Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

Had he any motive for doing this? He says the expense was “well incurred as it retires General Butler to private life,” ¹ although he admits that the expense amounts to millions.²

I had criticised his foolish performances in bombarding for eight pays Forts St. Philip and Jackson, leaving the latter, upon which he expended most of his work, as defensible as before. Weitzel had so reported it, and therefore Porter did not like him, and me he hated as the devil hates holy water, and he did not show me the ordinary courtesy of conferring with me.

He says on the first day (December 24th) Fort Fisher was silenced in an hour and a half.³ He says substantially the same of it on the 25th. I knew that it was not silenced and that earthworks of that description which he saw before him could not be so silenced.

I had seen him with twenty-one mortars bombarding Fort Jackson on the Mississippi, a little further off, for seven days throwing in thirteen-inch shells, and he did not effectually demolish but one gun. Weitzel had seen the same thing, and he knew that fort was not disabled.

Colonel Lamb, then commander of Fort Fisher, says there was but one gun out of twenty on the land face demolished, and out of his forty-four barbette guns,--that is, guns mounted on top of the works,--but three had been demolished, and two of them, Brooke's guns, had been exploded. He also says that at the first attack the fire of the fleet was desultory, and did but little harm, a large portion of the shells going clear over the fort into the water of the river.

How was it at the second attack? Porter says he made a new plan. The fire was very fast, and from all the broadsides of his vessels which could be brought to bear.⁴ His plan shows that he arranged the iron-clads and heavier vessels, some eighteen of them, so as to bear directly on a quarter to a half a mile nearer range than at the first attack (some of them seven hundred to one thousand yards from the land face of the fort), and he reports that the fort was reduced to a pulp.⁵

He doesn't claim any such damage done to the fort or its approaches on the first attack, and in that attack he claims to have expended only as much shot and shell as he would have expended