The War in Real Time: Importance of Wilmington

Well, it would have been real time had I not gotten busy yesterday with the yard before the rain and cool came.

From the Civil War Naval Chronology.

MAY 9TH

Captain Case, commanding the USS Iroquois, reported that the Confederates were mounting guns on the northern face of Fort Fisher at Wilmington.  "They appear," he wrote Rear Admiral S.P.Lee, " to be large caliber."

This defensive strengthening of the Southern position was in keeping with the view voiced by Lt. John Taylor Wood, CSN, in a 14 February 1863 letter to President Davis concerning Wilmington's defenses:  "The batteries covering the water approaches, as far as I am able to judge, are well placed and admirably constructed.  But the great want, the absolute necessity of the place if it is to be held against naval attack, is heavy guns, large caliber."

As we know, Fort Fisher withstood one huge Union Navy assault in December 1864, before falling to an even bigger one in January 1865.

The Confederacy's Malakoff Tower.  --Old B-Runner