On the morning of the 8th of May we came in sight of a long, low line of sand banks, dotted with curious hillocks, between which the black muzzles of heavy guns could be made out, and fringed with a perfect naval chevaux-de-frise of wrecked blockade runners, whose broken hulls and protruding machinery gave an ill-omened look to the whole coast. As we were closely studying the bleak aspect of this entrance to the great smuggling entrepôt of the Southern Confederacy, the glasses began to reveal an unexpected activity along the line of the guns, which our signal shot for a pilot by no means diminished. Our ship drew too much water to cross the bar, excepting at high tide, and we were, consequently, compelled to go over in the Captain’s gig to the pilot boat—a proceeding that the rough sea made very difficult and even dangerous. Leaving those who could not venture the transhipment, to roll wearily among the breakers till evening, we headed straight through the narrow and difficult channel for Fort Fisher, and learned that we had been mistaken for the Rebel pirate “Stonewall,” and that the guns had been shotted ready to open fire the moment we should show signs of a disposition to run in.^[5]

Ah! that weary day at Fort Fisher! To see a fort is naturally supposed to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort.

We began by climbing Battery Buchanan, near the landing, and inside the main line of works. Trenches, embrasures, casemate and barbette guns, bomb-proofs, gabions, riflemen’s pits, all in sand that no rifle projectiles could breach, and bombardment could only render stronger, seemed to assure absolute impregnability to this work alone, except against regular siege operations. Yet it was but protection for one flank of the long line before which Weitzel turned back, and which no soldiers but ours would ever have stormed. To this battery (so called, although a perfect and very strong fort in itself) the Rebels made their last retreat, after that long, hand-to-hand fight through the sea front of the fort, which stretched far into the night, and seemed doubtful to the last. But Battery Buchanan, though impregnable, as a flank to the sea line, is itself commanded by the last work of that sea line; and so when the Mound Battery fell into our hands, its guns had only to be turned, and Buchanan fell almost without a struggle.

The Mound Battery is a vast heap of sand, uplifting its guns and embrazures from a flat and desert beach against the sky, and commanding perfectly the whole northern entrance to the river. It contained one of the finest specimens of heavy ordnance ever seen in this country, the famous Armstrong rifle, presented by British sympathizers to the Confederacy.

Imagine a long line of batteries, connected by traverses in the sand, separated by huge hillocks of sand, and fronted by deep trenches in the sand, stretching away almost interminably along the coast toward the North, and ending in another strong work, which was supposed to protect that flank as perfectly as Buchanan did the other; put in magazines and bomb-proofs, at convenient points, and a very heavy armament; then conceive muzzles of the guns knocked off, guns dismounted, carriages shattered, the parapets plowed with shells, a great crater in the sand where a magazine had exploded, all shape and symmetry battered out of the works, and only their rude strength remaining; and you have Fort Fisher.

The ground was covered with showers of musket balls. Behind every traverse could be found little heaps of English-made cartridges, which the Rebel sharpshooters had laid out for the convenience of rapid firing, as they defended line after line of the successive batteries, along which they were driven. Fragments of shells lay everywhere over the works. Behind them were great heaps of shells, bayonets, broken muskets, and other fragments of iron, which were being dug out and collected to be sold for old iron. Hundreds on hundreds of acres were under negro cultivation, producing this valuable crop.

No man, I think, will ride along the coast line, which, by an inconceivable amount of labor, has been converted into one immense fort, without sympathizing with the officers who refused to assault it, and marveling at the seeming recklessness which success converted into the splendid audacity of the final attack.^[6]

The pilot boat was again placed at the disposal of our party, after some hours spent at Fort Fisher, and we ran over to Fort Caswell, one of the main defenses of the other entrance. It was originally a regularly-built brick fortification, with casemate and barbette guns, salients, ditch and interior castle, pierced with loopholes, for a last defense with musketry. Like Fort Macon, at Beaufort (and like Sumter), this has been converted into an infinitely stronger work, by having earthen fortifications thrown up outside and against it. The Rebels blew it up after the surrender of Fort Fisher, and we shall probably be making appropriations, every Congress, for the next dozen years to rebuild it.

The labor here, as well as the vast amount involved in the construction of Fort Fisher, was all performed by slaves, impressed from time to time by the Rebel authorities. Both works were completed—Wilmington had grown rich on the profits of blockade-running; Nassau had risen to first-class commercial importance, and the beach under these guns was strewn with the wrecks, which spoke more loudly than could any balance sheet, of the profits of a business that could afford such losses—before our Congress had done disputing whether the Constitution, and a due regard for the rights of our Southern brethren, would permit us to use negroes as teamsters!