After Colonel William Lamb was wounded, command of Fort Fisher passed to Major James Reilly, who faced the impossible task of mounting another counterattack. His effort was quickly repulsed, and less than an hour later a fourth Union brigade entered the sally port to join three brigades already inside the fort. As nightfall approached, General Adelbert Ames entrenched his troops while Union forces kept pressing the attack. General Robert F. Hoke's troops failed to attack the Union fieldworks north of Fort Fisher, and General Alfred Terry then sent his reserve brigade under Colonel Joseph C. Abbott into the fort. Assisted by naval gunfire, Abbott's fourteen hundred troops began the final operations to secure the position. General W.H.C. Whiting and Colonel Lamb were carried on stretchers from Pulpit Battery to Battery Buchanan as the remnant of the garrison fell back in orderly retreat along the sea-face, fighting in the darkness. At ten o'clock that night, Admiral David Dixon Porter's flagship, the U.S.S. Malvern, received a torch signal from the battlements spelling out, "THE FORT IS OUR [sic]." Around ten-thirty p.m., Confederate authorities received a telegraphed message from Battery Lamb saying firing and signals had ceased, rockets were rising from the fleet, and it was believed the fort had surrendered. Colonel Albert M. Blackman's Twenty-seventh United States Colored Troops and Colonel Abbott's brigade secured Battery Buchanan and five hundred captives, and General Terry received the official surrender of Fort Fisher from mortally wounded General W.H.C. Whiting as rockets, colored lights, whistles, cheers, and saluting guns proclaimed the fall of the stronghold.