150 years ago: “…open fire on Fort Sumter when within easy range…”

On April 4, 1863, Rear-Admiral Samuel DuPont wrote orders for the long anticipated ironclad attack on Charleston harbor.

Flagship James Adger

North Edisto, South Carolina, April 4, 1863

The bar will be buoyed by the Keokuk, Commander Rhind, assisted by C.O. Boutelle, assistant, U.S. Coast Survey, commanding the Bibb; by Acting Ensign Platt, and the pilots of the squadron.

The commanding officers will, previous to crossing, make themselves acquainted with the value of the buoys.

The vessels will, on signal being made, form in the prescribed order ahead, at intervals of one cable’s length.

The squadron will pass the main Ship Channel without returning the fire of the batteries on Morris Island, unless signal should be made to commence action.

The ships will open fire on Fort Sumter when within easy range, and will take up a position to the northward and westward of that fortification, engaging its left or northwest face at a distance from 600 to 800 yards, firing low and aiming at the center embrasure.

The commanding officers will enjoin upon them the necessity of precision rather than rapidity of fire.

Each ship will be prepared to render every assistance possible to vessels that may require it.

The special code of signals prepared for the ironclad vessels will be used in action.

After a reduction of Fort Sumter it is probable that the next point of attack will be the batteries on Morris Island.

The order of battle will be the line ahead in the following succession:

1. Weehawken.
2. Passaic.
3. Montauk.
4. Patapsco.
5. New Ironsides
6. Catskill
7. Nantucket.
8. Nahant.
9. Keokuk.

A squadron of reserve, of which Captain J.F. Green will be the senior officer, will be formed outside the bar and near the entrance buoy, consisting of the following vessels:

Canandaigua. Wissahickson. Housatonic. Houron. Unadilla.

And will be held in readiness to support the ironclads when they attack the batteries on Morris Island.

S.F. DuPont,

Rear-Admiral, Comdg. South Atlantic Blockading Squadron.

Once disseminated, the warships had to wait for weather, wind, and tides for the right time to sortie.  Several interesting aspects within DuPont’s orders – marking the channel, signal coordination, order of movement, intended ranges, and the posting of reserves.  But consider the firing instructions.  Slow, aimed, and deliberate.  For the initial target, Fort Sumter, the fires were to concentrate on a specific point in the middle of the fort’s face.  In other words, the objective was a breach of the wall.  Contrast those instructions to those used a year before at Fort Pulaski.

And the objective of these fires was the “reduction” of Fort Sumter.  Not “silencing” or “neutralizing” but reduction.  The word has a specific meaning and a specific intention.

(DuPont’s orders are from the Naval ORs, Series I, Volume 14, pages 8-9.)

Battlefields in Motion: Fort Moultrie

Charleston, South Carolina will soon return to our Civil War Sesquicentennial stream.  In our queue are the anniversaries of the events such as the Confederate ironclad sortie, the Federal ironclad assault on Fort Sumter, and the siege of Battery Wagner.  That in mind, any new resources for the “battlefield” at Charleston are welcome additions.

The team at Battlefields in Motion have put together a very useful resource offering a detailed study of Fort Moultrie – an important component of the Charleston battlefield.  Pages covering the pre-war period in the fort’s history are posted, along with several good articles on the artillery that armed the fort.  As are a set of videos:

Also useful for those “looking back” are a set of stills based on the CGI from the videos.  These allow a reader to look back in time at a fort which has undergone so many transformations over the years.

A good link to bookmark.  Many thanks to the Battlefield in Motion crew, and keep up the good work!

Related articles

• Shells preserved in place where they smashed into Fort Sumter 150 years ago (chronicle.augusta.com)
• Mountain Howitzer returned to wartime station at Fort Sumter (markerhunter.wordpress.com)

Mapping the Charleston Battlefield

From the University of South Carolina’s website:

Mapping Charleston’s Civil War Naval Battlefield

What remains of a five-year siege for control of Charleston Harbor during the Civil War now lay in watery graves amid the harbor’s channels and under the beaches of bordering sea islands.

Thanks to a team of archaeologists at the University of South Carolina, the Charleston Harbor naval battlefield has been mapped for the first time, providing historical and archaeological detail on the drawn-out struggle that spanned 1861-1865. The survey shows where military actions took place, where underwater obstructions were created to thwart enemy forces and the spots where Union ironclads and Confederate blockade runners sunk.

The National Park Service, which funded the project through an American Battlefield Protection Program grant with matching funds from USC, will use the survey to preserve the battlefield. Information gathered about the wrecks and obstructions also will be valuable to harbor managers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and to USC archaeologists to ensure that underwater relics aren’t damaged. Their work will also be considered in decisions involving beach renourishment and the deepening of the harbor.

“The archives of South Carolina’s maritime history are under water. For years we have had these great resources that we should hold in as much respect as historical documents,” said James Spirek, a USC underwater archaeologist. “They are the physical representations of the state’s maritime legacies.”

Spirek directed the project that began in 2008 and wrapped up this spring. He applied the same approach that was used to understand the historic landscape of Gettysburg to understand the Civil War naval operations at Charleston Harbor.

“The scheme, called KOCOA, is a modern concept based on ages-old military tenets that gets archaeologists and historians to think about how the participants saw the battlefield,” Spirek said. “Today, all we see is the aftermath. But how did the battle come to be? And why are things where they are in Charleston Harbor?”

To answer those questions, Spirek had to define the boundaries of the harbor battlefield from the perspective of Union and Confederate forces. He conducted research on Confederate and Union ships and naval actions using official records of the armed forces, the National Archives, Library of Congress and USC’s South Caroliniana Library and Digital Collections.

His archaeological work centered on locating the various shipwrecks and obstructions. Two key findings were locating the famous First Stone Fleet, a series of New England whaling and merchant vessels filled with stone and intentionally sunk by Union forces to prevent Confederate blockade runners from entering the harbor, and getting exact locations for the blockade runners, most of which sank in Maffitt’s Channel along Sullivan’s Island. (Read More)

For those non-military types, KOCOA is an acronym, more a mnemonic device – standing for Key terrain, Observation and fields of fire, Cover and concealment, Obstacles, Avenues of approach – which describes the evaluation criteria for terrain analysis.  If you are going to talk about a battle, and hence a battlefield, then you must discuss these aspects of the terrain.  As my naval counterparts would agree, these elements of terrain analysis hold true in the littorals as they do on land.  So Charleston is a perfect place to apply KOCOA.

The project has a website offering some fruits of the study.  There’s already a virtual tour using a map of the harbor:

As the news release states, Charleston was the war’s longest continuously fought over objective.  There’s more to the city’s wartime story than just Fort Sumter.