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Updated: June 22, 2025
These were successfully carried and held, at the same time that the English stormed a position called the Quarries, close under the formidable Redan. Of this bombardment Gordon gives in one of his letters a very good description: "On the 6th we opened fire from all our batteries. I was on duty in the trenches.
Picked artillerymen led the way. Concealed by rock and thicket, and unobserved by the British the trail being regarded as impassable they reached the hill-top, only thirty yards in rear of the solitary gun in the redan. The noise of their movements was drowned by the crash of the batteries, which reduced Hamilton's stone house to ruins and drove Crowther and his small gun out of range.
Battery No. 1, on the main-land, called the Redan, armed with six guns, was three thousand yards in an air-line above the point of the island. A line of infantry intrenchments, en crémaillère, extended from the Redan to the water of a bayou which connects with Reelfoot Lake. A floating battery, anchored near the lower end of the island, added ten guns to its defence.
Of the many anecdotes of heroism exhibited during the war, none is more worthy of note than one told of Ensign Dunham Massy, of the 19th Regiment, then one of the youngest officers in the army. At the storming of the Redan he led the grenadier company, and was about the first of the corps to jump into the ditch, waving his sword, and calling on his men to follow.
No silver-throated bugles wake the night with "Lorena." No soft refrain of the "Suwanee River" melts all the hearts. It is not a gala evening, when "Maryland, my Maryland," rises in grand appeal. The now national "Dixie" tells not of fields to be won. It is a dark presage of the battle morrow. Behind grim redan and salient, the footsore troops rest from the day's indecisive righting.
About 8 A.M. I got an order to commence a plan of the works, for which purpose I went to the Redan, where a dreadful sight was presented. The dead were buried in the ditch the Russians with the English Mr. Wright reading the burial service over them." On the fall of Sebastopol Gordon joined the force that besieged Kinburn, and was present at the fall of that fortress in October.
Finally, they captured the place, and drove the Russians out, who then tried to retreat into the town, but the English had taken the Redan, and shut them off with a wall of flame; there was nothing for them to do but go back and retake the Malakoff or die under its guns.
When last I heard of him he was secretary to a blameless society which has for its object the discovery of the lost Ten Tribes, and it occurs to me that it would have been a good thing for Thomas John to have been blown up in the destruction of the Redan: he might have become a man.
The big gun was pouring a continuous stream of destructive metal upon the American boats that were attempting the passage of the river within the limited zone of its fire. Fort Gray, above Lewiston, was fairly belching flames, to which the isolated eighteen-pounder on the Queenston redan was roaring an angry and defiant response.
A faint illumination from its rays began to glow upon her face, and the fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of two converging bank fences. Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by heather and rushes.
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