On Morris Island, South Carolina, Confederate defenders of Fort Wagner beat back a second heavy attack

Union forces initiated an artillery and naval gunfire barrage at mid-morning on the Confederate fortifications on Morris Island, protecting Charleston Harbor.  Ten hours later, at dusk, two full brigades, the 54th Massacusetts in the lead, made a ground assualt.  In heavy fighting that cost the lives of hundreds of Union officers and men and decimated the African-American 54th, the attack was repulsed.  Federal forces settled afterwards into a a siege but Fort Wagner remained in Confederate hands until September 1863.  (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Russell Duncan, Where Death and Glory Meet: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Massacusetts Infantry (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 112-116. 
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Type
    Battles/Soldiers
    How to Cite This Page: "On Morris Island, South Carolina, Confederate defenders of Fort Wagner beat back a second heavy attack ," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/32926.