Cockspur

Fort Pulaski was the Colonel’s first fort, and it was very nearly my last.

I mean that he began his life in the Army on it, as a young lieutenant in 1829, sent down to the marsh at the mouth of the Savannah River to lay its foundations on Cockspur Island, where there was nothing but mud and mosquitoes and the tide going in and out twice a day over ground that would not bear a man’s weight, let alone a fort’s. He spent the better part of two years there, sinking timber piles into the mud and laying a grillage of logs across them, and the fort that stands there now stands on what he put under it. And I mean that I spent most of a year on the same fort more than a quarter of a century later, in 1857, on the brickwork, after my two years at Sumter; and I knew every course of it from the scarp to the parapet, and which of the casemates leaked and which of the arches had settled, and where the masons had been hurried at the end of a season and had used lime that was not as good as it should have been.

So that when the Colonel sent for me, in the middle of March, and told me that he had been asked by the department to advise on how the fort might be breached, and that he had written his advice, and that he wished me to carry it south to the batteries and explain it to the men who would carry it out, I understood that I was being sent to help knock down a wall that the two of us had built between us, nearly thirty years apart; and I understood, too, that he knew exactly what he was asking, and had chosen me for it on purpose.

He said, “You will know where they hurried the lime, Mr Ashton.”

I said that I did.

He said, “So do I. I have written it down. You may add anything I have forgotten.” And he gave me his note, three pages in his hand, folded and sealed, with a copy for me to read on the way.

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The rebels had taken the fort in the first weeks of the rebellion, as they had taken nearly every fort on the coasts of the five polities that had no garrison in it, and they had held it for a year. It closed the river to Savannah. Nothing could go up to the town or come down from it without passing under its guns, and its walls were seven and a half feet thick, of solid brick, and the nearest dry ground from which a battery could fire on it was on Tybee Island, more than a mile away across the water and the marsh. Every engineer in America knew that no gun in the world could breach a wall like that from a mile. I had been taught it at the Point. The professors had shown us the tables. A masonry fort of the first class, they said, was proof against any battery that could be brought against it from a distance greater than about seven hundred yards, and Pulaski’s walls were thicker than the first class required. An old officer of my own Corps had said of it, I was told, that you might as well bombard the Rocky Mountains.

But the fleet had taken the sounds in the autumn, and Tybee with them, and the Crown had new guns.

I had seen them at the foundry before I went south: rifled guns, with spiral grooves cut into their bores so that the shot spun as it flew, and long iron bolts instead of round shot, which went through the air point first like an arrow and struck like a pile driver, and kept their weight and their aim at distances where a round shot would have tumbled and fallen short. They were very new. Nobody had ever used them against a fort. The men who had made them said that they would breach Pulaski from Tybee in a day; the men who had built Pulaski said that they would not breach it in a month. I had built some of Pulaski, and I had seen the guns, and I did not know which side I was on, and the Colonel’s note did not tell me. It told me where to aim.

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I came to Tybee at the end of March, in a supply steamer from the fleet in the sound, and found the batteries going up in the dark.

They were being built along the north-west shore of the island, eleven of them, in a line, behind the sand ridges and the scrub, as close to the fort as the ground allowed, which was a mile at the nearest and two miles at the farthest; and they were being built entirely at night, by men who hauled the guns and the timbers and the ammunition across the marsh on sledges and on their own shoulders, without lights and without speaking, because the fort could see the whole shore by day and would have knocked the batteries to pieces as fast as they went up. They had been at it for six weeks. The guns had come ashore through the surf and been dragged on rollers across a mile of sand and swamp, by hand, two hundred and fifty men to a gun, and some of the guns weighed eight tons. I have seen a great many works built since, in worse places and under worse fire. I have never seen anything to touch the batteries on Tybee.

I gave the Colonel’s note to the engineer officer commanding, a captain of my own Corps whom I had known slightly at the Point, and to the officers of the batteries, in a hut behind the sand ridge, by a shaded lantern, on the night I arrived. I read it to them, because the Colonel’s hand was hard to read for anybody who had not spent a year copying it, and I explained the parts of it that needed explaining, and I added what I knew.

I will not give Your Majesty the note itself. It was not mine to give, and it is in the department’s file, where anybody who has the right may read it. I will say only that it told them the fort’s weak place was the south-east angle, the one that faced Tybee across the water; that the angle had been built last, in a hurry, on ground that had settled more than the rest; and that the guns should not try to breach the wall in general but should all strike the same few yards of it, low down, at the angle, over and over, until the face came away and opened the casemates behind it. And that if they could open the casemates at that angle, they would be able to fire through the gap across the inside of the fort, at the far wall, where the magazine was.

I added that the lime in the core of the wall at that angle was bad, because I had been there when it was laid, and that the brick would come away more easily than the tables said it should. The engineer captain wrote that down. He asked me how I could be sure. I said that I had signed for it.

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The batteries opened at eight in the morning of Thursday the tenth of April.

A boat went across under a flag first, at dawn, with a summons to surrender, and came back an hour later with the answer, which was that the fort was there to be defended and not surrendered; and then the mortars began, and then the columbiads, and then the rifled guns. I was in the battery nearest the fort, a little to one side, with a glass, where I could see the south-east angle and call back what the shot was doing to it. It was the strangest day of my life, and I have had some strange ones since.

For the first hours nothing seemed to happen. The mortar shells went up in long arcs and came down inside the fort or in the water round it, and the round shot from the columbiads struck the wall and broke on it and fell into the moat, and the fort fired back, slowly and well, with its own guns, so that the sand of our parapets flew up in fountains and men were knocked down by it. But the rifled guns did not fire at the fort. They fired at the angle. They fired at the same few yards of wall, low down, every few minutes, all day, and every bolt that struck it went into the brick instead of breaking on it, and threw out a shower of red dust that hung over the angle in the sun, and by noon there was a cloud of brick dust over that corner of the fort that never cleared. I watched it through the glass. I could see the scars coming. I could see the face of the wall, which I had watched go up course by course five years before, beginning to come away in chips and then in lumps and then in sheets, the outer layers of brick peeling off like the bark of a tree, and the inner layers showing behind them, a different colour, darker, the colour of the lime in the core.

By the evening there was a hole in the face of the angle you could have driven a wagon into, and behind it the arches of the casemates, standing open. I called it back to the guns at about four. The engineer captain came forward himself to look, and lay beside me on the sand with the glass, and was quiet for a long time, and then said, “Well. The professors were wrong.” I said that they had been wrong about the guns. I said that they had been right about the fort; that it was as good a fort as had ever been built in America, and would have stood against anything in the world on the morning before. He said that this was what he meant.

The guns went on all night, slowly, to stop the garrison repairing the breach, and in the morning they went on fast. By noon on the Friday the breach was through, two casemates wide, and our bolts were going through it and across the parade inside and striking the far wall, the wall that covered the magazine, as the Colonel’s note had said they would; and at a little after two o’clock in the afternoon, a day and a half after the first gun, the flag on the fort came down, and a white one went up in its place.

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I went across with the first boat.

I am not sure I can make Your Majesty understand what it was to walk into that fort, so I will simply tell what I saw. The garrison was drawn up on the parade inside, perhaps three hundred and fifty men, Georgians, most of them very young, in a great variety of uniforms, and their colonel was at their head, a young man, some years younger than I was, who gave up his sword to the officer commanding our boat with a little speech that I did not hear and that he had obviously been composing all morning. The parade was covered in brick and splinters and the fragments of shells. The far wall had been struck so often that the casemates in front of the magazine were half full of rubble, and the officers of the garrison told us that they had surrendered because they had calculated that one more hour of it would put a bolt into the powder and kill every man in the fort; and I believed them, because I had made the same calculation, from the other side, in the battery, with the Colonel’s note in my pocket.

I went and stood in the breach. I put my hand on the brick. It was warm, from the sun or from the shot, I did not know which; and the inner face of it, where the bolts had laid it open, was exactly as I had known it would be: soft, the lime crumbling under my fingers like old bread, the courses I had signed for in the summer of 1857 coming apart in my hand. I stood there for a long time. I thought about the Colonel, sinking his piles into the mud in 1829, a young man with his career in front of him; and about myself, in 1857, in my shirt-sleeves on the scaffold with a level and a gang of hired masons from Savannah who belonged to somebody else, signing for lime I knew was not good enough because the season was ending and the money was spent; and about the guns on Tybee, which had come through the wall at exactly the place where the two of us had left it weakest. I do not know what the moral of that is. I am not sure there is one. I record it because it is the only time in the war that I knew, with my hand on it, exactly how much of a thing I had done was mine.

The rebel colonel came up while I was standing there and asked me, very civilly, whether I was the engineer who had told our guns where to shoot. I said that I was one of them. He said that he had thought so; that the fire had been too well placed to be luck. Then he said that his engineers had told him the angle was the strongest part of the fort, because it was the newest. I said that it was the newest, and that this was the trouble with it. He thought about that, and then laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Well, Captain, I hope your own walls are better built,” and went back to his men.

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I was kept in the south for a month after the fort fell, on the islands, because the army wished to know what works it would need to hold the sounds, and I was the engineer on the spot who knew the coast.

I had known the Sea Islands from the water, from my years on the forts, as a coast of low green islands and marsh and tidal creeks, with the great cotton plantations on them, the long-staple cotton that was the finest in the world and fetched the highest price at Liverpool, and the big houses among the live oaks, and the people. I had known that the people on the islands were more numerous than anywhere else on the coast, many times more numerous than the masters, and that they spoke a language of their own that a man from Virginia could hardly follow, and that they had been on those islands, most of them, for generations, cut off from everything by the water. I had not thought about them any more than that. They were part of the coast.

When the fleet had come into the sounds in the autumn, the masters had gone. All of them, in a day or two, as soon as they saw the ships, up the rivers to the mainland, taking what they could carry and some of their people, and leaving the rest. And the rest had not gone with them. Some of them had hidden in the marsh when the masters tried to take them and had come back when the boats had gone. Some had simply refused. Most of them had just stayed where they were, on the land they had always worked, in the cabins they had always lived in, while the big houses stood empty above them; and when the army came ashore, a few days later, it found them there, in their thousands, already living as free people, and nobody had told them to.

Nobody had told them to, Sir. I want to be exact about this, because I have read since a good many accounts of what the Crown did for the people of the Sea Islands, and of how they were freed, and the accounts are not right. When I was there, in April and May of 1862, there was no order that freed anybody. The army’s officers did not know what the people were, in law; some of them called them contrabands, which is a word from the law of war about the enemy’s property, and some of them called them refugees, and some of them did not call them anything and simply put them to work and paid them, when there was money, and fed them, when there was food. The law, so far as anybody could tell me what it was, said that they were still the property of the men who had run away up the rivers, who were in rebellion against the Crown, but who owned them all the same, because nothing had yet happened in any court or any Parliament to say that they did not. And the people did not care in the least what the law said. They had freed themselves, in the few days between the masters’ boats leaving and the army’s boats coming, by the simple method of not going, and they were not waiting for anybody to agree.

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I met a woman on St Helena Island, in May, whom I think of more often than I think of the fort.

I was riding along the shore with a sergeant and two men, looking at the creeks for a place to put a battery, and we came out of the live oaks into an old cotton field above the water, and there was a woman working in it with a hoe. She was perhaps fifty, small, very straight, with a cloth tied round her head, and there were children working along the rows behind her; and they were not working the cotton. They had pulled up the cotton, and planted corn, and potatoes, and peas, in the field where the cotton had been, and the corn was a foot high.

I stopped and asked her whose field it was. I asked it, I suppose, as an officer asks it, wishing to know whom to deal with about the battery. She looked at me for some time, leaning on her hoe, and then answered me in the language of the islands, which I could only half follow, and the sergeant, who had been on the islands since the autumn and had learned some of it, put it into English for me.

She said that it was her field. She said that she had worked it for forty years for the master and that the master had gone up the river, and that she would work it now for herself and her children, and that she had pulled up the cotton because nobody could eat cotton. She said that the army’s men had told her that the cotton belonged to the Crown now and that she should pick it, and that she had said that she would pick it when the Crown paid her for it, and not before. She said that she did not know who the King was, but that if he wanted her cotton he could come and ask her for it himself.

I am setting that down as she said it, Sir, or as the sergeant said she said it, because I think Your Majesty should have it. I did not answer her. I could not think of anything to say that would have been true and of any use to her. I said that I was sorry to have disturbed her, and that I hoped the corn would do well, and she looked at me again, for a long time, as Daniel had looked at me in the hall at Marlfield, and as the weaver’s wife had looked at me in Blackburn, and as John Brown had looked at me from his pallet, and then she went back to her hoe.

I rode on along the shore and found a place for the battery, and drew it that evening, and it was built.

I thought about her on the steamer going north, and I have thought about her since. She had done, by herself, on her own field, what neither the Crown nor the rebellion nor the Parliament at New Westminster had yet found the courage to do or the words to say, and she had done it without asking anybody’s leave, and she had done it, as far as I could tell, without any notion that it was remarkable. She had stayed. That was all. She had stayed where she was, when the man who owned her ran, and had pulled up his cotton and planted her own corn, and the law, which said that she was still his, had simply stopped having anything to do with her.

I did not think, on that steamer, about Daniel. I want to be honest about that. I thought about the woman on St Helena, and about the fort, and about the Colonel’s note and the lime in my hand, and about the professors at the Point and their tables. I did not think about the man I owned, whom I supposed to be at the hammer at the ironworks below Fredericksburg, on the far bank of a river that the army had been marching towards since the roads dried.

I should have. The war got there before I did.