wreck . . . hardly worth the time it would take to starve it out. Once taken, the prize wasn't much to look at—devastated, evacuated, and still burning—when Federal troops landed at the waterfront.

After the war, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, Gen. Montgomery Meigs, indirectly complimented the effectiveness of Beauregard's defense. Meigs wrote, Its [Charleston's] defense ceased only when after a siege almost unexampled since the invention of artillery, for duration and persistency, the approach of a powerful army from the Mississippi Valley rendered any further resistance entirely hopeless. . . . The place was defended to the last extremity and the whole town is a conquest.

This work is not intended simply to tally up the number of shells thrown into the city of Charleston during the bombardment, a labor that would be exhausting and, in the end, inaccurate. Rather, it is an effort to chronicle the bombardment as it persisted throughout the changing seasons of the war, and to shed more light on an all-too-often neglected topic. I have tried to select people, places, and events related to the bombardment, directly or indirectly, so as to provide the reader with a brief sketch of Charleston's experience as a city under fire, and to explain how the shelling fit into the overall picture of the operations in the area.

I have made no attempt to analyze battles or revise history, and little time is spent discussing the events surrounding the corresponding bombardment of Fort Sumter 1863-65. There are many studies on this subject, none more thorough than the work entitled The Defense of Charleston Harbor, compiled by Maj. John Johnson, Confederate engineer at Sumter during the siege. Johnson states that, during the last year and a half of the war, Sumter's garrison endured three major and eight minor bombardments. A major bombardment could last as long as sixty days. Combined with desultory firing, the men experienced a total of 280 days under fire from the Federal batteries only a half-mile away on Morris Island. During this period, 46,053 shells were thrown at Sumter, the total weight equaling 3,500 tons of iron. It is enough to know that while Charleston was being heavily shelled at an extreme range, Fort Sumter was being shelled during the same period with greater energy at a much closer range.

Acknowledgments

As I compiled this history of the bombardment of Charleston, many individuals provided me with encouragement and assistance in one way or another, and to forget to acknowledge even one of them would be criminal. However, being the absent-minded human that I am, I am sure that I have forgotten someone. Please forgive me.

Above all others I have to thank my loving wife, Aimee, who organized my notes and patiently crocheted hour after hour while I tapped away on my keyboard. Also, I thank our son, Tucker, for understanding all of those times when Dad couldn't play because he was working on his book.

Special thanks must also be extended to my business partners Trae Rhodes and Col. Dennis Stiles, who maintained faith in my project. The finest English professor in South Carolina, Dr. Robert Clark, persistently encouraged me to write this book. My friend Eric Wright read chapter after chapter whether he wanted to or not. Sean Ruff's computer genius saved my life when he retrieved everything I had on floppy disk (the whole project) when my ignorance nearly lost it— twice. Another good friend, Terry Manier, took time out of his busy graphic-design schedule to design the cover and arrange all the maps.

I must also extend many thanks to the helpful staffs at the National Archives and Library of Congress in Washington, the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, and the National Battlefield Parks of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in