Dobak William A. Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867 (ENG)

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Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865

391

record the names of volunteers by 8 August, and have the party ready to march the

next day. “Anyone who is lazy or inattentive will be sent back to his company with-

out pay,” the order warned. Soon afterward, men of the 4th, 6th, and 22d USCIs

reported to Dutch Gap and began to dig.

Butler meant well, but he underestimated greatly both the number of men and

the length of time the job required. Work dragged on into the fall, and took many

men, not all of them volunteers. In mid-October, the commanding ofcer of the

4th USCI complained that his regiment was short seven of the ten second lieuten-

ants it was entitled to. Moreover, 196 recruits who had been assigned to him were

instead “at work in the canal at Dutch Gap. These men are wholly without drill or

discipline and in their present condition totally unt for service against the enemy

and with our present depleted list of ofcers, I am unable to do ought to improve

their condition.” The situation remained unchanged at the end of the month. Before

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 2, p. 70; Edward G. Longacre, A Regiment of Slaves: The 4th United

States Colored Infantry, 1863–1866 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), pp. 110–14;

James M. Paradis, Strike the Blow for Freedom: The 6th United States Colored Infantry in the Civil

War (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 1998), pp. 61–67.

White troops as well as black toiled from August through December 1864 to dig the

Dutch Gap Canal, a shortcut for Union shipping to avoid Confederate batteries on the

James River.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

392

the project was done, it would involve the efforts of soldier and civilian laborers

from as far away as Roanoke Island, North Carolina.

Military authorities expected that canal workers would undergo what the senior

naval ofcer on the James River called “annoyances and interruptions” from enemy

artillery, and Confederate batteries did not take long to open re. What neither side

foresaw was that Dutch Gap would become the scene of a test of will between the

federal and Confederate governments about the treatment of prisoners of war. Feder-

al interrogators learned from enemy deserters that more than one hundred black pris-

oners of war were at work on Confederate defenses north of the James River, under

re from Union artillery. Col. Samuel A. Duncan, commanding the all-black brigade

at Dutch Gap, wrote to General Butler on 21 September: “Is it not established with

sufcient certainty that the rebels have . . . put to hard labor, colored prisoners of war

. . . , to warrant the use of rebel prisoners upon the work . . . at Dutch Gap, where the

shells of the enemy are beginning to tell with considerable effect upon our laboring

soldiers? My men would take pleasure in acting as guards; would perform the duty,

I think, with unusual pride and efciency.”

Not only did Butler command the Army of the James and the Department of

Virginia and North Carolina; he also served as commissioner for the exchange

of prisoners of war. Early in October, he wrote to his Confederate counterpart in

Richmond, enclosing four depositions by deserters who swore that black Union

prisoners were at work under re in the trenches and adding that he had ordered

one hundred ten prisoners held by his own side “into the canal at Dutch Gap

. . . at hard labor, . . . until this practice is stopped.” Uncertain of the exact number

of black prisoners of war at work for the Confederates, or perhaps reckoning on

future casualties, he asked the Union provost marshal general at City Point to

send one hundred fty of the prisoners in his care to the canal. Grant approved

this proceeding. The next day, having received no reply from Richmond, Butler

put his prisoner-hostages to work.

The Confederate secretary of war wrote to General Robert E. Lee, outlining

the situation. Government policy, he maintained, was to treat black soldiers as pris-

oners of war, unless they had been slaves before enlistment. Confederate authori-

ties advertised the names of former slaves captured in uniform and hoped that their

owners would reclaim them. The secretary compared their special status to that of

turncoats caught wearing the uniform of the other side. The whole episode, he told

Lee, became more complicated because the Confederate government was reluctant

to deal with General Butler, whom Jefferson Davis had pronounced not “simply

. . . a public enemy of the Confederate States of America, but . . . an outlaw and

common enemy of mankind” because of what he regarded as Butler’s high-handed

and illegal behavior while commanding at New Orleans in 1862. Any Confederate

Maj A. S. Boernstein to Lt Col E. W. Smith, 16 Oct 1864 (quotation), and 29 Oct 1864, both

in 4th USCI, Regimental Books, RG 94, NA; Patricia C. Click, Time Full of Trouble: The Roanoke

Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp.

130–33.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 2, pp. 158, 959 (“Is it not”); ORN, ser. 1, 10: 345 (“annoyances”).

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3, pp. 216–17; ser. 2, 7: 967 (quotation). Private and Ofcial

Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, 5 vols. ([Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press], 1917), 5:

250.

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865

393

ofcer who captured Butler was to hang him forthwith. Lee would have to corre-

spond about the prisoners directly with General Grant.

Lee sent Grant a long letter in which he began by citing precedents about slave

property during wartime that went back to the Revolutionary War. Almost inciden-

tally, he mentioned that the black prisoners of war were put to work by mistake and

against his orders and had been withdrawn. He also insisted that “the negroes em-

ployed upon our fortications are not allowed to be . . . exposed to re,” and asked

whether Grant approved of Butler’s retaliatory treatment of the Confederate prison-

ers. As soon as the letter reached Grant, he ordered Butler to return the Confederates

to City Point, and wrote the next day to Lee:

I shall always regret the necessity of retaliating for wrongs done our soldiers, but

regard it my duty to protect all persons received into the Army of the United States,

regardless of color or nationality. . . . I have nothing to do with the discussion of the

slavery question, therefore decline answering the arguments adduced to show the

right to return to former owners such negroes as are captured from our Army. In

answer to the question at the conclusion of your letter, . . . all prisoners of war falling

into my hands shall receive the kindest possible treatment consistent with securing

them, unless I have good authority for believing any number of our men are being

treated otherwise. Then, painful as it may be to me, I shall inict like treatment on

an equal number of Confederate prisoners.

By the time Grant’s letter arrived, Lee had withdrawn the black prisoners from their

exposed position. Three more months would pass before the Confederate government

agreed to equal consideration for “all prisoners . . . held by either party.” The exchange

system, which had ground to a halt more than a year earlier when the Confederacy

refused to recognize black soldiers as legitimate combatants, then began to function

again. Colonel Duncan’s idea, Butler’s implementation of it, and Grant’s support of his

action all served to put black soldiers on a par with a group of captive Union generals at

Charleston four months earlier. The Confederate defenders had placed the generals in

the way of artillery re but had withdrawn them when the besiegers ordered prisoners

of equal rank sent from Northern prison camps to work in exposed positions.

Excavation of the Dutch Gap Canal also raised again the question of the dispro-

portionate use of black soldiers for fatigue duty. Commanding ofcers of black regi-

ments complained often about excessive fatigues, but white troops also performed such

chores. The response to Butler’s offer of additional pay was favorable: in one white

regiment, six hundred men volunteered. Elsewhere in the Union trenches, when bri-

gade commanders in white divisions received orders to build a road or to clear a eld

OR, ser. 1, 15: 906 (quotation); ser. 2, 7: 990–93.

OR, ser. 2, 7: 1010–12 (“the negroes,” p. 1012), 1018–19 (“I shall always”).

Ibid., 7: 1012, 1018; 8: 98 (quotation). McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 799–800; Brooks

D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction,

1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 66–67; Richard J. Sommers,

“The Dutch Gap Affair: Military Atrocities and the Rights of Negro Soldiers,” Civil War History

21 (1975): 51–64. On the use of captive generals as hostages at Charleston, see Chapter 2, above.

The June 1864 correspondence about the Charleston prisoner-hostages between Maj. Gen. John G.

Foster, commanding the Department of the South, and the War Department is in OR, ser. 1, vol. 35,

pt. 2, pp. 141–45.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

394

of re in front of their trenches, their own troops did the job. In mid-October, one white

division in the Army of the James was furnishing three hundred men a day for such

fatigues.

While it is clear that white troops undertook many onerous fatigues, the equitable

distribution of these tasks is much less so. Late in August, the X Corps issued an order

tapping its black division and one of its white divisions for three hundred men each to

go on fatigue duty. The X Corps, though, was in General Butler’s Army of the James.

Butler was a hearty proponent of the Lincoln administration’s Colored Troops policy.

Things looked somewhat different in the Army of the Potomac, where General Meade

deprecated the military ability of black soldiers. In Meade’s army that fall, the only

black division (Brig. Gen. Edward Ferrero’s 4th Division of the IX Corps) sometimes

furnished details of as many as twenty-two hundred men—half its strength—for work

on fortications and roads. Daily drafts of ve, six, or seven hundred men, which white

divisions also furnished routinely, were far more usual; even so, no division could hold

its trenches for long with half of its men on pick-and-shovel duty. The root of the prob-

lem of unequal assignments, and its solution, lay in the practices that high authorities

at the scene would encourage or allow.

Fatigues were not the only form of labor that took men from their regiments. Black

and white divisions alike detailed men as hospital attendants and as teamsters in the

Quartermaster Department and elsewhere. That summer, Brig. Gen. Charles J. Paine

noticed that eighty black infantrymen from his division were absent as teamsters in the

XVIII Corps artillery brigade and that 192 men were with the corps ambulance train.

He wrote to corps headquarters, asking for the return of all “except the fair proportion

of this division. I make this application, not on account of particular need for the men

with their companies, but because I consider it of the greatest importance to the Col-

ored Regiments that they should be made to think themselves soldiers, and should not

feel that they are only to be soldiers when they are not wanted as teamsters.”

For Union troops on both banks of the James River, October was a month of rou-

tine siege duty. “Dig, dig, dig is again the order of the day and night,” remarked Capt.

Elliott F. Grabill of the 5th USCI. The 4th USCI stood to arms at 4:00 a.m. daily, Sgt.

Maj. Christian A. Fleetwood recorded in his diary. Capt. Solon A. Carter, a staff ofcer

in the all-black 3d Division of the XVIII Corps, went nineteen days without “an op-

portunity to take a bath all over, or change my underclothing,” he told his wife. On the

same divisional staff, 2d Lt. Robert N. Verplanck kept an eye on the weather, which

turned “real cold & windy” on 8 October after a week of rain. “There is one consola-

Maj Gen D. B. Birney to Maj R. S. Davis, 8 Aug 1864, Entry 345, X Corps, LS, pt. 2, RG 393,

NA. Capt C. A. Carleton to Col J. C. Abbott, 11 Oct 1864; to Brig Gen J. R. Hawley, 17 and 19 Oct

1864; to Col F. B. Pond, 18 and 20 Oct 1864; to Col H. M. Plaisted, 23 Oct 1864; all in Entry 376, 1st

Div, X Corps, LS, pt. 2, RG 393, NA.

X Corps, Special Orders (SO) 108, 28 Aug 1864, Entry 359, X Corps, Special Orders, pt. 2,

RG 393, NA. Capt G. A. Hicks, daily Ltrs to Col O. P. Stearns and Col C. S. Russell, 5–11 Oct 1864,

and Capt G. A. Hicks to Col O. P. Stearns, 12 and 13 Oct 1864, all in Entry 5122, 4th Div, IX Corps,

LS, pt. 2, RG 393, NA. For fatigue details in white divisions, see Capt W. R. Driver to Lt Col W.

Wilson, 6 and 7 Oct 1864, and to Lt Col J. E. McGee, 6 and 7 Oct 1864, all in Entry 86, 1st Div, II

Corps, LS, pt. 2, RG 393, NA. 3d Div, V Corps, SO 91, 23 Oct 1864, and Circular 24, 26 Oct 1864,

both in Entry 4357, 3d Div, V Corps, Orders and Circulars, pt. 2, RG 393, NA.

Brig Gen C. J. Paine to Maj W. Russell Jr., 11 Aug 1864, Entry 1659, 3d Div, XVIII Corps,

LS, pt. 2, RG 393, NA. For such assignments in a white division, see 3d Div, V Corps, SO 74, 4 Oct

1864, Entry 4357, pt. 2, RG 393, NA.

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865

395

tion,” he wrote, “that it will dry up the roads and we will get our supplies regularly and

the ration will be full.”

By the third week in October, Grant had conceived a plan that he would put into

action at the end of the month. Attacking from its trenches around Petersburg, the Army

of the Potomac would seize the South Side Railroad, a line that ran west more than one

hundred miles to Lynchburg, where there was a further rail link to Tennessee. Taking

part in this movement would be Ferrero’s nine-regiment division of the IX Corps. To

prevent Confederates around Richmond from sending reinforcements to help defend

the railroad, Butler’s troops would launch a simultaneous attack north of the James

River with the X Corps, which included Brig. Gen. William Birney’s division of seven

black regiments, and the XVIII Corps, with its all-black division of nine regiments led

by the senior ofcer, Col. Alonzo G. Draper.

Compared to earlier attacks that year, especially the asco at Cold Harbor in June,

the move against the South Side Railroad was almost tentative. “Let it be distinctly

understood . . . that there is to be no attack made against defended, intrenched posi-

tions,” Grant told Butler on 24 October, and sent a similar warning to Meade. Butler’s

men were to “feel out” the enemy line “and, if you can, turn it.” In Meade’s army, the

IX Corps commander in particular, “if he nds the enemy intrenched and their works

well manned,” was “not to attack but confront him, and . . . advance promptly” if the

other two corps, operating on either ank, were able to shift the Confederates. With

the presidential election two weeks away, Grant did not want to risk following recent

Union successes in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley with a bloody defeat.

Southwest of Petersburg, Ferrero’s division was awake and on the road at 3:30,

three hours before sunrise on 27 October. Each man carried six days’ rations and two

hundred rounds of ammunition. The ammunition alone weighed about sixteen pounds.

When daylight came, the division formed line of battle and plunged into what Col.

Delavan Bates called “the worst piece of woods I ever saw.” Bates, who had been

captured in a forest near Chancellorsville in 1863 and had led the 30th USCI through

some of the same country the next spring, commanded a brigade in the division. His

men struggled forward to within one hundred yards of the enemy position. “The under-

brush, briars, logs &c. made it . . . almost impenetrable,” he told his father, “and when

we halted in front of the enemy works a line of breastworks had to be thrown up and

the timber slashed to prevent a surprise and be able to resist an attack if the rebs should

undertake one. It was an awful job. . . . But fortunately the affair terminated without

great loss to our Division or corps. . . . As usual when we make a move it rained like

fury all night.” On the west end of the Union advance, the II Corps failed to turn the

E. F. Grabill to Dearly Loved One, 3 Oct 1864, E. F. Grabill Papers, Oberlin College (OC),

Oberlin, Ohio; C. A. Fleetwood Diary, entries for Oct 1864, C. A. Fleetwood Papers, Library of

Congress (LC); S. A. Carter to My own darling, 17 Oct 1864, S. A. Carter Papers, U.S. Army

Military History Institute (MHI), Carlisle, Pa.; R. N. Verplanck to Dear Mother, 8 Oct 1864, R.

N. Verplanck Letters typescript, Poughkeepsie [N.Y.] Public Library; Robert K. Krick, Civil War

Weather in Virginia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), pp. 140–41.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3, pp. 317–18, 331–32, 463, 465–66.

Ibid., pp. 317 (“if he nds”), 331–32 (“Let it be”); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant:

Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 2000), pp. 386–87.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

396

enemy’s ank, and the next day the IX Corps, along with the rest of the Army of the

Potomac, retired to its previous position.

North of the river, Butler’s troops found themselves in a similar predicament.

Birney’s division of the X Corps was moving an hour before sunrise. Passing through

the Union front line, it formed line of battle and moved almost at once into woods

choked with underbrush. Capt. Edward W. Bacon was in the lead with the 29th Con-

necticut, acting as skirmishers and covering the entire division front, which stretched

for nearly three-quarters of a mile. Turning to look around just before the advance be-

gan, he saw “two whole Corps of as ne troops as there are in the country. . . . It was the

grandest display of men I ever saw.” The regimental adjutant, 1st Lt. Henry H. Brown,

rode along the line from end to end, and saw things differently: “Co[mpany] H . . . I

found in a very bad x. It had never drilled the skirmish & the 2nd Lt comdg knew as

little of it as they & he was so hoarse with a cold he could not be heard so mounting a

stump I deployed them & then wheeled the line to the left clearing the right from the

swamp.”

At length, the 29th Connecticut “advanced slowly through dense woods and a bad

swamp for nearly a mile when we encountered the videttes of the enemy who promptly

red upon us,” Bacon wrote. The rest of the brigade followed. “The line moved for-

ward in excellent order but in a few moments received a severe re from the gopher

holes of the picket—which were very numerous and well built,” he continued.

I answered with my front rank and on we ran at full speed—for the land was

more clear just there and when the men understood the design they showed their

appreciation of it by the most horrible howls—very similar to those with which the

enemy love to charge—the gopher holes still sent out bullets into our faces until

their inmates saw that we were black & close on them when they dropped all and

ran. . . . A short half mile further through the meanest of under growth—slipping

on the clayey ground wet by the last nights rain, dodging from the shrapnel which

began to reach us now & from the branches which they were cutting from the

bigger pines, wondering what we would nd and how soon we would nd it, on

we went until at the edge of the woods.

There they saw a corneld full of tree stumps and beyond that “a chain of redoubts

connected in the usual manner by strong breast works. Into these the pickets which

we had driven before us went pell mell and as they rose to cross the works we took

delight in hitting them.”

After the Confederates reached their trenches, the attackers had to lie down

to seek cover. Despite the awkwardness of loading and ring a muzzle-loading

rie while not standing erect, the men of the 29th Connecticut managed to

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, p. 592, and pt. 3, p. 350; D. Bates to Father, 25 May 1863 and 28 Oct

1864 (quotation), both in D. Bates Letters, Historians les, CMH; The Ordnance Manual for the

Use of the Ofcers of the United States Army (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1862), pp. 270, 487.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, p. 771; E. W. Bacon to Dear Kate, 31 Oct 1864, Bacon Papers;

H. H. Brown to Dear friends at Home, 29 Oct 1864, H. H. Brown Papers, Connecticut Historical

Society, Hartford. Brown’s account agrees with Bacon’s in other respects, especially regarding the

Confederate troops’ terror of black soldiers.

Bacon to Dear Kate, 31 Oct 1864.

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865

397

discharge at least one hundred fty rounds each in the course of the day. By

evening, their rie barrels were foul; some men dismantled their weapons on

the spot to clean them. The regiment’s commander, Capt. Frederick E. Camp,

asked for relief. Rain fell through the night. Before dawn, the 7th USCI moved

forward to relieve the skirmishers. In twenty hours, the 29th Connecticut had

suffered eleven killed and sixty-nine wounded, more than the rest of the divi-

sion combined.

Lieutenant Califf commanded a company in the 7th USCI. “It was clear

and cold,” he noted in his diary, “with a keen wind from the S.E.

Long before we reached the line, we could hear the continual, crack, crack,

crack of the skirmishe[r]s. When we reached the line, by feeling our way

through the dripping undergrowth, the bullets began to whistle past, or crash

among the limbs above us. Before daylight we had our line established. . . .

When day broke the rebs opened a sharp re with musketry. Within two hours

I had ve men wounded & one killed. . . . The last man wounded was Isaac

Cooper, “K,” while lying in a place I had just quitted, at the reserve. The ball

struck him just below the small of the back—He rolled and screamed for a

moment & then became quiet. We were losing so many men that the order was

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, pp. 149–50, 777, 779; Bacon to Dear Kate, 31 Oct 1864.

Swampy woods near Petersburg. “The worst piece of woods I ever saw,” one Union

ofcer remarked.

Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867

398

given to fall back with most of the line. . . . We occupied a line of rebel gopher

holes farther back in the woods until about 3 o’ck when the order came to

prepare to fall back. We waited a long while . . . for the order but none came—

Soon we discovered that the entire line had fallen back leaving us alone. I

advised falling back . . . for the John[n]ies were evidently advancing their

lines. [1st Lt. Charles G.] Teeple opposed it until it became evident that we

should have to fall back without orders or go to Richmond. . . . We fell back

& after we had got inside our cavalry picket line we met Gen. Birney with the

remainder of the brigade going out to ght us in if necessary.

During more than ten hours in its advanced position, Califf’s party of twenty-

ve accounted for seven of the regiment’s thirty-two casualties. This rate of

casualties, between one-quarter and one-third of the men engaged, was nearly

as great as the 29th Connecticut had suffered the day before.

The XVIII Corps left its camp near the James River at 5:00 a.m. on 27

October and marched about eight miles north to Fair Oaks, the site of a battle

during McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign of 1862. By midafternoon, both divi-

sions of white troops were in action and soon learned that the Confederate line

was too stoutly defended to be captured by anything less than an all-out attack.

While this was going on, Maj. Gen. Godfrey Weitzel, the corps commander,

ordered Col. John H. Holman’s brigade of Draper’s division to take position on

the extreme right of the Union line, a few hundred yards north of the Williams-

burg Road. The fteen hundred ofcers and men of the brigade were to attack

west toward Richmond along the line of the York River Railroad.

The 37th USCI crossed the tracks to guard the right ank. South of the

rail line, the 1st USCI advanced with the 22d USCI on its left. After the two

regiments had moved forward about a mile, they saw Confederate cavalry.

Two enemy twelve-pounders unlimbered and opened re. Holman ordered

a charge. The 1st USCI advanced across cleared space close to the railroad

tracks, reached the guns, and spiked them. The 22d USCI had to make its way

through woods and never came close to the enemy. Two different stories of its

misadventure began to circulate at once.

According to Colonel Draper’s account, a misunderstood order caused

confusion. Only one company of the 22d USCI heard it properly and managed

to execute the maneuver. The regiment’s commanding ofcer, Lt. Col. Ira C.

Terry, was more explicit:

Had the regiment left its recruits behind I think we could have gone in. They

kept ring their muskets while advancing, and in the midst of the excitement

broke and ran, causing the worst of confusion. I will say on behalf of these

recruits that they did well so far as they knew how, never having any drill of

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, pp. 149–50; Califf Diary, 28 Oct 1864.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, pp. 795–97, 802–03, 807–08; Field Return, 27 Oct 1864, Entry 1659,

pt. 2, RG 393, NA.

OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, pp. 814–17.

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia, 1864–1865

399

any account. They did not know how to act, and their conduct might have been

foreseen.

Unable to count on support from the 22d USCI, the 1st USCI had to leave the

Confederate guns and fall back along the railroad line. The 1st suffered 124

casualties in the afternoon’s ghting (20 percent of about six hundred twenty

ofcers and men), and the 22d fty of about ve hundred present. It was the

second time in as many months that poor re discipline had slowed the pace of

a charge by one of the black regiments.

Stymied by Grant’s instructions not to press attacks on defended Confeder-

ate positions, the second and nal fall attack on Richmond sputtered out. By

29 October, Butler’s and Meade’s armies had returned to their earlier positions.

“Everyone is xing up for winter,” Colonel Bates of Ferrero’s division wrote

a week later, “building replaces, logging up tents, . . . and preparing for cold

weather as much as possible. We have no orders to prepare winter quarters

but there are many little things in the management of the army that looks like

staying where we are for some time.” Weather would play a large part in de-

termining the extent of operations for the next few months. “No ghting since

we have been here,” Colonel Pierson of the newly arrived 109th USCI told his

daughter, “and unless we have some very soon we cannot do much this fall or

winter as the Roads will be so bad we cannot move.” As the men began to pre-

pare their quarters for the winter, the generals looked around for a new avenue

of attack, one that would not involve movement by land.

Wilmington, North Carolina, some two hundred fty miles south of Pe-

tersburg, had been the Confederacy’s only seaport since Union regiments had

seized the islands that blocked Mobile Bay that August. It lay twenty miles

from the ocean, protected by thirteen Confederate batteries: ve along the

banks of the Cape Fear River, two at the river’s mouth, and six more on nearby

islands and promontories. The largest of these, Fort Fisher, ran across a spit

of land between the east bank of the river and the ocean. On the seaward side,

ried cannon dissuaded Union warships from close pursuit of blockade run-

ners making a nal dash into the river’s mouth. Although the U.S. Navy had

attempted to blockade Wilmington for more than three years, it had managed

to capture, sink, or drive ashore only about one hundred thirty of the many

fast vessels that carried Confederate cotton to the Bahamas and Bermuda and

returned with military stores. Through the port passed most of the 925 tons

of saltpeter, 745 tons of lead, and 420,000 pairs of shoes—besides blankets,

Ibid., pp. 815–16, 818–19 (quotation); Field Return, 27 Oct 1864, Entry 1659, pt. 2, RG 393,

NA.

OR, ser 1, vol. 42, pt. 1, pp. 78, 107, 109; D. Bates to Father, 6 Nov 1864, Bates Letters;

J. Pierson to Dear Daugter [sic], 20 Nov 1864, Pierson Letters; Edward G. Longacre, Army of

Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863–1865 (Mechanicsburg,

Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), pp. 228–31.

This map from the Ofcial Atlas shows Fort Fisher at the tip of Federal Point and other

Confederate positions between Wilmington and the mouth of the Cape Fear River.