the iron-clad fleet could, with as little delay as possible, enter upon the ex ecution of their part of the joint programme. The early elimination of this famous fort from the conflict, considered simply as auxiliary to the reduction of Fort Wagner, was greatly to be desired, and elaborate arrangements were at once coinmenced to place the breaching guns in position. On the 18th August, Gillmore opened heavily against the east face cl Fort Sumter from his land batteries enfilading it. The cannonade was continued throughout the day, nine hundred and forty-three shots being tired. The effect was to batter the eastern face heavily, doing considerable damage, and to disable one ten-inch gun and a rifled forty-two pounder. On the 22d the enemy threw six hundred and four shots at the fort, disabling some of the barbette guns, demolishing the arches of the northwest face, and scaling the eastern face severely. The next day the fire from the enemy's land batteries was kept up on Sumter, disabling the only ten-inch columbiad that remained, and the three rifled forty-twopounders in the northern salient of the second tier. The eastern face was badly scaled, and the parapet seriously injured. On the 24th August Gen. Gillmore reported to Washington "the practical demolition of Fort Sumter as the result of our seven days' bombardment of that work." The assertion was insolent and absurd. Fort Sumter had, indeed, been severely injured; but it was in one respect stronger than ever; for the battering down of the upper walls had rendered the casemated base impregnable, and the immense volume of stone and debris which protected it, was not at all affected by the enemy's artillery. Although apparently a heap of ruins, it still afforded shelter to the Confederate heroes, who raised the standard of the South each time it was beaten down; and it was still protected by the batteries of Fort Wagner, which the Federals had vainly endeavoured to carry by assault. Gen. Gillmore must, at all hazard, overcome this obstacle. He opened the trenches by means of the rolling sap, making work enough for a company of miners. Five parallels were established in succession, and two batteries were constructed, with bandages, under fire of James and Sullivan's Islands. From this moment Fort Wagner received more fire than she could return; solid shot and shells fell right and left; no living soul could remain upon the parapets; everything was shattered in pieces; the arches of the casemates commenced to crumble in, and to crush the defenders who had sought refuge there. All For two days and nights the fort had been subjected to the most terrific fire that any earthwork had undergone in all the annals of warfare. the light mortars of the enemy were moved to the front, and placed in battery; the rifled guns were trained upon the fort; and powerful calcium lights aided the night work of the cannoniers and sharpshooters and blinded the Confederates. It was a scene of surpassing grandeur. The FEDERAL OCCUPATION OF MORRIS ISLAND. 437 calcium lights turned night into day, and brought the minutest details of the fort into sharp relief. For forty-two consecutive hours, seventeen siege and coehorn mortars unceasingly dropped their shells into the work while thirteen heavy Parrott rifles-100, 200, and 300-pounders-pounded away at short though regular intervals. Peal on peal of artillery rolled over the waters; a semi-circle of the horizon was lit up; an autumnal moon hung in the misty sky; and ear and eye were alike appealed to with emotions of sublimity and grandeur. The shock of the rapid discharges trembled through the city, calling hundreds of citizens to the battery, wharves, steeples, and various look-outs, where, with an interest never felt before, they gazed on a contest that might decide the fate of Charles ton itself. On the night of the 6th September, Gen. Gillmore ordered an assault on Fort Wagner at the hour of low tide on the following morning. The assault was to be made in three columns. About midnight a deserter reported to him that the Confederates were evacuating the island. The work of evacuation had commenced at nine o'clock that night, and was already concluded. All the garrison had got off upon the Chicora, an iron-clad gunboat of the Confederates, and fourteen barges. Fort Gregg had been equally abandoned. Morris Island was thus the prize of the enemy, who now possessed themselves of Cumming's Point, from which they could plainly see Charleston at a distance of four miles. The Northern public at once jumped to the conclusion that Gillmore had the key of Charleston, and had at last opened the gate to the Monitors and iron-clads, which, at leisure, might ascend the harbour. Gillmore himself insisted that he had done his part of the work; that " Fort Sumter was a shapeless and harmless mass of ruins ;" and he indicated that it only remained for Admiral Dahlgren, with his fleet, to enter upon the scene, and accomplish the reduction of Charleston. But from this view the Federal admiral dissented; he indicated that Gen. Beauregard had accomplished a new object by his long retention of Morris Island; that, in fact, he had replaced Sumter by an interiour position, had obtained time to convert Fort Johuson from a foriorn old fort into a powerful earthwork, and had given another illustration of that new system of defence practised at Comorn and Sebastapol, where, instead of being any one key to a plan. of fortification, there was the necessity of a siege for every battery, in which the besiegers were always exposed to the fire of others. He was unwilling, too, to risk the destructive defences and infernal machines with which the passes were blockaded. The Confederates had given out that by no possibility could one of the gunboats escape these, and Dahlgren's' squadron of iron-clads and Monitors did not dare venture far up the harbour past Fort Ripley and within range of the immediate defences of the city. Gillmore claimed that he had reduced Fort Sumter; but the Confed erate flag still floated over it. It had been held through the siege and can nonade by the First South Carolina Artillery, under Col. Alfred Rhett, until its armament had been disabled; and the services of the artillerymen being elsewhere required, Gen. Beauregard determined that it should be held by infantry. On the night of the 4th September, the Charleston Battalion, under Maj. Blake, relieved the garrison; Maj. Stephen Elliot relieving Col. Rhett in command of the post. On the 7th of September, Admiral Dahlgren, determined to test Gillmore's assertion that Sumter was a "harmless mass of ruins," summoned the fort to surrender. Gen. Beauregard telegraphed to Maj. Elliot to reply to Dahlgren that he could have Fort Sumter when he took it and held it, and that in the mean time such demands were puerile and unbecoming. In the evening of the 7th September, the iron-clads and Monitors approached Fort Sumter closer than usual, and opened a hot fire against it. In the night of the 9th September thirty of the launches of the enemy attacked Fort Sumter. Preparations had been made for the event. At a concerted signal, all the batteries bearing on Sumter assisted by one gunboat and a ram, were thrown open. The enemy was repulsed, leaving in our hands one hundred and thirteen prisoners, including thirteen officers. There were also taken four boats and three colours, and the original flag of Fort Sumter, which Maj. Anderson was compelled to lower in 1861, and which Dahlgren had hoped to replace. After this repulse of the Federals in their last attack upon Fort Sumter, but little more was done during the year by the enemy, except bombarding the forts and shelling Charleston at intervals during day and night, until this became so customary that it no longer excited dismay or was an occasion of alarm to even women and children. The city was intact and safe; Gillmore had expended many thousand lives and thrown shell enough to build several iron-clads to obtain a position that proved worthless; Admiral Dahlgren feared the destruction of a fleet which had cost so much sacrifice, and refused to ascend the harbour; and the demonstration upon Charleston degenerated into the desultory record of a fruitless bombardment. The Northern public appeared to sicken of the experiment of Parrott guns and monster artillery, and read with disgust the daily bulletins of how many hundred useless shots had been fired, and of how much ainmunition had been grandly expended in a great noise to little pur pose. "How many times," asked an indignant Philadelphia paper, "has Fort Sumter been taken? How many times has Charleston been burned? How often have the people been on the eve of starvation and surrender? How many times has the famous Greek Fire poured the rain of Sodomi and the flames of hell upon the secession city? We cannot keep the count --but those can who rang the bells and put out the flags, and invoked the imprecations, and rejoiced at the story of conflagration and ruin." CHAPTER XXVII. GEN. JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON'S PROPHECY OF THe fate of tenNESSEE.-CHARACTER AND EXTRA- SEE. GEN. FRAZIER IN COMMAND AT CUMBERLAND GAP.-HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH THERE was no Confederate commander so remarkable for long foresight and for the most exact fulfilment of prophetic words as Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. He was more profound than Lee; his mind could range over larger fields; at all times of the war his cool, sedate judgments were so in opposition to the intoxicated senses of the Confederate people, that he was rather unpopular than otherwise, and rested his reputation on the apprecia tive and intelligent, who steadily marked him as the military genius of the Confederacy. It remained for the sequel to justify the reputation of this greatest military man in the Confederacy, who, cooler even than Lee hinself, without ardour, made up almost exclusively of intellect, saw more clearly than any other single person each approaching shadow of the war, and prophesied, with calm courage, against the madness of the Administration at Richmond and the extravagant vanity of the people. When the Vicksburg campaign was decided upon at Richmond, Gen. Johnston then warned the authorities there that they should make choice between Mississippi and Tennessee; and in urging the retention of the latter State, he declared, with singular felicity of expression, that it was "the shield of the South." In six weeks after the battle of Murfreesboro, our army in Tennessee was as strong as when it fought that battle, and, with ordinary generalship, might have driven Rosecrans from the State. But when Stevenson's division was sent to the lines of the Mississippi, Johnston saw the errour; he sent to Richmond a protest against it, which he thought of such historical importance as to duplicate and to copy carefully among his private memoranda; and he then predicted that the Richmond Administration, in trying to hold the Mississippi River and Tennessee, would lose both, and that the enemy, once pressing the northern frontier of Georgia, would obtain a position that would eventually prove the critical one of the war. With his forces reduced for the defence of Vicksburg, Gen. Bragg inisted upon regarding his army in Tennessee as one merely of observation. Rosecrans was in his front, and Burnside, who commanded what was called the Army of the Cumberland, was in a position, by an advance towards Knoxville, to threaten his rear. In July, Gen. Bragg occupied a ridge extending from Bellbuckle towards Bradyville, very strong by nature on the right and made strong by fortifications on the left, in front of Shelbyville. An injudicious disposition of forces left Hoover's Gap undefended by our army. Rosecrans advanced upon Hoover's Gap. Three brigades of Confederates moved rapidly up, and held them in the Gap over forty hours. This position gained placed Rosecrans on Bragg's flank, who, to save his army, commenced a retreat, which was eventually continued to Chattanooga. EXPEDITION OF JOHN MORGAN. As part of the general plan of action in the West, and an important contribution to the success of Gen. Bragg's retreat, we must notice here a remarkable expedition of the famous cavalier, Gen. John Morgan, the |