The Fall of Wilmington, February Eighteen Sixty-Five
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
Near this spot ran a line of Confederate earthworks defending Wilmington in the final weeks of the Civil War. After Union forces captured Fort Fisher in January eighteen sixty-five, closing the last major Confederate port, General Robert Hoke entrenched his troops south of the city to buy time. Union infantry and gunboats pressed the line through mid-February.
On the evening of February twenty-first, Hoke's men abandoned the works, and the next morning, February twenty-second, eighteen sixty-five, Union troops marched into Wilmington unopposed. The city had been the Confederacy's lifeline for supplies. Its fall helped seal the outcome of the war just weeks before Appomattox.
