The Clifton steamed in and opened the attack from her pivot gun, throwing a number of shells which dropped into the fort and exploded. The Sachem and the Arizona followed, pouring in broadsides from their thirty-two-pound cannon.
No reply came from the fort, which seemed to be deserted. The gunboats came nearer and nearer. Suddenly a shot from the fort clove the air and fell hissing into the water beyond the Arizona. The fight at once became furious. The Clifton and the Arizona moved backward and forward, vomiting huge shells which tore the earthwork of the fort and filled the air with dust. Ships and fort seemed wrapped in flame. The Sachem meanwhile was stealing into the Pass toward the unprotected rear of the fort. But a well-aimed shot from Dowling’s battery struck her, crushing her iron plating and causing her to rise on end and quiver like a leaf in the wind. She was at the mercy of the fort, and her flag was instantly lowered. The Clifton kept up the fight with great skill and bravery. But she soon ran aground in the shallows, where she continued to fire until a shot passed through her boiler, completely wrecking her. A white flag was run up at her bow, and the battle was over. The Arizona and the Granite City steamed out to the transports, whose men had watched the fight with breathless interest.
The fleet at once retired, leaving the Sachem and the Clifton to the “Davys.”[41]
Three hundred Union soldiers were taken prisoners. Captain Crocker of the Clifton came ashore with a boat’s crew, and, mounting the parapet, asked for the commanding officer. Lieutenant Dowling, covered with the dust of the fort, presented himself as the person sought.
The gallant Federal in his handsome uniform could hardly believe that this dirty little boy was his conqueror, or that the handful of men before him comprised the force which had so calmly awaited a hostile fleet and defeated it.[42]
Eight months afterward the United States gunboats, the Granite City and the Wave, were captured at Sabine Pass.
In November and December, 1863, General Banks took possession of the Texas coast, protecting it with a land force from Brownsville to Indianola. Within a short time, however, he withdrew his troops, leaving only a garrison at Brownsville. But the cruel war was fast drawing to a close. The Confederate army, thinned in ranks and in need of food, as well as of powder and of shot, could no longer be maintained. There were no men to take the place of those who fell in battle; the untilled fields gave no harvests; the coasts were so guarded that the most reckless blockade-runner, could no longer get in with supplies. On the 9th of April, 1865, General Robert E. Lee, commander-in-chief of the Confederate army, surrendered to General U. S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
Before this news reached Texas the last skirmish of the war had taken place near Brownsville (April 13) between some of Banks’ soldiers and a party of Confederates. The scene of this skirmish was the old battlefield of Palo Alto.
On the 30th of May Generals Kirby Smith and Magruder went on board the United States ship Fort Jackson at Galveston and made a formal surrender of the Trans-Mississippi Department.
On the 19th of June General Granger, United States army, took command at the island and announced the freedom of the negroes.