Fort Desperate Artillery

During the siege, Colonel Benjamin W. Johnson of the 15th Arkansas Regiment, commander of Fort Desperate, recalled ordering Lieutenant Edrington to open on advancing Union forces with shrapnel and shell when Colonel Steadman's right wing was heavily pressed and in danger of being flanked, and he praised the gunfire's rapidity, coolness, and precision. A photograph taken shortly after the siege shows a 12-pounder howitzer on its wooden platform. On May 27, a shell from a Union battery opposite Fort Desperate destroyed the gun and killed Lieutenant Jesse B. Edrington, its commander. The platform stood in the fort's right front corner, where a raised area of earth now marks its location. Soldiers of Battery B, 1st Mississippi Artillery Regiment, manned the gun, and the same shell that killed Edrington injured two of them. Fearing the loss of another 12-pound howitzer, the fort's only other artillery piece, Johnson moved it to a safer position near the rear of the works.

Louisiana · United States