Monday, August 08, 2022

Wilmington, Fort Fisher, and Historiography

Monument at Fort Fisher. 

   Has the importance of Fort Fisher and the great Wilmington area been missed in the historiography of the past 160 years? I recently came up with this question during our annual visit to the greater Wilmington area. In working on my upcoming book on food and the Army of Northern Virginia, I came to the conclusion that Wilmington, at least during the second half of the war, was second only to Richmond.

   So what do the historians say? How important were Wilmington, Fort Fisher, and the Cape Fear River area? Charles Roland, The Confederacy (1960), William C. Davis, Look Away! A History of the Confederacy (2002), and Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War (2000) make no real mention of the importance of the area.

   Keegan, while making mention of Fort Fisher and the ensuing battle, does not really get to the importance of the area, writing that  “The most important military operation in North Carolina during the closing phase of the war was not the work of Sherman’s army but a deliberate and separate operation to close down the South’s last large blockade-running port at Wilmington…”[1] Vandiver writes that “In Wilmington. . . the best of the blockade ports outside of Bagdad, Mexico, things settled into a pattern of hard work. Most citizens decamped in fear of invasion or of pestilence from foreign ships, or because the town became little more than a military depot.” Once again, he does not really seem to get the importance that Wilmington had to the entire war effort.[2]  

   There are a couple of historians who kind of get it. James McPherson writes that “Wilmington became the principal Confederate port for blockade runners because of the tricky inlets and shoals at the mouth of the Cape Fear River…”[3] Edward Pollard, in his early (as in 1867) history of the Confederacy, concludes that Wilmington was the “the most important sea-coast port left to the Confederates, through which to get supplies from abroad, and send cotton and other products out by blockade-runners.”[4]

Only two of the texts in the sample survey (i.e., books on my shelf) seem to get the importance. Robert S. Henry writes in 1931 that Wilmington was “most important of all” ports in the South. Due to this, it became “one of the great centers of the business of blockade running.”[5]    One other example comes from the pen of Shelby Foote. Foote tells us that in the last nine weeks of 1864, supplies landed at the port of Wilmington included “8,632,000 pounds of meat, 1,507,000 pounds of lead, 1,933,000 pounds of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 pairs of blankets, 520,000 pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles, 97 packages of revolvers, 2,639 packages of medicine, 43 cannons,” along with other munitions. “Just how important those cargoes were to the continued resistance by the rebels was shown by the fact that R.E. Lee himself had sent word…that he could not subsist his army without supplies brought in there.”[6]

   Overall, I think the importance of the port of Wilmington, with its surrounding fortifications, has been underrepresented in the greater portion of the historiography of the past 160 years.



[1] Keegan, The American Civil War, 278.

[2] Vandiver, Their Tattered Flags, 107.

[3] McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 380.

[4] Pollard, The Lost Cause, 671.

[5] Henry, The Story of the Confederacy, 239, 437.

[6] Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, 3:741.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:19 PM

    See Rod Gragg’s Confederate Goliath on Ft Fisher and Fonveille’s The Wilmington Campaign. Both portray a truly heroic defense but hampered by inadequate forces or reinforcements. It’s importance cannot be overstated.

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  2. Thanks! I have several books on Wilmington and the war, including those you mentioned. I was kind of looking farther afield.

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