Battle of Plymouth: The CSS Albemarle and the Last Confederate Victory

The Battle of Plymouth in April eighteen sixty-four was the last major Confederate victory of the Civil War in North Carolina. Confederate General Robert Hoke attacked the Union garrison, numbering between roughly twenty five hundred and three thousand men depending on the source, on April seventeenth. Two days later, the newly commissioned ironclad CSS Albemarle steamed down the Roanoke River and sank the gunboat U.

S.S. Southfield, driving off the remaining Union naval support.

The garrison surrendered on April twentieth. What followed was darker. After the battle, Confederate soldiers killed at least one hundred Black soldiers and civilians who had sought safety within Union lines.

A policy drawn from Fort Pillow, Tennessee just eight days before, declared that Black troops would not be treated as prisoners of war. Plymouth remained in Confederate hands until the war's final months.