Shipwreck dating to the American Civil War found off North Carolina
The goal of the Union blockade was to keep supplies from reaching the Confederacy through one of its most important ports and to prevent the export of cotton and other marketable items by the Southerners.
Archaeologists discovered the shipwreck 44 km (27 miles) downstream from Wilmington near Fort Caswell, at the mouth of Cape Fear River — making it the first Civil War shipwreck uncovered in the region in decades, said Billy Ray Morris, deputy state maritime archaeologist and director of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology's Underwater Archaeology Branch.