Chapter 11: The Ironclads Off Charleston

After five letters from Washington, in the first of which he had predicted that in a few days, for the first time in war, there would be the great contest between ironclads and forts, and the stroke of fifteen-inch shot against masonry, Carleton set off for salt water, determining to see the tug-of-war on the Atlantic coast. It was on Saturday afternoon, February 7th, that he stood on deck of the steamer Augusta Dinsmore as she moved through the floating masses of ice down the Hudson River to the sea. This new ship was owned by Adams’s Express Company, and with her consort, Mary Sandford, was employed in carrying barrels of apples, boxes of clothing, messages of love, and tokens of affection between the Union soldiers along the coast and their friends at home. Heavily loaded with express packages, with fifty or sixty thousand letters, and with several hundred fifteen-inch solid shot, packed ready for delivery by Admiral Du Pont at or into Fort Sumter, the trim craft passed over a sea like glass, except that now and then was a dying groan or heave of the storm of a week before. A pleasant Sunday at sea was spent with worship, sermon, and song. After sixty hours on salt water, Carleton’s ear caught the boom of the surf on the beach. The sea-gulls flitted around, and after the sun had rent the pall of fog, the town of Beaufort appeared in view.

The harbor was full of schooners which had come from up North, bringing potatoes, onions, apples, and Yankee notions for the great blue-coated community at Newburgh. Carleton moved up the poverty-stricken country through marsh, sea-sand, pitch-pine, swamp, and plain. Here and there were the shanties of sand-hillers, negro huts, and scores of long, lank, scrimped-up, razor-backed pigs of the Congo breed, as to color; but in speed, racers, outstripping the fleetest horses. Making his headquarters at Hilton Head, Carleton made a thorough study of the military and naval situation. He visited the New England regiments. He saw the enlistment of negro troops, and devoted one letter to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s first South Carolina regiment of volunteers.

With his usual luck, that is, the result of intelligence and energy which left nothing to mere luck, Carleton stood on the steamer Nantasket, off Charleston, April 7, 1863. Both admiral and general had recognized the war correspondents as the historians of the hour. At half past one, the signal for sailing was displayed from the flag-ship. Then the ugly black floating fortresses moved off in a line, each a third or a half a mile apart, against the masses of granite at Sumter and Moultrie, and the earthen batteries on three sides. “There are no clouds of canvas, no beautiful models of marine architecture, none of the stateliness and majesty which have marked hundreds of great naval engagements. There is but little to the sight calculated to excite enthusiasm. There are eight black specks, and one oblong block, like so many bugs. There are no human beings in sight, —no propelling power visible.”