A Glorious Death
The morning after the assault on Fort Wagner, the 54th Massachusetts counted its dead, learned the fate of its colonel, and discovered what its sacrifice had already won.
In a little over an hour the fight was over. Additional regiments failed to turn the tide of the battle and may have, in all the confusion, accidentally fired on some of the men in the 54th Massachusetts. Men from all the regiments stumbled back, many of them wounded, all of them exhausted.
Adding insult to injury, drunken artillerymen allegedly prevented the retreating soldiers from passing to the rear. A reporter observed, “The battle is over; it is midnight; the ocean beach is crowded with the dead, the dying and the wounded…. Faint lights glimmer in the sand-holes and rifle pits where many a poor and bleeding soldier has lain down to his last sleep.”
The scale of the regiment’s loss became increasingly clear as the survivors gathered together under the command of Capt. Luis F. Emilio, one of the few officers who returned from the fight unscathed. Emilio reformed the regiment to guard against a counterattack that never materialized.
Of the 650 men who followed Colonel Robert Gould Shaw against Fort Wagner’s ramparts, 272 became casualties—nearly half the regiment’s strength. Three officers including Shaw and thirty-one enlisted men lay dead on the beach. Eleven officers and 135 men carried wounds that would mark them for life, while twenty-nine had been captured, fourteen of whom would die in Confederate prison camps.
Sixty-three men remained missing, perhaps drowning in the rising tide and carried out to sea, buried in shell craters or vanished as a result of a direct hit by a Confederate shell.
The story of what happened in the days after the assault, from the fate of the wounded men taken prisoner to the family on Staten Island waiting for word of their son, continues below. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription to read the rest of this post and to support the research and writing that make this work possible. Thank you.