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THe Berenice OF FORF FISHER.

By rms CommanpDER, WILLIAM LAMB, Coronet Turrty Stxta ReGIMent
Nortru Carona TROoPs.

The capture of Fort Fisher, N. C., on 15 January, 1865,
was followed so quickly by the final dissolution of the South-
ern Confederacy that the great victory was not fully realized
by the American people. The position commanded the last
gateway between the Confederate States and the outside
world. Its capture, with the resulting loss of all the Cape
Fear river defenses, and of Wilmington, the great importing
depot of the South, effectually ended all blockade-running.
General Lee sent me word that Fort Fisher must be held,
or he could not subsist his army.

The indentation of the Atlantic Ocean in the Carolina coast
known as Onslow Bay and the Cape Fear river running south
from Wilmington form the peninsula known as Federal Point
which, during the Civil War, was called Confederate Point.
Not quite seven miles north of the end of this peninsula stood
a high sand hill called the “Sugar Loaf.” Here there was
an intrenched camp for the Army of Wilmington, under Gen-
eral Braxton Bragg, the department commander, that was
hid from the sea by forest and sand hills. From this in-
trenched camp the river bank, with a neighboring ridge of
sand-dunes, formed a covered way for troops to within a
hundred yards of the left salient of Fort Fisher. Between
this road and the ocean beach was an arm of Masonboro
Sound, and where it ended, three miles north of the fort,
were occasional fresh-water swamps, generally wooded with
serub growth, and in many places quite impassable. Along
the ocean shore was an occasional battery formed from a nat-
ural sand hill, behind which Whitworth guns were carried
from the fort to cover belated blockade-runners, or to protect

This is reprinted from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, by
courtesy of the Century Company, New York.