842 NortH CaroLina Troops, 1861-’665.

home in Fayetteville after six months service on the Penin-
sula at Yorktown. The work of enlistment began almost im-
mediately, and it was made up of members of that company
with the addition of sturdy farmers from Robeson, Cumber-
land and Harnett.

In January, 1862, the following officers were chosen: Jos.
B. Starr, Captain; Thomas C. Fuller, First Lieutenant;
John Whitmore, Second Lieutenant, and Benjamin Rush,
Junior Second Lieutenant. The roll of non-commissioned
officers and privates will be found in Vol. 4, Moore’s Roster,
pp. 252, 255.

On account of the difficulty experienced by the Confeder-
ate authorities at Richmond in fitting out the companies of
light artillery with field pieces, Starr’s Artillery was ordered
to Fort Fisher for its first service, and on 21 January, 1862,
took the steamer for Wilmington. There the men were
equipped in uniforms and other furnishings for camp life,
arriving at Fort Fisher on the day following, where Captain
Starr reported for duty to Major John J. Hedrick, command-
ing the post. oats

At this post, afterwards so celebrated in the stirring events
of the Civil War, Starr’s Battery faithfully performed the
duties devolving upon it in manning the heavy guns of the
fort, guarding the shore batteries, mounting guard, etc.,
through the remainder of the winter, the spring and part of
summer. It was while here that T. R. Wardell, then acting
as Sergeant-Major of the post, mysteriously disappeared one
night during a very heavy storm. The fact that Wardell
was a Northern man by birth, and that he had been for some
time despondent of the success of the Southern cause, availed
to give circulation to the report that he had deserted, and
found means to reach the blockading vessels of the Federal
fleet lying off the coast. But no credence was given to this
nefarious rumor by his comrades in arms; and information
from his family after the war disproved this theory, and the
mystery of his fate remains unsolved.

“Tn those days there was little to enliven the monotony of
camp life at Fort Fisher save the lazy turn of some leviathian
Union gun-boat forming the blockading squadron, and then a

THIRTEENTH BATTALION. 343.

puff of smoke, with a hurtling, shrieking shell over the casé-
mates. ‘This would call the men to the guns, and the fire
would be returned. But this was heavy artillery play of a
harmless kind, which caused not a head to “duck” or a pulse
to take an extra beat.

An event later on put it into the power of a part of Starr’s
Fattery to show their mettle as soldiers and their skill as
marksmen. “The Modern Greece” (whose skeleton hulk,
inbedded in the sands, can still be seen to-day) a blockader,
superbly furnished in stores of a varied and extensive kind,
making up a costly cargo of medicines, fine liquors, shoes,
elething, ete., finding herself hard run by her Yankee foes,
while attempting to make the port of Wilmington, was
beiched under shelter of the guns of Fort Fisher, and the
greater part of her valuable freight was landed by boats.

-n the “Modern Greece” was a battery of Whitworth guns,
sujerb breech-loading, rifled steel pieces, carrying a long con-
ica ball, and endowed with a reach and precision of fire in
acton little short of marvelous. Two of these guns were as-
simed to Starr’s Battery, were mounted, and sent, under
charge of a Sergeant, to Fort Caswell at the mouth of the
rivr—a little bunch of fosse, rampart and casemate, badly
served with old time siege pieces, which the Federal block-
adng cordon daily insulted with its superior armament.

During the night masked batteries were skilfully prepared,
an¢ by sunrise the detachments were ready for work with
ther Whitworth guns. All that day and the next there was
anintensely exciting duel between the sea and land forces,
the latter spitting forth its terrible volley of conical projec-
tils from two clumps of bushes. Again and again the block-
adws shifted their position—only to find it apparently impos-
sille to get beyond that deadly range. Northern papers,
coning into the hands of the men a few days afterwards, gave
thm a gratifying triumph in the information that the Whit-
weth guns had wrought havoc-—the Miantanomah having
ben so badly crippled as to require towing out of the line of
fir, while another gun-boat was struck no less than three
tines.

The next most exciting incident in the féw months of ser-

 

 

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