When America's Civil War broke out in April 1861, the newly created Confederate States of America embarked on an almost impossible task. Far outmatched by the Northern states in all materiels of war, the Confederacy's only hope was to trade her one advantage, cotton, for weaponry and support from overseas. This proved a daunting task as well, for although a large percentage of the soldiers of the United States Army resigned their positions and joined the Southern cause, virtually none of the United States Navy did. This disparity in shipping was immediately put to good use when Abraham Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports.

Early in the conflict, the senior commander in the United States Army, Major General Winfield Scott, developed a grand strategy to defeat the Confederacy. The Anaconda Plan, as its name implies, was designed to squeeze the South to death. The first phase of that plan was to cut them off from the rest of the world, and Lincoln's blockade did that within a matter of weeks. The United States Navy was stationed off every Southern port to keep cotton in and foreign aid out. To counter this, Confederate agents in Europe (primarily in England) purchased or commissioned the construction of fast ships to run the blockade. These ships had some success, but unfortunately for the Confederate cause, many cargoes were full of scarce trade goods instead of scarce weaponry. Still, enough supplies got through to give some aid to the Southern armies.

Over time, the Union military was able to end the blockade running by capturing the ports from which they operated. Some of those ports, however, proved exceedingly difficult to capture. The toughest, and therefore the last to fall, was Wilmington, North Carolina, 20 miles up the Cape Fear River from the Atlantic and protected by Fort Fisher. The fort was massive and built unlike almost any fort along the Southern coast. While most fortifications had been built over the preceding few decades using masonry, Fort Fisher was made of earthworks and sand piled on a base of logs. It was built in an L-shape, measuring almost 2,000 yards along the sea face of Confederate Point, then turning west for some 600 yards to cover any approach from the landward side. The walls were 9 feet high and 25 feet thick, and 47 guns made sure that no unwanted ship approached the mouth of the Cape Fear River, where the uncertain course of the river through numerous shallows would make any vessel an easy target. In December 1864 General William Sherman captured Savannah, Georgia, and immediately turned his army north to link up with his superior, Ulysses Grant, then in the process of besieging Petersburg, Virginia. Grant wanted to possess Wilmington as a handy supply port for Sherman's men, as well as a potential refuge should Confederate resistance in the Carolinas proved stiffer than expected. He directed Admiral David Porter to escort a force of soldiers to the North Carolina coast to seize Fort Fisher and then Wilmington. The Union army operating along the Carolina coast was the Army of the James, commanded by political appointee General Benjamin Butler. Butler believed the fort could have but few defenders and so he took command of the operation in order to enhance his political future.

Butler's plan was to overpower Fort Fisher in spectacular style. With Porter's reluctant but growing cooperation, the USS Louisiana was stripped down to resemble a blockade-runner, then packed with 215 tons of gunpowder. On the night of 23 December the ship was anchored before the fort; as planned, the defenders took it for a distressed runner. A ninety-minute timing device was set, but the ship's captain set a slow-burning fire as an emergency backup. At 0118, the expected explosion did not occur, but the fire finally got to the powder at 0140 and the explosion was massive. And completely useless. Other than serving to wake up the defenders from a sound sleep, no harm was done.

At noon on the 24th Porter ordered his ships in to bombard the fort and cover the landing of Butler's men. Their late arrival meant no landing took place until the following day, Christmas. While another bombardment took place, 2,000 men landed 3 miles north of the fort and marched south. They ran into heavy shrapnel fire and discovered the entire approach to be mined. They took a few prisoners from one captured redoubt, then withdrew. Butler ordered them back on board, then sailed away. The first attempt to storm Fort Fisher was a dismal failure, but most in the Union army were mollified upon learning that Grant removed the despised Butler from command and sent him home.

Grant ordered a second attempt on the fort, putting Brigadier General Alfred Terry in command of 8,000 soldiers to join Porter's ships still along the North Carolina coast. On shore, Lamb's defenders had been reduced to 800 and his appeals for more men had gone without effect when Terry's transports arrived on the afternoon of 12 January 1865. Before dawn on the 13th, Porter's ironclads had been firing on the fort, hoping to locate Confederate guns by their muzzle flashes. That gave the fleet as a whole more success when they came in close after dawn and began bombarding the positions marked by the ironclads. The fire was much more accurate and effective than during the first engagement, and soon the angle of Fort Fisher's defenses was crumbling.

Meanwhile, Terry was landing his men 9 miles up the coast. He had all 8,000 ashore by mid-afternoon and they began digging a line of defenses facing north, in order to face expected Confederate reinforcements. General Robert Hoke arrived with 6,000 men from Wilmington, but the Union defenses were so strong he would not attack them. As Union troops were entrenching, Porter's ships brought a total of 627 guns to bear on the fort. The defenders lost 100 men and half their guns, and regular fire throughout the night slowed repair work. General W. H. C. Whiting arrived with some 750 reinforcements, but also with news that the theater commander, Braxton Bragg, was focusing on withdrawal more than defense. "Lamb, my boy, I have come to share your fate. You and your garrison are to be sacrificed" (Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 743). Another constant bombardment on the 14th was so intense the Confederate gunners were barely able to return fire and another hundred casualties were inflicted.

On the morning of 15 January a force of 350 men floated downriver to join the garrison, but they entered a fort rapidly disintegrating under the shellfire. They also arrived coincident with a Union assault. Lamb led men out of the fort to face the charge, and they threw it back with well-aimed musketry. Unseen by the defenders, however, was a smaller force slipping around their left flank along the river and rushing the walls of the fort, placing three flags there. Whiting responded with the remainder of the garrison while Lamb fell back to help. Just as the Confederates seemed to be restoring the situation, Porter's ships began firing into the mass of troops now exposed. Whiting and Lamb were both wounded and placed in a bombproof shelter as the fighting went on. At 2000 a messenger brought news that the north wall had fallen and the fight was now taking place within the fort. Lamb ordered them to keep up the resistance, but Terry by then had almost his entire force inside. At 2200, the Union possessed the fort.

"If hell is what it is said to be, then the interior of Fort Fisher is a fair comparison. Here and there you see great heaps of human beings laying just as they fell, one upon the other. Some groaning piteously, and asking for water. Others whose mortal career is over, still grasping the weapon they used to so good an effect in life." Thus wrote a Union sailor after the battle (Foote, The Civil War, vol. 3, p. 746). In the two attacks, the Union ships lobbed almost 40,000 rounds into the fort. Not only was it in ruins, the loss of life was high. Some 500 defenders died, while Terry lost 955 killed in the assault and Porter lost a further 386 during the exchange of fire with the defending guns. Another 104 were killed and wounded when exhausted soldiers entered a powder magazine with torches while looking for a place to sleep.

As Fort Fisher was falling, former commander Benjamin Butler was sitting before a congressional committee defending his actions in the first attempt. He was in the process of convincing the congressmen that the fort was impregnable and he was fully justified in calling off his attack when word arrived of Terry and Porter's victory. He tried to laugh off his dismay at this ill-timed news, but his future political career was rapidly collapsing. Few mourned its passing.

Lamb and Whiting were both taken to a Union prison camp in New York. Lamb survived his wounds but Whiting did not.

"The fall of Fort Fisher did not clear the way to Wilmington. Yet it was decisive of the fate of the city. On the 19th of February, Fort Anderson, higher up the river, was evacuated under a heavy fire from Porter's fleet, with a cooperating Yankee force eight thousand strong.... The troops were pushed for Wilmington, while at the same time Porter's vessels passed the obstructions and steamed up the river. Wil-mington was occupied without resistance" (Pollard, Southern History of the War, p. 444).

During the last nine weeks of 1864, blockade-runners had smuggled past the blockade, primarily through Wilmington, some 12 million pounds of food and war materiel, as well as shoes, blankets, coffee, rifles, revolvers, medicine, and artillery. After Wilmington's fall, nothing entered.