Stop 7 Fort McDermott:

Late on March 26, C.S. General St. John Liddell withdrew into the relative safety of Fort Blakeley and Spanish Fort, with Liddell taking personal responsibility for the defense of Blakeley and General Randall Gibson directing Spanish Fort. On the morning of March 27, A.J. Smith moved against Spanish Fort's left flank near Bay Minette while Granger and Bertram closed on its center and right, and Gibson answered aggressively with sorties that struck the 47th Indiana, the 161st New York, and Smith's forces near the burned Bay Minette Bridge. Spanish Fort was protected by a sloping plain choked with fallen trees and stumps, a fifteen-foot-wide abatis, a ditch eight feet wide and five feet deep, rifle pits, breastworks ten to fifteen feet high, six redoubts, a hundred-foot bluff, a bastioned water battery, the Blakeley River, torpedoes in the water approaches, and subterra shells on land. Gibson's garrison of 1,810 men, including at least one company of black artillerymen, mounted 47 field guns, Coehorn mortars, Columbiads, Parrots, and Brooke Rifles, strengthened the works day and night, protected embrasures with steel plates, and even made wooden mortars from gum stumps. Although the fort was weakest on its extreme left beside a nearly impassable swamp, Canby's division fought through the trees to tighten the cordon from the north, south, and east while Gibson's skirmishers and batteries resisted across the line. By a little after noon Canby's field guns answered the Confederate batteries, and in front of Fort McDermott Granger's and Bertram's regiments pushed forward through heavy fire and difficult ground, eventually placing the 7th Massachusetts Light Battery within 750 yards of the fort's twenty-five-foot ramparts. By nightfall Canby's front lay within a thousand yards of the main works, but instead of ordering an assault, he chose to take Spanish Fort by entrenching and digging zigzag approaches and parallel trenches while skirmishers on both sides fired at close range. Gibson launched at least 12 sorties to slow the advance, and on March 31 Captain Clement Watson led 16 officers and men out of Fort McDermott under cover of smoke, captured Captain R.B. Stearns of the 7th Vermont Infantry and twenty of his men, and brought them back into the fort. Gibson's stubborn defense led some Federals to believe the Confederates had as many as 15,000 men inside, and as the siege continued both sides also used improvised mortars made from sections of logs bored out and sometimes strengthened with iron hoops and sheet iron.

Daphne, Alabama · United States