8
SIEGE AND CAPTURE OF FORT PULASKI.
stead briefly declined to comply with the demand, saying that he was there“ to defend the fort, not to surrender it.”
The first shell was fired at a quarter-past 8 o’clock A. m., from Battery Hal-leck, about the middle of the line, and by half-past 9 all the batteries were inoperation, each mortar firing at fifteen-minute intervals, and the guns fromtwo to three times as rapidly. The enemy replied vigorously, though at firstnot very accurately, with his barbette and casemate guns, following up
our line as the batteries successivelydisclosed their position. It appearedsubsequently that he knew the exactposition of only two of our batteries—Nos. 5 and 6, which had been establishedwith no special attempt at concealment.
By 1 o’clock in the afternoon it be-came evident that, unless our gunsshould suffer seriously from the ene-my’s fire, a breach would be effected:with a glass it could be seen that therifled projectiles were surely eating theirway into the scarp of the pan-coupe andadjacent south-east face. When the fir-ing ceased for the night, after nine anda half hours’ duration, the commence-ment of a breach was plainly visible. Itwas equally manifest, to the surpriseand disappointment of all experiencedofficers present, that the 13-inch mor-
\ General Horace Porter , in a letter to theeditors, records the subjoined incidents of thesiege :
“ One of the regiments which was assigned to dutyon Tybee Island, and participated prominently inthe siege operations, was the 46th New York, com-posed entirely of Germans . There was the savorof German cooking in their mess, the sound of Ger-man songs in their camp; all the commands weregiven in German at drill, and the various calls,such as reveille and tattoo, were the same as thoseused in the German army. We were at this timevery anxious to get some information about theconstruction of the interior arrangements for thedefense of the fort, and one morning a strappingfellow in the regiment, who looked as if he mighthave been a lineal descendant of a member ofFrederick the Great ’s Potsdam Guards, becameenthusiastic in the belief that if there was any sonof Germany in the fort the playing of the strainsof the Vaterland within hearing of the enemywould bring him promptly into camp. The planwas put into execution, and, sure enough, one darknight a German came floating over on a log fromCockspur to Tybee Island. We got from him somevery useful information.
“When thewhiteflagwent up, General Gillmore ,with a number of officers, started for the fort in awhale-boat to receive the surrender. The boat wasloaded to the gunwales, as everybody was anxiousto go on this mission and get a first sight of thecaptured work. There was a sea running whichthreatened at times to swamp the craft, and therowers could make little headway against the windand tide. In fact, the parties made such slow prog-ress in pulling for the fort that the effort becamerather ludicrous, and it looked for a time as if eventhe patience of a garrison waiting to surrendermightbecome exhausted, and they be tempted to openfire again on their dilatory captors.
“Among the visitors to the fort was GeorgeW. Smalley, the correspondent of the ‘New YorkTribune,’ and now the well-known London repre-sentative of that journal.
“One of the captured officers asked me who wasthe person in citizen’s dress, and when I repliedthat he was a war correspondent of the ‘ Tribune, ’exclaimed, ‘What! that old abolition sheet?’
‘ Yes.’ ‘ Edited by old man Greeley ? ’ ‘ Yes.’,
‘And we’re going to be written up by his gang?’‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I could have stood the surrender,but this humiliation is too much ! ’ ”