KURE BEACH — Ask anyone to talk about the Civil War in North Carolina, and the first name you're likely to hear is Sherman.
Fisher is almost an afterthought. The battle on the beach outside Wilmington seems lost in the shuffle.
Historians believe the battle was one of the pivotal conflicts of the war. It was the largest fort ever built in the United States, and it endured one of the heaviest naval bombardments in history.
But 150 years later, it remains almost unknown outside the state.
"The fort's fame, like the fort itself, eroded away," said North Carolina historian Jim Leutze.
Leutze, a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is a member of the advisory board for Fayetteville's proposed North Carolina Civil War History Center.
"There are many factors for that," he said. "One of them is much of the fort has been lost."
Another, Leutze said, is a lack of drama.
"The war was just about over, and there wasn't a dramatic figure," he said. "You didn't have Adm. Farragut shouting, 'Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead!'"
While the biggest name in the Carolinas, William T. Sherman, wasn't at the battle, it is doubtful anyone benefited more than his army when Wilmington fell.
This week, thousands of visitors will be on hand to witness the fort's fall once again - this time by re-enactors. But if guests want to see some of the fort's more famous vantage points, they will need to bring scuba gear.
"There's a lot of history that will never be seen," said Ray Flowers, curator of Fort Fisher State Park.
Thankfully, much of it was preserved by photographers after the battle. Otherwise, we might never know the exact layout of things.
The name Fort Fisher is a bit misleading for first-time visitors to the sandy spit of land southeast of Wilmington.
People looking for looming walls instead find a sand castle at high tide. Much of the once-massive, mile-long wall that defied the Union Navy for two years has washed into the sea.
"And during World War II, the Army took a bulldozer and plowed a runway right through the middle of that," Leutze said. "The fort, or what's left of it, has seen a number of indignities."
What remains of the "Gibraltar of the South" is a small, windswept series of sandy mounds about 20 feet high.
Re-created palisades of sharpened pine and a faithful re-creation of a hulking 150-pound Armstrong cannon - the original was captured and taken to West Point - await a foe that will never arrive.
A scale map in the fort's visitor center provides a glimpse of just how imposing the fortifications were. And several talking points by fort docents on a quarter-mile tour of the fort's remnants are prefaced by the words, "If you use your imagination. ..."
For much of the war, the fort, a collection of menacing mounds sprinkled with cannons, was responsible for feeding the Confederate Army a steady diet of imported weapons, thanks to the busiest fleet of blockade runners in the South.
"Fort Sumter (in the mouth of Charleston Harbor) got the attention," said Flowers. "But Fort Fisher kept the port of Wilmington open until January of 1865."
"Its importance to the survival of the Confederacy cannot be overestimated. When the fort fell, the last lifeline of the Confederacy fell.
"They built the fort with what they had. And they had sand - lots of sand."
There was no Fort Fisher when the Civil War began. There was no need for it. North Carolina was not part of the Confederate States of America when its neighbors to the south opened fire on Fort Sumter.
It was another month before North Carolina joined the fight. At that point, Confederate forces tossed up a scattered series of sand batteries along the coast near Wilmington to deter any Union ships interested in reaching Wilmington.
Strategically, it made sense. Wilmington's port had easy rail access from the port into Virginia, feeding Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Confederate military leaders quickly realized the port's importance and sent Col. William Lamb to shore up the batteries in the summer of 1862.
Lamb was inspired by a massive sand fort called the Malakoff Tower in the Crimean War, a sprawling mound able to absorb artillery fire without damage.
Lamb planned a similar defense, bridging batteries along a mile-long stretch of beach. A narrow mound would stretch about 200 yards across the neck of the island, offering marginal defense from land forces.
The fort, the largest in the Confederacy, was named for Col. Charles Fisher, a North Carolinian who had died at the Battle of Manassas a year earlier.
Soldiers and slave labor tossed up sand walls and chopped connecting roads through the marsh that summer.
"The amount of work that went into this project was enormous," Leutze said. "There were no steam shovels, no bulldozers. Just back-breaking labor."
When a yellow fever outbreak struck the workers, Confederate officials began conscripting free men of color from as far as Fayetteville and dozens of Lumbee Indians. Many chose to hide in the swamps of what would become Robeson County rather than go to Wilmington.
When completed, the fort looked like a giant number 7, stretching from what is now the visitor center to the present-day North Carolina Aquarium. It stood more than 30 feet high, 40 feet thick, held in place with muck and marsh grass from the Cape Fear River.
Two prominent batteries stood 40 and 60 feet high, commanding several miles of the coast.
Union forces were aware of Wilmington's strategic importance. In fact, plans were in place to bombard the port before Fort Fisher could be finished.
However, Charleston - "the cradle of secession" - was a far greater political plum and received the bulk of attention. When that harbor was effectively sealed in 1863, Wilmington became the only Atlantic port of size open to the Confederacy.
"When Charleston fell, Wilmington became the South's most important city on the coast," said Flowers. "Gen. Lee wrote Col. Lamb, saying, 'If Wilmington falls, I cannot maintain my army.'"
The fighting roared on in Virginia, but the South was being fed through its lifeline on the North Carolina coast.
Blockade runners, sleek ships with shallow bottoms, were able to slip over the shoals close to shore beneath the fort's protecting cannon. They brought weapons, ammunition and increasingly hard-to-find comforts for the army.
Leutze said exhibits at the fort show how ill-prepared the South was for the effects of war.
"These blockade runners brought weapons and creature comforts," he said. "They also brought things like ax heads, shovels, files. These aren't for battle. They aren't for the rich. These were things you needed to survive in everyday life."
Flowers said life at Fort Fisher was hard, as it was anywhere in the South. But there were some perks. Archaeologists have found orange peels and coffee grinders during digs.
"Coffee and oranges were almost unheard of luxuries among Southern troops. Lamb also made sure they received edible meat from the blockade runners. Any meat that was too far gone was used to grease the cannons.
"When they fired the guns," Flowers quipped, "the beach probably smelled like bacon."
When the tide was right, some soldiers netted crabs and shrimp from the nearby river. Fish were also plentiful, and occasionally an ill-fated blockade runner provided perks. Historians estimate about 50 ships met such a fate near Wilmington.
"There was a famous blockade runner, the Modern Greece," Flowers said. "It was forced ashore north of the fort in 1862."
Troops removed ammunition and cannons for the fort. Flowers said the men also "liberated a considerable amount of alcohol on board. Records show they had quite a party."
The party ended with a bang on Christmas Eve 1864. President Abraham Lincoln had ordered the capture of Wilmington, or at least ending its use as a port for Confederate supplies.
The fort's garrison had been expecting an attack for weeks, according to Lamb's diary. But no one anticipated the noisy, futile explosion that rattled Wilmington just before dawn.
An ill-fated Union scheme to detonate a gunpowder-packed ship to blast a hole in the fort's defenses was a dismal failure. Despite being outgunned and outmanned, Confederates pushed back the initial attack with minimal losses.
The second attack, which began on Jan. 13, 1865, was far more effective. Nearly 60 Union warships aimed 600 cannons at the fort, smashing it like a sand castle at high tide with nearly 20,000 shells.
This was followed by bitter, bloody fighting by 10,000 veteran Union troops. The landing was the largest amphibious operation in American history until the Pacific battle of Guadalcanal during World War II.
By 10 p.m. Jan. 15, 1865, the fort had fallen. The port of Wilmington was sealed.
The fort's loss was cataclysmic to an already reeling South. It created a launching point for supplies and soldiers for the Union Army in North Carolina to help Sherman's advance.
When Fort Fisher was attacked, Sherman's army was still in Savannah, preparing to move into the Carolinas. Had Fort Fisher held, Leutze said, Sherman likely would have needed to split his forces. It would have delayed his attack on the armory in Fayetteville and given the South more time to ship supplies.
"Generals traditionally don't like to leave opposing armies on their flanks, and certainly not in their rear," Leutze said. "If Fort Fisher had held, that's what Sherman would have been looking at.
"He probably would have had to factor getting that obstacle out of his way before he'd feel comfortable advancing farther."
With Wilmington in Union hands, the threat was gone. Two weeks after Fort Fisher fell, records show, Gen. Ulysses Grant was in Wilmington Harbor. There, he arranged to meet Sherman and plan the final stages of the war.
In early March, Sherman requested supplies once his army reached Laurel Hill, in what is now Scotland County. They were waiting on the Cape Fear River five days later in Fayetteville, flanked by federal gunboats.
"The effect," Sherman wrote in his diary, "was electric. No one can realize the feeling unless, like us, he had been for months cut off from all communications with friends."
If the effect was electric for Sherman, it was lamentable for the Confederacy. With Wilmington now in federal hands, a second army could be sent north into the state to meet Sherman near the rail hub of Goldsboro. After the battles at Averasboro, the last Confederate victory of the war, and the Union win at Bentonville in mid-March, there was no organized Confederate activity. Less than three months after the fort fell, the Civil War was over.
Ironically, the nature of Fort Fisher that allowed it to withstand bombardment became a factor in its being passed over for preservation.
After the war, erosion and development proved to be far more damaging to Fort Fisher than Union guns had ever been.
Unusable as a fort, the defenses were abandoned to nature. A generation later, aside from ordnance still visible in the sandy soil, the fort might as well have been sand dunes.
In the early 1900s veterans groups from both sides asked Congress to preserve the fort. Local committees pressured politicians. However, with a limited budged, Congress focused on more permanent sites.
Other coastal batteries were washed away by sea and neglect. A similar site, Battery Wagner near Charleston, had already been swallowed by the sea, and it seemed likely Fisher would share that fate.
By the late 1920s, records show, more than 100 yards of the beach had washed away, claiming some of the more memorable gun batteries.
Development of the beachfront followed, and when developers began carving coquina, a rocky substance beneath the sand used to pave roads, the erosion seemed to accelerate to nearly a foot per month.
Historian Rod Gragg said when one expert was asked his opinion about preserving the fort, he replied, "Kiss it goodbye and save your money."
Flowers said the long-accepted opinion that the whole place was going to fall into the sea likely limited government preservation efforts.
"After a while, there really wasn't much left to preserve," he said.
A final effort by locals and the Daughters of the Confederacy succeeded in making Fort Fisher a state historic site in the late 1950s. It soon became a national historic site, and restoration began a few years later.
In the 1990s, the Army Corps of Engineers built a 3,000-foot stone barrier to halt erosion of the fort. If not, Hurricanes Fran and Floyd in the late 1990s might well have eaten more of the remaining mounds.
Leutze said the story of Fort Fisher is one of the pieces the future Civil War History Center will be able to share.
Scheduled to be completed by 2020, the center will be a $65 million complex built on the site of the Fayetteville Arsenal destroyed by Sherman in March 1865.
Planners for the project say it will be a state-of-the-art learning center that will weave historic events from around the state into a complete story. The project is in the fundraising stage, with a goal of $7 million by the end of this spring.
"How Fort Fisher figured into the war in North Carolina, and how events elsewhere affected events there, are all part of the story," he said. "Hopefully, when people visit us, they'll leave wanting to visit and study other places, like Fort Fisher."
They'll have plenty of company. The fort remains the most-visited Civil War site in North Carolina, primarily because of the neighboring aquarium and public access to the beach, rather than the history. Officials estimate that more than 600,000 visitors pass through the historic site annually.
"It's not your typical battlefield," Flowers said. "But it's an interesting place.
"We get people who didn't know the history, and they're blown away by what happened here.
"You can't stand on much of the battlefield now. It's out there," he said, sweeping a hand toward the ocean. "But you can get a sense of what a huge place this was and what happened."
©2015 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.)
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