Ironclads and Columbiads

The Coast

William R. Trotter

• Publisher: Blair
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780895875525
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Ironclads and Columbiads recounts the exciting battles and events that shook the coast of North Carolina during America's bloodiest war. Throughout the Civil War, North Carolina's coast was of great strategic importance to the Confederacy. Its well-protected coastline offered a perfect refuge for privateers who sallied forth and captured so many Union merchant vessels in the early days of the war that maritime insurance companies in the North went into a panic, forcing the government to mount an expedition against Cape Hatteras. North Carolina's coastal counties and the state's coastal railroad system were vital to the feeding and resupply of Robert E. Lee's army. And even after the tightening blockade and powerful Federal assaults closed off the ports of Charleston, New Orleans, and Mobile, Wilmington continued to provide a haven for blockade runners. That city eventually became the most strategically important location in the entire Confederacy. To subdue Fort Fisher, which stoutly defended Wilmington, the Union was forced to assemble what was then the largest naval and amphibious landing force in American history.

William R. (Bill) Trotter is an essayist, book reviewer, and author of The Civil War in North Carolina and A Frozen Hell, among other books, as well as several short stories and novellas, and has twice been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. He wrote a monthly column called "The Desktop General" for PC Gamer magazine until 2004. He was the first recipient of the North Carolina English Teachers' Association "Lifetime Achievement Award." He lives in Greensboro, NC.

PART 1

THE COAST ATTACKED

SEIZING THE FORTS

The first acts of open militancy in North Carolina occurred in the Cape Fear region, where passions against the Lincoln administration were high. On the last day of 1860, the secessionist citizens of Wilmington sent a telegram to Governor John Ellis, asking for permission to seize two Federal posts in their neighborhood.

The posts occupied very strategic locations. Fort Caswell, a stout masonry fortress, lay 30 miles south of Wilmington on the west bank of the Cape Fear River. And between Fort Caswell and Wilmington, at Smithville (now Southport), lay a Federal barracks called Fort Johnston. There were no Federal garrisons at either place — just a couple of ordnance sergeants who acted as caretakers. But there was concern in Wilmington that Lincoln was prepared to dispatch troops in sufficient numbers to turn these positions into genuine bastions, just as a similar concern was felt throughout the lower Piedmont about the Federal arsenal at Fayetteville.

When Governor Ellis turned down the telegraphed request, a delegation from Wilmington took the train to Raleigh and argued the case for seizure directly to the governor. Their main argument derived from strong rumors that a Federal warship, the revenue cutter Harriet Lane, had been loaded with troops and might, even at that moment, be on its way to the Cape Fear outposts. Ellis sympathized with the Wilmington firebrands, but he stood firm on the matter. For the moment, North Carolina was still a part of the Union, and the armed seizure of two Federal posts would be inflammatory as well as unlawful.

Champing at the bit, the secessionists of Wilmington prepared for war nonetheless. A militia unit was formed, its ranks filled with hotbloods and would-be gallants, called “The Cape Fear Minute Men.” Not long after the company began drilling and strutting, a report arrived on January 8, 1861. The report stated that a Federal cutter was indeed on its way, bearing 50 soldiers and eight guns, destined for Fort Caswell.

Now began the first campaign of the Cape Fear Minute Men. They engaged a small schooner, packed it with a week’s supply of food and water, rounded up a motley assortment of arms — including ancient flintlocks, shotguns, and Bowie knives — and sailed down the river. They reached Fort Johnston in Smithville during the wee hours of January 9. At 4 a.m. they banged loudly on the door of the barracks. The “Fort Keeper,” Ordnance Sergeant James Reilly, who comprised the entire garrison, groggily responded. Reilly had no choice but to surrender the post to his visitors, after demanding and obtaining a proper receipt. He probably wasn’t too indignant about the incident, since his sympathies lay with the South. Indeed, James Reilly would soon enlist in the Confederate Army, attain the rank of major, and serve gallantly at Fort Fisher.

After detailing 15 men to stay behind and man Fort Johnston, the Cape Fear bravos — now in high spirits indeed — set sail on January 10 to “capture” Fort Caswell. In contrast to Fort Johnston, Caswell really was a fort. Construction had started in 1827 and was completed in 1838. Caswell was built in the classic pentagonal design so common in masonry forts of the early 19th century. It was surrounded by a moat and could be entered by passing through two protected sally ports as well as the main gate. Its peacetime garrison was ostensibly 50 men (to be reinforced in wartime to 450), but at the start of 1861 there was only a single man stationed there — the Fort Keeper, another ordnance sergeant with the intriguing name of Dardingkiller.

Dardingkiller’s thoughts are not a matter of record, but the appearance of the Cape Fear Minute Men was probably the most interesting thing that had happened to him since he had left his last posting. The life of the Fort Keeper must have been solitary almost beyond endurance. The one extant piece of correspondence known to have been written by one of these men (Ordnance Sergeant Corlette, in a letter dated April 19, 1853) indicates that one of his primary duties — and pastimes — was to collect a fee from people who came out to fish on the fort’s beaches.¹

Dardingkiller surrendered at about 7 p.m. on January 10. The commander of the Cape Fear company, Major John Hedrick, now set about doing what he could to prepare the place to resist Federal attack. He must have been a frustrated man in this regard, for he found only two cannon on the ramparts of Fort Caswell, and neither of them could be fired because exposure to the salt air had rotted their mountings. So Hedrick’s men patrolled the walls, scouted the beaches, and kept a keen lookout, making a bold show of things despite the fact that most of them were armed with shotguns and varmint rifles.

When Governor Ellis learned of these goings-on, he promptly wired Colonel John Cantwell, commander of a militia regiment in Wilmington and the only man in the area who outranked Hedrick. Ellis explained to Cantwell the possible political repercussions of Hedrick’s actions, and ordered Cantwell to restore things to their proper status. Ellis had already wired President James Buchanan, both informing him of the situation and asking him, point-blank, what he planned to do with the forts. When Buchanan’s secretary of war telegraphed back that nothing was planned for the moment, Ellis decided that his initial response was the correct one: North Carolina had nothing to lose by adhering to the letter of the law.

Colonel Cantwell made a difficult and thankless trek out to Fort Caswell. After his boat was becalmed in the river, he had to walk the last few miles into Smithville, where he located a steam launch to take him to the fort. Once there, he presented Major Hedrick with the governor’s order. Hedrick and his men grumbled at this negation of their dashing achievement, but he replied to the governor’s message: “We, as North Carolinians, will obey the command.”² Reilly and Dardingkiller eventually reported to Washington that everything in their respective posts had been “returned in good order” (which wasn’t saying much, considering how shabbily Washington had maintained the two places over the years).

One inhabitant of Smithville recalled discussing the condition of Fort Caswell with some of the Minute Men. After seizing the fort, they told him, they had been ordered to “be ready for action at the first alarm.”

But no alarm followed and they settled themselves down to get as much ease as they could, which was mighty little. On inspection the fort was found to be dilapidated and almost unfit for human habitation. There were no guns mounted which could be fired, the moat was nearly filled with sand and muck, and there was not a room in the fort, finished or unfinished; mosquitos were the only energetical objects that made an appearance. To the troops who had performed this service for their country, there did not seem to be any of the pomp or circumstance of “glorious war”; but it was necessary to keep up some form of military display and the sentinels posted on the walls were ordered to give immediate notice of the approach of any hostile ships…None came however and after waiting a few days a…steamer was seen approaching which they found to be the bearer of dispatches to the effect that the troops occupying Fort Johnston and Fort Caswell should evacuate those places and return immediately to Wilmington where they were to disperse and return to their homes. It was explained that North Carolina had not yet seceded from the Union, and until she had done so, the United States were the rightful possessors of all such property…[When the Minute Men returned] the inhabitants of Smithville looked at each other and wondered. They had not thought that the war would end so soon, without the loss of a single man.³

Three months later, on April 15, 1861 —just after sending his feisty “you can get no troops from North Carolina” wire to Washington in response to Lincoln’s call for soldiers to subdue the rebellious South — Governor Ellis sent new orders to Colonel Cantwell. This time, Ellis instructed the militia officer to seize Forts Johnston and Caswell “without delay.”

Colonel Cantwell set sail with 120 men on the morning after he received the governor’s telegram. The militia companies that comprised his command were given a spirited farewell by the populace. They boarded a steamer and set sail for Smithville, where, for the second time, Sergeant Reilly was relieved of his keys. A few hours later, the equally hapless Sergeant Dardingkiller experienced a similar episode of deja vu.

Ellis had also ordered the seizure of Fort Macon, across Bogue Sound, opposite the little port of Beaufort. Fort Macon was already in rebel hands, however, for Captain Josiah Pender and a detachment of volunteers from Beaufort had taken it on April 14 (from its one-man garrison, Ordnance Sergeant William Alexander).

Fort Caswell was still in its original forlorn condition, and Fort Macon was found to be just as bad. Captain Pender reported that its ironwork was pitted, the embankments and sides of the moat had collapsed, and of the fort’s 17 cannon only 4 were mounted — and those on carriages which looked as if they would disintegrate with the recoil of the first shot. Cantwell, getting his first really detailed look at Fort Caswell, was so unimpressed that he wired Governor Ellis and proposed that the fort be placed under strict blackout so that no passing Federal ship could see that it had been garrisoned and perhaps be tempted to attack. In its present condition, Cantwell averred, the fort was indefensible.

By the end of May, however, the industrious garrison had mounted 22 guns, deepened the moat, and erected a supporting battery (Fort Campbell) about half a mile to the southwest, covering the beaches. Over the next two years, Caswell would gradually be improved until it was second only to Fort Fisher in terms of strength. Its gun emplacements would be protected by thick casemates of pine logs, sand, and overlays of railroad iron. Attempts to strengthen Fort Macon proved less successful, and it was far from ready when its baptism of fire took place.

Once the garrisons had done whatever was in their power to arm and repair the forts, their lives settled into a dreary, monotonous, and uncomfortable pattern. One letter written from Fort Caswell in the summer of 1862 recounts that the soldiers spent their days lying around in the shade, if they could find any, “and when night comes, instead of getting cooler it positively gets warmer and the mosquitoes come out in swarms…some of them as large as a hummingbird with bills half an inch long…there is no such thing as sleeping.⁴

Another letter home described the daily routine of the Caswell garrison:

I will try and give you a routine of my daily labors. I have to be on parade ground [to answer to] my name, I then have my face to wash and hair to come which is quite a job here as it generally takes about half an hour to find a basin…at [7:30 a.m.] I have again to be on parade ground to answer to my name for breakfast. We are then marched into our mess room when we have a chief of mess appointed from our company to superintend the cooking. Those that cannot get plates at the first table (which is very hard to do) will have to take a seat on the bricks, and wait their turn. We have rice[,] bacon bread…which we relish very well as our work gives us a good appetite. At 8 after breakfast we are drilled until night, resting at short times every hour or so. If we are not drilled at the cannons we are drilled at the sea beach with our muskets. We have to answer to our names for every meal, and also at 9 o’clock before we go to bed, and such scrambling to get to sleep you never saw.⁵

That was at Fort Caswell. Up the coast at Fort Macon — and at the newly constructed Forts Hatteras, Clark, Oregon, and Ocracoke — things were less regimented. Aside from the (so far) false alarms concerning vast armadas of approaching Federal ships, life for the garrisons was not too bad during those early weeks of the war. The main enemy was boredom. A man who could play a good tune on a fiddle was accorded a place of honor. An officer who could arrange a brass band concert for his men (the cornet and trumpet ensemble from Fayetteville was especially in demand), was assured of their loyalty. Marathon card games were held on the parapets. Men answered the morning roll calls with fishing poles in their hands instead of muskets. The gentle art of surf-casting was brought to perfection, with the crudest of equipment, during the long off-duty hours of tedium.

Other than gambling, gabbing, and fishing, however, the main pastime appears to have been the soldiers’ traditional favorite: drinking. Local purveyors of spirits did a thriving business dispensing alcohols of various strengths and contents. Since the officers drank too, as much if not more than the men, drunkenness on duty was usually treated as a minor offense. Harsh disciplinary punishments were reserved for troopers found guilty of grossly indecent behavior toward the local female population, such as it was on the Outer Banks in 1861.

Across the sounds, the inhabitants of North Carolina’s coastal towns made the transition from peace to war after their own individual styles. Wilmington bustled with patriotism and bellicosity, while down river, the peaceful little town of Smithville held a public meeting and formed a Home Guard company that was probably the shortest-lived unit in the Confederate order of battle. The incident was drolly recounted in the memoirs of Dr. Walter Curtis, a Smithville native who served for 30 years as quarantine surgeon for the Port of Wilmington:

Mr. John Bell was elected Captain, his chief qualifications being that he was good natured and not likely to enforce any military discipline whatever. Much wisdom was apparent in the…conversation of these ancient gentlemen. They proposed to the Captain a great number of things heretofore unheard of in any military organization; the principle one being that as they were liable to become fatigued by the exertion of marching and inquiring of the citizens “if they were well” and listening to their replies that “they were not well, that they had a mighty hurting in their heads and a misery in their backs” which being duly reported to Captain Bell he would reply by saying that “he was sorry for their infirmities but that Mustang linament was a good thing to rub on the aching places and that a small quantity of Plantation Bitters taken internally would finish the cure.”

Captain Bell issued orders that they should all meet for drill the next morning and one member of the force proposed to the Captain that the soldiers of the “home guard” should be required to bring camp stools with them so that when they were tired they could sit down and rest. Captain Bell then gave the order of “attention” and put them through the various drills marching them around town and it was observed that when one of the company got opposite to his own home he left the ranks and was no more seen. The “home guard” being thus weakened so that they could not face any kind of enemy, it was moved and seconded …that the “home guard” ought to be disbanded, to which motion Captain Bell remarked that “he thought so too….”⁶

‘WE HAVE ON THESE WATERS SOME BOLD AND SKILLFUL SEAMEN’

Governor John Ellis reported on the coastal situation in a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis dated April 27, 1861. The letter reveals that Ellis had a clear understanding of both the vulnerability and the strategic importance of the coastline:

The State is to all intents and purposes practically out of the Old Union, and we are deciding on the speediest mode of giving legal sanction to this State of facts…All lights have been extinguished on the coast. Vessels have been sunk in the Ocrachoche [sic] Inlet and a fleet of armed vessels (small) is now being fitted out to protect our grain crops lying on the inland waters of the [northeastern] part of the State. A good Ship Canal connects those waters with the Chesapeake at Norfolk.

Beaufort harbor, protected by Fort Macon is a most eligible point for privateering & c…we have on these waters some bold and Skilful Seamen who are ready to go out as privateers at once. The forms required in procuring letters of Marque present a great obstacle. Had you an authorized agent here who could deliver letters and receive the bonds &c. the work would be greatly facilitated. The enemy’s commerce between N. York and all the West Indies and South American ports could be cut off by privateers on the coast of No. Carolina.¹

Orders went out from Raleigh in the last days of April to erect fortifications at Ocracoke and Hatteras, two of the most strategic points on the Outer Banks. On the last day of the month, the Confederate government authorized the transfer to North Carolina of 20 13-pounder fieldpieces. These guns were intended to provide landward protection for Forts Macon and Caswell, as well as to guard the landing sites along the banks of the Neuse River. This gesture seemed to indicate an awareness on Richmond’s part of the urgent need to protect the state’s coastline. Unfortunately, this token transfer of artillery was the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Coast Attacked
• Part 2: Burnside’s Expedition — The Coast Conquered
• Part 3: Raids And Excursions
• Part 4: Confederate Moves
• Part 5: Running The Blockade
• Part 6: The Guns Of Fort Fisher
• Appendix A: Artillery Terms
• Appendix B: A Massacre At Plymouth?
• Appendix C: The Curious Behavior Of Braxton Bragg
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index