by Bruce Catton
The Confederates were so woefully overmatched that it was really no contest, although bad weather and Federal inexperience with the intricacies of a combined operation stretched the job out through twenty-four hours. Fort Clark was a mere outwork containing five guns, wholly unfit to stand up to the fire of a strong fleet. Hatteras was bigger, well-designed, containing perhaps a score of guns, but the guns were too light, the supply of powder was defective, and Stringham kept his ships cruising in a long oval which made it impossible for the Rebel gunners to register on their targets. Toward evening an easterly gale came up and the warships drew offshore for the night. Federal troops were sent ashore, with difficulty, the two hulks drifting in through the breakers in imminent danger of shipwreck; after some three hundred soldiers were landed the hulks pulled out into deep water and the three hundred were left rationless and unprotected on the beach, and out in the fleet men feared that during the night this landing party would be gobbled up. Nothing happened, however, better weather came with the dawn, and the warships returned to reopen their bombardment.
It did not go with complete efficiency. One of the ships vigorously bombarded a herd of beef cattle under the impression that it was firing on Confederate cavalry. The soldiers moved into Fort Clark, which had been abandoned during the night, just in time to come under fire from their own fleet; a soldier in the 9th New York was wounded in the hand by a Federal shell fragment, and so became the only Federal casualty of the entire operation. But these were mere incidents. Confederate guns were quite unable to reach the warships, the volume of Navy gunfire was devastating, and by noon the Confederate commanders did the only sensible thing and surrendered. (There was a little mix-up, here; the Confederates refused to surrender to the Army, which was at the gates, arguing that they could have held out against mere soldiers all year and that it was the big guns of the Navy which had beaten them. It was agreed at last that they would surrender to the “armed forces” of the United States, without specifying which arm of the service had done the job.) The Federals found that they had won two forts, 670 prisoners, a thousand stand of small arms and upwards of two dozen guns. The victory had been complete, inexpensive and speedy.2
Hatteras Inlet did not contain enough depth of water to admit the big warships, and thus it appears that the expedition had originally planned simply to block the passage by sinking stone-laden schooners so that Confederate blockade-runners and privateers could no longer use it. But both Butler and Stringham could see that this was an important entrance to a stretch of water which offered striking opportunities to the Federals. They detailed two regiments of infantry to garrison the captured forts, together with some of the smaller warships to look after them, and sailed back to Hampton Roads at once to arrange for supplies and reinforcements and to induce the authorities to revise their plans.3 Mindful, no doubt, of the merit automatically gained by the bearer of good news, Butler hurried on to Washington, called on Montgomery Blair, and with Blair and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox paid a midnight visit at the White House. Lincoln got out of bed and (according to Butler) received the callers in his nightshirt, and found the news so good that he and Fox, who was a good head shorter, danced gaily around the room together, the presidential nightshirt all a-flutter.4 … However all of this happened, Washington agreed to exploit the victory. Reinforcements were ordered to Fort Hatteras, and the War and Navy Departments began planning for operations inside the Carolina sounds.
The victory was worth a White House jig. The Navy had found a soft spot, and there was no way for the Confederates to repair the damage or to avert more trouble. A Southern newspaperman at Raleigh, North Carolina, asked dolefully: “What does the entrance of the Yankees into our waters amount to? It amounts to this: The whole of the eastern part of the State is now exposed to the ravages of the merciless vandals. New Berne, Washington, Plymouth, Edenton, Hertford, Elizabeth City, are all now exposed, besides the whole of the adjacent country.… Our state is now plunged into a great deal of trouble.”5 As soon as they got around to following up their victory the Federals would in effect control a good third of North Carolina and a sizable portion of the Confederate seacoast; they would eventually command the back door to Norfolk, the Dismal Swamp Canal which came up from Elizabeth City, they would stop water communication between Virginia and the South, and if they bestirred themselves they might even cut the main railroad line that went south from Richmond. If Jefferson Davis felt that he could not strip the southern coast of troops in order to reinforce Johnston and Beauregard, what happened at Hatteras Inlet could only confirm him in his belief.6
But Hatteras Inlet was just the beginning. It was followed by a much heavier blow which put the Confederacy at a permanent disadvantage—a stroke which might even have inflicted a mortal wound except for the ironic fact that the men who were almost tearing the government apart with their demands for speedy action were quite unable to see that such action did not necessarily have to take place under their eyes, in northern Virginia.
The naval strategy board which had seen the possibilities at Hatteras Inlet had also given thought to the matter of tightening the blockade all along the line. The problem here was not that there were so many seaports to be closed: actually, as Minister Adams pointed out to the British Foreign Secretary, who had asked whether the United States really meant to blockade everything from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande, there were hardly more than ten harbors in all those 3500 miles that needed to be plugged. The real problem was the lack of bases. Vessels patrolling off Charleston or Savannah, for instance, had to go to Hampton Roads or even back to New York to get their coal; as a result they spent most of their time simply going and coming, and a cruiser no sooner reached its station than its captain had to begin to think about leaving.
In addition, the coast below Cape Hatteras was more intricate than it looked, all honeycombed by bays and sounds behind a series of swampy islets. A blockade runner rarely needed to approach the main entrance of the seaport to which he was bound; if his craft did not draw too much water he could slip in through any one of a dozen little inlets and reach his destination by a side door, letting the big cruisers lie-to in the deepwater channels to their hearts’ content. (One Federal skipper remarked that when blockade-runners were caught, in those early days, “it was due rather to the stupidity of the persons attempting to run the blockade than to the effectiveness of the force employed to prevent it.”)7 The Navy needed a swarm of shallow-draft gunboats that could prowl into every river, creek and tidal marsh between Florida and North Carolina; and these boats, being fragile and often quite unseaworthy, could not stay at sea indefinitely but needed a convenient place to make minor repairs and escape bad weather.
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 stream 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. T. W. 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