Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 3.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[193] of which the latter cleverly availed themselves. The Tallahatchie and the Yallabusha form a junction a little above the village of Greenwood. The Yazoo, which takes its source from the confluence, flows in a different direction from that of the Tallahatchie, so as to leave a peninsula nearly four miles in length between them, which at the narrowest point is only four hundred and fifty yards wide. At this point the Confederates had constructed a work of considerable magnitude, known as Fort Pemberton, which completely commanded the course of the Tallahatchie: it consisted of a series of bastions dividing the peninsula in two, to which a mixture of earth and cotton-bales imparted both solidity and prominence. Two heavy guns and a battery of fieldartillery constituted its armanent. The waters of the Tallahatchie, in overflowing its banks, had submerged all the approaches to this work and turned the peninsula into a veritable island. Ross's troops therefore could not land to make an attack, and the task of reducing it fell exclusively upon the two gunboats. The Chillicothe opened fire on the 11th of March, but this vessel was too weakly built and her armor too fragile. Most of the enemy's balls penetrated her through and through; others, loosening the bolts of her plates, did still more damage to her between-decks, and she was obliged to abandon the attempt after having had four men killed and fifteen wounded.

On the 13th, the impossibility of an attack by land having become manifest, the two gunboats fired up again: for a while the De Kalb silenced the guns of the fort, but Ross did not dare to land his troops on the only accessible point, which was too much in sight of the enemy's works, for the purpose of making an assault. In this fight the Confederate garrison had only one man killed and twenty wounded. Not wishing to have recourse to force, the Federals tried to dislodge it by less dangerous means. The fort was only two feet above the level of the river: it only required a slight overflow, therefore, to flood it. It was hoped to produce an artificial inundation by cutting through the levee of the Mississippi at Austin, above Delta, so as to throw a larger volume of water into the Tallahatchie. But this water spread over such an immense space that the level of the river was not sensibly affected; and after waiting five days Ross decided to retrace his steps.