Chronicles of the Cape Fear River

most accomplished officers in the Southern Army. He was a
splendid engineer, and having been engaged in the Coast Sur-
vey for some time on that portion of the coast, knew the country
thoroughly, the capability of defense, the strong and the weak
points. He was fond of the social glass, and may have some-
times gone too far. He was not popular with many of the
citizens, as he was arbitrary, and paid little attention to the
suggestions of civilians. He was a very handsome, soldierly-
looking man, and though rough sometimes in his manners, he

was a gentleman at heart, incapable of anything mean or low,
and of undaunted courage. Peace to his ashes!

On Whiting’s staff were three young officers of great prom-
ise: his brother-in-law, Maj. J. H. Hill, formerly of the United
States Army, now an active express agent at Wilmington; Maj.
Benjamin Sloan, his ordnance officer, now teaching school some-
where in the mountains of South Carolina; and Lieut. J. H.
Fairley, a young Irishman, who had been many years in this
country, and who hailed from South Carolina. Fairley was
noted in the army as a daring scout and a very hard rider,
withal one of the quietest and most modest of men. He is now
drumming for a dry-goods house in New York instead of in-
specting the outposts. We wonder if he recollects the night

when the writer picked up a rattlesnake in his blanket at Mason-
boro Sound.

Whiting scarcely ever had enough troops at his command
to make up a respectable Confederate division. In 1864 he
had at Wilmington Martin’s brigade, which was a very fine and
large one, composed of four North Carolina regiments, remark-
ably well officered; two or three companies of heavy artillery
in the town, doing provost and guard duty; at Fort Caswell at
the mouth of Old Inlet on the Western Bar, a battalion of
heavy artillery and a light battery; at Smithville, a similar bat-
talion; at Bald Head, an island opposite Fort Caswell, Hed-
rick’s North Carolina regiment, about 600 effective men; at
Fort Fisher, Lamb’s North Carolina regiment, about 700 effect-
ive men; a company at Fort Anderson; a company of the
Seventh Confederate States Cavalry at the ferry over New
River, sixty miles northeast of Wilmington, on the sound; two
companies of cavalry, a light battery, and a company of infan-
try at Kenansville, forty miles north of Wilmington and seven
miles east of the Weldon Railroad. These, with two or three
light batteries scattered along the sound, from a little above

Blockade Running 485

Fort Fisher up to Topsail, constituted in the spring of 1864
the whole Confederate force in the Department of Cape Fear.

With this force and Whiting’s skill and bravery, we military
men thought we could hold Wilmington, for we justly regarded
the general as one of the few eminently fit appointments that
the War Department had made. In Whiting, we had implicit
faith. So, though there were constant rumors of expeditions
against the place, we scarcely believed they were coming, 80
long had the thing been delayed, and, in fact, an attack was
wished for by the youthful Hotspurs to relieve the monotony of
garrison life at Caswell, Bald Head, and Fisher. Thus we had
lapsed into a dream of security, or thought, at least, the evil
day was far off. We ate, drank, and were merry, and there
was marrying and giving in marriage, as in the days before the

flood.
It seemed singular to us that the United States should so long

neglect to close almost the only port of the Confederacy into
which, every “dark of the moon,” there ran a half-dozen or so
swift blockade runners, freighted with cannon, muskets, and
every munition of war, and with medicines, cloth, shoes, bacon,
etc. Through that port were brought, till January, 1865, all
the stores and material needed by the indefatigable Colonel
Gorgas,’ the Confederate chief of ordnance, the most efficient
bureau officer the Confederacy had. Through it came those
famous Whitworth and Armstrong guns sent us by our English
friends. Into Wilmington was brought by Mr. Commissary
General Northrup that rotten, putrid bacon called “Nassau,”
because it had spoiled on the wharves of that place before being

reshipped for Wilmington. It was coarse Western bacon,
bought by Confederate emissaries at the North; and many a

time have we imprecated curses both loud and deep on poor old
Northrup’s devoted head as we worried down a piece of the

rancid stuff. We must say, in all candor, that he was impartial
in his distribution of it, and ordered it given to both Confeder-
ate trooper and Federal prisoner. Northrup himself ate none
of it; he lived on rice, of which he would buy a hogshead at a

- time from the commissariat. We became so vitiated in our

taste by eating it that at last we came to prefer it to good bacon,
and liked the strong, rancid taste. We could not afford to per-
mit our stomachs to cut up any shines, and forced them to
stand any and everything by breaking them into it.

1The father of the present distinguished officer of that name.