Terrible Swift Sword (16 page)

All
of this meant that the South Atlantic coast could not be sealed off with even
moderate effectiveness until the Navy had a satisfactory base right in the
middle of the area that was being blockaded—a harbor of refuge big enough to
hold fleet, colliers, supply ships, subsidiary craft and the innumerable
facilities for repair and maintenance, held with so much strength that the
Confederates could not recapture it. The naval board consulted its charts and
its collective experience, and finally, early in August—a fortnight or so
before the Hatteras Inlet expedition sailed—drew up plans which were quickly
embodied in formal orders. A powerful amphibious expedition, comprising the
heaviest warships the Navy could spare and at least 12,000 soldiers, would go
south as soon as it could be organized and equipped, and it would take
possession of Port Royal Sound, in South Carolina—the sound, its interlocked
arms and tentacles, and as much of the adjacent shoreline as might be needed
to make everything secure.

Port Royal Sound lay in the heart of the
fabulous sea island region, and it was potentially one of the best harbors on
the Atlantic coast. Lying sixty miles beyond Charleston and thirty miles short
of Savannah, and offering a shallow-draft inland waterway approach to both
places, it was roomy enough for any imaginable fleet. The main entrance from
the Atlantic was two miles wide, and deep enough for the big steam frigates,
and the extensive shoreline offered convenient places for all of the docks,
wharves, warehouses, barracks, and hospitals that could ever be needed. There
was no city of any commercial importance here; the nearest town was Beaufort,
a pleasant residential community, cooled by ocean breezes, a favorite place of
resort for wealthy planters during the hot summers. The Confederates were known
to have fortified the entrance strongly, and it seemed likely that Port Royal
would be a much tougher proposition than Hatteras Inlet.

To
handle this operation the Navy chose a man who had served on the naval strategy
board—Captain Samuel Du Pont, until recently in command of the Philadelphia
Navy Yard, an officer who had experience with blockade work in the war with
Mexico. He was equipped with high priority orders, the cumbersome title of
"Flag Officer"—the Navy at that time did not have any admirals and
could not give the admiral's title to a man doing admiral's work—and a note
from Gideon Welles to the effect that "no more effective blows can be
inflicted on those who are engaged in this causeless and unnatural rebellion
than by naval expeditions and demonstrations on the coast."
⁸
Du Pont was given the big steam frigate
Wabash
for
flagship and he went to work at once to get his armada together.

To
command the troops the War Department appointed Brigadier General Thomas W.
Sherman, a West Pointer who had fought Indians and Mexicans and who had been
employed this summer on the Washington fortifications; big, blue-eyed, with a
good martial bearing and a great barracks-square voice, gifted apparently with
all the talents a general needs except a knack for understanding and making
himself understood by the American volunteer.
⁹
Early in August he
and Du Pont went to New York, Du Pont to get ships lined up, Sherman to bring
together, organize, and train the 12,000 men who were to be assigned to him.

He did not get far before he was singed
by the fire that was being interchanged between Scott and McClellan. The Port
Royal move had Scott's warmest blessing, but McClellan did not like it, and, in
September, McClellan was warning the War Department of an imminent Rebel
invasion and was demanding that every available soldier be put into the Army of
the Potomac. For a time he got Sherman and Sherman's new regiments. On
September 18 Mr. Lincoln had to intervene, with orders to Cameron and Scott:
"To guard against misunderstanding I think fit to say that the joint
expedition of the Army and Navy agreed upon some time since, and in which Gen.
W. T. Sherman was and is to bear a conspicuous part, is in no wise to be
abandoned, but must be ready to move by the first of, or very early in,
October. Let all preparations go forward accordingly."
¹⁰
The
President's will prevailed, but McClellan remained obdurate. In mid-October he
was asked to send the 79th New York to Sherman, and he made formal protest to
the War Department: "I will not consent to one other man being detached
from this army for that expedition. I need far more than I now have to save
this country and cannot spare any disciplined regiment. Instead of diminishing
this army, true policy would dictate its immediate increase to a large extent.
It is the task of the Army of the Potomac to decide the question at issue. No
outside expedition can effect the result. I hope I will not again be asked to
detach anybody."
¹¹

Despite this protest the work of
preparation went forward; and so, in the end, did the 79th New York, in spite
of McClellan. Sherman got his men assembled at Annapolis, loaded them on a
wonderfully varied lot of transports—vessels ranging from regular ocean liners
down to harbor ferry boats— and late in October the whole expedition lay at
anchor at Hampton Roads, ready to go.

Altogether
there were fifty ships, counting the transports. They were headed by the Navy's
best fighting ships, the powerful steam frigates and the lighter steam sloops
that were to prove so handy in the years just ahead; there were converted
merchant vessels which Du Pont, somewhat skeptically, had hurriedly armed for
duty as men of war (turning a merchantman into a warship, he wrote, was
"like altering a vest into a shirt"); there were even four of the
light new warships that were known as "90-day gunboats" because only
three months had elapsed from the laying of their keels to their actual commissioning;
and all in all here was the largest fleet ever assembled under the American
flag, up to that moment. Ready to go with it were twenty-five schooners loaded
with coal. Sealed orders were distributed among the ship masters, and on

October 29 the entire fleet got its
anchors aboard and put to sea; with considerable confusion a double line was
formed off Cape Henry, and the armada moved down the coast in the general
direction of Cape Hatteras, bucking a rising sea and a stiff easterly wind.

It
seemed for a time that the expedition might be heading straight into disaster.
The easterly wind swung around to the southeast and blew up into a furious gale,
and, on the afternoon of November 1, Du Pont signaled that each ship should
look after itself; if the convoy was scattered captains could open their sealed
orders and find out where they should reassemble. Next morning Du Pont could
see only one vessel besides his own
Wabash.
However,
the gale at last subsided and on November 4 most of the fleet got together off
the bar at the entrance to Port Royal Sound. One transport carrying six hundred
Marines had foundered, with a loss of seven lives: another transport full of
army stores had gone down, and the warship
Isaac
Smith
had had to throw her broadside guns
overboard to stay afloat.
¹²
But the damage had been surprisingly
minor. The fleet was ready for business.

Du Pont lost no time getting down to work.
The fleet crossed the bar, which lay ten miles offshore, and anchored near the
entrance to the sound. The gunboats went in close to brush off a little
squadron of improvised Confederate warships under Flag Officer Josiah Tattnall,
small boats were sent out to buoy the channel, and the warships cleared for
action. Another day was lost when a stiff wind from the south made proper
maneuvering impossible, but, on the morning of November 7, Du Pont hoisted a
signal and the Navy went at it in earnest.

Port Royal was tougher than Hatteras
Inlet. The Confederates had two good forts—Fort Beauregard, on Bay Point at
the northern side of the entrance, and Fort Walker, on Hilton Head Island on
the southern side—and they were solidly built, armed with heavy guns and plenty
of them, a two-mile channel between the forts. Du Pont sailed straight down the
middle, sprinkling each fort with long-range fire; then, just past the
entrance, he led his ships in a swing to the south and came back close inshore,
six hundred yards from Fort Walker, steaming slowly, throwing in heavy-duty
shell as fast as his gun crews could service their pieces. Fort Walker replied
stoutly;
Wabash
and
other ships were hit, rigging was cut and spars came down, men were killed, and
splinters flew from the wooden sides of the ships; but Fort Walker was
plastered with a barrage heavier than the Confederate gunners had dreamed of,
the jarring detonations of the big guns coming, as a Federal officer wrote,
"as fast as a horse's feet beat the ground in a gallop." Explosive
bursts of sand shot up in the air as the big shells exploded in the sand
revetments; guns were dismounted, the flagstaff was knocked down, men were
dismembered, and
Wabash
steamed
in close, hardly moving, a man in the fore chains calmly taking soundings,
broadside guns firing with the swift unhurried precision of professionals at
target practice.
¹³

Tattnall tried to come out, once, to make a
fight of it. He had been a good friend of Du Pont in the old Navy days, and
when he steamed up to open fire he dipped his flag in salute, and exchanged
broadsides with
Wabash.
But
he was tragically overmatched. His ships were river steamers, undermanned and
wholly unprotected.
Wabash
loosed
two-dozen heavy guns at him, the shot flying high but promising to blow him out
of the water once the gunners corrected their range, and he could do nothing
else but turn around and flee deep into the sound, pursued by Yankee gunboats,
powerless to affect the issue of the battle.
¹⁴
The Federal fleet
swung past Fort Walker three times, pounding hard, and a newspaper
correspondent riding with the fleet saw a prodigious spectacle in the flashing
guns, the innumerable white clouds of bursting shell, the incessant racket and
the steady, methodical precision of the advance. Fort Walker's fire slackened,
then stopped, and from the ships men could see soldiers running out of the
works and heading for safety in the rear. Du Pont pulled up and sent a boat's
crew ashore; the officer in charge found the fort empty, everything smashed,
nobody on hand to offer surrender. He hoisted a United States flag on what
remained of the flag staff, reporting proudly that he was "first to take
possession, in the majesty of the United States, of the rebel soil of South
Carolina"; the warships anchored and sounded off with their whistles, the
crews cheered, and on the transports the bands broke out their instruments and
played "The Star-Spangled Banner." A slightly impressionable war
correspondent wrote that at this moment "I felt an enthusiasm, a faith in
the might and the power of the Government to vindicate itself . . . such as I
never before experienced." A thoughtful reporter for the

Cincinnati
Gazette
consulted whatever sources were available and
estimated that the victory had cost the Federal government approximately
$4,903,000, including the value of the two ships lost in the storm.
¹⁵

The Marines landed to take full possession,
followed by Sherman's troops. Fort Beauregard, whose people had been front-row
spectators of the whole affair, was abandoned when Fort Walker fell, and early
next morning a landing party took possession. It found everything in good
order, tents full of soldiers' gear and personal effects, a flock of turkeys
strutting around in a pen; found that the departing Confederates had
booby-trapped a frame building formerly used as headquarters, with a mine
which blew up when a sailor tripped over a wire. The sailor was stunned and the
house was wrecked, but there was no other damage. Sherman's troops went ashore,
the turkeys were all eaten, and the Navy's gunboats went ranging far into the
sound to see how the victory might be exploited.

Residents of the area had panicked, most
of them having fled when the troops fled. One gunboat found three deserted
forts, and in his examination of the surrounding countryside the skipper could
meet no one but Negro slaves, abandoned by their owners, luxuriating in their
unexpected freedom: they were "perfectly demoralized, are doing nothing,
and seem to be perfectly convinced that we have come to free them, and are in
consequence most friendly." Another naval officer got up to Beaufort,
where the slaves were plundering the houses, loading rowboats and scows with
their loot. He found only one white man, who "appeared to be suffering
from some strong excitement or the effects of liquor," assured him that
the United States forces would protect life and property, and sent him off to
spread the word. Hundreds of Negroes came out to the fleet in boats, hailing
the Federals as heaven-sent deliverers, and a refugee camp was set up on the
southeast end of Edisto Island, with a gunboat detailed to stand by and keep a
watchful eye on things.
¹⁶
And Du Pont and Sherman took counsel
regarding the next step on the program.