April 14 

 

          On this day in 1861, hearing rumors from Charleston, South Carolina, that Fort Sumter had surrendered to Confederate forces, 41-year old Josiah Solomon Pender (1819-1864), the proprietor of the posh Atlantic Hotel resort on Front Street in Beaufort, North Carolina, rallied                                                        17 other eager town residents on a Sunday afternoon to help him                                                        take the Federal fort that guarded their harbor. They sailed out                                                            to Fort Macon and captured that 25-year old earth-and-masonry                                                        pentagonal bastion on the eastern tip of Bogue Banks. Their task                                                        was not difficult; only one individual–a maintenance man–                                                                  inhabited the fort and he surrendered without a quarrel at 3:30                                                          p.m. Pender, disappointed that North Carolina had not seceded,                                                          brought along a Confederate flag, and raised it above the fort.                                                              Pender dashed off a letter to South Carolina Governor Francis                                                              Pickens proclaiming, “We intend that North Carolina shall occupy a true, instead of a false position with her sister states of the South.” Pender got his wish as North Carolina officially seceded five weeks later on May 20, even though the state had been making military preparations to join the Confederacy almost immediately after Fort Sumter surrendered. A cousin of future Confederate general William Dorsey Pender, Josiah was appointed Captain of a heavy artillery battery, the “Beaufort Harbor Guards” (which became Company G, 1st North Carolina Artillery), and his unit served as part of the garrison the fort that he had captured. However, military discipline did not agree with Pender, and he was court-martialed for being absent without leave and lying about it, and dismissed from Confederate service on December 19, 1861. Pender continued contributing to the Confederate cause (and his own financial interests) by serving as a blockade runner. He contracted yellow fever and died in Beaufort in October 1864.

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Sources: 

Judkin Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 30, 32; New Bern Daily Progress, April 16, 1861; Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 1:113-114.

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