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