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A Digression Of Interest To Students Of The Civil War

The previous page has thus concluded my discussion of weaponry for Crucible of Blood, however, since this feature is about Civil War technology I have a tangential, yet interesting digression which I present to you now:

I realize that this is a controversial and unprovable theory, but while researching The Fires of Pride, I spent two years intensively studying Braggs' dispatches and windy after-action reports about the Wilmington campaign and especially about the part Bragg played - and did not play - in the fall of Ft. Fisher, the enormous Confederate "sand castle" that had guarded the approaches to that port for more than three years. Its commander, a gallant and wholly honorable young Virginian colonel named William Lamb, had created in the U.S. Navy's imagination a bastion that appeared so close-to-impregnable that Ulysses Grant once estimated that it would take an entire army corps to seize it (it actually took little more than one well-led division) and for two years vetoed all plans to besiege the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy" because he could not spare so many troops.

Much of the brilliance of Col. Lamb's leadership lay in the cleverness with which he concealed how weak Ft. Fisher's garrison was and how pathetic was his supply of reserve ammunition. He maintained a posture of fierce belligerence, by engaging every blockade ship that came within range (and his gunners, who practiced by pot-shooting at barrels drifting a mile or so out to sea, were so good they usually hit their target after the fourth or fifth shot, or at least raised alarming water-spouts close enough to it to cause its skipper to reverse course rather than risk a duel with Lamb's brawny columbiads or his "Flying Battery" of horse-drawn Whitworth breechloaders (not very destructive guns but incredibly accurate - they could put a hole in a smokestack at 3,000 yards, which was farther than most of the blockaders' guns could even shoot, never mind "accurately"!). If a blockade-runner could evade the Navy's frigates until it was within sight of the fort, it was safe; unless and until Ft. Fisher was neutralized, the Rebels had at least one major port through which Lee could reliably obtain the guns, machine-tools, saddle leather, and medicines needed to keep the Army of Northern Virginia in the fight).

What the Federals did not realize, is that the immense visual strength of Ft. Fisher (whose walls of buttressed sand could soak up heavy projectiles like a giant sponge) was almost totally an enormous bluff. Despite two years of pleading with Richmond, when the Yankee assault finally came, Lamb had less than 800 able-bodied infantry to defend a citadel whose walls were almost two miles long; (and the U.S. Navy expended 21,000 rounds of heavy shells during the first day of its bombardment - the heaviest naval shelling in history until the bombardment of Tarawa), yet succeeded in destroying only two of Lamb's cannon and killing only eight of his men!.

Given the strategic importance of Wilmington, it still surpasses belief that Jefferson Davis would have made Braxton Bragg responsible for its defense. When the news of Bragg's appointment became known, the Raleigh newspaper ran an editorial that began: "We hear that Bragg is going to assume command in Wilmington. Goodbye, Wilmington!"

Bragg would not have been the first general, on either side, to become overly fond of opiates - laudanum was an easily obtainable drug, even late in the war, and if you could stand the taste (variously described as "liquid sewage" or "distillate of rotting corpse") it would rock your world into a treacherous but potent kind of euphoria. Bragg's otherwise inexplicable behavior - manic activity one hour, impenetrable lethargy the next - during the Union assault on Ft. Fisher can be explained, in my opinion, only by three causes:

One: he was both a coward and a traitor (not a shred of evidence for that, and even a nincompoop can be brave under fire); 2) Bragg was temporarily deranged by the stress of his new command (and we KNOW he was paranoid - after all, in Mexico his own men had tried to "frag" him by rolling a lighted 12-pounder shell under his bunk on the night before the battle of Chapultepec (alas for the Rebel cause, the shell was a dud); or, 3) he was severely delusional from narcotics, and since no alcohol was smelled upon his breath, several staff officers suspected the general's valise held a massive supply of liquid pain-killer - that was eventually my conjecture, too, and as a former, well-trained substance-abuse counselor I can state with some authority that Bragg's behavior fits the classic template of someone alternately blissed-out and morose from chomping 'way too many Percocets.

Bragg's first move, upon taking command of the Wilmington theater, was actually a smart one: citing the critical importance of Wilmington to the Southern war effort, he forcefully argued to General Lee the importance of providing a strong reserve force that could be moved quickly to eject the inevitable Union landing. Lee was stretched mighty thin himself by the winter of 1864, but he saw the logic and detached one of his finest veteran units, the division of General Robert Hoke, a native North Carolinian with a distinguished battlefield record, a vigorous and aggressive commander beloved by his men and respected by the enemy. When Hoke's division arrived, Bragg positioned them on the one piece of "high ground" available, a snow-white sand hill four miles north of Ft. Fisher named "Sugar Loaf". When the Union expeditionary force landed, on January, 1865, Hoke's men were ideally placed to deliver a potentially shattering counterattack straight into the invader's backs. Distracted and badly mauled by the resistance Lamb's garrison was putting up, a concerted attack from the north, timed to coincide with a sortie from the fort, might very easily have turned a looming and disastrous defeat into a stunning upset victory; might actually have bought the Confederacy another six months; might even have convinced the war-weary northern public that a negotiated peace was now preferable to an unequivocal victory.

But of course that didn't happen. And no one except Braxton Bragg ever understood why. Bragg was charged with defending the single most critical objective still in Rebel hands; it was his duty to try an repel the attack, not to hoard Hoke's veteran soldiers for "a better opportunity" (as he later and very lamely explained in a whiny and self-serving letter to Davis) - if Wilmington fell, anything else Bragg tried to do was more or less irrelevant.

Bragg's mis-reading of the situation was flabbergasting; in order to see with his own eyes what the situation was at Ft. Fisher, all he had to do was board a small steamship and make a twenty-minute voyage down the Cape Fear River - the whole battle could have been observed through binoculars in such detail that Bragg could have identified old West Point classmates. Yet he never made that trip. Instead, he fired off a series of ever-more-deluded, even farcical telegrams to Richmond.

"Delusional" barely begins to describe Bragg's soothing assertion that a counterattack from Sugar Loaf was unjustifiably risky; that he had already sent: "adequate reinforcements" to Col. Lamb. The only significant reinforcement Lamb had received all week consisted of a single pathetic battalion of "Junior Reserves", average age fifteen and barely trained enough to know which end of their muskets the bullet came out of. To his everlasting credit, Lamb dismissed the boys and sent them home as soon as the horrendous naval bombardment began; he figured they would probably run away anyhow, as soon as nobody was watching them, and frankly he could not blame them. The grateful youths fled and only suffered one fatality: a sixteen-year-old corporal who was unlucky enough to be running directly underneath a 15-inch shell from a monitor when it exploded. Nothing was left of him except a greasy red smear on the sand and one empty, charred shoe.

Lamb's outnumbered garrison fought savagely all day long, killing or wounding 1200 men before finally surrendering the one bastion still in Rebel hands, at about 10:15 that night.

For at least six hours prior to that capitulation, Robert Hoke had pleaded with Bragg to unleash his 6200 experienced soldiers for that all-out counterattack on the Union rear. And with increasingly testy words, Bragg had refused. At one point, mumbling like a man far gone in drink…or dope…Bragg muttered something about "night attack's too risky…troop'll get lost in the darkness…" To which the choleric Hoke responded by drawing a pencil sketch on the wall: "General Bragg, here is my division. On my right is the Cape Fear River, and on my left is the Atlantic Ocean; to my front is Fort Fisher, less than four miles from my entrenchments, parts of it are on fire and all of it is illuminated by flares and bursting shells. In order to smite the enemy with thunderclap surprise, all my men have to do is keep the ocean on their left and the river on their right, a task even an imbecile could manage, and advance resolutely toward the fort, where the enemy's sentries cannot possibly hear us coming due to the thunder of their own cannon! How can anyone possibly 'get lost' in such a situation?" Bragg just glared at him, retreated to his office, and slammed the door.

Bragg's behavior was so peculiar, so militarily idiotic, that his stunned surprise when he heard of Lamb's surrender might have been genuine. We will never know whether Bragg simply suffered a failure of nerve, or was by that point in the evening too stoned to know the difference between delusion and reality. But the Confederate survivors knew they had fought like lions, and so did the Federals who had finally, by sheer numbers as much as by their own valor, overcome them. Lamb, who suffered an agonizing hip wound when trying to organize a last desperate bayonet charge to recapture a gun-position, was treated with the greatest courtesy, even deference, by the Federal officer who accepted his surrender, Col. Martin Curtis, whose brigade had been shot to pieces by Lamb's heroic but hopelessly out-numbered garrison. Not long after the war, in fact, the two men became very close and remained so until their respective deaths, well into the Twentieth Century. They sometimes took long walks together on the desolate beach north of the ruins of Ft. Fisher, and should they encounter a fisherman or a beach-comber, they would introduce each other with these words: "I'd like for you to meet my dear friend, the enemy…"

Braxton Bragg spent his remaining years trying to justify his own battlefield failures, which were, of course, always someone else's fault. As I remarked in the text, the Civil War was a veritable Bach fugue of ironies, and not the least of them is the fact that one of America's largest and most important military installations is named for a man whose own troops tried to murder him in 1847, and whose inexplicable lapse of generalship cost the Confederacy its last chance to obtain a negotiated peace.

Stay tuned for next month's edition of Crucible of Blood - The American Civil War And the Evolution of Modern Military Technology!

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