Battle Of Fort Fisher  "I Have Come To Share Your Fate"  January 15, 1865

The Christmas Day 1864 attack by a joint army-navy Union force on Fort Fisher, the Confederacy's earthwork bastion that protected the South's remaining major port of Wilmington, NC, fizzled when Gen. Benjamin F. Butler lost his nerve, pulled out his troops, and returned to Hampton Roads, VA. To Adm. David D. Porter, the digested naval commander of the expedition who had prepared the way for Butler's assault with the greatest bombardment of the war, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote that he would "be back again with an increased force and without the former commander."

The new commander was Gen. Alfred H. Terry, one of Butler's former division commanders, and the increased force was composed of 8,000 men in three white divisions and one black division. Located at the end of a long peninsula, Fort Fisher was a a massive L-shaped earthwork that stretched 682 yards across the neck of land and another 1,898 yards down the beach. Armed with 44 heavy cannon to protect the approaches to the Cape Fear River and 125 other cannon to be used in its defense, and manned by 1,500 soldiers, the fort was a formidable target. Terry and Porter devised a plan of attack, and on January 13, 1865, under covering fire from Porter's 44 ships, Terry's men went ashore and established a beachhead five miles north of the fort. Terry sent his black troops to work building and manning a strong line of works across the peninsula to hold off any Confederate threat to his rear; Terry scouted the land face of the fort and decided to make his attack there. To aid in the attack, Porter recruited 2,000 sailor and marine volunteers to storm the fort from the ocean side simultaneously with the army's assault.

Confederate Gen. W.H.C. Whiting, planner and builder of the fort, was unsuccessful in his efforts to get reinforcements and returned to Fort Fisher on the morning of the 13th. He greeted the fort's commander, Col. William Lamb, "Lamb, my boy, I have come to share your fate. You and your garrison are to be sacrificed."

Fascinating Fact:  Porter, a lifelong navy man, instructed his volunteer sailors-turned-soldiers to "board the fort on the run in a seaman-like way."


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