Fort Macon was a Civil War engagement fought in North Carolina, 1862. It was a Union victory.
In late March, Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside's army advanced on Fort Macon, a third system casemated masonry fort that commanded the channel to Beaufort, 35 miles southeast of New Berne. The Union force invested the fort with siege works and, on April 26, opened an accurate fire on the fort, which soon breached the masonry walls. Within a few hours the fort's scarp began to collapse, and the Confederates hoisted a white flag. This action demonstrated the inadequacy of masonry forts against large-bore, rifled artillery.
Fort Macon endured a month-long siege beginning March 23 and ending April 26, 1862, in the Outer Banks region of Carteret County, North Carolina. This engagement formed one piece of General Ambrose E. Burnside's larger North Carolina Expedition, launched by the Union Army during the American Civil War.
As March drew to a close in 1862, Burnside, now a Major General, moved his troops toward Fort Macon, a masonry structure built with casemates that guarded the water route into Beaufort, situated some 35 miles (56 km) to the southeast of New Bern. Union forces surrounded the fort using siege works, and by April 25 they had begun firing on it with deadly precision, quickly tearing through its stone walls. The fort's outer wall started giving way within hours of this bombardment, and as afternoon faded, Confederate Colonel Moses J. White gave the command to hoist a white flag in surrender. Burnside's conditions for the surrender were then agreed upon, allowing Federal soldiers to formally occupy the fort when morning arrived.
Constructed in the years after the War of 1812, Fort Macon belonged to the group of Third System fortifications erected to guard the coastline of the young nation. Builders placed it at the eastern tip of Bogue Banks along North Carolina's Outer Banks, positioning it to guard the channel leading into Beaufort and Morehead City. Construction started in 1826, and the post finally stood ready for its first troops in 1834. Since planners designed it to withstand assault from warships, masonry formed its structure, a reasonable choice given that cannon fired from a pitching deck lacked the precision needed to shatter brick and stone at that time. Rifled artillery would eventually render such walls vulnerable, yet the fort received no upgrades to counter this threat, leaving it essentially a relic by the time war broke out decades later.
Enthusiasm for maintaining the installation faded quickly after its completion. Wood components rotted away, metal fittings rusted through, and the carriages holding its guns fell into disrepair. Troop numbers dwindled steadily as well, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, responsibility for the entire post rested with a lone sergeant. Captain Josiah Solomon Pender led North Carolina troops in seizing the fort on April 14, an action that occurred even before the state formally left the Union. At that moment only four cannon stood mounted within its walls. Officers overseeing the region quickly moved to bolster its firepower, eventually installing fifty six pieces altogether: five 8-inch columbiads, two of the 10-inch variety, nineteen 24-pounders, thirty two 32-pounders, and half a dozen field guns. Even so, supplies of ammunition would last only three days of sustained fighting.
By the time the siege commenced, roughly 430 officers and enlisted men made up the garrison, under the command of Colonel Moses J. White. Illness thinned these ranks by close to a third, though remarkably only a single soldier succumbed despite the substandard food and harsh conditions everyone endured. Spirits among the troops sagged badly overall, since separation from their loved ones weighed heavily on them, and White himself found little favor either with his own soldiers or with the residents of Beaufort. A handful of men chose to slip away from their posts before the fighting ended.
When the assault finally arrived, the garrison faced it while saddled with an antiquated structure, insufficient weaponry, thin supply lines, and a design suited to a style of warfare that no longer matched what confronted them. Taken together, these shortcomings account fully for how swiftly the fort gave way once the enemy struck.
Once Federal troops secured Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks, Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside conceived a scheme for enlarging Union authority over the eastern portion of North Carolina through combined land and sea operations. McClellan, the General-in-Chief, along with the War Department, signed off on this proposal. Burnside received permission to assemble and organize a new division called the Coast Division, tasked with cooperating alongside the Navy's North Atlantic Blockading Squadron in seizing command of the sounds along the North Carolina coastline together with the towns bordering them. Beginning its movement in January 1862, this campaign, which would eventually bear Burnside's name, achieved its opening triumph at Roanoke Island during the first days of February. Additional successes followed at Elizabeth City and then at New Bern, sometimes rendered "New Berne" in period spelling. As a consequence of these engagements, Confederate soldiers retreated well inland, pushed back nearly to Kinston, with one notable exception: the defenders holding Fort Macon refused to yield.
Because Confederate control of Fort Macon blocked Union access to the harbors at Beaufort and Morehead City, Burnside, who had just risen to the rank of major general, wasted no time after seizing New Bern on March 14. He instructed Brigadier General John G. Parke, leading the Third Brigade, to subdue the fortification. Parke's campaign unfolded through a sequence of captures along the inner coastline, starting with Carolina City on the 21st of March, continuing through Morehead City the following day, then Newport on March 23, and concluding at Beaufort on March 25. These maneuvers cut off any possibility of contact between the fort's garrison and other Confederate units. Additionally, Parke faced the task of rebuilding a railroad bridge near Newport that retreating Confederate forces had destroyed after abandoning New Bern, a repair essential for hauling his siege guns into position.
On March 23, General Parke dispatched a communication from his headquarters at Carolina City, calling upon Colonel White to surrender the fort and pledging
By the grim measure that Civil War fighting would soon establish, this engagement cost remarkably little blood. Union losses amounted to a single soldier killed, with two more soldiers and one sailor wounded. Confederate casualties ran somewhat higher: seven killed outright, two who later succumbed to their wounds, and sixteen wounded in total.
Despite the cheap victory this gave the Burnside Expedition in North Carolina, commanders failed to press the advantage. Wilmington sat exposed and seemingly ripe for capture, yet no assault came until the war's closing days. Burnside himself left the region soon after Fort Macon fell, called away to support General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign in Virginia. With his departure came a lull in major fighting, and North Carolina slipped into the role of a secondary theater for the remainder of the conflict.
Decades later, in 1906, the flag was formally returned to the State of North Carolina during a ceremony held in the Senate Chamber, with veterans of the siege among those present. Today the ground where the battle unfolded is preserved as Fort Macon State Park.
This page covers Fort Macon. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
The account on this page is written by Aubrey Research from cited sources. Wikipedia is cited as a reference; its text is not reproduced.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.