The Battle of Port Royal: Five Hours That Changed the Island
Near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
On the morning of November seventh, eighteen sixty one, the largest naval fleet the United States had ever assembled at the time sailed into Port Royal Sound, and by one o'clock that afternoon the Confederate fortifications on Hilton Head Island had been abandoned. The Battle of Port Royal was, by the measure of ships and guns, the largest naval engagement ever fought in American waters to that point, and it lasted just five hours. The Union fleet, under the command of Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont, consisted of seventeen warships and dozens of supporting vessels.
Du Pont's plan was straightforward: sail the fleet in an oval pattern around the sound, looping back and forth to pour continuous cannon fire on the Confederate guns at Fort Walker on Hilton Head and Fort Beauregard across the water on Bay Point. Fort Walker had been constructed through the summer of eighteen sixty one by Confederate forces using enslaved labor. It mounted twenty three guns and was garrisoned by about fourteen hundred and fifty men of the Eleventh Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers.
When Du Pont's fleet began its oval passes, the Confederate guns held for a time, but the precision of the naval fire and the overwhelming weight of iron told against the defenders. By early afternoon, with only three guns still capable of firing, the Confederate commander ordered Fort Walker abandoned. The soldiers fled in such haste that they left behind personal belongings, ammunition, and guns that had not been spiked.
The fall of Port Royal had immediate and far-reaching consequences. The Union now held one of the finest deepwater harbors on the southern coast, a base for the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron that would strangle Confederate commerce for the rest of the war. The fort was immediately renamed Fort Welles by the occupying forces, in honor of the Secretary of the Navy.
And the ten thousand or more enslaved men, women, and children who had been held on the plantations of Hilton Head and the surrounding Sea Islands found themselves, in the days that followed, free for the first time. That freedom was untested and came with no guarantee. But it came on November seventh, eighteen sixty one, on the shores of this island.
