Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[No. 136. See page 814.]
the defences of Fort Fisher.¹
by its commander, William Lamb, Colonel, C. S. A.

. . . Lee sent me word that Fort Fisher must be held, or he could not subsist his army. . . .

At the land face of Fort Fisher, five miles from the intrenched camp, the peninsula was about half a mile wide. This face commenced about a hundred feet from the river with a half bastion, and extended with a heavy curtain to a full bastion on the ocean side, where it joined the sea face. The work was built to withstand the heaviest artillery fire. There was no moat with scarp and counterscarp, so essential for defence against storming parties, the shifting sands rendering its construction impossible with the material available. The outer slope was twenty feet high from the berme to the top of the parapet, at an angle of forty-five degrees, and was sodded with marsh grass, which grew luxuriantly. The parapet was not less than twenty-five feet thick, with an inclination of only one foot. The revetment was five feet nine inches high from the floor of the gun-chambers, and these were some twelve feet or more from the interior plane. The guns were all mounted in barbette, on Columbiad carriages; there was not a single casemated gun in the fort. Experience had taught that casemates of timber and sand-bags were a delusion and a snare against heavy projectiles; and there was no iron to construct them with. Between the gun-chambers, containing one or two guns each (there were twenty heavy guns on the land face), there were heavy traverses, exceeding in size any known to engineers, to protect from an enfilading fire. They extended out some twelve feet on the parapet, and were twelve feet or more in height above the parapet, running back thirty feet or more. The gun-chambers were reached from the rear by steps. In each traverse was an alternate magazine or bomb-proof, the latter ventilated by an air-chamber. Passageways penetrated the traverses in the interior of the work, forming additional bomb-proofs for the reliefs of the guns.

The sea face for a hundred yards from the northeast bastion was of the same massive character as the land face. A crescent battery, intended for four guns, joined this. It had been originally built of palmetto logs and tarred sand-bags, and sand-rivetted with sod; but the logs had decayed, and it was converted into a hospital bomb-proof. In its rear a heavy curtain was thrown up to protect the chambers from fragments of shells. From this bomb-proof a series of batteries extended for three quarters of a mile along the sea, connected by an infantry curtain. These batteries had heavy traverses, but were not more than ten or twelve feet high to the top of the parapets, and were built for ricochet firing. On this line was a bomb-proof electric battery, connected with a system of submarine torpedoes. Farther along, where the channel ran close to the beach, inside the bar, a mound battery, sixty feet high, was erected, with two heavy guns, which had a plunging fire on the channel; this was connected with the battery north of it by a light curtain. Following the line of the