166 Norra Carotina Troops, 1861-65.

stillness reigned supreme, broken only by the moans of the
wounded and dying. At last the long night was ended and

the sun of a peaceful Sabbath rose revealing the sickening
scene. “Blood, mud, water, brains and human hair matted
together; men lying in every possible attitude, with every
conceivable expression on their countenances ; their limbs
bent into unnatural shapes by the fall of twenty or more feet,
the fingers rigid and outstretched as if they had clutched at
the earth to save themselves; pale, beseeching faces looking
out from among the ghastly corpses, with moans and cries
for help and water and dying gasps and death struggles. In
the salient and on the ramparts they lay heaped and pent up,
in some places, three deep.

All of Sunday was employed in burying the dead. © Eight
hundred were buried by the Confederates in front of Wagner.
The wounded and dead more remote from Wagner were cared
for by their friends. We took prisoners, including wounded
and not wounded, about six hundred.

For fifty-eight days Wagner and Gregg with a force never
‘exceeding sixteen hundred men, had withstood a thoroughly
equipped army of eleven thousand five hundred men, the Iron-
sides, eight monitors and five gunboats. For every pound of
sand used in the construction or repair of Fort Wagner, 1ts as
sailants had exploded two pounds of iron in the vain attempt
to batter it down. At the end of the bombardment, as at the
commencement, Wagner stood sullen, strong and defiant as
ever.

Federal history calls the capture of Battery Wagner. 4
ereat victory. Victory? Seven hundred and forty men
driven out of sand hills by eleven thousand five hundred.
Two months in advancing half a mile towards Charleston,
they made their boast that ‘Sumpter was demolished over
Wagner. This only teaches the world that sand batteries

are more impregnable than the most solid masonry, especially
when men are behind them who know how to fight in them by
day and repair them by night.

To-day that famed fort is leveled, its bomb-proof, parapets
and traverses are blotted out; not by the iron hail of hostile
batteries, but by the wind of heaven and the tides of ocean.

DEFENCE oF Fort WAGNER. 167

What the wrath of man could not accomplish, the “still small

_ voice” of the Almighty has done.

Ere long the sea with its white capped waves will sweep
athwart the page of our country’s history, which has been
written in blood; even the site of Fort Wagner will be gone.
Not so its name and fame. Sooner will Thermopyle, Mar-
athon, Salamis, Sebastopol and the other places where in the
past men have dared, endured and died, be lost to memory,
than will be forgotten the heroic patience and devoted courage
of the soldiers who manned the defences of Morris Island.

In consequence of the great importance of a proper defence
of Wagner, the command devolved on some officer of high
rank, as for instance during this siege by General W. B. Tal-
iaferro and Colonel Graham, General Johnson Hagood, Gen-
eral A. H. Colquitt, General T. L. Clingman (of our bri-
gade), Colonel Geo. P. Harrison and L. M. Keitt succeeded
each other in command, serving generally about five days
each.

The Confederate forces engaged in repelling this famous
assault on 18 July, 1863, was as follows: The Fifty-first
North Carolina Regiment ; detachment of Captains Buckner’s
and Dixon’s companies of Sixty-third Georgia Artillery ; Cap-
tains Tatum’s and Adams’ companies First South Carolina
Infantry (as artillery) ;. section of howitzers of DeSaussure
Artillery, Captain DePass; section of howitzers Blake’s Ar-
tillery, Lieutenant Waties; Charleston Battalion, Lieutenant-
Colonel P. C. Gaillard, and Thirty-first North Carolina Reg-
iment, General W. B. Taliaferro in command—about fifteen

hundred men all told.
E. K. Bryan,

E. H. Meapows.

New Bery, N. C.,
18 July, 1901.