Confederate Goliath: The Battle of Fort Fisher. By Rod Gragg. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge La., 1991.

            By the fall of 1864 the Confederacy was on her knees. The Army of Tennessee had been smashed at Franklin and Nashville and Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia was pinned down in their trenches around Petersburg. The only thing keeping Lee and his men alive was the Confederacy’s sole remaining port of Wilmington North Carolina. Guarding Wilmington was a massive earthen structure known as Fort Fisher.

            In Confederate Goliath, Rod Gragg does an excellent job of chronicling the history of Fort Fisher and the lives of the men who defended and captured her. He begins on the night of December 18, 1864 when a Federal expedition left Hampton Roads Virginia bound for Fort Fisher. The commander of the naval wing of the joint army-navy expedition was Admiral David Dixon Porter. Porter was an old sailor who was determined to capture or demolish the fort and retain the glory for the navy. Two divisions from Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James were selected as the army contingent of the force, led nominally by Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel. However, Butler insisted on accompanying the expedition himself, making Weitzel’s position little more than symbolic.

            On the Confederate side, Colonel William Lamb of Virginia commanded the Confederate garrison at Fort Fisher. Though not an army man by vocation, never the less, he turned out to be naturally gifted as a commander and an engineer. When he took command of Fort Fisher in 1862 he transformed the previously weak stronghold into a virtually impregnable fortress of massive earthen walls and many pieces of heavy artillery.

The over all commander of the Wilmington district was Major General William Henry Chase Whiting. Though brilliant at West Point and as an engineer, Whiting had a knack both for alcohol and for offending his superiors. When he refused to implement Jefferson Davis’ scheme to reorganize brigades by state in the fall of 1861, it was all Joseph Johnston could do to stop Davis from demoting Whiting to major. But the damage was done. When Lee saw the opportunity to promote John Bell Hood to division command in the fall of 1862, he took it, relegating Whiting to command of Wilmington and Fort Fisher. Whiting became Lamb’s mentor and the two developed a close relationship. However, when Davis learned that an expedition was headed for Fort Fisher, he placed Braxton Bragg in overall command of the forces in North Carolina, effectively superseding Whiting. One thing that Gragg does try to do is resurrect Whiting to a place of hero rather than incompetent drunk as he is often seen by Civil War historians.

A major point of friction arose between Ben Butler and David Porter on December 23 when the flotilla arrived at Wilmington. For starters, Porter despised Butler and his being assigned to the expedition under the authority of the shifty Massachusetts politician had only worsened his demeanor. One idea that Porter had hatched for demolishing Fort Fisher involved a “powder ship.” With some reluctance President Lincoln signed on to the scheme and Porter soon had a ship filled with two hundred and fifteen tons of black powder. Without Burnside’s permission, on the night of December 23, Porter had a skeleton crew tow the ship within what they thought was three hundred yards of the fort, though they wanted it to be closer. In reality the distance was six hundred yards and when the ship went up, it did absolutely no damage to the fort other than awakening and frightening the garrison. Burnside was furious that Porter had gone in without his permission and afterwards relations between the two rapidly deteriorated.

On Christmas Day, Porter’s gunboats began a fierce and sustained bombardment of Fort Fisher. Though withering, the shells mostly did no harm, inflicting only 23 casualties and killing several horses. The Confederates hunkered down inside their bomb proofs and only fired their guns every half hour. That afternoon the first Federals landed on the beach north of Fort Fisher and quickly neutralized some small Confederate outposts. Meanwhile, Lee had sent Robert F. Hoke’s six thousand-man division from Petersburg to reinforce the garrison. Fearing that Hoke’s men would be too much, Butler ordered a withdrawal of all of his infantry units back to Hampton Roads. Porter was stunned. But without infantry, he too retreated back to Hampton Roads.  

That was the end of Ben Butler’s military career. Grant relieved him of command of the Army of the James and replaced him with Major General E.O.C. Ord. This time Grant placed Brigadier General Alfred Terry in charge of the two divisions of infantry to accompany Porter’s fleet. On January 12, 1865 the expedition once again set out from Hampton Roads.

The next day some of Terry’s infantry had landed north of Fort Fisher and entrenched. In the meantime, Hoke’s Division had been withdrawn by Bragg and was rushed back when word reached him of another Federal thrust. A major criticism Gragg levels against Bragg is that if he had not withdrawn Hoke’s Division to begin with, they might have been able to contest Terry’s landing. Bragg became defensive-minded and entrenched Hoke’s men across the peninsula north of the fort to prevent any movement toward Wilmington. Lamb had also received reinforcements from Hoke, though, bringing his total garrison to one thousand five hundred men.

While one brigade held Hoke in place, Terry decided to strike south in two columns against the fort. At dawn on January 15 he planned to send a volunteer force of two thousand two hundred sailors against the northeast side of the fort while the main army column swung around and hit the Confederates from the east, the sea face of the fort. According to Gragg, Terry’s worst fear was that Bragg would become aggressive and order Hoke’s Division to charge down on his rear, crushing the Federal columns.

On the morning of the fifteenth, Porter’s naval guns opened with pent up furry on Fort Fisher. This time the bombardment was much more accurate, tearing holes in the palisades of the fort and disabling a great number of the Confederate cannons. The sailors charged the north face of the fort, only to be routed after going to ground before reaching the fort walls. The Confederates were elated, only to find that Terry’s main column was attacking from the east. Whiting and Lamb were both wounded in the defense of Fort Fisher as Union infantrymen swept over and captured the entire garrison of almost two thousand men.

The capture of Fort Fisher closed the port of Wilmington. With the steady stream of supplies from blockade-runners choked off, Lee’s Confederates around Petersburg were even more pressed for food than usual. Three months later Lee was forced to abandon Petersburg and retreat toward Appomattox Court House. The central thesis of Gragg’s book seems to be that had Bragg attacked with Hoke’s Division, things could have turned out very differently for Fort Fisher and her garrison. Ironically, Whiting pushed for an investigation of that very issue after the war. Gragg clearly sides with Whiting in the dispute, allowing it to color his perception of Bragg and the outcome of the battle. Though Gragg gives equal coverage to both the Union and Confederate sides in his book, the work can clearly be placed in the Lost Cause school of Civil War history. In the acknowledgements Gragg states that he grew up near Fort Fisher and refers to the Civil War as the War Between the States. Despite this, it is a very well written and informative account of Fort Fisher that covers both the issues of high command as well as the minutiae of the battle.

 John R. Lundberg