FRONT VIEW OF MRS. CRISP’S HOUSE.
eral advance. Probably the most they knew was that the immediate objective before them was the capture of the battery on the hill.
The line when formed stood thus from the right: the 49th Illinois, then the 17th, and then the 48th, Colonel Haynie. At the last moment, a question of seniority arose between Colonels Morrison and Haynie. The latter was of opinion that he was the ranking officer. Morrison replied that he would conduct the brigade to the point from which the attack was to be made, after which Haynie might take the command, if he so desired.
Down the hill the three regiments went, crashing and tearing through the undergrowth. Heiman, on the lookout, saw them advancing. Before they cleared the woods, Maney opened with shells. At the foot of the descent, in the valley, Graves joined his fire to Maney’s. There Morrison reported to Haynie, who neither accepted nor refused the command. Pointing to the hill, he merely said, ‘ ‘ Let us take it together.” Morrison turned away, and rejoined his own regiment. Plere was confusion in the beginning, or worse, an assault begun without a head. Nevertheless, the whole line went forward. On a part of the hillside the trees were yet standing. The open space fell to Morrison and his 49th, and paying the penalty of the exposure, he outstripped his associates. The men fell rapidly; yet the living rushed on and up, firing as they went. The battery was the common target. Maney’s gunners, in relief against the sky, were shot down in quick succession. His first lieutenant (Burns) was one of the first to suffer. His second lieutenant (Mas-sie) was mortally wounded. Maney himself was hit; still he stayed, and his guns continued their punishment; and still the farmer lads and shop
THE CRISP FARM—GENERAL GRANT’S HEADQUARTERS.
guns. The duel lasted until night. Next morning it was renewed with increased sharpness, Maney being assisted on his right by Graves’s battery of Buckner’s division, and by some pieces of Drake’s on his left.
McClernand’s advance was necessarily slow and trying. This was not merely a logical result of unacquaintance with the country and the dispositions of the enemy; he was also under an order from General Grant to avoid everything calculated to bring on a general engagement. In Maney’s well-served guns he undoubtedly found serious annoyance, if not a positive obstruction. Concentrating guns of his own upon the industrious Confederate, he at length fancied him silenced and the enemy’s infantry on the right thrown into confusion—circumstances from which he hastily deduced a favorable chance to deliver an assault. For that purpose he reinforced his Third Brigade, which was nearest the offending battery, and gave the necessary orders.
Up to this time, it will be observed, there had not been any fighting involving infantry in line. This was now to be changed. Old soldiers, rich with experience, would have regarded the work proposed with gravity; they would have shrewdly cast up an account of the chances of success, not to speak of the chances of coming out alive; they would have measured the distance to be passed, every foot of it under the guns of three batteries, Maney’s in the center, Graves’s on their left, and Drake’s on their right—a direct line of fire doubly crossed. Nor would they have omitted the reception awaiting them from the rifle-pits. They were to descend a hill entangled for two hundred yards with underbrush, climb an opposite ascent partly shorn of timber; make way through an abatis of tree-tops; then, supposing all that successfully accomplished, they would be at last in face of an enemy whom it was possible to reinforce with all the reserves of the garrison—with the whole garrison, if need be. A veteran would have surveyed the three regiments selected for the honorable duty with many misgivings. Not so the men themselves. They were not old soldiers. Recruited but recently from farms and shops, they accepted the assignment heartily and with youthful confidence in their prowess. It may be doubted if a man in the ranks gave a thought to the questions, whether the attack was to be supported while making, or followed up if successful, or whether it was part of a gen-
suggestions of spring it turned to intensified winter. From lending a gentle hand in bringing Foote and his ironclads up the river, the wind whisked suddenly around to the north and struck both armies with a storm of mixed rain, snow, and sleet. All night the tempest blew mercilessly upon the unsheltered, fireless soldier, making sleep impossible. Inside the works, nobody had overcoats ; while thousands of those outside had marched from Fort Henry as to a summer fête, leaving coats, blankets, and knapsacks behind them in the camp. More than one stout fellow has since admitted, with a laugh, that nothing was so helpful to Mm that horrible night as the thought that the wind, which seemed about to turn his blood into icicles, was serving the enemy the same way ; they, too, had to stand out and take the blast. Let us now go back to the preceding day, and bring up an incident of McClernand’s swing into position.
About the center of the Confederate outworks there was a Y-shaped hill, marked sharply by a ravine on its right and another on its left. This Colonel Heiman occupied with his brigade of five regiments—all of Tennessee but one. The front presented was about 2500 feet. In the angle of the V, on the summit of the hill, Captain Maney’s battery, also of Tennessee, had been planted. Without protection of any kind, it nevertheless completely swept a large field to the left across which an assaulting force would have to come in order to get at Heiman or at Drake, next on the south.
Maney, on the point of the hill, had been active throughout the preceding afternoon, and had succeeded in drawing the fire of some of McClernand’s
REAR-ADMIRAL HENRY WALKE, U. S. N., Commander of the “ Carondelet,” at Fort Donelson.
behind the crests of the hills or in thick woods, listening to the ragged fusillade which the sharpshooters and skirmishers maintain against each other almost without intermission. There is little pause in the exchange of shells and round shot. The careful chiefs have required their men to lie down. In brief, it looks as if each party were inviting the other to begin.
These circumstances, the sharp-shooting and cannonading, ugly as they may seem to one who thinks of them under comfortable surroundings, did in fact serve a good purpose the day in question in helping the men to forget their sufferings of the night before.
It must be remembered that the weather had changed during the preceding afternoon: from
THE POSITION OF THE GUN-BOATS AND THE WEST BANK.
Fort Donelson is in the farther distance on the extreme left. The upper picture, showing• Isaac Williams’s house, is a continuation of the right of the lower view. (From a photograph taken in 1884.)
40