Fort Fisher was a Civil War engagement fought in North Carolina, 1864. It was a Confederate victory.
Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler was relieved of command of the Army of the James and assigned to lead an amphibious expedition against Fort Fisher, which protected Wilmington, the South's last open seaport on the Atlantic coast. Learning that large numbers of Union troops had embarked from Hampton Roads on December 13, Lee dispatched Hoke's Division to meet the expected attack on Fort Fisher. On December 24, the Union fleet under Rear Adm. David D. Porter arrived to begin shelling the fort. An infantry division disembarked from transports to test the fort's defenses. The Federal assault on the fort had already begun when Hoke approached, discouraging further Union attempts. Butler called off the expedition on December 27 and returned to Fort Monroe.
During the American Civil War, Confederate forces relied on Fort Fisher to shield Wilmington, North Carolina's crucial commercial shipping lanes, a defense that held firm from 1861 until Union troops finally seized the stronghold in 1865. Sitting along one of the two points where the Cape Fear River meets the Atlantic Ocean, the fort occupied ground once called Federal Point or Confederate Point, an area now known as Pleasure Island. So formidable were its defenses that people nicknamed it the Southern Gibraltar, and it also carried the moniker "Malakoff Tower of the South". Among all engagements fought within North Carolina during the war, the clash at Fort Fisher stood out as the one with the greatest bearing on the conflict's outcome.
Situated some 21 miles (34 km) inland from where the Cape Fear River empties into the Atlantic, Wilmington served the Confederacy as one of its most vital gateways for incoming supplies. Through its harbor flowed cotton and tobacco bound outward, exchanged for munitions, clothing, and food brought in from abroad. This commerce sustained not only the Confederate states broadly but also fed Lee's army operating in Virginia.
The lifeblood of this trade came from British blockade runners, vessels that relied heavily on steam power to slip past the Union's naval cordon around southern ports. The bulk of these ships originated from British holdings such as Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Nova Scotia.
Wilmington's strategic weight grew even further once Norfolk, Virginia fell in May 1862, leaving it as the Confederacy's principal Atlantic seaport. Thanks to Fort Fisher, the city boasted the strongest fortifications anywhere in the Confederacy, a fact that allowed it to hold out against Union pressure for much of the conflict.
Downstream from the city, across the final 20 miles (32 km) of the Cape Fear River, a scattering of Confederate forts and gun batteries watched over the constant traffic of vessels moving to and from the sea. To make passage even harder for enemy ships, the channel itself had been deliberately choked with debris and underwater mines, referred to at the time as torpedoes. Confederate pilots had to steer each vessel carefully through this obstacle course.
Where the Cape Fear met the ocean, roughly half a dozen Confederate strongpoints ringed the area. There, the river split into two shallow inlets divided by Smith Island, known today as Bald Head Island. This dual outlet proved enormously useful to the Confederates: with local guidance, blockade runners could dodge Union patrol vessels simply by darting unpredictably from one inlet to the other.
Early in the conflict, Confederate forces had already secured Federal Point, a peninsula sitting in a commanding position along the New Inlet branch of the Cape Fear.
Artillery first appeared at this site in the spring of 1861, positioned a mile from New Inlet, with Maj. Charles Pattison Bolles overseeing construction. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes headed the regional command, working alongside Maj. William H. C. Whiting, Bolles' brother-in-law, who served as chief inspector for North Carolina's coastal defenses.
When Bolles moved on to Oak Island, Capt. William Lord deRosset stepped into his role. deRosset brought the Wilmington Light Infantry to this still-rudimentary gun emplacement and gave it the name "Bolles Battery." A rotating cast of temporary officers led the battery afterward. North of this position, troops also constructed a training ground called Camp Wyatt.
By the summer of 1861, Colonel Seawell L. Fremont, of the 1st NC Volunteer Artillery and Engineers, took command and expanded the defenses along the peninsula with four new batteries: Meade, Zeke's Island, Anderson, and Gatlin. Around September the site received its official name, Fort Fisher, honoring Col. Charles F. Fisher of the 6th NC Infantry, killed in action at the First Battle of Manassas.
Few civilians lived on the peninsula beyond a handful of small farming families, and pine forest covered much of the surrounding land. Confederate lookouts would scale these tall pines using long ladders to catch sight of approaching blockade runners, then hurry down to meet the vessels and steer them safely past the outer defenses toward Wilmington.
Heavier guns shipped in from Charleston allowed further strengthening of the fort. With this added firepower, Confederate forces could push Union blockading ships far enough offshore that they could no longer bombard the coastline.
Col. William Lamb took charge of Fort Fisher in July 1862 and quickly voiced frustration over its unfinished, primitive condition. When Norfolk fell, the fort gained new strategic weight, as protecting Wilmington's commerce became essential. Workers raised earthen mounds to form the Land Face, running from Shepherd Battery to the shoreline, while the Sea Face followed later as an extension of that same line, eventually reaching what would become Mound Battery. Where the two faces met stood the Northeast Bastion, rising 30 feet high. Mound Battery, the fort's most vital structure, went up during the spring of 1863 through the labor of several hundred workers and the help of a small locomotive that dumped soil onto the growing pile. Its summit held a beacon light used to guide blockade runners.
Constructed largely from packed earth, the fort could absorb heavy bombardment with remarkable resilience, a design philosophy borrowed from the Malakoff Tower built at Sevastopol during the Crimean War.
Construction ultimately depended on more than a thousand laborers, a mix of Confederate soldiers and enslaved people. Plantations in the area supplied over 500 enslaved black workers for the project, and some Native Americans, primarily Lumbee, were also forced into service on the fortifications.
These efforts made Fort Fisher the largest fort in Confederate hands. President Jefferson Davis toured the site in November 1863. By 1864 the entire 36th North Carolina regiment was garrisoned within its walls, and that October saw the construction of Battery Buchanan.
Fort Fisher's imposing bulk generally kept Union warships at bay, since the coastal artillery forced them to keep well away from the shore.
The land face stretched 1,800 feet (550 m) across more than fifteen mounds, holding twenty-five guns positioned 32 feet (10 m) above sea level. An underground network linked the mounds together, built so that artillery fire could not reach it, and this subterranean space doubled as an arsenal. A stake fence nine feet (2.7 m) high stood in front of the walls.
Facing the water, the defense ran for a mile (1.6 km) and mounted 22 guns set 12 feet (3.7 m) above sea level, anchored by two large batteries at either end. Two smaller mounds held additional pieces, one serving as a telegraph office and the other as a hospital built to withstand bombardment.
At the very tip of Confederate Point, looking out over Cape Fear's New Inlet, stood Battery Buchanan, a compact yet formidable work raised in 1864 and named after Admiral Franklin Buchanan of the Confederate Navy.
The sea face bristled with numerous 8 inch columbiad cannon, several 10 inch columbiads, and a combination of rifled 32-pounders and Brooke Rifles. The Northeast Bastion carried an 8 inch Blakeley Rifle, while a 150-pound Armstrong Gun, notable for its innovative design, sat along the seaward wall. Every cannon rested within its own barbette, and guns lined both faces of Shepherd Battery and Mound Battery. On the land side, Shepherd Battery held 4.5 inch Parrott Rifles, and the land face also carried two 24-pound Coehorn Mortars along with a single 10 inch seacoast mortar. Near the entrance stood a 12-pound Napoleon M1857 alongside a 3 inch Parrott Rifle, while two 12-pounders guarded the middle sally port along the land face.
The capture of Fort Fisher severed the trading route to Wilmington and choked off the supply line that sustained Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Once Fort Anderson on the Cape Fear River also fell, Union forces settled into permanent control of Wilmington on February 22, 1865.
Just after sunrise on January 16, 1865, a catastrophic explosion tore through Fort Fisher's main magazine, killing at least 200 men from both armies. This disaster ignited fierce controversy, with the victorious Federals quick to point fingers at Confederate treachery. Yet the truth was messier: the night before had seen Union soldiers celebrating with abandon, many of them drunk, and the blast happened even though sentries had been stationed at the fort's magazines.
A formal Court of Inquiry laid out its conclusions as follows:
FINDINGS.
After careful review of the testimony, the court identified these central facts:
As soon as the fort was taken, General Ames directed Lieut. Samuel M. Zent of the Thirteenth Indiana Volunteers, acting through Capt. George W. Huckins of the Fourth New Hampshire Volunteers, assistant adjutant-general for the Third Brigade, Second Division, to station guards at every magazine and bombproof.
Zent began his work at the fort's northwest corner near the river, working his way along the traverses and posting men at thirty-one separate entrances beneath them. However, the main magazine, positioned behind these traverses, went unnoticed in this sweep and was left without any guard, from his unit or any other.
Meanwhile, soldiers, sailors, and marines wandered the fort carrying lights, some entering bombproofs while intoxicated and firing weapons carelessly.
Witnesses reported seeing individuals with lights rummaging through the main magazine for plunder roughly ten to fifteen minutes before it exploded. The court dismissed as unimportant a claim that a magnetic wire linked this fort to another position across the Cape Fear River.
OPINION.
In the court's judgment, the explosion resulted from carelessness by parties who could not be identified. With that, the court adjourned sine die.
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