Chapter 6.

Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark

      The course of military affairs in North Carolina during the first six months of the Civil War was filled with frustration, disappointment and defeat. Because Jefferson Davis was determined to make a supreme effort to defend the territorial integrity of the entire Confederacy, including its new capital city of Richmond, most Tar Heel troops were destined to engage the enemy on battlefields in neighboring Virginia. Indeed, on June 10, 1861, D. H. Hill commanded troops, mostly former cadets from the North Carolina Military Institute, at Big Bethel, Va., the first major land battle of the Civil War. While assuring that North Carolina would be relatively safe from overland invasion, the concentration of strength in Virginia robbed the Tar Heel State of much of its already sparse soldiery and made North Carolina vulnerable to attack from the sea.

     The North Carolina Coastal Plain is a place of subtle and fragile variety. Its most dramatic feature is a series of narrow barrier islands that stretches from just above the Virginia line southward for approximately 250 miles to the New River Inlet in Onslow County. Most probably formed thousands of years ago when rising seas inundated low lying areas and flooded the land on the back or lee side of a ridge of sand dunes that once punctuated the coast of the mainland, the so-called Outer Banks have profoundly influenced North Carolina’s economic development through the centuries. Huge estuaries, called sounds, have arisen where the onrushing sea water retards the flow of coastal rivers and floods the river valleys for many miles inland. The largest, Pamlico Sound, covers what were once the lower valleys of the Neuse River and the Pamlico River. Albemarle Sound, to the immediate north, floods the easternmost sections of the Roanoke River and its coastal tributaries -- the Chowan, Pasquatank, Perquimans, and Alligator rivers. Currituck Sound , just below the Virginia border, and Core Sound and Bogue Sound, which lie south of Pamlico Sound, also retard the flow of sluggish coastal streams.

    Treacherously shallow, the sounds and their principal inlets through the Outer Banks at Hatteras, Ocracoke, Oregon and Beaufort test the abilities of even the most experienced seamen. These enormous lagoons and their off shore shoals, their sandy bottoms buffeted to and fro by the surging tides, contain the wrecks of hundreds of hapless ships and boats, giving the area the inglorious sobriquet “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Only in extreme southeastern North Carolina can one gain access from the sea to the interior with relative ease. The Cape Fear River opens directly into the ocean at Southport, formerly Smithville.

     The coastal regions of the North Carolina mainland teem with huge swamps and slightly elevated wetlands called pocosins. The largest of these boggy landscapes is the Great Dismal Swamp near the Albemarle and Currituck Sounds. Ferns and Spanish moss and standing pools of murky water are seemingly everywhere. Deer, bears, bobcats, raccoons, squirrels and insects of vast variety and voracious appetite move through the dark shadows of this eerie and somber domain. Creepers and vines hang from the trees -- red maple, black gum, ash, sweet gum, pine, and cypress. Standing on the shores of Lake Drummond in the heart of this enormous wetland, peering at the swarms of critters and the flocks of birds that soar above its surface, experiencing the stillness and seeing the shadows and reflections of the surrounding wilderness flicker in its ink-black waters, one cannot help but feel powerless, alone, and profoundly melancholy.

     For all its vastness, the Great Dismal Swamp did succumb to the hand of man in the half century before the Civil War. Two water channels, the Dismal Swamp Canal and its offshoot, the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal, were opened to provide a secure, inland water route from the Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay and Norfolk.[1] Railroads also began to rumble across the Coastal Plain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In October 1838, the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad started laying track from the Cape Fear River town of Wilmington, North Carolina’s main port, northward 161 ½ miles to the town of Weldon on the Roanoke River, where the Petersburg Railroad, built in 1834 from Petersburg, Va., already had its southern terminus. When it opened in March 1840, the Wilmington & Weldon was the longest railroad in the world. The Raleigh & Gaston Railroad ran from the State capital also to the Roanoke River at Weldon.

    Weldon was to become a strategic rail center for the entire Confederacy. Until 1864, when a line was completed between Greensboro, N.C. and Danville, Va., all trains east of the Appalachian Mountains had to travel through that small North Carolina town to take supplies to the huge Confederate army in Virginia. The final railroad in the North Carolina Coastal Plain was the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad. It began its 95-mile westward journey at Morehead City, just across the Newport River from Beaufort, and connected with the North Carolina Railroad at Goldsboro, where the Wilmington and Weldon crossed the Neuse River.

     Governor Ellis appreciated the military import of the North Carolina Coastal Plain and did all within his power to strengthen its defenses.[2] “Beaufort Harbor,” he informed Jefferson Davis, “is a most eligible point for privateering.” “All the light have been extinguished on the Coast,” Ellis continued. “Vessels have been sunk in Ocracoke Inlet and a fleet of armed vessels (small) is now being fitted out to protect our grain crops lying on the waters of the No. East part of the State. A good Ship Canal connects those waters with the Chesapeake at Norfolk.” [3] Governor Ellis knew that he had no time to waste. The threat of a Union naval attack was clear. On April 27th, President Lincoln issued a proclamation announcing the extension of a naval blockade of the Confederate states to include the coasts of North Carolina and Virginia. “. . . duly commissioned officers of the United States, while engaged in executing the orders of their superiors, have been arrested and held in custody as prisoners or have been impeded in the discharge of their official duties without due legal process by persons claiming to act under the authority of the States of Virginia and North Carolina,” the proclamation asserted.[4]

     Federal authorities understood the strategic significance of eastern North Carolina. On June, 1, 1861, Union   Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (1802-1878), a Connecticut lawyer and able administrator, received a dispatch from an officer who argued persuasively that Norfolk and Richmond could not be effectively blockaded as long as the North Carolina sounds remained in Confederate hands. “By the enclosed pamphlets and maps it will be perceived that Norfolk and Richmond are not yet blockaded or completely cut off from the sea. They have a back outlet by way of the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal.”

     The letter went on to describe the Currituck, Ablemarle, and Pamlico sounds as a “vast internal water navigation” system that the South was using to transport critical supplies to rebel troops in Virginia. “The waters are covered with vessels carrying on inland trade, while many steamers ply to and from the many towns and villages,” the writer proclaimed. “We are also informed that the waters of these inland sounds wash the shores of a vast soil, abounding in rich productions, as cotton, corn, grain lumber, turpentine, and provisions of all kinds.”[5]

    Similar sentiments appeared in a communiqué Secretary Welles received on June 25th. “The Dismal Swamp Canal and the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal offer facilities of communication,” this dispatch read. “Vast quantities of corn are sent from the eastern counties of North Carolina to Norfolk by the routes indicated. So long as the rebel troops can receive abundance of corn from North Carolina, rice from Wilmington and Charleston, bacon and pork from Memphis and New Orleans, they can scarcely be starved out.”[6]

   Gideon Welles

   Knowing that he must act quickly to meet the prospect of an attack by the Union Navy, Governor Ellis ordered Colonel Elwood Morris on April 29th “to proceed to Ocracoke and Hatteras, plan and construct fortifications.” Morris was to “use all powers necessary to carry out this enterprise.”[7] Hatteras Inlet was almost 40 miles from the mainland and over twice that distance from the closest rail center at New Bern, a former State capital and a port situated where the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad reached the Neuse River. Hauling men and supplies from New Bern across the broad expanses of Pamilico Sound to Hatteras Inlet was no easy task. When calm, the sound resembled a huge lake. Schooners searched for the wind, their crews peering toward the horizon in hopes of seeing the distinctive black and white stripes spiraling upward on the Hatteras Lighthouse. When turbulent, the sounds churned with sudden fury, drenching men and cargo with stinging spray.

     Hatteras Island was a scene of frenzied activity in May and June 1861. About 180 free blacks, drenched with sweat, their faces sometimes battered by clouds of swirling sand, labored almost incessantly to build gun emplacements amid the stark white dunes at the edge of the inlet and the sea. Heavy artillery was transported by barge through the Great Dismal Swamp and then carried across the Ablemarle and Pamlico sounds to the Outer Banks.

     Two octagonal forts made of sand, mud, marsh grass and turf were erected at the southern end of the island. The larger was Fort Hatteras. About five feet high with slanting sides it stood approximately 1/8 of a mile from the channel entrance. The smaller, Fort Clark, about ¾ of a mile from Fort Hatteras, was closer to the ocean. Fort Hatteras had 12 thirty-two pound smooth-bore guns as its principal armament, while Fort Clark had 5 thirty-two pounders and two smaller guns. Acting together, the two citadels could almost certainly destroy any enemy ship that dared to pass through Hatteras Inlet and enter Pamlico Sound. “I hardly think a flotilla can get into the harbor,” boasted Colonel W. Bevershaw Thompson, a North Carolina military engineer.[8] This optimism rested upon the accepted notion that one gun ashore could match four guns aboard ship. All the while, Federal naval officers sat off shore. They watched the black laborers and the Tar Heel soldiers readying North Carolina’s coastal defenses and pondered how they should respond.

     President Lincoln and his military commanders were under mounting pressure to assuage their critics by providing the North with some good news. The war in Virginia was not going well, at least not for the Union. On July 21, 1861, Federal troops under General Irvin McDowell suffered a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. Looking for an opportune place to defeat the Confederates, Secretary of the Navy Welles began to cast his eyes toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina. “The undersigned confidently asserts that there is no part of the country in armed rebellion against the Government which can be so easily and so terribly made to feel the power of the United States by its occupation by the Federal forces as the inland cost of North Carolina,” wrote U. S. Navy Lieutenant R. B. Lowry on June 1st.[9]

    Owners of Northern merchant ships were clamoring for relief from a pesky band of Tar Heel privateers that was operating out of Hatteras Inlet. Atop the Hatteras Light House sat a lookout who would signal whenever he saw an unprotected Union vessel appear off shore. Like so many mice emerging from their holes, the Confederate seamen, when notified, would venture forth into the Atlantic and swoop down upon their defenseless prey. Clutching their purloined cargo, the privateers would then dash back into Pamlico Sound under the protective guns of Fort Clark and Fort Hatteras.

     One Union sailor described how his boat was overtaken by a Confederate steamer off Cape Hatteras on June 25th. “I endeavored to make my escape by setting all sail and running free,” he explained, “but the steamer being a fast one and the brig a slow sailer I was soon overtaken and compelled to surrender.”[10] Another seamen, a lieutenant, went beyond describing the problem. He suggested a solution. “It seems that the coast of Carolina is infested with a nest of privateers that have thus far escaped capture,” he declared. “Hatteras Inlet, a little south of Cape Hatteras light, seems their principal rendezvous. Here they have a fortification that protects them from assault.”

    The lieutenant insisted that this problem could be easily solved. A Federal flotilla could bombard the Confederates at Hatteras Inlet into submission. “. . . in three weeks nothing more will be heard of Carolina privateers,” he proclaimed.[11]

     On August 12th a Yankee ship captain, who had been held prisoner at Hatteras for several weeks and released, provided Secretary Welles with invaluable intelligence about what an attacking force would encounter. He described the depth of the water in the inlet, the size and configuration of Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark, the number and disposition of the defending troops, even the availability of drinking water. “Water is obtained by sinking wells in the sand to the depth of 5 or 6 feet,” he reported. “It is not very good, but answers.”[12]

     Secretary Welles, bolstered by the advice of the Navy’s Board of Strategy, decided to act. In early August he ordered an amphibious attack which had as its purpose the destruction of Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark and the placement of sunken ships in Hatteras Inlet. Commanding the Union naval forces committed to this bold enterprise was Silas H. Stringham (1798-1876), the elderly head of the North Atlantic Blockading Fleet. His ships, most of which were outfitted with screw propellers, powered by steam, and able to fire explosive shells, would take full advantage of their increased maneuverability and firepower and blast away at the Confederate defenses. The plan also called for sending some 860 troops ashore to attack the two Confederate forts after Stringham’s flotilla had bombarded them. The strategic objective of this undertaking was to seal the inlet and thereby reduce the number of harbors that the Union blockading squadrons had to patrol by denying privateers a significant entryway to the open Atlantic from Pamlico Sound.

     The commander of the foot soldiers assigned to the Hatteras expedition was Benjamin F. Butler (1818-1893). A flamboyant, ambitious, cross-eyed, redheaded criminal lawyer from Lowell, Massachusetts, he would eventually earn the nickname “Beast Butler” among Confederates because of his harsh rule over captured Southern territory. The son of a textile mill boardinghouse keeper, Butler had failed to obtain an appointment to West Point in 1836 and had remained bitterly resentful of graduates of the United States Military Academy. He had something to prove. Fiercely competitive, Butler had struggled to get ahead despite his lack of money or political influence. He had succeeded. Because of his courtroom antics and his ability to obtain acquittals for his clients, Butler had become one of the most famous and highly paid lawyers in New England.

    Benjamin "Beast" Butler

     Butler was now determined to prove that he was an adroit military commander as well. “He was aware that Presidents in America are sometimes made on the battlefield,” comments Butler’s biographer.[13] Butler had convinced his friend, Secretary of War Cameron, that a combined operation against the Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet should be undertaken. Accordingly, John Ellis Wool (1789-1869), Butler’s commanding officer at Fort Monroe, Va., received instructions to supply army troops for the Hatteras Mission and put the enterprising Butler in charge. “Major-General Butler will prepare 860 troops for an expedition to Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, to go with Commodore Stringham, commanding Home Squadron, to capture several batteries in that neighborhood,” read the special orders from Wool.[14] Boarding ship on August 26th, his sparse red hair hanging in ringlets over his broad forehead, this politically ambitious and exuberant Massachusetts lawyer must have looked forward to the likelihood of being victorious in a battle with an isolated and outgunned adversary, the North Carolina defenders of Hatteras Island. “I sail to-day at noon for Hatteras Inlet, the weather being more favorable than for weeks past, though wind yet from east and northeast,” Commodore Stringham reported to Secretary Welles. “The expedition, I hope, will be successful.”[15]

     The Yankee attack against the Outer Banks came as no surprise. The man responsible for the defense of the North Carolina coast between the Virginia line and the New River Inlet was Brigadier General Walter Gwynn. In early July he had sent a letter to his military superiors in Raleigh in which he had warned that the Outer Banks and the sounds would be attacked by Federal forces in the near future. He had implored that more troops and guns be sent to him. Gwynn had maintained that if the barrier islands and Pamlico and Ablermarle Sounds were captured by the enemy, they would provide a springboard for widespread pillaging and marauding. “None could yield him a richer harvest and at the same time occasion such disaster and distress,” he had said. “The occupancy of the Sounds by the enemy may indeed be regarded as the subjugation of the state.”[16] No less vociferous in his expressions of concern had been a Tar Heel military official stationed at Beaufort. “As we are taking prizes . . . the U.S. will certainly make some efforts to break up this nest; that is, if they have not been bereft of their sense.”[17] These admonishments fell on silent ears. The Confederate Government, its resources stretched almost to the limit to meet the continuing threat of a Federal advance on Richmond, did not or could not provide what the troops at Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark desperately needed. More guns of sufficient caliber. More ammunition. More powder. More fresh water. More food. More soldiers. Put plainly, Colonel William F. Martin, the commander of the troops at Hatteras Inlet, lacked the resources required to resist a vigorous Federal effort to overwhelm him. A foretaste of what awaited the Confederates had occurred on July 10th. A Union warship, the U.S. Roanoke , had discovered that fortifications were being constructed on Hatteras Island and had steamed toward shore to take a closer look. Martin had ordered his guns to open fire on the Roanoke only to discover that all his shells fell far short of their target. “The colors were hoisted and we immediately returned fire with three rounds from forward pivot gun, and two from after pivot gun, and five rounds from rifle howitzers,” a Yankee naval officer had reported.[18] Obviously, the future did not bode well for the Confederates defenders of Hatteras Inlet.

       Commodore Stringham

     The lookout atop the Hatteras Lighthouse must have been the first Confederate trooper to spot ink-black smoke on the horizon on the morning of August 27th.[19] It was a disquieting sight. Steaming straight toward Colonel Martin and his 580 soldiers was a formidable flotilla of ships and boats. The steam frigates Minnesota (47 guns), Wabash (46 guns), the gunboats Monticello and Harriet Lane , the steamers Adelaide and Peabody with Butler’s soliders ( mainly from New York State) aboard and schooners and metal surf boats in tow, the Pawnee , the tugboat Fanny , and two transport ships.[20]

     The Tar Heel troops at Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark must have gulped more than once as they watched Commodore Stringham’s fleet gather a few miles off shore and drop anchor in the late afternoon beyond the reach of the Confederate artillery. It was painfully obvious that the listless days of summer, when Martin’s men had spent much of their time fishing along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound and carousing and getting drunk in the nearby villages of Portsmouth and Hatteras, were over.[21] Martin knew that he did not have enough troops to man his guns properly and to prevent a landing of Federal forces. He therefore dispatched a pilot boat to Portsmouth Island late on August 27th with an urgent request that the Confederate commander send reinforcements. Unfortunately for the Confederates, the message did not get through until the next morning.

    Stringham devised a tactical plan for deploying his ships off Hatteras Inlet that took full advantage of the fact that his frigates were powered by steam. The scheme, first used in the mid-1850’s by the French and the British in the Crimean War, called for his fleet to steam continuously in a narrow ellipse, all the while letting lose its guns, many of which were rifled, on the Confederate batteries ashore. Through his spyglass Colonel Martin watched the Union flotilla steam toward the beaches on the morning of August 28th and make final preparations for battle.

     The Union bombardment began at 10 a.m. Soon thereafter, Butler’s foot soldiers started climbing into the metal surf boats that would take them ashore about three miles north of Fort Clark. The winds were high, and the seas rough. Only about 315 soldiers made it to the beaches before landing operations were suspended due to the fact that most of the small boats were swamped. “It was impracticable to land more troops because of the rising wind and sea,” Butler stated in his official report.[22] No doubt the intrepid Butler was embarrassed that he had to watch the rest of the battle from the decks of the Harriet Lane .

      Stringham’s warships drew 18 to 20 feet of water and could get no closer than one mile from shore. Because Fort Clark was closer to the Yankee ships, it received most of Stringham’s early barrages. Among the defenders of this still unfinished sand and timber fortress was Captain John B. Fearing of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. At 12:25 p.m. Stringham observed that the Confederates had lowered the rebel flag at Fort Clark and were scurrying toward Fort Hatteras. “They fired incessantly for 3 ½ hours,” Fearing explained. “We returned the shots until we had no ammunition, then retreated under the heaviest shelling any man ever saw; we were compelled to run and fall at almost every step, to escape the fragments. Some of our men were killed, some wounded, some cut off.”[23] Colonel Martin explained that he had ordered the troops to abandon Fort Clark because “every charge of powder and every primer was exhausted.”[24] The sailors and soldiers aboard the Union flotilla cheered when they saw a United States flag appear above Fort Clark at 2 p.m. It was placed there by troops who had landed earlier that morning on the beach and who now occupied the abandoned Confederate citadel without a fight.

      Believing that the battle might be over, Commodore Stringham ordered the gunboat Monticello to steam into Hatteras Inlet and investigate the situation. It was 4 p.m. Captain John Gillis proceeded cautiously, constantly on the lookout for shoals and sandbars,. “In feeling our way through the entrance, endeavoring to reach with this vessel the harbor, we grounded, frequently touching bow and stern,” Gillis reported.[25] The sailors aboard the Monticello were surprised when the guns of Fort Hatteras opened fire on the Federal gunboat. Artillery shells ripped into the Monticello , shredding its auxiliary sails, splintering its wooden decks.

      Stringham recognized that Captain Gillis was finding it difficult to maneuver in the tight confines of Hatteras Inlet and sent warships close into shore to support him. Succeeding in extricating the Monticello from its predicament, Stringham decided to move his flotilla out to sea and renew the attack the next morning. Meanwhile, shortly before dark on August 28th, Confederate reinforcements from Portsmouth Island did finally arrive. They included Samuel Barron, chief of coastal defenses for North Carolina and Virginia, who assumed command from Colonel Martin.

      Whatever meager chances the Tar Heel defenders had to prevail at Hatteras Island were lost when they did not attack the Union troops left ashore by Commodore Stringham during the rainy night of August 28-29, 1861. “Much of the disaster which occurred on Thursday (August 29th) may be attributed to the fact that we did not possess ourselves of Fort Clark by the bayonet that night. But wiser heads than mine thought otherwise,” commented one Confederate officer.[26] Commodore Barron delayed an offensive move because he expected to receive additional troops from New Bern “at or before midnight.”[27] When those reinforcements did not arrive, he decided to postpone the attack against Fort Clark. He focused his attention instead upon strengthening the defenses at Fort Hatteras. It was a fatal blunder.

      Stringham’s fleet resumed the bombardment of the Confederate entrenchments on Hatteras Island at 8 a.m. on August 29th. The results were devastating for the Tar Heel troops. Too far away for the rebel artillery to reach them, the Union warships pounded Commodore Barron’s men with pivot guns fired at extreme elevation. Shells arced through the sky and fell almost perpendicularly upon Fort Hatteras. John Fearing wrote movingly about the events of that terrible morning.

“I never heard or read of such a bombardment . . . Commodore Barron said he never did. We returned the fire as best we could but our guns were too small, and the distance too great. They had Rifle Cannon and put almost every shell inside the Fort after they got the range.[ 28]

  Commodore Barron and his fellow officers understood that their situation was hopeless. “This state of things, shells bursting over and in the fort every few seconds, having continued for about three hours, the men were directed to take shelter under the parapet and traverses,” he stated in his official report. “I called a council of officers, at which it was unanimously agreed that holding out longer could only result in a greater loss of life, without the ability to damage our adversaries.”[29] A white flag appeared above Fort Hatteras at 11:10 a.m. Benjamin Butler was dispatched on the tugboat Fanny to deliver the terms of surrender – total capitulation. Commodore Barron accepted the arrangements, and he and his fellow Confederate officers boarded Stringham’s flagship as prisoners that afternoon. “In conclusion, I state that as far as I can learn our destination, we are bound to Fort Hamilton, N.Y., and I may be permitted to add that we have been treated most kindly, both officers and men, by those in whose charge we are placed,” proclaimed Colonel Martin.[30]

     The original plan was for Federal troops to destroy Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark, sink boats filled with stone in Hatteras Inlet, and then return to the North. Butler and Stringham decided to ignore these instructions, however. Butler explained.

  “On consultation with Flag-Officer Stringham and Commodore Stellwagen (the officer responsible for sealing the inlet), I determined to leave troops and hold the fort, because of the strength of the fortifications, its importance, and because, if again in possession of the enemy, with sufficient armament, of the very great difficulty of its capture, until I could get some further instructions from the Government.” [ 31]

   President Lincoln did subsequently approve this change of plans to hold on to Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark.

       Not surprisingly, Butler underscored the significance of the Hatteras campaign. He insisted that by seizing the inlet and the Confederate forts guarding it he and his fellow officers had made the entire coast from Norfolk to Cape Lookout near Beaufort susceptible to attack by light draught vessels. “In my judgment, it is a station second in importance only to Fortress Monroe on the coast. As a depot for coaling and supplies for the blockading squadron it is invaluable,” he proclaimed with characteristic hyperbole.[32]

    Benjamin Butler’s penchant for exaggeration notwithstanding, he was correct in assigning considerable weight to the outcome of the combined operation against Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark. However, the fundamental significance of the Hatteras campaign was psychological and political. It was true that North Carolina and the Confederacy as a whole could no longer dispatch privateers through Hatteras Inlet or use that opening to bring supplies from overseas to the Pamlico and Albemarle region. It was true that the planter elite along the edges of the sounds and along the lower reaches of the rivers that emptied into them could no longer navigate the great inland seas of North Carolina with absolute certainty that their vessels and property would be safe from attack and seizure. It was true that Federal troops and sailors now had a base of operations at which they could concentrate the strength needed to mount a major offensive campaign into the North Carolina Coastal Plain. It was true that Union naval officers had learned the important tactical lesson that rifled guns aboard steam-powered vessels could indeed overwhelm coastal fortifications. Still, the campaign’s critical importance was not military. Again, it was psychological and political. “The Federal military’s capture and occupation of Hatteras Island created consternation and anxiety within North Carolina and the Confederate government,” writes Gerald W. Thomas in Divided Allegiances. Bertie County during the Civil War .[33]

      In their book Why The South Lost The Civil War , Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr. argue that the principal reason for the South’s ultimate defeat in the Civil War was the weakness of Confederate nationalism, especially when Southern whites began to receive news of reversals on the battlefield. “We hope our analysis demonstrates,” the authors declare, “the relationship between military success, morale and will and the weakness of Confederate nationalism when undermined by battlefield defeat.”[34] According to this line of thinking, naval operations like the seizure of Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark “did produce potent indirect results.”[35] First, they gave rise to recriminations between Confederate officials in Richmond and those in the individual States and strengthened the centrifugal political impulses that always threatened to tear the South apart. Second, they exacerbated political tensions on the home front and brought extreme pressure to bear upon the brittle slave-holding system of the South by carrying the pain of war to the home front.

    When the planters of Washington County, North Carolina, for example, learned that Federal troops had captured Hatteras Inlet, many “fled the county for places further inland,” writes historian Wayne K. Durrill.[36] Also, those slaves lucky enough or resourceful enough to obtain boats began almost immediately to make their way to Hatteras Island. Major General John Wool reported that slaves were “almost daily arriving at Hatteras from the interior.”[37]

   In some ways even more alarming in the eyes of the planter elite of Coastal North Carolina was the behavior of many of the yeoman farmers of the Albemarle and Pamlico region after the defeat at Hatteras Inlet. William Pettigrew, a Washington County plantation owner, told Jefferson Davis that those local residents “more attached to the old Union than the new government” were beginning to discuss openly “who will & who will not take the oath to Lincoln’s government.”[38] A delegation of thirty residents of Hatteras Island visited Colonel Rush C. Hawkins, whom General Butler had left in charge, and assured him that they had no sympathy for secession. "We did not help by our votes to get North Carolina out of the Union," their proclamation stated.[39] Hawkins reported that 250 men had taken an oath of loyalty to the United States and that more were "still coming in."[40]

     Illustrative of the feelings of disappointment and outrage produced among Confederates by the Yankee victory at Hatteras Island were the observations of Elizabeth Collier, an eighteen-year-old girl who lived in Wayne County, North Carolina. “O My God! It makes every vein ready to burst with just indignation,” she wrote in her diary on August 28th. “When I think of such vile feet treading the soil of the Proud old North State. Arise! Arise! Let the cry be ‘Victory or Death.’”[41] The Raleigh Register attempted to reassure its readers. “If the State authorities will only do their duty and give us the means of defending the coast and protecting the citizens and property thereon, the people will do it,” the newspaper predicted.[42]

    The South did make desultory efforts to dislodge Federal troops from the Outer Banks. Colonel Hawkins felt compelled to dispatch some 600 men to the northern end of Hatteras Island in mid-September and establish a base at the tiny village of Chicamacomico, because he feared that Confederate troops assembling on Roanoke Island were preparing to attack him. He was right. Having captured the tugboat Fanny off Chicamacomico on October 1st, the Confederates landed in force near the northern end of Hatteras Island on October 5th and proceeded to chase the retreating Federal troops southward toward Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark, only to fall back precipitously when Hawkins brought the main body of U. S. troops northward to meet them, an inglorious battle known as the “Chicamacomico Races.” It turned out to be an inconclusive engagement. The Confederates returned to Roanoke Island, and the Federals marched back to Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark. Neither side had sufficient strength to defeat the other.

    The Yankee victory at Hatteras Inlet had a most salutary impact on public opinion in the North. Benjamin Butler rushed to Washington, D.C. with the joyous news. Butler met with Gustavus Fox, a former high school classmate of his in Lowell, Mass. who had become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Fox escorted Butler into the President’s office. What transpired is wondrous to imagine. “Looking even taller than usual in his nightgown, the delighted Lincoln fell into Fox’s arms,” says one historian. “The General, sitting on the sofa, roared with laughter as the lanky President flew around the room once or twice with the squat Assistant Secretary.”[43] Admiral David D. Porter in his naval history of the Civil War published several years later emphasized that the Hatteras campaign was “our first naval victory indeed our first victory of any kind.” Porter went on to explain that “the Union cause was then in a depressed condition, owing to the reverses it had experienced.” In his judgment, “the moral effect of this affair was very great, as it gave us a foothold on Southern soil and possession of the Sounds of North Carolina . . . and ultimately proved one of the most important events of the war.”[44] Clearly, more amphibious operations along the Carolina coast were in the offing