January 15, 1865---The Second Battle of Fort Fisher (Day Three)

JANUARY 15, 1865:           

After a long, difficult trip through the lines, Francis Preston Blair meets with Confederate President Jefferson Davis bearing his own peace proposals. Blair insists that Lincoln has already approved them in essence, which is untrue. He convinces Davis to dispatch Peace Commissioners to meet with Union representatives.

Part of Blair’s offer to Davis concerns an alliance between North and South against French-dominated Mexico, and the expansion of slavery southward into territories to be acquired from Latin America, including Cuba. Blair, like Seward at the beginning of the war, believes that an American alliance will end in reunification of the States of America and the furtherance of Manifest Destiny. Blair conveniently ignores the slavery debates raging on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, deciding that peace between Euro-Americans can be bought cheaply, at the price of the freedom of African-Americans.

The Assault on Fort Fisher  (Day Three):           

The main assault on Fort Fisher commences at daybreak as the Union flotilla blasts the seawall of the fort. The sand and earthen wall partially collapses by noon, silencing all but four of the fort’s 22 seaward facing cannons. Thirteen Union brigades attack the fort. Confederate troops on the point attempt to turn back the massed attack, but only 400 Confederates are able to engage with the Union troops, and they are quickly overrun. 

In desperation, the Confederates turn the landward-facing guns and the guns of Fort Buchanan (a subfort of the Fort Fisher complex) against Fort Fisher itself, trying to blast the Yankees away from the walls. Many men in blue are already topping the walls and hacking with axes at the defensive palisade of sharpened spikes and abatis. Although the Confederate cannonade temporarily stops the Union advance, the Union naval flotilla soon zeroes in on the Southron guns, putting them out of commission.  

The battle degenerates into hand-to-hand combat. General Whiting, the overall Confederate commander and designer of the fort, is severely wounded, and later dies of his wounds. His subordinate, Colonel Lamb spends the next seven years on crutches. 

Losses on the Union side are even more severe. The Confederates within the fort viciously defend themselves, shooting down most of the Union regimental officers and all of the Brigade-level officers. Without a command structure to manage the battle, a suggestion is made to entrench the Federal line until morning. Brigadier General Newton M. Curtis U.S.A. laughs it off --- “Entrench?” he says, holding up a spade. “Here, Johnnies, dig deep, because I’m coming for you!”

Shells scream in exploding in deadly bouquets of shrapnel as the very air vibrates and the stench of cordite, blood and entrails fills men’s nostrils. The nearly leaderless Union forces seem possessed --- without officers, in blue mobs, they attack the fort, screaming like banshees, terrifying their enemies with their own Union Yawp. Unable to take the time to reload in the chaos, they bayonet or club to death any Rebel who stands in their way. The men in gray are no longer fighting for the fort, they are fighting for their lives. Even after the sun goes down the fight continues in the lurid light of shellfire and flame and powder-flash that punctuates the pungent darkness. 

Around 9:30 P.M. General Whiting sends an urgent message to General Braxton Bragg C.S.A., headquartered further up the coast, asking for reinforcements. Bragg, assuming the fort is impregnable, does nothing. By the time he reconsiders, Fort Fisher is gone. 

But more than Fort Fisher is gone.  Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last remaining port facility is closed off to the blockade-runners. The loss of Wilmington is, in its way, as devastating a loss as the loss of Atlanta in September. For Fort Fisher’s mighty guns have kept the Union blockade at bay, farther out to sea, allowing runners nearly free access to Wilmington. Nowhere else in the South has this been true. 

Hated Charleston, the “Cradle of Secession” is the only other east coast port that has not been taken or blocked off by occupation of its sea frontage. But Charleston, so despised, has been the most heavily blockaded port in the Confederacy since 1861. Virtually nothing comes in through Charleston. But despite everything, much has been coming in.

Wilmington has been the ultimate supply line for the Army of Northern Virginia: In the last two months of 1864 alone, Wilmington’s wharves have handled 8.6 million pounds of beef, 1.9 million pounds of saltpeter, 1.5 million pounds of lead, half a million pairs of shoes, half a million pounds of coffee, 300,000 blankets, 70,000 rifles, 2,600 medical shipments, 100 crates of revolvers, and 43 cannons for the army, in addition to a plethora of civilian supplies, most of it from Europe or European New World dependencies. Now all that will be gone. Robert E. Lee’s starving army will starve the more.  The end of the Civil War is less than 90 days away.

Fort Fisher has been an expensive prize. Of the 10,000 Federals engaged in the battle, 1,400 are casualties (400 killed). Of the 8,500 Confederates engaged, both inside and outside the fort, 600 are casualties (500 killed).