Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 4.djvu/43

Rh the first capture of an armed vessel during the war. Encouraged by this success, Colonel Wright and Colonel Shaw, of the Eighth North Carolina, loading their troops on Commodore Lynch s vessels, moved down to attack Chicamacomico. The Georgia troops effected a landing and drove the Indiana regiment some miles down the beach, taking about 30 prisoners. Colonel Shaw, who had moved further down the coast with the intention of landing and cutting off the enemy s retreat, put his men off into the water, his vessels having grounded, but they found it impossible on account of intervening sluices to wade ashore. The failure of Shaw s arduous efforts to land led to an abandonment of further pursuit.

The fall of Hatteras and the report of the preparation of another great expedition to fall on Southern coasts produced the utmost anxiety. This disquietude was not unmixed with indignation at the condition of affairs. The State s troops, especially her best-armed and best-trained regiments, were nearly all in Virginia, and all her coast defenses were, like Hatteras, poorly armed and insufficiently manned. Governor Clark, in a letter to the secretary of war, thus pictures affairs in his State: We feel very defenseless here without arms. . . We see just over our lines in Virginia, near Suffolk, two or three North Carolina regiments, well armed and well drilled, who are not allowed to come to the defense of their homes. . . . We are threatened with an expedition of 15,000 men. That is the amount of our seaboard army, extending along four hundred miles of territory, and at no point can we spare a man, and without arms we cannot increase it. ... We have now collected in camps about three regiments without arms, and our only reliance is the slow collection of shotguns and hunting rifles, and it is difficult to buy, for the people are now hugging their arms for their own defense.

Despairing at last of getting even his own regiments, he writes: