On January 15, 1865, Union forces launched one of the most dramatic assaults of the American Civil War, storming Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina. The battle marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy’s last open Atlantic port, a fortress so imposing it was called the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy. ” Yet the fort’s fall was anything but inevitable, and its capture was preceded by political infighting, personal grudges, and a stunning military failure just weeks earlier. The Union’s first attempt to take Fort Fisher came in December 1864, when a massive fleet under Rear Admiral David Porter bombarded the fort with over 20,000 shells, the heaviest naval bombardment of the war.
Despite the barrage, the fort remained defiant. The earthen walls absorbed the punishment, and a planned assault by General Benjamin Butler’s troops never materialized. Butler, who had been tasked with landing forces, withdrew after deciding the fort could not be taken. Porter was furious, and in a written complaint to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, he wrote, “If this temporary failure succeeds in sending General Butler into private life, it is not to be regretted.
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President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant agreed. Butler was removed from command, and a second, better-planned expedition was organized. On January 8, 1865, between 8,000 and 9,000 federal troops, many of them veterans of the first attempt, left Bermuda Hundred on the James River and headed back toward Fort Fisher. This time, the assault was carefully coordinated by Porter and the new land commander, General Alfred Terry.
The geography of the area made the task difficult. Smith Island split the Cape Fear River into two channels, and the Frying Pan Shoals extended ten miles into the Atlantic. This meant the Union needed at least 50 ships, divided into two separate blockade squadrons, to effectively seal the port. Fort Fisher itself was a massive earthen work bristling with heavy guns, and a second smaller bastion, Battery Buchanan, guarded the tip of Confederate Point.
The fort’s fall would leave nearby forts like Caswell, Johnson, and Anderson vulnerable, potentially sealing Wilmington’s fate. Confederate command was in disarray. General Braxton Bragg, a North Carolina native, was sent to take command of the defense, superseding the fort’s hero, Colonel William Lamb. Bragg’s leadership was hesitant and confusing.
He even ordered troops away from Fort Fisher to participate in a parade in Wilmington, a decision that left the fort dangerously undermanned when the Union attack began. Inside the fort, about 1,500 men faced roughly 9,000 attackers. As one Union officer later described the chaos, “They were packed like sheep in a pen, while the enemy was crowding the ramparts not 40 yards away and shooting into them as fast as they could fire. ”
The assault was led by Colonel Newton Martin Curtis’s first brigade, which struck the weakest point of the fort.
With two more brigades behind, the Federals swarmed over the walls. Colonel Lamb, though wounded, returned to the fight, leading his men from an improvised hospital inside the fort. Battery Buchanan opened fire northward, hitting both Union attackers and its own men in the confusion. The scene inside the fort was horrific.
One witness wrote, “If hell is what it is said to be, then the interior of Fort Fisher is a fair comparison. Others whose mortal career is over, still grasping the weapon they used to so good an effect in life. ”
The battle was the largest amphibious assault in U. S.
history up to that time, only surpassed later by D-Day. Union losses included 955 Army casualties and 383 Navy men and Marines killed or wounded. The Confederates suffered far worse, with many captured or killed. On January 17, two days after Fisher’s fall, Fort Caswell was blown up by its own garrison to prevent capture.
Despite the victory, the aftermath was complicated. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens had been sent to discuss peace terms, but he had little to offer and the negotiations went nowhere. Unlike the destruction seen in other Southern cities like Columbia and Atlanta, Wilmington was largely spared from burning. But the human cost was lasting.
Colonel Lamb, a young man who had survived 13 battle wounds during the war, three of them life-threatening, took ten months to heal from his Fort Fisher wound. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. After the war, Lamb returned to Norfolk with his family, serving as mayor for three terms like his father had before him. He lost his wife Daisy in 1892 and never remarried, instead throwing himself deeper into public service.
Most histories of the war ignored him, and Fort Fisher itself fell into ruin, washed away by the sea. By the time a handful of veterans testified before the House Committee on Military Affairs on January 16, 1909, under a snowstorm in Washington, much of the fort was already gone. Still, the memory of Fort Fisher endured. For the Union, it was a hard-won victory that helped close the Confederacy’s last supply line.
For the Confederates, it was a desperate stand against overwhelming odds. As one observer noted, most people wanted to forget the war, but the fort was gone, not the memory of those who fought there.