- 15 Jan 2023 13:32
#15262130
January 15, Sunday
General Bragg assures General Lee that the Federals’ assault on Fort Fisher is bound to fail because the fort hasn’t been surrounded—and cannot be unless or until the Federal fleet forces its way into the Cape Fear River.
At Fort Fisher, Admiral Porter assembles a volunteer force and instructs them to “board the fort on the run in a seaman-like way.” To the Navy Department and some of his subordinate officers, the admiral confidently suggests that if the Army fails again, he will take Fort Fisher with his own bluejackets. The sailors and Marines manage to land and dig protective rifle pits without being observed from the fort, most of whose defenders are in the bombproofs seeking shelter from the fleet’s relentless cannonading. The Navy men under Commander Breese are to charge when all the guns on the ships suddenly fall silent at 2 pm. Once the attacking columns have scaled the parapet, Porter’s guns will commence firing again, but only on the sea face, where no Federal troops will be engaged. The sailors wait anxiously for the silence that will be their attack signal. But the time comes, and the ships are still firing. Breese is hard put to keep his men in order. The Marines, who are supposed to bring up the rear, providing backup fire with their muskets, suddenly pull back toward the beach; their trenches are needed by Ames’s infantry, and they are trying to reestablish themselves in a safe shelf on the oceanfront. But some of the sailors, seeing the Marines pass to their rear, assume that a retreat has begun and trot after them.
At 2:30 pm, the silence that signals the attack finally settles over the fleet. “Charge! Charge!” shouts an officer onshore. Sailors and Marines rush forward, yelling and cheering—not in three waves according to plan, but in a jumbled mass to which no orders can be passed. By this time, a Confederate sentinel has spotted the hectic assault and spreads the alarm. Immediately, Confederate infantrymen rush to the parapet, urged on by General Whiting. He stands up on the parapet clapping his hands, singing out to his men to kill the “Yankee sons of bitches.” To support the guns that haven’t been dismounted from the fort’s land face, Colonel Lamb brings up all the small artillery that can be moved, and soon the bluejackets are being showered with grapeshot and canister. The sailors are packed like sheep in a pen, while the Confederates are crowding the ramparts not forty yards away and shooting into them as fast as they can fire. The Navy men, totally untrained for fighting on land, turn and flee, leaving 300 of their comrades dead or wounded on the beach; some of the wounded will drown in the incoming tide.
A cry of triumph goes up from the defenders. But suddenly Lamb catches sight of three Union flags fluttering from the fort’s western salient. He had thought the invaders repelled, but a larger and better-prepared force—General Ames’s division—has gained a footing at the other end of the land face. Ames and his troops have had their troubles. While they were waiting on a road by the Cape Fear River for the attacks to begin, the Confederate gunboat Chickamauga spotted them from the river and fired into their ranks. The soldiers were forced to take cover among the scrub trees and sand hills. Once they formed up again, they were late for their scheduled assault on the fort; they attacked after the Navy men did. As Admiral Porter will be quick to point out afterward, these mischances may have been fortunate, for the Confederates have been distracted from the main attack and persuaded to concentrate their artillery in the east angle. In response, Ames’s three brigades swept one after the other toward the less heavily fortified western salient. Soon they merge chaotically into a cheering mass crowned with glistening bayonets. They burst through the palisade in the teeth of cannon fire, scale the parapet, and fight the Confederates in vicious hand-to-hand battles from one gun emplacement to the next.
The conquest of the three westernmost traverses and the guns around them cost the Federals dearly. A round of canister cuts down the entire color guard of a Pennsylvania regiment. All three brigade commanders—Colonels Newton M. Curtis, Galusha Pennypacker, and Louis Bell—are severely wounded, Bell mortally. (Both Curtis and Pennypacker will be appointed brigadier generals for their actions today, making the 20-year-old Pennypacker the youngest general in the Federal army.) The fighting then shifts eastward to the fourth traverse, where Colonel John W. Moore is killed as he leads his Pennsylvania regiment forward waving the regimental flag. At the fifth traverse, Lieutenant Colonel Jonas Lyman of the same regiment kills a Confederate in hand-to-hand combat, only to be shot dead a moment later. The Confederates also lose some prominent officers in the struggle. General Whiting, among the first to reach the contested western salient, is confronted by a score of Federals demanding his surrender; he refuses, and they shoot him down. Colonel Lamb, who arrives on the scene soon after with the main body of defenders, fights long and hard to stem the Federal tide. He even rounds up wounded men from the fort’s improvised hospital and leads them back into the fight. But he too falls, severely wounded in the hip, as he leads a final desperate charge.
During this struggle for the northern wall of the fort, Admiral Porter’s gunners, under his personal direction, perform a feat that compensates in some degree for the ill-conceived land attack by his sailors. With astonishing precision, the rifled pivot guns of the New Ironsides and several smaller vessels clear the enemy out of each successive gun platform just ahead of the advancing Federal troops. The gunners are rarely off target, and only a handful of Federal troops are killed or wounded by stray shots. Such sharpshooter accuracy helps the Army take emplacement after emplacement with fewer casualties than they have reason to expect. Once the land face is in Federal hands, the rest of the stronghold is doomed to fall. Major James Reilly, commander of a North Carolina regiment and next in command to Colonel Lamb, hopes to hold out in Battery Buchanan to the south, but when he finds this last bastion abandoned by its defenders and the guns spiked he knows the fight is over. At 10 pm Reilly strides onto the beach in front of the fort, holding a white flag. As a Federal officer approaches, the major says curtly, “We surrender.”
This evening, Porter’s ships stage a victory celebration: The coast is lit by “battle lanterns, calcium lights, magnificent rockets, blue lights and every description of fireworks.” There is revelry, too, among the victors in the fort, though many are aghast at the human wreckage of the battle. The battle, one of the war’s fiercest fights, has cost the Federal Army and Navy 266 killed, 1,018 wounded, and 57 missing for 1,341 casualties. The Confederates have lost about 500 killed or wounded, and well over 1,000 of Fort Fisher’s defenders have been taken prisoner.
To the north, the remainder of the Federal army, 4,700 strong, man the defensive works against R.F. Hoke’s men of Bragg’s command, 6,000 strong, but are never seriously attacked. The Southern officers at the fort will violently assail Bragg for failing to relieve the pressure. Bragg will claim the defensive line was too strong. The result, though belated, is significant: Wilmington is cut off as a blockade-running port, so even though the city itself remains in Confederate hands it is now of little importance. The coastal war is over. From Virginia down to Florida and westward along the Gulf to the Mississippi, not a single important port remains open to sustain the faltering Confederate cause.
Up to now, blockade runners have continued to scurry in and out of Southern ports, evading and outwitting the Union squadrons—even this late, two out of every three blockade-running attempts along the entire Confederate coast were successful. Wilmington alone exported $65 million (2020 ~$1.071 billion) worth of cotton over the last year. In exchange for Southern cotton, the Confederacy received from blockade runners a continuous if inadequate supply of rifles, artillery pieces, and munitions, to say nothing of perfume, satins, and corset stays. All told, about 8,500 successful trips were made through the Federal blockade, whereas approximately 1,500 blockade-running vessels were captured or destroyed. Obviously the United States Navy has never come close to its objective of making the blockade 100 percent effective, and up to the closing months of the war a runner stood at least a 50-50 chance of slipping through the Union cordon. For all that, the impact of the blockade on the course of the war has been enormous. It has greatly constricted the South’s commerce, permitting her to export only small quantities of cotton and forcing her to buy supplies dear. This has drained the Confederacy of its limited supplies of specie, inaugurating spectacular inflation at home and undermining its credit overseas. And once the Confederacy lifted its voluntary and ill-advised embargo of cotton, it discovered that the blockade severely limited exports of this precious commodity. In dramatic contrast to the 10 million bales that were shipped in the last three antebellum years, only one million bales have shipped in the last years of the war. All told, the Federal blockade has reduced the South’s foreign trade by more than two thirds, just at the time when a vast increase in this exchange was needed to carry on the war effort. In short it has been succor only, not sustenance, that has filtered through the blockade to the beleaguered Confederacy. And even though the war will be decided on the battlefield, not on the blockade line, it surely would have been a different war had the US Navy not stood silent guard along the Southern coast and the crushing results of their assaults on the Confederates’ coastal strongholds.
Federal monitors at Charleston, South Carolina, have been demonstrating nightly near the forts at the entrance of the harbor. The Confederates therefore have placed torpedoes somewhat farther out. USS monitor Patapsco, dragging for torpedoes, strikes one herself. In some fifteen seconds the ironclad goes down with the loss of 62 men. A number on deck do escape.
Grant is making massive preparations to ensure the success of Sherman’s march into the Carolinas. A division from XIX Corps is sent by sea to garrison Savannah, so that Sherman can take all of his veterans with him. Meanwhile, at Clifton, Tennessee, Schofield’s XXIII Corps is detached from the Army of the Cumberland—which has just administered a smashing defeat at Nashville to General Hood and the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Schofield’s new assignment is to occupy the North Carolina port of Wilmington, then move inland to Goldsborough, which is roughly halfway between Savannah and Richmond. After repairing the railroad to Goldsborough and establishing a supply base there for Federal forces, he and his more than 20,000 men are to join Sherman for the push through North Carolina and into Virginia.
There is a skirmish in Madison County, Arkansas. Federal expeditions of several days each move from New Orleans to Mandeville, Louisiana, and from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Through the 21st a Union scout operates from Fort Larned to Pawnee Fork, Walnut Creek, and Smoky Hill River, Kansas.
Edward Everett, clergyman, teacher, congressman, writer, and famous orator who spoke at Gettysburg with President Lincoln, and who was the 1860 vice-presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union party, dies at 71 in Boston.
President Lincoln writes Major General Grenville M. Dodge in St. Louis of his concern over “so much irregular violence in Northern Missouri as to be driving away the people and almost depopulating it.” The President tells Dodge to appeal to the people to “let one another alone.”
In Richmond, President Davis writes General Hardee in South Carolina, “I hope you will be able to check the advance of the enemy,” and adds that he is seeking all possible reinforcements to oppose Sherman. He writes the intransigent Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia asking for troops.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke