In January 1865, as the Civil War entered its final months, Henry F. Evans wrote home from aboard the USS Susquehanna following the bloody capture of Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina.
Evans, a native of Wales who had emigrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1859, was serving as a sailor in the United States Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron. He had previously answered the call during the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863 with the 49th Emergency Militia, before enlisting in the Navy in May 1864 as a landsman, the lowest rank aboard ship.
His letter provides a vivid, first-person account of one of the most important amphibious assaults of the Civil War. Sailors from the Susquehanna, including Evans, were ordered ashore alongside U.S. Marines to dig trenches, advance under fire, and launch repeated assaults on the Confederate works. Evans describes the thunder of naval bombardment, the chaos of failed charges, and the heavy losses suffered by “bluejackets” attacking fortifications designed to repel land forces.
The Second Battle of Fort Fisher took place from January 13-15, 1865.
The fall of Fort Fisher sealed the fate of Wilmington, the Confederacy’s last major Atlantic port, and marked one of the Navy’s most decisive contributions to Union victory. Few surviving letters capture so clearly what it meant for ordinary sailors – many with no prior combat experience – to leave their ships and fight as infantry on open sand under direct fire.
What follows is Henry F. Evans’s letter in full, published in the Pittston Gazette in February 1865…