January 18, 1865---"What God failed to do . . . To make a soldier of Braxton Bragg."

JANUARY 18, 1865:           

The Charleston Mercury reports on the fall of Fort Fisher, which it discounts. The report reads in part:

THE LAND ATTACK ON WILMINGTON

- DEFENCE AND FALL OF FORT FISHER

Our community was much depressed yesterday by the news, which reaches here in the forenoon that Fort Fisher, the gate of the Cape Fear River, had succumbed to another tremendous combined land and naval attack by the enemy. It was currently stated that among the incidents o the disaster, 3000 of our men . . . are all reported to have been wounded . . .  We annex a detailed account of the attack from a Wilmington contemporary:

As already stated . . . the enemy suddenly appeared off our coast on Thursday night . . .  and commenced landing on Friday morning . . .  On Friday they landed a considerable force . . . 

On Friday the bombardment of Fort Fisher was heavy . . . We learn that on Saturday and yesterday the bombardment continued heavy . . . the last report we have heard is that things remain pretty much in status quo . . . the enemy force consists of seven thousand whites and four thousand negroes.

General Bragg telegraphed Sunday forenoon that all was quiet, and then there was no cause for excitement or apprehension . . . 

LATER.

At half-past six . . . (Sunday) . . .  the enemy were making a heavy assault by land and sea. The bombardment was going on furiously . . . It is reported that the enemy had succeeded in establishing a battery on the river above Fort Fisher and below Sugar Loaf, cutting off communication with the fort by water . . . The gallant defenders of Fort Fisher are passing through a terrible ordeal. God grant that they may pass through it successfully.

STILL LATER.

The following official dispatch from General Bragg has been kindly handed to us. SUGAR LOAF, JANUARY 15, 8 p.m.

The sensational reports about Fisher are entirely unfounded. Official information from General Whiting of later hour, reports enemy attack unsuccessful. Fresh troops are being sent to him, and we are confident they will hold it.

***

It should be remembered that Bragg was not present at Fort Fisher and ignored Fort Fisher’s repeated calls for reinforcement. Where this information came from, and whether Bragg simply made it up, is unknown.  Certainly, Bragg had refused to send fresh troops. Bragg’s military career and reputation, already badly dented, is ruined by the debacle. General Joseph Johnston wrote:

I know Mr. Davis thinks he can do a great many things other men would hesitate to attempt. For instance, he tried to do what God failed to do. He tried to make a soldier of Braxton Bragg . . ."

 

Bragg’s negative reputation dated back to before the Civil War, when he supposedly requisitioned powder and shell (in his capacity as a Battery Commander), passed the paperwork on (in his capacity as the Company Clerk), and then denied the requisition (in his capacity as the Company Supply Officer); having denied his own request he (as Battery Commander) then filed an appeal (as Company Clerk) against himself (as Supply Officer) to a superior officer who approved it with much head-shaking and many harsh words for Bragg. Although the story is bizarre (and probably apocryphal) it reflects the low opinion which most fellow officers held of the inflexible Bragg. Jefferson Davis, however, was one of Bragg’s few friends, and stood by him no matter what, and too often blindly.

January 17, 1865---"I Never Saw A More Confident Army"

JANUARY 17, 1865:           

Having rested and resupplied his army, General William Tecumseh Sherman U.S.A. is prepared to leave Savannah. In the three weeks he has spent there he has done much to encourage the revival of Unionism in the city, which has begun to regain its prewar importance as a port and a commercial center.  Although Ulysses S. Grant had asked Sherman to leave Savannah by sea and make landfall on the Virginia Capes as part of Grant’s grand strategy to choke off Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia in an (hopefully) more successful replay of the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Sherman has demurred with a plan of his own --- another March, this time to spread destruction across the heart of South Carolina. Sherman’s plan is to march his army into North Carolina in order to lock down the Confederate forces there. Grant takes some persuading, but impressed with the psychological toll the March to The Sea has exacted on the Confederacy, he finally agrees.

A winter campaign through the heart of the Carolinas --- with their many broad rivers, their low-lying swamplands and bogs, their Jurassic-reminiscent woodlands, and their rolling landforms --- will be far harder than the fairly straightforward autumn hike across Georgia’s open fields that made up the March To The Sea. Then too, the winter season will be farther advanced, and the climate more northerly than Georgia’s, especially as Sherman moves due north. 

Many of Sherman’s subordinates are concerned that there will be no forage for the horses and that the fall harvest that sustained them in Georgia will have been consumed in the Carolinas. And their concerns seem to be confirmed when torrential rains begin to fall this day.  The deluge that follows is the worst in twenty years. For the next ten days it will rain unceasingly, bringing the rivers to flood, washing out the bottomlands, and turning every dale and hollow into a lake. Although the storms do nothing to deter Sherman from marching, the ten-day delay encourages him to have his combat engineers devise all types of ingenious devices to speed the army along in hostile territory under hostile skies. Sherman intends to move fast and to leave nothing --- nothing --- in his wake.  

“[I] never saw a more confident army . . . The soldiers think I know everything and that they can do anything," Sherman writes, and General Joseph E. Johnston C.S.A. later concurs. Upon hearing that Sherman's men were advancing on corduroy roads through the Salkehatchie Swamps at a rate of a dozen miles per day, Johnston "made up his mind that there had been no such army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.”

January 16, 1865---Overthrowing The Union: Sabotage at Fort Fisher?

JANUARY 16, 1865:          

General William Tecumseh Sherman issues General Order Number 15, specifying that all Freedmen’s families be given “Forty Acres and a Mule.”

Celebrations over the fall of Fort Fisher are dampened when news is heard of the disastrous explosion of the fort’s magazine. At first blamed on Confederate saboteurs, the explosion is later put down to a tragic accident. More than two hundred men of both sides are killed in the blast. Many of them are never identified.

The fact that the explosion is immediately blamed on sabotage is indicative of the deterioration of the Confederate war effort. No longer able to mount effective battlefield challenges, the Confederacy is increasingly embracing guerrilla warfare and terror tactics as alternative means of inflicting damage on the Union.

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).  

    

January 14, 1865---The Second Battle of Fort Fisher (Day Two)

JANUARY 14, 1865:           

The Assault on Fort Fisher (Day Two):   

As Confederate troops advance in a counterattack, 9,000 Union infantry take and hold the south end of  Confederate (formerly and later Federal) Point at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. The Confederates, outnumbered, call off their assault.  The 800 men inside the fort hold out, though many are being driven mad by the relentless bombardment. The sand walls of the fort are beginning to give way. By the end of the battle, 1.6 million tons of Union ordnance will be fired at the fort.

January 13, 1865---The Second Battle of Fort Fisher (Day One)

JANUARY 13, 1865:          

The Assault on Fort Fisher (Day One):     

The largest amphibious assault in history (to that time) is launched against Fort Fisher, outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. The fort, which was unsuccessfully assaulted by troops and ships under General Benjamin “Beast” Butler U.S.A. in December, is today hit by a flotilla of 60 warships and 10,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines. On this day, under cover of a brutal bombardment of 100 shells per minute and against heavy resistance, 2,000 U.S. Marines establish a beachhead under the seawall of the fort.