“A little more steam! Lay her in quick!” says Captain Phelps.
He is not to be beaten. We jump ashore, scramble up the bank ahead of all the soldiers, reach the upper works, and fling out the Stars and Stripes to the bright morning sunshine on the abandoned works of the Rebel Gibraltar!
The crews of the boats crowd the upper decks, and send up their joyous shouts. The soldiers farther up stream give their wild hurrahs. Around us are smoking ruins,—burned barracks and storehouses, barrels of flour and bacon simmering in the fire. There are piles of shot and shell. The great chain has broken by its own weight. At the landing are hundreds of Mr. Maury’s torpedoes,—old iron now. We wander over the town, along the fortifications, view the strong defences, and wonder that the Rebels gave it up,—defended as it was by one hundred and twenty guns,—without a struggle, but the fall of Fort Donelson compelled them to evacuate the place. They carried off about half of the guns, and tumbled many of those they left behind down the embankment into the river. The force which had fled numbered about sixteen thousand. Five thousand went down the river on steamboats, and the others were sent to Corinth on the cars.
This abandonment of Columbus freed Kentucky of Rebel troops. It had been invaded about six months, and Jeff Davis hoped to secure it as one of the Confederate States, but he was disappointed in his expectations. The majority of the people in that noble State could not be induced to go out of the Union.
CHAPTER X
OPERATIONS AT NEW MADRID.
There are many islands in the Mississippi, so many that the river pilots have numbered them from Cairo to New Orleans. The first is just below Cairo. No. 10 is about sixty miles below, where the river makes a sharp curve, sweeping round a tongue of land towards the west and northwest, then turning again at New Madrid, making a great bend towards the southeast, as you will see by the map. The island is less than a mile long, and not more than a fourth of a mile wide. It is ten or fifteen feet above high-water mark. The line between Kentucky and Tennessee strikes the river here. The current runs swiftly past the island, and steamboats descending the stream are carried within a stone’s throw of the Tennessee shore. The bank on that side of the stream is also about fifteen or twenty feet above high water.
The Rebels, before commencing their works at Columbus, saw that Island No. 10 was a very strong position, and commenced fortifications there. When they evacuated Columbus, they retired to that place, and remounted the guns which they had brought away on the island and on the Tennessee shore. They thought it was a place which could not be taken. They held New Madrid, eight miles below, on the Missouri side, which was defended by two forts. They held the island and the Tennessee shore. East of their position, on the Tennessee shore, was Reelfoot Lake, a large body of water surrounded by hundreds of acres of impassable swamp, which extended across to the lower bend, preventing an approach by the Union troops from the interior of the State upon their flank. The garrison at the island, and in the batteries along the shore, had to depend upon steamboats for their supplies.