Tired, hungry and proud, the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry stood in the light of the setting sun and awaited the call to battle on the evening of July 18, 1863. The air was filled with the rumble of big guns, and the very ground on Morris Island, South Carolina, trembled beneath their feet. The regiment’s baptism of fire had come only two days before, but the memories of that sharp skirmish had already begun to fade in the shadow of the awesome task that now lay before them.
The path that had brought these determined men to the embattled sands of South Carolina had been a long one, born of idealism and fraught with difficulty. That they had succeeded in the face of bigotry and doubt was due in great measure to the colonel who led them. Slight and fair-haired, Robert Gould Shaw appeared even younger than his 25 years. But despite his initial trepidations, the Harvard-educated son of abolitionist parents had assumed the weighty responsibilities of command, and never wavered in his fervent resolve to show friend and foe alike that black soldiers were the fighting equals of their white counterparts.
Suddenly, a mounted general and his staff rode up before the assembled ranks. The officer was handsome and smartly dressed, and grasped the reins of his prancing gray steed with white-gloved hands. Brigadier General George C. Strong pointed down the stretch of sand to the sinister hump of a Confederate earthwork that loomed amidst the roiling smoke and spitting fire of the guns. Loudly, Strong asked, ‘Is there a man here who thinks himself unable to sleep in that fort tonight?’ ‘No!’ shouted the 54th.
The general called out the bearer of the national colors, and grasped the flag. ‘If this man should fall, who will lift the flag and carry it on?’ After the briefest of pauses, Shaw stepped forward, and taking a cigar from between his teeth responded, ‘I will.’ The colonel’s pledge elicited what Adjutant Garth Wilkinson James later described as ‘the deafening cheers of this mighty host of men, about to plunge themselves into the fiery vortex of hell:’
The moment of trial for the 54th Massachusetts had come about through the appointment of a new Union commander, the then Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore, who had taken charge of the Department of the South on June 11, 1863, replacing the querulous and unpopular Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Stocky and balding, the 38-year- old Gillmore had stood first in the West Point class of 1849, and had gone on to make a name for himself as a talented and intellectually inclined officer of engineers. His successful siege of Confederate Fort Pulaski early in the war had secured the water approaches to Savannah, Ga., and had won Gillmore wide acclaim. The victory had also fueled his considerable ambition.
From the moment of his arrival in the department, Gillmore had set his sights on the capture of Charleston, S.C. To many Northern eyes, Charleston was the very bastion of the Southern cause-the birthplace of the rebellion, from which the first shots had been fired at the Union flag. Indeed, one of the most formidable of Charleston’s defenses was Fort Sumter, the battered island fortress whose capture had precipitated the war itself. Moreover, the commander of Charleston’s 6,000-man defense force was none other than General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the engineer officer turned Confederate leader whose forces had compelled Sumter’s garrison to surrender two years before.
Eleven hours into the unprecedented land and sea bombardment, Gillmore had every reason to expect that a determined assault would carry the battered enemy earthwork. Gillmore’s chief subordinate, Brig. Gen. Truman Seymour, shared his commander’s confidence. Seymour had formed a part of the Regular Army garrison that surrendered Fort Sumter at the start of the war, and eagerly anticipated the day