Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Battle of Fort Fisher

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

This is a preview, for the full episode support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/117750397?pr=true

Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode, as well as years of other bonus content, at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. Now look, I'm gonna tell you though, that our current US government does put out some really good pamphlets and information on foraging and stuff. Really good things out there, but you know, we also have Costco, so it's a little different. Right. It's still an option. My favorite zine, I'm using the term that I'm sure a lot of people are going to be upset at, that they put out was like how to safely make alcohol out of the things in your home. Because they couldn't get any, like when the problems was for back of the day, what do people do when they're depressed and miserable?

They drink. But Anaconda had strangled off the booze supply, even to the point they could no longer safely make normal moonshine? So people were just brewing shit in their backyard, going blind and dying. So the Confederate government's like, no, this is, you can make other things. Please stop naming yourselves. We need to draft your children. We're losing. I like the idea that there's a predecessor to the anarchist cookbook that is the Anaconda cookbook, I guess, is like how to smoke banana peels. So we don't have banana peels anymore. Here's how to smoke some random, some random paprika. That'll fuck you up. Probably not in a way that you're looking for but it will fuck you up You know the grand tradition of high school students everywhere look for these mushrooms in the forest. Yeah

It's the what if the anarchist cookbook was really racist by 1865 only one in three ships managed to run the Union blockade Previous to this when it first started pretty much all of them made it. Nine out of ten. And in the beginning, as in the end, most of these ships are all going to one place, and that was the port of Wilmington. At this point, sitting at the mouth of the bay, just out of gun range, was a Union task

force of 33 ships, spawn camping the Confederate war effort. The blockade was so effective that the harbor shore was littered with skeletons of Confederate smuggling ships that either been blown to shit or when they realize they're not going to bust the blockade and safely make it like sneak by them, they would just try to ground their ships because then it would save the cargo. And as I remember, like the bays down there are pretty much like, they're pretty sandy, they're pretty muddy. So it's like, you're not, you are probably still saving the ship and the cargo.

You're not putting that shit up as some rocks. Yeah. But even if they did put it into some rocks, it wasn't that the Confederates had a shortage of ships necessarily, because everybody had a ship laying around from riverine to ocean going because they just kind of swallowed up the civilian fleet. It was like we need everything on that boat desperately. Fuck the boat.

Get us the shit. And that didn't mean even if like very few were making it that people would stop trying. They'd wait for moonless nights to try and gun it through the Union blockade and they had a ye olde version of NOS to make their ships go faster and it was just rowing oh yeah it's like oh don't worry I have a secret weapon slaves we're gonna make Jethro get out and push them back they they would dump pork fat and turpentine soaked rags into the the burners to make them go faster oh which didn't work and probably just made it smell like bacon all the time also sometimes they did explode you could only throw somebody explosively flammable things into a

boiler until you accidentally just cook off. But some ships made it through, most still failed, and the Confederate war effort was truly feeling it. By the end of 1864, the Confederates were feeling something else too. The end of Sherman's legendary march to the sea, and the fall of Savannah, Georgia. Once that was cut off, there's only one last major target to hit when it came to important harbors for the Union, Wilmington, and the fort guarding it, Fort Fisher.

Fort Fisher was only 18 miles from the city itself. It started the war as little more than a dirt berm on what was then known as Federal Point, which had, of course, been renamed Confederate Point, because we can't have that now can we? In 1862 Colonel William Lamb, a former journalist from Virginia, was put in command of the fort and spent the next two years expanding it with multiple other earthworks, bomb-proof bunkers, dozens of artillery positions, and the means to resupply them. Little star on his homework, we have an officer who remembered that logistics exist. It's been a while, I know. Every once in a while you're just like, oh shit,

you guys need water, don't you? Oh, we need bullets for our guns. I went to West Point to learn this Somebody didn't read the art of war. That's the problem. You gotta read the whole art of war Not just the just not just the war bits You also have to do the bring horses bring bring weapons like like we've joked about before the show if you've made it to the 1800s and you're still having rebel like revelations while reading art of, you should not be in command of troops. No. Now, the fort had plenty of telegraph lines allowing them to communicate directly with Wilmington, as well as brand new and kind of experimental fields of electrically wired

land mines protecting any overland route towards the fort. They were quite temperamental. People didn't really like working with them too much. Precursor to the corpse road. Nobody wants to be the first guy to work with a new kind of landmine, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, here's your pamphlet about weeds you can eat in the forest

instead of us giving you rations. Oh, by the way, we've put you on the experimental landmine detachment. It's like- Okay. Let me ask though. Do you want to be on experimental landmine detachment or do you want to be in a very first submarine created detachment? Oh, landmines. I'll fuck with landmines every time. You want me to stop on it, boss? Fuck yeah, I'll do that. I got a 50%. This is new. It probably won't work either either it will work or I won't have to deal with this anymore I will never have to see you again so either way I win and either way you're really not asking the army about your pension designation you know

you're not my cousin Jasper told me what happened with the Confederate fucking submarine I'm good with the landmines Jasper died twice. Most of this work on the fort was done by General William Henry Chase Whitting, a career military engineer and West Point grad. Whitting was a close personal friend of Lamb, so their working relationship was pretty solid, and this will be the last time I say this during this episode regarding anyone else. The fort did have one very big weakness though That was it was still a fort being manned by the Confederacy in the last stages of the war its ammo supply had

Continuously been pilfered and raided by other army commands leaving the garrison with so little ammo That its largest and most important cannons were left with fewer than ten shells apiece. That's no good You need more than that. It's not good. And like their ammo situation across the board was as a baseline dire at all times. Facing Lamb would be two characters from the Union that listeners of this show might be familiar with. One is Admiral David Dixon Porter, who would be in charge of the Navy portion of the attack that

the Union was going to make. The land forces were under the command of General Godfrey Whitsell, a Bavarian board West Point grad who had begun his military education at the ripe old age of 15. He was a solid choice for command, which is why it surprised everyone when Whitsell's superior and second guy people might be familiar with, Benjamin Butler took over the operation personally. Wob Wob. You might remember Porter and Butler from our episode of the Battle of New Orleans, and if you remember that, you might also remember they fucking hate one another.

Like cannot stand to be in the same room as what another level of hatred. This will obviously become very important later on. Word of the attack on the fort eventually trickled back to Lamb and Whitting, who weren't exactly confident about their ability to hold it, given that their resources kept getting stripped away. Then seemingly out of nowhere, Whitting was fired and replaced with Braxton Bragg. Yeah! Yeah! My t-shirt is off! I'm spinning it around my head. We got Bragg here. We got Bragg. Let's do it. Everything's going to get so much better for everyone involved from this point

forward. Definitely not precipitously worse. Yeah. Two bad things in one anybody named Braxton and the guy for Bragg is that named after Braxton is what you would like name your child today. That's the problem Brett. He's got he's got one of those Upper middle-class white people from like Whitehaven Yeah, but not Mormon that weird name with all the extra G's and H's Whitehaven. Yeah, but not Mormon weird name with all the extra G's and H's. He was a close personal friend of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Bragg was known for being a political general who only advanced in his career during the war thanks to two things. His victory in the Battle of Chickamunga, which he still kind of fucked up in the end, and his friendship with the president, which protected him from all of the fallout from his multiple failures that happened since that.

Just walking around with like a whiteboard with the president being like look scoreboard man. You gotta, I technically I won so. Every time his superior goes to yell at him as he just picks up like the telegraphs like do I need to wire the president? No. Let's just let's just cut to the chase and have you take my job again.