April 25
On this day in 1862, in a maelstrom of Union artillery shells, Sergeant Jechonias P. Willis (1838-1862) met his untimely fate within the battered walls of Fort Macon. The 23-year old had been a clerk in his hometown of Beaufort when he enlisted alongside his older brother, Hezekiah, in the “Topsail Rifles” (Company H, 1st North Carolina Artillery). The company had been raised by a local newspaper editor, Stephen Decatur Pool, and assigned to garrison the nearby fort. When New Bern fell to Union forces on March 14, 1862, the 450 men in the fort knew that they would be the next target. Union forces arrived on March 23 and began establishing a siege, digging trenches and landing artillery on Bogue Banks, the island on which the fort stood. The fort’s commander, Colonel Moses White, admitted “some discontent arose among the garrison” because of poor food, stern discipline, and a sense of hopelessness in withstanding the siege; at least ten soldiers deserted the fort in April. At 5:40 a.m. on April 25, Union guns unleashed a relentless bombardment that would last for eleven hours. From land and sea, shells pounded the fort, and Willis, manning his battery with resolve, worked diligently to return fire. Suddenly, a Union Parrott rifle shell struck an eight-inch Columbiad in Willis’s battery, ricocheting into another cannon and killing him instantly. Hezekiah, nearby, likely witnessed the horrific moment of his younger brother’s death. The fort surrendered the next morning, after 8 defenders had been killed and 17 wounded. Willis’s death rocked the close-knit community of Beaufort, and his funeral became a somber spectacle, even drawing coverage in the New York Times. At the Methodist Episcopal Church, Captain Pool eulogized him “as a brave and good man.” Four officers carried the simple pine coffin to the Old Burying Ground. Trying to imbue his death with some greater reach, locals developed a legend (almost certainly apocryphal) that the Union expedition commander, General Ambrose Burnside, wept at the sight.
Jechonias Willis (on left) and Thomas Lindsey, 1st North Carolina Artillery. Lindsey survived the war.
Sources: Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 1:137; 1860 U.S. Census: Carteret County; Judkin Browning, Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (2011), 60-61; Hardy, Wilson, and Collins, Beaufort’s Old Burying Ground (1999), 57; New York Times, May 8, 1862
