Battle at Charleston Harbor, The

DESCRIPTION: "On the seventh day of April, in 1863, The South Atlantic Squadron, with colors waving free," attacks Charleston. Admiral Dupont urges them on, and the monitors fight hard, but the defenses are stout and the Keokuk is sunk
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1863 (broadside)
KEYWORDS: battle ship navy Civilwar
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Apr 7, 1863 - Naval battle of Charleston, in which Union monitors attempt to enter the harbor. Heavy fire damages all the ironclads and force them to retreat; the Keokuk is sunk. The song probably under-reports the scale of the Union defeat
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, pp. 299-300, "The Battle at Charleston Harbor" (1 text)
Roud #V31424
BROADSIDES:
Library of Congress, "The Battle at Charleston Harbor," A. Anderson (Philadelphia), 1863
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf "Napoleon's Grave" (tune, according to the Anderson broadside)
NOTES [2513 words]: The American Civil War began in 1861 with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This gave it great symbolic value. With the possible exception of Richmond, there was no place in the Confederacy the Union more wanted to capture (Anderson, p. 156; Stern. pp. 146-147). "If the Union army was obsessed with 'On to Richmond,' the navy was no less preoccupied with 'Back to Charleston'" (Fowler, p 251).
But Charleston had great value to the Confederates, too. The South had only a few high-quality ports for blockade runners and such -- New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Wilmington, and the Richmond/Norfolk/Hampton Roads area. The Confederates didn't want to yield any of them -- especially in 1863, since Mobile and Pensacola didn't have great communications with the interior, and New Orleans had been captured in 1862, and Hampton Roads was closed by blockade and the Union capture of Norfolk.
Recognizing the need to guard Charleston, the Confederates built probably the best set of naval defenses anywhere around their perimeter, plus they were working on ironclads to try to break the blockade (Anderson, p. 157). There were about 75 large-caliber guns to cover the harbor entrance (Stern, p. 143), and the harbor was carefully buoyed and the ranges calibrated so that, if any Union ship tried to enter, every gun would immediately have it ranged (Stern p. 144).
The Union's blockading fleet was substantial but Charleston harbor had three entrances, making it much harder to guard than other ports (Anderson, p. 156). And the Confederate ironclads had already sortied once, in January 1863, capturing one ship, damaging another, and forcing the others to move away (Fowler, pp. 252-253). The Union did not want a repetition of that. An ideal solution for the Union, for both psychological and logistic reasons, would be to capture the port. Many ports could be taken by landing an army nearby and coming at them from the land side, but even that wouldn't work very well in this case; "A maze of islands, marshes, creeks, and small rivers provided many defensive positions against a land attack" (McPherson, p. 135). A small army couldn't take the port, and to bring in a large army meant it would need to be supplied. Which meant the navy needed a port to supply the army.
"The 'clamor for Charleston' pushed the navy into a major effort to capture the city -- but it turned out to be its most disheartening failure of the war" (McPherson, p. 134).
The fortification of Charleston was so heavy that everyone agreed wooden ships could not take it (Stern, p. 143). But the Navy thought it had a solution: Monitors. As a result of the Battle of Hampton Roads (for which see "The Cumberland Crew" [Laws A18]), the navy had become entranced with the new ships, and was building them in large numbers (Anderson, pp. 158-159; Stern, p. 92) -- even though it was already clear that they were barely seaworthy and that they had limited offensive potential (Fowler, p. 257, says that the usually needed at least seven minutes between shots, so it was hard for them to damage any but the most fragile targets).
Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, who commanded the naval blockade of the east coast and was responsible for guarding Charleston, didn't think an attack on Charleston could succeed. But the Navy Department demanded it (McPherson, p. 141).
It should be noted that Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and his #2 Gustavus V. Fox wanted Du Pont to commit what we would now call a war crime: To bypass the fortifications, then threaten to bombard the town if the forts didn't surrender (McPherson, p. 142; according to Fowler, p. 253, Welles gave the order to "enter the harbor of Charleston and demand the surrender of the defenses"). It was clearly impossible, but Du Pont had his orders....
Du Pont did what he could to prepare, sending his monitors on other missions to train the crews and work out the bugs (Stern, p. 143; Anderson, p. 162). It was a good idea, but no amount of preparation would have made them ready for what they were about to face.
The Federal attack force consisted of nine ships -- seven monitors, the more conventional ironclad New Ironsides (Du Pont's flagship), and the experimental Keokuk, "a round-backed armored 'turtle' with alternate strips of iron and wood covered by thin iron plating" (Stern, p. 92). This experimental form of armor would not prove effective. The other ships were stronger, but they had other problems. New Ironsides handled badly in shallow water; the monitors broke down a lot, and with only two guns, and those very large (one eleven inch and one fifteen inch each, their rate of fire was low (Anderson, p. 162). They represented most of the Union's available ironclads at the time; officers in other departments were left short of monitors so that the strongest possible fleet would be available at Charleston (McPherson, p. 142). It was perhaps the biggest mistake the Navy made in the war.
The ships made a first attempt to enter the harbor on April 6, 1863, but thick weather caused them to give up the assault (Anderson, p. 163). On the afternoon of April 7, 1863, after the weather cleared, they moved in to attack. Their initial target was the rebuilt Fort Sumter, since it stood in the center of the main harbor entrance and was the single most important defensive fortification.
The ships entered the harbor in line, with the monitor Weehawken in the lead, followed by Passaic, Montauk, Patapsco, New Ironsides, Catskill, Nantucket, Nahant, and Keokuk (Anderson, p. 163).. Weehawken had had a wooden contraption added to her front, which it was hoped would clear any mines she encountered (Stern, p. 144). But when her captain, John Rodgers, saw a row of casks floating in the water, and heard a mine go off near him, he slowed down (Fowler, p. 255; Stern, p. 144). McPherson, p. 146, says that he also had trouble controlling the minesweeping raft. Weehawken's maneuvering threw the Federal line, already a little ragged, into disorder.
The New Ironsides had never managed to get close to the action; she drew too much water to go as close to shore as the monitors and had had to anchor when she lost the ability to maneuver, and even had minor collisions with two of the monitors (Fowler, p. 255). She was twice lucky: She didn't face as much fire -- and she positioned herself over an electric mine that the Confederates were unable to fire because the wiring was damaged (Stern, p. 184; Anderson, p. 164). But she was so far away that she couldn't fire at Fort Sumter for fear of hitting the American monitors (McPherson, p. 146).
It was a gunner's dream for the defenders. The monitors were hit repeatedly -- several of them more than fifty times. The Keokuk, the most fragile of the ships, suffered the most; heading in for Fort Sumter, she was hit an estimated ninety times in thirty minutes, with nineteen of the shots penetrating her hull or hitting her below the waterline. After half an hour, she had to retreat, and she sank early the next morning. The only good news was that her casualties were relatively light: nine killed and sixteen wounded,the latter including her captain, Commander A. C. Rhind (Anderson, p, 164; Stern, p. 144).
None of the other ships was in danger of sinking, but only New Ironsides, Montauk, and Catskill were still in fairly good fighting condition. Most of the others were barely able to fire their guns due to stuck turrets or damage to the weapons themselves (Anderson, pp. 164-165).
Nor had they done much damage to Charleston's defenses. The nine ships got off only about 150 shots in total (Anderson, p. 165, says 139; McPherson, p. 146, says 151). This compares to more than 2000 fired by the Confederates, who managed more than 500 hits (McPherson, p. 146). About 55 Union shots managed to hit Fort Sumter, which was damaged but still serviceable. The Confederates suffered five wounded in Fort Sumter and one killed at Fort Moultrie (Anderson, p. 165).
Du Pont had planned to try again, but when he heard the damage reports, he gave up, concluding that it simply wasn't possible to take Charleston by sea without help from land (Stern, p. 144). Moderns generally agree that he was correct (though I wonder what might have happened if the Union had sent in small boats the night before to try to clear the obstacles).
The Navy Department refused to concede defeat. They wanted to try again. When Du Pont did nothing, they fired him and (after potential successor Andrew Foote died) replaced him with Admiral John A. Dahlgren (Stern, p. 147; Anderson, pp. 167-168, says that Dahlgren was an ordinance specialist newly appointed admiral, and McPherson, p. 149, says he had almost no sea experience. But he was actually the man who had designed the Dahlgren guns in the monitors; McPherson, p. 173). At least the new orders allowed for combined Army/Navy operations, trying to attack some of the forts around the edges of the harbor (McPherson, p. 150). But that just meant the army as well as the navy got bogged down. Dahlgren and General Quincy Gillmore, who took over the army command from David Hunter, tried a peripheral strategy. They started on Folly Island, in the swamps well south of Charleston, using it as a jumping-off point to Morris Island, which held Battery Wagner, the southernmost of the major defenses of Charleston. (The Federals sometimes called it "Fort Wagner" because they didn't realize it wasn't enclosed; McPherson, p. 173.) On July 10, as Catkill, Montauk, Weehawken, and Nahant bombarded the battery (Anderson, p. 168), George C. Strong led his brigade across the gap to Morris Island. On July 11, he tried to attack Battery Wagner. He lost 339 men; Confederate casualties were 12 (Boatner, p. 391).
The Union then brought in land- as well as sea-based guns to bombard Wagner. then tried again to assault it, this time with two brigades, one led by Strong and one by H. S. Putnam, with Truman Seymour commanding the whole thing. It was another fiasco, with Putnam killed, Strong mortally wounded, and Seymour also wounded. The only bright spot was that a Black unit, the 54th Massachusetts, proved that Black soldiers could truly fight. But they were slaughtered. (For more details, see the notes to "Give Us a Flag.") Federal losses were about 1500 (Stern, p. 149, says the Confederates buried 800 bodies); Confederate, about 175.
The Federals set down to a regular siege of Wagner, as well as tossing a few shells at Charleston itself (Anderson, p. 171). The Federals made a big push on Morris Island starting on September 5, firing more ammunition than every before. McPherson, p. 176, says that the ironclad fleet fired more than 8000 rounds against Morris Island and Fort Sumter in those months, with New Ironsides alone getting off 4439. Battery Wagner was almost totally disabled and clearly almost indefensible. Under the Union forces' noses,the Confederates abandoned Battery Wagner and Morris Island in September (Stern, p. 149; McPerson, p. 176). With Wagner in Union hands, the blockade of Charleston was absolutely tight, because the blockading ships could stay in the channels to and from the harbor (McPherson, p. 177). But Charleston itself remained secure.
As the noose tightened, land and sea guns reduced Fort Sumter to rubble. But when the Union tried a surprise raid after the fall of Battery Wagner, the Confederates (who had captured a Union code book) knew it was coming and easily beat off the ill-coordinated assault (Anderson, pp. 170-171; McPherson, p. 177), taking more than a hundred prisoners (Stern, p. 149). That was mostly the end of offensive operations at Charleston, though both army and navy remained in the vicinity.
The Confederates kept things lively for the blockaders with several attempts to sink blockading ships, including the near-submersible David and the true submersible H. L. Hunley (Anderson pp. 171-172; McPherson, pp. 178-179). The David managed to damage the New Ironsides, and lived to fight another day (Paine, p. 133); the Hunley, after killing several crews, managed to sink the U.S.S. Housatonic although she was herself destroyed in the attempt -- the first time a submarine had sunk an enemy craft, even though more Confederate than Union sailors died in the attempt (Paine, pp. 247-248) The Union sailors also suffered badly from the hot southern weather aboard their cramped, ill-ventilated ships (McPherson, p. 175),
This sort of lack of success had gotten Admiral Du Pont fired, but Admiral Dahlgren had the support of Lincoln, so he kept his job (Anderson, p. 173).
Charleston never would fall to an attack involving the navy (McPherson, p. 135). It remained in Confederate hands until 1865, when William T. Sherman's men marched from Georgia through the Carolinas toward Virginia. Sherman's troops cut off Charleston on the land side, so the Confederate forces in the area, much too small to fight Sherman, had to evacuate (February 18, 1865; Anderson, p. 175) . That was celebrated in another song, "The Fall of Charleston."
It wasn't quite the end of Dahlgren's problems; on March 1, his flagship struck a mine and sank. But the Confederacy was moribund by then.
The broadside of this claims a date of April 1863. This seems unlikely. Yes, the battle took place on April 7. But because it was a naval battle, there were no northern newspapermen present; apparently the first word most northerners heard of it was when it was reported in Confederate newspapers smuggled across the border! And the Confederates would hardly have known the names of all the ships, let alone how many shots hit the Keokuk. I think this must have been based on later reports with more detail. And it would take at least some time to write and typeset the words. So I think we can safely say this was published no earlier than May 1863, and I'd frankly think June or later, after all the reports came in, to be more likely.
The accuracy of the broadside is almost stunning. The date of the attack -- April 7, 1863 -- is correct. The attacking force was indeed the "South Atlantic [Blockading] Squadron (Anderson, p. 175). The New Ironsides was indeed the flagship. The order of the ships is also correct except that the Keokuk has been "promoted" two positions for metrical reasons (and mis-spelled for rhyme purposes, but correctly spelled later on). Admiral Dupont was the commander, though the usual spelling is "Du Pont" with a space. Their objective was indeed Fort Sumter. Fort Moultrie and Cummings Point (actually Battery Gregg on the Point) were key positions firing on the harbor channel. I'm sure there was a Battery B in there somewhere, too.
The one major inaccuracy is that the Confederates do not seem to have managed to fire 3000 shots. But that's not too bad an estimate, given that the actual Confederate total was more than 2000. And the Keokuk did take about ninety hits and sink. If other historical songs were as accurate as this broadside, we wouldn't need history books! - RBW
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.0
File: CAFS1299

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