Mainers meet the Swamp Angel, part 1

The most celebrated Union artillery during the Civil War was the Swamp Angel, a 200-pound Parrott rifle placed in the Marsh Battery on Morris Island, South Carolina. (Library of Congress)

While that weren’t no angel the 11th Maine boys aimed at Charleston, Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore certainly thought it was.

Few individual artillery pieces drew acclaim during the Civil War. For the Confederacy, there was the 12-pounder bronze Napoleon that Maj. John Pelham and his gunners from the Virginia Horse Artillery maneuvered at Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862. Pelham skillfully shelled Union infantry and delayed their attack at least an hour.

For the Union, there was the Swamp Angel, a 200-pounder Parrott rifle that lasted two days, yet went into poetry, song, and Civil War lore.

And Maine has a solid connection with this particular “Angel.”

Assigned to recapture Fort Sumter and possibly Charleston, S.C. was Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore. He took to the job with a vengeance. (LOC)

Gillmore’s an odd Civil War character, all but forgotten except by historians interested in Charleston, South Carolina. The native Ohioan graduated atop his West Point class (’49), served as an Army engineer, reduced Fort Pulaski by bombardment in April 1862, and won a Kentucky battle in March 1863.

General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck gave Gillmore the Department of the South, effective June 12, 1863. His assignment? Retake Fort Sumter and capture Charleston.

Losing a few thousand men, Gillmore ordered two disastrous infantry assaults against Fort Wagner on Morris Island and then, in cooperation with the Navy, started shelling the fort apart. Its garrison held out.

Between the Wagner attacks, Gillmore got the bright idea to shell Charleston into submission. On July 16, he ordered his chief engineer, Col. Edward W. Serrell, “to see if a position could be found on the [Morris Island] marsh … where a battery could be constructed” to the west nearer James Island.

Alfred M. Waud sketched Fort Sumter in 1861. Standing three stories high, the fort guarded the main shipping channel into Charleston. (LOC)

That Thursday morning, Serrell and Lt. Nathaniel M. Edwards “proceeded at once on foot across the swamp” toward Light House Creek separating Morris and James islands. Soldiers apparently went with them, because someone carried “an iron rod three-quarters of an inch in diameter and 30 feet long” to take soundings in the mud.

Serrell did not indicate if the rod was one piece or not, but solid iron it was.

Morris Island and its lighthouse lie across the channel separating them from Folly Island. The Swamp Angel was placed in a battery on the far side of Morris Island. (Brian F. Swartz Photo)

Examining the terrain, including “a spot of high ground,” he and Edwards found where “a battery … entirely made of sand-bags” and wooden platforms could be built.

Serrell reported that “a gun weighing not over 10,000 pounds can be drawn across the marsh on skids framed together to slip on the mud.” In the way was “one small creek, about 9 feet wide” that must “be crossed.

Col. Edward W. Serrell, an experienced engineer, was assigned to find a site to place a battery that could fire directly on Charleston, S.C. (LOC)

The Morris Island mud ranged from “18 to 23 feet deep, generally about 20 feet deep,” said Serrell. “The bottom is hard sand, or has that feeling with the point of the sounding iron. Very coarse grass … 4 or 5 high” grew atop the mud, but did “not … form a sod.”

So atop this morass Gilmore ordered a battery built for “one 200-pounder Parrott rifled gun … that … should be placed as near … Charleston as practicable,” Serrell said.

Infantrymen cut “suitable trees” on Folly Island and turned the trunks into lumber. At a Morris Island site called “the old engineer camp,” other soldiers worked “day and night filling [sand] bags and hiding them from the enemy’s view, under cover of the bushes and ridges,” he noted.

Serrell submitted “a general plan for the battery” on Sunday morning, August 2. Gillmore approved the plan, and construction began, with soldiers hauling material by boat to the battery site. Soldiers built a road over the marsh to a “landing place” on a creek, and at high tide boats delivered “the gun and gun carriage, and … timber work, forming the … gun platform,” Serrell said. “A plank walk” extending eastward opened after dark on August 12 so soldiers could cross the marsh on foot rather than arrive by boat.

According to Serrell, engineer Lt. Col. Charles B. Parsons oversaw the construction, which included 307 tons of timber, 28 tons of lumber, and 13,000 sand bags cumulatively weighing 812 tons.

An engineer’s drawing shows the Swamp Angel protected by thousands of sand bags. The position was called the Marsh Battery. (LOC)

After sunset on August 17, soldiers started delivering the 200-pounder Parrott and its components to Battery Marsh. Serrell soon moved on to building other batteries.

Needing gunners for the so-called Marsh Battery, Gillmore summoned 1st Lt. Charles D. Sellmer, serving with Co. D, 11th Maine Infantry Regiment at Fernandina, Florida. A sergeant major with the 1st U.S. Artillery, he had received an 11th Maine commission in mid-June 1863 and had mustered with the regiment on July 21.

The next day, Sellmer and “a volunteer detachment” departed Florida for South Carolina. With Sellmer came 2nd Lt. Charles H. Foster of Co. K and 40 enlisted men. Upon arriving at Morris Island, Sellmer and Foster split the detachment and took turns spelling 3rd Rhode Island Artillery gunners operating “10-inch siege mortar batteries,” Sellmer recalled.

Firing the mortars was good practice for firing the Swamp Angel, as Gillmore’s Charleston buster would be called.

The Maine boys soon met their loud and smoky angel.

Next week: The Swamp Angel visits Charleston

Sources: Col. Edward W. Serrell, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Vol. 28, part 1, No. 4, pp. 230-236; Robert Brady Jr. and Albert Maxfield, The Story of One Regiment: The Eleventh Maine Infantry Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion, J.J. Little & Co., New York, NY, 1896, pp. 139-143


If you enjoy reading the adventures of Mainers caught up in the Civil War, be sure to like Maine at War on Facebook and get a copy of the new Maine at War Volume 1: Bladensburg to Sharpsburg, available online at Amazon and all major book retailers, including Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble. —————————————————————————————————————–

Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.

Brian Swartz

About Brian Swartz

Welcome to "Maine at War," the blog about the roles played by Maine and her sons and daughters in the Civil War. I am a Civil War buff and a newspaper editor recently retired from the Bangor Daily News. Maine sent hero upon hero — soldiers, nurses, sailors, chaplains, physicians — south to preserve their country in the 1860s. “Maine at War” introduces these heroes and heroines, who, for the most part, upheld the state's honor during that terrible conflict. We tour the battlefields where they fought, and we learn about the Civil War by focusing on Maine’s involvement with it. Be prepared: As I discover to this very day, the facts taught in American classrooms don’t always jibe with Civil War reality. I can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net.