Carolina in the vicinity of the sounds. Hill set his soldiers to putting up earthworks across the center of the island, but he was called away to service in Virginia before they were completed. Shortly after his departure, his district was split in two; the southern part was assigned to Brig. Gen. Lawrence O'B. Branch, while the northern part was put in control of Henry A. Wise, whose command included Albemarle Sound and Roanoke Island, but not Pamlico Sound and its cities. It is also significant that Branch reported to Brig. Gen. Richard C. Gatlin, who commanded the Department of North Carolina, while Wise was under Maj. Gen. Benjamin Huger, who was in charge of the defenses of Norfolk. Wise had been commander of the so-called Wise Legion, but his troops did not accompany him. The Legion was broken up, although he was able to retain two of his old regiments, the 46th and 59th Virginia. He also had three regiments of North Carolina troops, the 2nd, 8th, and 31st North Carolina, plus three companies of the 17th North Carolina. The men from North Carolina were ill-equipped and poorly clothed, often armed with nothing more than their own shotguns. All told, the number came to about 1,400 infantrymen, but the number available for duty was smaller than that because the living conditions put as many as one-fourth of the command on the sick list. Wise begged Richmond to send him some guns, as had Hill before him, but the numbers that were actually sent were inadequate. They were distributed into several nominal forts: facing Croatan Sound were twelve guns in Fort Huger, at Weir's Point, the northwestern corner of the island; four guns in Fort Blanchard, about a mile (1.6 km) to the southeast; and nine guns in Fort Bartow, at Pork Point, about a quarter of the way down the island. Across the sound, at Redstone Point opposite Fort Huger, two old canal barges had been pushed up onto the mud, protected by sandbags and cotton bales, armed with seven guns, and named Fort Forrest. These were all the guns that would bear on the sound; the southern half of the island, nearest Pamlico Sound, in the direction from which the attack would come, was unprotected. Five other guns did not face Croatan Sound: a battery of two guns on the eastern side of the island protected against possible