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[173] the cotton used in the traverses, and it soon took fire from the muzzles of the enemy's rifles. The Texans, lying flat to avoid the stream of minie-balls, were busied for a time in keeping fire from the magazines. One cannon was early disabled and the detachment for the other was depleted. ‘About 2 o'clock,’ said Smith, ‘I ordered it to be run up into battery and fired. As the last remaining corporal raised himself over the tail to aim, a minie-ball, within 15 inches of the platform, passed through his heart and he rolled over dead. . . . In one of the furious assaults the enemy mounted the parapet to near its superior slope. Numbers of them were pouring a murderous fire through our right embrasure, amid the smoke of the burning cotton, which enveloped and almost blinded the men in this angle of the fort, and they were apparently on the eve of rushing in. I shouted, “Volunteers to clear that embrasure!” Four men sprang to the platform, Sergt. William T. Spence of Company B, and Privates T. E. Bagwell, A. S Kittredge and J. A. Stewart of Company C, and discharging their pieces within 5 paces of the muzzles of the assailants, hurled them back headlong into the ditch outside. The repulse was decisive. Bagwell fell dead on the platform; Spence fell by his side, shot through the brain. He lingered a few days.’ At the close of the assault, Colonel Smith said, the Federal dead lay so-thick in front that along the road for more than 200 yards one might have walked upon them without touching the ground. Major Elliott, of the Thirty-third Illinois, subsequently estimated the Federal killed at 600 and their wounded at 1,200 on that day before the Texan line. The Second Texas held the fort until the end. On May 2d they had left their camp on Chickasaw bayou, without a change of clothes and one blanket to a man, and thus provided they fought uncomplainingly, under constant rifle fire and frequent heavy cannonading, and incessant mental strain on account of the enemy's steady approach, from May 17th to July 4th. When it rained,
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
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