|
Summary: A brief but perceptive letter to the governor of North Carolina informing him that he will soon visit Roanoke Island, a weak point in the South’s Atlantic Coast defenses, with the implication that he will urge the War Department to send reinforcements. D.H. Hill. Autograph Letter Signed, to Governor Henry T. Clark. New Bern, N.C., November 6, 1861. 2 pp. Inventory # 21775 $5,000 Complete Transcript:
Newbern N.C.
Nov 6th 1861
His Excellency
Henry T. Clark
Gov of North Carolina
Dear Sir
Your very kind letter is most gratefully appreciated. I regret that I cannot go to Raleigh before the 17th or 18th. I am about to start to Roanoke Island, the most important and weakest point in N.C. Unless one or more Regiments can be sent there, the whole Albermarle region will be at the mercy of the enemy. Gen'l Huger will withdraw [2] the Georgia Regiment, and then the Island must be lost
With great respect
D H Hill Historical Background:
From the moment he assumed office, Governor Clark was justly concerned about the defenses of his state’s long, vulnerable coastline. Clark wrote Secretary of War Leroy Walker on September 7, 1861, “I have received a petition from the people of Cape Fear to send them aid in this particular.” He further suggested that there be two distinct districts because of the length of the coastline, and that D.H. Hill, an adopted North Carolinian, be named to command one of the districts. Walker adopted this idea, but Hill remained in North Carolina for less than two months. On November 16, the War Department reassigned him to command the North Carolina Brigade in Joseph Johnston’s Army of the Potomac. Hill’s assessment was accurate and prophetic. Two months later, on February 8, 1862, Roanoke Island fell to Ambrose Burnside’s expeditionary force. Henry Wise, a political general from Virginia, was placed in charge of the North Carolina coastal defenses early in 1862. With only 3,000 men at his disposal, he sought reinforcements from Benjamin Huger, in command of 13,000 men up the coast in Norfolk, Virginia. Failing that, Wise beseeched Secretary of War Judah Benjamin for assistance, but none was provided.
Ambrose Burnside developed a brilliant scheme for an amphibious assault on the North Carolina coast in early 1862. Having been trapped in Hatteras Inlet for several weeks, partly due to miserable winter weather, Burnside turned and landed at Roanoke Island, the historic first site of Virginia colonization, on February 7. The next day, there was a brisk fight, and Wise’s subordinate, Colonel H.M. Shaw, surrendered the island garrison with about 2,600 surviving soldiers and 32 guns. On February 9, Burnside seized Elizabeth City on the mainland, moving on in short order to take New Bern and Beaufort. These early conquests hurt the Confederate economy and provided future bases for the Union blockade fleet. According to the editors of Jefferson Davis’s papers, “a congressional investigation of the ‘capitulation of Roanoke Island’ absolved Wise of responsibility for its loss and blamed the secretary of war and Huger for failing to either reinforce Wise or withdraw his troops from an untenable position.”
Historian James McPherson underscores the importance of Roanoke Island and its aftermath: “by April 1862 every Atlantic coast harbor of importance except Charleston and Wilmington (N.C.) was in Union hands or closed to blockade runners.” General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan, put forth in the first year of the war but initially discredited by the popular cry of “On to Richmond,” called for the United States to occupy major Southern rivers, seize Confederate ports, and restrict the ability of the South to function as a society by cutting it off from the outside world. Burnside’s victory at Roanoke Island was an early success patterned on the Anaconda Plan. Daniel Harvey Hill (1821-1889) a native South Carolinian and West Point graduate (Class of 1842), had been a mathematics professor at Davidson College and superintendent of the North Carolina Military Institute before the war. In 1848, he married Isabella Morrison, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister (and first president of Davidson College). In 1857, Isabella’s sister, Mary Anna, married Thomas J. (later “Stonewall”) Jackson. Hill was commissioned brigadier general on July 10, 1861, shortly after participating in the Battle of Big Bethel, the first land battle in the state of Virginia, as a regimental colonel. Hill fought at Seven Days, Second Bull Run, and Antietam. Hill is credited with holding the Confederate center, the “Bloody Lane,” at Antietam against repeated Federal assaults. However, Hill was blamed by some contemporaries for the loss of a copy of Lee’s “Special Order 191,” which, when discovered by Union pickets on September 13, revealed Lee’s plans to Union commander George McClellan. The lost order had been hand-coped by Jackson’s adjutant, Robert Chilton, and sent to Hill, who insisted he never saw that copy, having received the same written order directly from Lee. In the summer of 1863,
Hill was reassigned to the western theater, performing admirably at Chickamauga, but his subsequent criticism of his commander, General Braxton Bragg, led to disputes with President Davis, who refused to submit Hill’s commission as lieutenant general to the Confederate Senate. He later served as president of the University of Arkansas. Henry T. Clark (1808-1874) was a Democratic politician and speaker of the state senate who succeeded to the position of governor upon the death of John Ellis in 1861. Clark served as governor from July 1861 to September 1862. References:
McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York, 1988, pp. 372-373.
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume IX, Chapter XIX (Washington, 1883), http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/waro.html, pp.110-112.
|
