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[10]
Wilmington, 492.
-- advance on Goldsboroa, 493.
-- Schofield enters Goldsboroa, 494.
-- Sherman's marching orders, 495.
-- March toward North Carolina, 496.
-- the National Army at Fayetteville, 497.
-- March on Goldsboroa, 498.
-- battle of Averasboroa, 499.
-- battle of Bentonsville, 500, 501, 502.
-- junction of the armies of Sherman, Schofield, and Terry, 503.
-- Stoneman's great raid in Virginia and the Carolinas, 504.
-- Moderwell's expedition, 505.
General Grant was greatly disappointed by the resuit of the expedition against
Fort Fisher, and in his General Report of the Operations of the Army,
he severely censured
General Butler, and charged him with “direct violation of the instructions given,” by the “re-embarkation of the troops and return of the expedition.”
In those instructions
General Grant had said: “Should such landing [on the beach above the entrance to the
Cape Fear] be effected whilst the enemy still holds
Fort Fisher and the batteries guarding the entrance to the river, then the troops should intrench themselves, and, by co-operating with the navy, effect the reduction and capture of those places.”
Instead of doing so,
Butler re-embarked his troops, after the reconnoissance to the front of
Fort Fisher.
He claimed, in justification, that the conditions precedent to intrenching were lacking, in that he had not effected a landing, as only twenty-two hundred of his six thousand five hundred men had reached the shore, and without a single gun, when the sea ran so high that no more guns or men could be landed, and that provisions could reach the shore only by being headed up in casks, and sent on rafts.
He also said that the navy had nearly exhausted its ammunition, and could not be expected to co-operate with the troops in further assault until supplied; and that he had positive information that Confederate troops, larger in number than the whole military force of the expedition, were nigh at hand.
At the request of
General Grant,
General Butler was relieved, and General E. 0.
C. Ord was assigned to the command of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina.
On being informed that the fleet had not left the vicinity of
Fort Fisher,
General Grant wrote to
Admiral Porter,
asking him to remain, and promising to send a force immediately, to make another attempt to capture the
Confederate defenses at the mouth of the
Cape Fear.
He selected for the enterprise the same troops led by
Weitzel, with the addition of a thin brigade of fourteen hundred men, and two batteries.
1 This force, numbering about eight thousand men, was placed under the command
