Never Call Retreat (20 page)

Beauregard took over in Charleston in September 1862, and concluded that trouble was coming. (He was entirely right; Du Pont had already been notified that the Federal government was going to go all-out to capture Charleston, even though it was not then ready to set a date.) Beauregard concluded also that Pemberton had left a good deal of work for him to do. The defensive installations, he said, were badly located, incomplete and poorly armed, and he applied himself to their improvement. He noted as he did so that the South Carolina authorities were most helpful but that the Richmond government, at least after Mr. Seddon became Secretary of War, was somewhat apathetic. But whether he was helped much or little he worked hard. New guns went into forts and batteries, floating mines (torpedoes, as they were called then) were planted in ship channels at the harbor entrance, buoys were anchored so that gunners in Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie would know precise ranges, ingenious floating entanglements to jam propellers and paddle-wheels were put afloat, new works were erected to cover secondary approaches to the city, more troops were brought in. From the far-away Rappahannock General Lee wrote to the President predicting a Yankee attack on Charleston and offering to contribute reinforcements if necessary. By the middle of the winter the Charleston defenses were strong.
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Admiral Du Pont had this forcibly brought to his attention. On January 30 the Federal gunboat
Isaac Smith
went prowling up the Stono River a dozen miles south of the entrance to Charleston harbor and came under heavy fire from concealed batteries; was disabled with a shot through her steam drum, lost nine men killed and sixteen wounded, and hastily surrendered. (The Confederates repaired her and put her on duty as a guard ship off Fort Sumter.) The next day two small lightly armored Confederate rams,
Chicora
and
Palmetto State,
slipped down past the fort on a misty dawn and took the Federal blockaders by surprise, overpowering the wooden gunboats
Mercedita
and
Keystone State
and forcing their captains to strike their flags. With other scattered Federal vessels hit, and momentary confusion prevailing, the ships that had surrendered managed to hoist their flags again and got away, but for a time the two rams controlled the sea approach and their officers insisted that not a Federal warship was in sight. This led Beauregard to issue a formal proclamation that the blockade had been broken and that Charleston was an open port again—technically an important point, since under international usage a broken blockade could not be re-imposed until the blockading government had given due notice to all neutral powers, which would take several weeks. The embarrassed Federal naval officers insisted that the blockade had not really been lifted. They got their cruisers back on station in a matter of hours, and things went on about as before. But they could see that Charleston was being defended with a good deal of energy, and Captain Percival Drayton of U.S.S.
Passaic
wrote gloomily that the city was "almost the strongest place by sea in the world."
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It seemed to Admiral Du Pont that the Federal government had entirely too much confidence in the monitors. It believed that they were invulnerable, it remembered how the navy's wooden warships had overpowered forts at Port Royal Sound and on the lower Mississippi, and it apparently felt that if the ironclads boldly steamed in and pounded Fort Sumter Charleston would quickly fall. It was so confident that the Navy Department notified Du Pont that as soon as this

Charleston affair was over he must send all but two of his monitors down to the Gulf to open the Mississippi. The administration did not want to lay siege to Charleston: it wanted the job done right away, navy-style, before Congress adjourned.
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Washington was overlooking several points. Du Pont, Farragut, and others had done well against strong forts by steaming boldly past them, taking a hammering but gambling that their own volume of fire would keep the Confederate gunners from inflicting crippling damage before the fleet got out of range. This could not be done at Charleston. The harbor was a blind alley, and the attacking fleet would have to anchor within easy range and slug it out until one side or the other was put out of action. Nothing that had happened yet in this war weakened the age-old naval axiom that ships could not fight forts. They could rush them, but unless the forts were unusually weak—like Fort Henry, in Tennessee— they could not overpower them.

In addition, when the monitors went in to attack Fort Sumter they would encounter a weight of fire no ironclads had yet faced. Beauregard had forts and batteries all around the harbor, and although his guns were not as heavy as the immense 11-inch and 15-inch monsters the monitors carried he had many more of them and they could fire much faster. The monitors would have to take half a dozen shots for every one they got off. They would also have to steam into a carefully prepared mine field. Worst of all, if a monitor was lost inside the harbor the Confederates would unquestionably raise it, repair it, and so come into possession of an instrument that could break any blockade the wooden cruisers could maintain; a prospect that gave Admiral Du Pont the cold shivers.

Du Pont suspected that the only proper approach was a joint army-navy operation, with the army coming up to Charleston on dry land while the navy gave its support; and here, if he had known it, Beauregard agreed with him. Long after the war Beauregard wrote that if the Yankees had sent troops inland on James Island, north of the Stono River, they could have struck the weakest part of the Confederate line: the weak works that lay in their path could have been stormed, they then could have built batteries that would command the inner harbor, and they would have been able to force "an immediate surrender."
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But although the Federals had plenty of troops in the area, and would eventually try the siege operation, right now they wanted the job done quickly and cheaply and Du Pont had his orders. And so on the morning of April 7 the sluggish ironclads were prodded into line and they came steaming up the deep-water channel, headed for Fort Sumter.

The monitors were formidable but cantankerous. When the wind was right they could steam at a little more than four miles an hour, and on ordinary sea passages they were towed by sturdier vessels. When they cast off the tows they were almost unmanageable, and they had a way of swinging around and drifting sideways the moment their propellers stopped turning. Each skipper peered out of his pilothouse through tiny peep-holes which allowed him to see very little; the big guns could be fired only once in five minutes; in any seaway water came in under the base of the turrets; and the mechanism by which the guns recoiled, came back into battery and then were trained on their targets was easily deranged. When a shot hit a turret the jar was as likely as not to put the guns out of action for a time; it could also knock bolt-heads loose and send them flying around inside like lethal shell fragments. Still, the turrets had nine inches of armor, and if the ships were hard to control they were also hard to sink, and the morning of April 7 was windless with a calm sea; and at last the monitors came in, black smoke trailing from their funnels, Sumter and Moultrie and all the batteries waiting for them. As the first ships came into view Sumter hoisted all of its flags and saluted the Confederate colors with thirteen guns, a band got on the parapet and played
Dixie,
and all along the Charleston waterfront eager crowds watched to see what would happen. The world's first salt-water action by an ironclad fleet was about to begin.
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It began in a good deal of confusion. Monitor
Weehawken
led the line, pushing an ungainly raft that was supposed to clear torpedoes out of the way but that actually made it nearly impossible for the ship to move at all;
Weehawken
slowed almost to a halt, sheering to right and left and throwing the whole line into disorder as the other monitors stopped their engines to avoid collision and swung off every which way. Then the flagship,
New Ironsides,
had to anchor because she drew too much water for the channel, and the line was further disarrayed as the monitors went stumbling past her; the disorder was so great that
Keokuk,
which had been last in line, was presently leading the whole fleet, steaming straight for Fort Sumter.

It was well after noon when the firing began. It started deliberately: one range-testing shot from Sumter, two answering shots a few minutes later from one of the monitors, then a shattering broadside from Sumter's entire battery; and at last most of the ships were within fifteen hundred yards of the fort, and all of the gun crews afloat and ashore went into action. The noise was irregular, with brief moments of dead silence broken first by single shots, then by the reverberating crash of battery fire. In the patchy smoke the gunners could see the heavy round shot from the big guns arching toward their targets; once in a while through all the tumult they could hear the smashing thud of a solid shot hitting Fort Sumter's masonry walls, or the sharp, bell-like clang of a shot striking the iron turret of a monitor. A Confederate gunner was probably right when he estimated that the next hour saw the most powerful bombardment yet fired anywhere.

Sumter was garrisoned by seven companies from the First South Carolina Regular Artillery, disciplined men under a good officer, Colonel Alfred Rhett. Rhett had his guns firing by battery, at first, but to get more accuracy he changed presently to individual fire; the smoke made it hard to see, the low hulls of the monitors were almost invisible, and the whole fleet seemed to be drifting slowly through a bewildering forest of water spouts as near-misses sent up enormous splashes. Rhett had trained some first-rate marksmen, and as his fire became slower it grew more effective. The monitors were hitting, too. Sumter was struck again and again, and when one of the terrible 15-inch shot hit the walls the whole fort seemed to quiver, down to its bedrock foundations. Here and there the walls were broken open, a shell exploded in the barracks and started a fire (perilously near the magazine, but quickly extinguished), showers of bricks spattered around the gun emplacements when shot struck the parapets, two embrasures were destroyed, and at times it looked as if the fort must eventually collapse. Yet casualties were astonishingly light, and before long the defenders realized that although the fort was a most uncomfortable place to be in it was not really being hurt badly, and their confidence rose. Moultrie was in action, and so were all of the shore-side batteries whose guns would bear, and although the firing went on for the better part of two hours it was clear enough after thirty minutes or so that this Federal attack was an outright failure.
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Back on
New Ironsides,
Du Pont could see only that the battle could not be finished today, and in late afternoon he hoisted the recall signal, planning to make repairs overnight and resume the fight next morning. But when the fleet withdrew, and the monitor captains came aboard and told what had happened to them, he realized that he had been defeated, and came to a conclusion that would make him most unpopular in Washington: he would not renew the attack because to do so might turn failure into disaster. Then and there he made up his mind that Charleston could never be taken by the navy alone, and he refused to modify that conclusion even though it finally cost him his command.
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The monitor captains described a strange battle: only one ship had been seriously damaged, the casualty list was almost too small to be worth mentioning, and yet the fleet had failed conclusively and the only thing to do was to accept defeat and to revise all former ideas about monitors. These vessels might indeed be almost unsinkable, but they were complicated pieces of machinery rather than warships and under the hammering of Beauregard's guns they had simply lost their fighting power; pound those invulnerable turrets hard enough, and the guns inside the turrets could not be worked. In the history of navies there never was a fight like this one, either before or afterward.

Du Pont had sent eight ironclads into action,
New Ironsides
having anchored outside effective range. One of the ironclads, experimental
Keokuk,
armored much more lightly than the regular monitors, had been hit ninety times in thirty minutes of action; her hull had been pierced at or near the waterline nineteen times, her twin gunhouses had been riddled, and when she staggered back after the cease-fire she was ready to founder—-did founder, in fact, early next morning, when a moderate sea came up, sinking at the edge of the ship channel, the top of her funnel still above water. The seven monitors were as seaworthy as monitors ever were, but four of them were unable to do any more fighting without undergoing repairs and all of them needed more or less attention.

Nahant,
for instance, had fired only a few shots before the blows she received (she was struck thirty-six times) jammed her turret; unable to revolve the turret she could not train her guns on any target. On
Passaic,
the 11-inch gun was disabled early in the action, and it was almost impossible to revolve the turret.
Patapsco
also got a jammed turret, lost the use of one of her two guns, and in the entire action was able to fire only ten shots.
Nantucket
could not use her 15-inch gun because the hits she received jammed a port stopper, a ponderous iron shutter that closed the gunport when the gun was run in for reloading; she also found that after she had been hit a number of times it was hard to turn the turret.
Weehawken
was able to maintain her fire, but she was struck fifty-three times, and after the action parts of her side armor were so badly splintered that a lucky waterline hit could have sunk her.
Catskill
and
Montauk
got off with minor damage, but
Montauk's
skipper, Captain John Worden of the original
Monitor,
was convinced that this fleet could never take Charleston and warned Du Pont not to continue the attack.
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