The fighting in front of that work was, from the first, desperate in the extreme. In order to approach it at all the Federal troops were forced to wade waist deep in water, carrying their rifles above their heads. The first assault was made on the eleventh of July, 1863, and was aided by a terrific fire from the fleet. It was led by the first regiment of negroes that had thus far actively participated in fighting in the war, and the conduct of those troops was worthy of the best traditions of battling. The assault was met in such fashion as to destroy the greater number of the assailants and hurl back the fragmentary remains of the column in confusion. So desperate was this endeavor and with such determination was the assault made that the Federals lost more than 1,500 men while inflicting a loss of less than one hundred upon their adversaries. Having failed in direct assault General Gillmore determined to take Fort Wagner and the works north of it by regular siege approaches. General Gillmore was an engineer of the highest capacity and a soldier of the utmost courage, energy and determination. He drew his first parallel and mounted great siege guns upon it almost immediately. Then working under such cover as he could provide he established a second parallel, and opened fire from it on the twenty-third of July. He was advancing in this slow and perilous way over a narrow strip of land--a mere marsh scarcely at all elevated above the level of the surrounding waters. His sick list was from the first enormous, and day by day it grew as one man after another succumbed to the poisonous miasms of those pestilential swamps in which, until the time of the war no white man had ever dared spend a night between the first of June and the end of November. "Country fever"--believed by many physicians to be nothing less than yellow fever in its native and endemic form--slew far more of his troops than the shot and the shell and the bullets of his adversary did. Nevertheless, like the soldier that he was, Gillmore pressed on, working his way inch by inch toward the hostile embankments. Toward the last his lines were swept by a fire from a battery on James Island and by a cross fire of infantry and sharpshooters from a point in Fort Wagner itself. With the ingenuity of an accomplished engineer he protected his men against these special dangers by bringing up tubes of boiler iron through which the men were able to do their mining, moving them forward at night, in order to cover the space excavated by day.