Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 1

[172] the narrowest part of the neck of land thus created, the rebels had hastily constructed, of earth and cotton-bales, a line of parapet, running irregularly across from the Tallahatchie to the north bank of the Yazoo. This work they called Fort Pemberton; it was defended by two heavy guns and a light battery, and so located as to command both the land and the water approaches, from the northwest; it also guarded the Yallabusha, and the road in the rear to Grenada, as well as the Yazoo. It was built on ground so low that the water spread along its entire front, across the neck of land, and indefinitely towards the interior. All approach being thus rendered impracticable for infantry, the idea of a land attack was excluded, and the expedition was compelled to rely entirely upon the naval force for success.

Two attacks were accordingly made by the ironclads, on the 11th, and one on the 13th of March, at a range of eight or nine hundred yards, and aided by a battery erected on the shore. In these fights one vessel was disabled, six men were killed, and twenty-five wounded.¹ Neither of the attacks was successful, and as every thing depended on the ability of the gunboats to silence the rebel batteries, and enable the transports to run down and land troops immediately at or on the fort itself, operations were apparently at an end; unless, indeed, the flood should drive out the occupants of the fort. As the site of the work was so little above water, a rise of two feet would accomplish this last object; and the levee on the Mississippi, three hundred miles away, was accordingly cut, at Austin, eighteen miles above Helena, with the hope that so large a volume of water