This week in our Literary Resolutions blog series, Blair’s office manager Artie Sparrow resolves one resolution by sharing about another.
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Nestled in the avalanche of emails when I returned to work after being away for two weeks was an announcement that Blair’s next blog series was about resolutions. At that point, I resolved to stop procrastinating and finish things I started, especially the following blog post that I began composing four months ago:
I’m not much of a Civil War buff, but I do enjoy reading about mistakes made by other people. When I started working at Blair, I eagerly devoured Clint Johnson’s Civil War Blunders. As the title implies, it’s accounts of big mistakes made during the Civil War, some of which are rather amusing, despite the underlying subject matter. My favorite blunder is the Union’s first attempt to capture Fort Fisher. It featured an earth-shattering kaboom, but no one got hurt.
Made of sand and dirt, Fort Fisher was located at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and protected Wilmington. In December 1864, Union forces were desperate to capture or destroy it, since Wilmington was the last Confederate port that remained open. 
The Union plan was simple in its genius and stupidity: it loaded a ship with gunpowder, ran it aground near the fort, and blew it up. The goal was to destroy the fort, but all the attack succeeded in doing was setting off a giant explosion that did little damage. The Confederates easily repulsed the first Union attempt to take the fort. Union troops had to return later using more conventional means to capture it.
Last year when my wife and I went to Southport for vacation, I finally got my chance to see where the giant kaboom took place. In the middle of the week, we took the ferry across the river to Fort Fisher. A helpful staff member at the visitor center told me how to get to the approximate spot where the Union ship blew up. One of my quirks is that I love looking out into the ocean at places where extraordinary things happened, even if the water 
there looks just like any other stretch of ocean. That didn’t take long, so afterward we took ourselves on a self-guided tour of the remains of Fort Fisher. The walls facing the Atlantic Ocean have mostly washed away, but those that went across the island to the river have been preserved. Thanks to Clint Johnson’s Touring the Carolinas’ Civil War Sites, we were able to understand what we were looking at and what happened there. We found out that the Armstrong gun is a replica of a cannon that could fire 150-pound shells a distance of five miles. We learned that Shepherd’s Battery was the scene of fierce hand-to-hand fighting when the Union finally succeeded in storming the fort.
I’m still not much of a Civil War buff, and there’s no danger that I’ll start reenacting. However, I will spend more time reading Clint Johnson’s books and other Blair backlist titles. Maybe I’ll find some more hidden gems for my travels.
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Check back next week for another post in our Literary Resolutions blog series. Happy reading!
John F. Blair, Publisher 