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[204] flotilla was so severe, that very soon the garrison became panic-stricken. Seven of the guns were dismounted, and made useless; the flag-staff was shot away; and a heavy rifled cannon in the fort had bursted, killing three men. The troops in the camp outside the fort fled, most of them by the upper Dover road, leading to Fort Donelson, and others on a steamer lying just above Fort Henry. General Tilghman and less than one hundred artillerists in the fort were all that remained to surrender to the victorious Foote.1

The Confederate commander had behaved most soldierly throughout, at times doing a private's duty at the guns. His gallantry, Foote said in his report, “was worthy of a better cause.” Before two o'clock he hauled down his flag and sent up a white one, and the battle of Fort Henry ceased,

Feb. 6, 1862.
after a severe conflict of little more than an hour.2 It was all over before the land troops arrived, and neither those on the Fort Henry side of the river, nor they who moved against Fort Hieman, on the other bank of the stream, had an opportunity to fight. The occupants of the latter had fled at the approach of the Nationals without firing a shot, and had done what damage they could by fire, at the moment of their departure.

“A few minutes before the surrender,” says Pollard, “the scene in and around the fort exhibited a spectacle of fierce grandeur. Many of the cabins in and around the fort were in flames. Added to the scene were the smoke from the burning timber, and the curling but dense wreaths of smoke from the guns; the constantly recurring, spattering, and whizzing of fragments of crashing and bursting shells; the deafening roar of artillery; the black sides of five or six gun-boats, belching fire at every port-hole; the volumes of smoke settled in dense masses along the surrounding back-waters; and up and over that fog, on the heights, the army of General Grant (10,000), deploying around our small army, attempting to cut off its retreat. In the ”

1 Report of Commander Foote to the Secretary of the Navy, February 6, 1862. Commander Stembel and Lieutenant-Commander Phelps were sent to hoist the Union flag over the fort, and to invite General Tilghman on board the commodore's flag-ship. When, an hour later, Grant arrived, the fort and all the spoils of victory were turned over to him. General Tilghman, and Captain Jesse Taylor of Tennessee, who was the commander of the fort, with ten other commissioned officers, with subordinates and privates in the fort, were made prisoners. It was said that the General and some of his officers attempted to escape, but were confronted by sentinels who had been pressed into the service, and who now retaliated by doing their duty strictly. They refused to let them pass the line, such being their orders, and threatened to shoot the first man who should attempt it.

2 The National loss was two killed and thirty-eight wounded, and the Confederates had five killed and ten wounded. Of the Nationals, twenty-nine were wounded and scalded on the gun-boat Essex, Captain W. D. Porter; some of them mortally. This calamity was caused by a 82-pound shot entering the boiler of the Essex. It had passed through the edge of a bow port, through a bulkhead, into the boiler, in which, fortunately, there was only about sixty pounds of steam. In its passage it took off a portion of the head of Lieutenant S. B. Brittain, Jr., one of Porter's aids. He was a son of the Rev. S. B. Brittain, of New York, and a very promising youth, not quite seventeen years of age. He was standing very near Commander Porter at the time, with one hand on that officer's shoulder, and the other on his own cutlass. Captain Porter was badly scalded by the steam that escaped, but recovered. That officer was a son of Commodore David Porter, famous in American annals as the commander of the Essex in the war of 1812; and he inherited his father's bravery and patriotism. The gun-boat placed under his command was named Essex, in honor of his father's memory.

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