Northeastern North Carolina is a landscape defined by water -- vast, shallow sounds stretching between the mainland and the sandy ribbon of the Outer Banks. Pamlico Sound fills the south, Albemarle Sound extends nearly to Virginia in the north, and the narrow passage between them is squeezed even tighter by Roanoke Island. The island sits at the hinge point of the entire coastal system. Control it, and you command Croatan Sound to the west and access to every port town on the mainland shore -- New Bern, Beaufort, Edenton, Elizabeth City. The sounds were also linked to Norfolk by canal, meaning that as long as the Confederates held these waters, the Union blockade of that critical naval port leaked like a sieve. Roanoke Island was the strategic key to it all, and both sides knew it.

The men defending Roanoke Island were set up to fail. General Henry A. Wise commanded roughly 1,400 infantrymen, many of them North Carolina troops so poorly equipped they carried their own hunting shotguns instead of military rifles. A quarter of his force was sick at any given time, laid low by the damp and miserable living conditions on the island. His pleas to Richmond for artillery went largely unanswered. The guns he did receive were scattered among four forts facing Croatan Sound -- twelve at Fort Huger, four at Fort Blanchard, nine at Fort Bartow, and seven at the improvised Fort Forrest, built atop two canal barges pushed into the mud and protected by sandbags and cotton bales. The Confederate Navy contributed seven gunboats mounting a grand total of eight guns, a flotilla known with unintentional accuracy as the Mosquito Fleet. Wise, who had a talent for complaint, called them "perfectly imbecile gunboats." To make matters worse, when the attack came on February 7, Wise was bedridden at Nags Head with what he described as pleurisy and threatening pneumonia. Command fell to Colonel H. M. Shaw of the 8th North Carolina.

The Union fleet opened its bombardment on February 7, sending shells crashing into Fort Bartow while other gunboats engaged the Mosquito Fleet. The weakness of the Confederate position showed immediately -- only four guns at Fort Bartow could bear on the attackers, and when the gunboat CSS Curlew took a hit at the waterline and ran aground directly in front of Fort Forrest, it masked that fort's guns entirely. The Mosquito Fleet exhausted its ammunition and withdrew. That afternoon, Burnside began landing 10,000 troops at Ashby Harbor on the island's midsection. A 200-man Confederate force meant to oppose the landing fled without firing a shot when Union gunboats spotted them. By midnight, the Federal army was ashore. The next morning, Union troops advanced north along the island's single road and ran into Shaw's redoubt -- an earthwork with three guns flanked by what the Confederates considered impenetrable swamps. For two hours the lines traded fire through blinding smoke. Then General Jesse Reno sent his brigade slogging through the supposedly impenetrable swamp on the left while General John Foster ordered regiments through the swamp on the right. Both flanking forces emerged almost simultaneously. Under assault from three sides, the Confederate line collapsed. Shaw surrendered.

The casualty figures were modest by Civil War standards -- 37 Union killed and 214 wounded against 23 Confederate killed, 58 wounded, and 62 missing. But the strategic impact was enormous. Some 2,500 Confederates became prisoners of war, including reinforcements from the 2nd North Carolina and 46th Virginia who arrived too late to fight but not too late to surrender. Federal gunboats immediately pushed through the now-silent forts into Albemarle Sound and destroyed the remnants of the Mosquito Fleet at the Battle of Elizabeth City. Burnside used Roanoke Island as a staging ground for subsequent assaults on New Bern and Fort Macon. The back door to Norfolk was kicked in, and the sounds of North Carolina belonged to the Union for the rest of the war.

After the guns fell silent, Roanoke Island took on an unexpected role. The Army classified enslaved people on the island as contraband, and by late 1862, hundreds of people who had escaped slavery had made their way there. In 1863, a Congregational chaplain named Horace James was appointed superintendent of freedmen's affairs and set about turning the island into a self-sustaining colony. The Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island built a sawmill, established fisheries, and by 1864 housed 2,200 residents. At its peak the population reached 3,900, straining the island's poor soil but sustaining a community that ran its own schools, with missionary teachers from the American Missionary Association teaching reading and writing to children and adults alike. More than 150 men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. For four years, this small island in the Carolina sounds served as a proving ground for a radical idea: that formerly enslaved people could build their own community, govern their own affairs, and take the first steps toward full citizenship.