The 85th Redoubt: One of the Heaviest Assaults

When the men of the Eighty-Fifth New York Regiment arrived at Plymouth, North Carolina, they built their own fort to help anchor the town's defenses. The earthwork they raised stood southwest of the main Union line and mounted artillery. Soldiers called it the Eighty-Fifth Redoubt, and also Fort Wessells, after their garrison commander.

During the multi-day Confederate assault on Plymouth in April of eighteen sixty-four, this position took some of the fiercest fighting. Confederate infantry surged forward against the redoubt in what witnesses described as one of the heaviest assaults of the entire siege, and the position was overrun before the rest of Plymouth surrendered on April twentieth. The Eighty-Fifth New York, the regiment that had built the position and sworn to hold it, was captured along with the entire Union garrison when the town gave way.

About twenty-five hundred Union troops faced roughly forty-five hundred Confederates under General Robert Hoke, and on April nineteenth the ironclad Albemarle sank the gunboat Southfield. Most captured enlisted men were sent to Andersonville prison, with the first trains arriving between April thirtieth and May third. The regiment itself had been organized at Elmira, New York, and mustered in on December second, eighteen sixty-one. It was reorganized in January of eighteen sixty-five, fought at Wyse Fork in March, and mustered out on June twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-five.