Fort Fisher I: Folly

Via Brother Henry

By late 1864, the anaconda strategy devised by Gen. Winfield Scott at the start of the war was reaching its lethal conclusion. The implacable, relentless naval blockade had crippled the South’s cotton economy, and drained the rebel army of its ability to wage battle. 

Still, daring blockade runners helped maintain a supply of goods that were as vital as they were meager. Their preferred port had always been Wilmington, N.C., but after federal forces captured Mobile, Ala., in August 1864, it was also their last. With its railroad connections to Virginia, Wilmington was the last vein through which the South received goods from the outside world, and the last artery to its army. Now federal forces focused on severing that link.

Wilmington is 28 miles up the Cape Fear River from the Atlantic Ocean. One of several but by far the most formidable of the confederate positions guarding Wilmington was Fort Fisher, located right at the mouth of the river. Fort Fisher was built at the end of a narrow peninsula that is shaped like an inverted triangle; on the east side is the Atlantic, on the west, the river. Anything entering the river had to pass under the guns of what had come to be called the Gibraltar of the South.

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