Combat· American Civil War
Fort Wagner Assault
The Marine share in one of the most famous failed assaults of the war.
On 18 July 1863 the Union forces besieging Charleston threw themselves against Fort Wagner, the powerful earthwork on Morris Island, in the celebrated attack led by the 54th Massachusetts, the Black regiment whose colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, was killed at the parapet. Marines from the South Atlantic Squadron supported the operation, manning siege artillery and serving alongside the army in the effort against the fort. The assault was bloodily repulsed, the attackers unable to hold the ground they reached. Though the storm failed, the steady pressure of the siege that followed eventually forced the Confederates to abandon Fort Wagner in early September. The action is remembered above all for the gallantry and sacrifice of the 54th Massachusetts; the Marines' part was a supporting one, in the batteries and the lines around the doomed assault.
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Record no. 419