Fort Fisher.
On the morning of the 8th of May we came in sight of a long, low line of
sand banks, dotted with curious hillocks, between which the black
muzzles of heavy guns could be made out, and fringed with a perfect
naval _chevaux-de-frise_ of wrecked blockade runners, whose broken hulls
and protruding machinery gave an ill-omened look to the whole coast. As
we were closely studying the bleak aspect of this entrance to the great
smuggling _entrepôt_ of the Southern Confederacy, the glasses began to
reveal an unexpected activity along the line of the guns, which our
signal shot for a pilot by no means diminished. Our ship drew too much
water to cross the bar, excepting at high tide, and we were,
consequently, compelled to go over in the Captain’s gig to the pilot
boat—a proceeding that the rough sea made very difficult and even
dangerous. Leaving those who could not venture the transhipment, to roll
wearily among the breakers till evening, we headed straight through the
narrow and difficult channel for Fort Fisher, and learned that we had
been mistaken for the Rebel pirate “Stonewall,” and that the guns had
been shotted ready to open fire the moment we should show signs of a
disposition to run in.[5]
Ah! that weary day at Fort Fisher! To see a fort is naturally supposed
to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher
means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing
of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling
over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have
destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of
solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of
the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort
Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort.
We began by climbing Battery Buchanan, near the landing, and inside the
main line of works. Trenches, embrasures, casemate and barbette guns,
bomb-proofs, gabions, riflemen’s pits, all in sand that no rifle
projectiles could breach, and bombardment could only render stronger,
seemed to assure absolute impregnability to this work alone, except
against regular siege operations. Yet it was but protection for one
flank of the long line before which Weitzel turned back, and which no
soldiers but ours would ever have stormed. To this battery (so called,
although a perfect and very strong fort in itself) the Rebels made their
last retreat, after that long, hand-to-hand fight through the sea front
of the fort, which stretched far into the night, and seemed doubtful to
the last. But Battery Buchanan, though impregnable, as a flank to the
sea line, is itself commanded by the last work of that sea line; and so
when the Mound Battery fell into our hands, its guns had only to be
turned, and Buchanan fell almost without a struggle.
The Mound Battery is a vast heap of sand, uplifting its guns and
embrazures from a flat and desert beach against the sky, and commanding
perfectly the whole northern entrance to the river. It contained one of
the finest specimens of heavy ordnance ever seen in this country, the
famous Armstrong rifle, presented by British sympathizers to the
Confederacy.
Imagine a long line of batteries, connected by traverses in the sand,
separated by huge hillocks of sand, and fronted by deep trenches in the
sand, stretching away almost interminably along the coast toward the
North, and ending in another strong work, which was supposed to protect
that flank as perfectly as Buchanan did the other; put in magazines and
bomb-proofs, at convenient points, and a very heavy armament; then
conceive muzzles of the guns knocked off, guns dismounted, carriages
shattered, the parapets plowed with shells, a great crater in the sand
where a magazine had exploded, all shape and symmetry battered out of
the works, and only their rude strength remaining; and you have Fort
Fisher.
The ground was covered with showers of musket balls. Behind every
traverse could be found little heaps of English-made cartridges, which
the Rebel sharpshooters had laid out for the convenience of rapid
firing, as they defended line after line of the successive batteries,
along which they were driven. Fragments of shells lay everywhere over
the works. Behind them were great heaps of shells, bayonets, broken
muskets, and other fragments of iron, which were being dug out and
collected to be sold for old iron. Hundreds on hundreds of acres were
under negro cultivation, producing this valuable crop.
No man, I think, will ride along the coast line, which, by an
inconceivable amount of labor, has been converted into one immense fort,
without sympathizing with the officers who refused to assault it, and
marveling at the seeming recklessness which success converted into the
splendid audacity of the final attack.[6]
The pilot boat was again placed at the disposal of our party, after some
hours spent at Fort Fisher, and we ran over to Fort Caswell, one of the
main defenses of the other entrance. It was originally a regularly-built
brick fortification, with casemate and barbette guns, salients, ditch
and interior castle, pierced with loopholes, for a last defense with
musketry. Like Fort Macon, at Beaufort (and like Sumter), this has been
converted into an infinitely stronger work, by having earthen
fortifications thrown up outside and against it. The Rebels blew it up
after the surrender of Fort Fisher, and we shall probably be making
appropriations, every Congress, for the next dozen years to rebuild it.
The labor here, as well as the vast amount involved in the construction
of Fort Fisher, was all performed by slaves, impressed from time to time
by the Rebel authorities. Both works were completed—Wilmington had grown
rich on the profits of blockade-running; Nassau had risen to first-class
commercial importance, and the beach under these guns was strewn with
the wrecks, which spoke more loudly than could any balance sheet, of the
profits of a business that could afford such losses—before our Congress
had done disputing whether the Constitution, and a due regard for the
rights of our Southern brethren, would permit us to use negroes as
teamsters!
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Footnote 5:
The Stonewall seems indeed to have produced about this time an
excitement along the whole coast, amounting, in some places, to panic.
The naval officer at Key West, for example, issued orders to
extinguish the lights in the light-houses along the coast, lest the
Stonewall should run into some of the harbors and destroy the
shipping.
Footnote 6:
The joint Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War, after
examining Generals Grant, Butler, Weitzel and Terry, and Admiral
Porter, as well as the Rebel commander of the Fort, and after a
careful inspection of the fortifications themselves, have, in a report
published since the above was written, reached substantially the same
conclusions. They attach no blame to any one for the failure to
attack, in the first movement upon the Fort.