Ransom's Assault: The Fall of Plymouth

By April of eighteen sixty-four, the small river town of Plymouth had been in Union hands for more than a year, its garrison of roughly three thousand men sheltered behind a ring of earthworks along the Roanoke River. Confederate General Robert Hoke intended to take it back.

The assault began on April seventeenth with Confederate cavalry capturing an advance Union patrol, and for three days Hoke's division of several thousand soldiers pressed the defenders hard. On the morning of April twentieth, Hoke launched his final, coordinated attack. General Matthew Ransom formed his brigade into a line of battle near this spot and drove at the Union right, while other Confederate columns struck from the west. The ironclad CSS Albemarle had already swept the Union gunboats from the river, cutting off any hope of naval relief. By ten in the morning the garrison commander surrendered. Plymouth was the last significant Confederate victory of the war in the east, and it returned control of the Roanoke valley to the Confederacy for several more months.