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Updated: October 28, 2025
General Buckner, as soon as he had dispatched the first of the above letters, sent word to his different commanders on the line of rifle-pits, notifying them that he had made a proposition looking to the surrender of the garrison, and directing them to notify National troops in their front so that all fighting might be prevented.
This line ran generally along the crest of high ground, but in one place crossed a ravine which opens into the river between the village and the fort. The ground inside and outside of this intrenched line was very broken and generally wooded. The trees outside of the rifle-pits had been cut down for a considerable way out, and had been felled so that their tops lay outwards from the intrenchments.
On his arrival he promptly sent a force across at Kelly's Ford; the Southern troops occupying the rifle-pits there were driven off, with the loss of many prisoners; and an attack near the railroad bridge had still more unfortunate results for General Lee.
Its offensive power if it ever had any was so completely destroyed, that I momentarily expected General Duffield's troops to ford the river above the railroad-bridge and take undisputed possession of it. But the Michigan men were apparently prevented from doing so by the fire from some rifle-pits up the ravine, which the guns of the war-ships could not, or did not, wholly silence.
The south wind held mastery for awhile, and the balloon passed the Federal front amid a howl of despair from the soldiery. It kept right on, over sharpshooters, rifle-pits, and outworks, and finally passed, as if to deliver up its freight, directly over the heights of Yorktown. The cool courage, either of heroism or despair, had seized upon Fitz John Porter.
How the conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell how, at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns we need not recount.
A bullet fired at him from one of the Russian rifle-pits, 180 yards away, passed within an inch of his head. "It passed an inch above my nut into a bank I was passing," wrote Gordon, who had not forgotten his school-boy slang. Three months later, one of his brothers wrote home "Charlie has had a miraculous escape.
Upon its principal road, the "White Oak," aforenamed, they had a ditched breastwork with embrasures of logs and earth, reaching east and west three miles, and this was covered eastward and southeastward by rifle-pits, masked works, and felled timber; the bridges approaching it were broken; all the roads picketed, and a desperate resolve to hold to it averred.
There was some skirmishing along the centre, and in the evening Early attacked Warren with some vigor, driving him back at first, and threatening to turn our left flank. As the best means of reinforcing the left, Hancock was ordered to attack in his front. He carried and held the rifle-pits. While this was going on Warren got his men up, repulsed Early, and drove him more than a mile.
These, skilfully constructed by means of double or triple rows of heavy palisades, masked by flax and divided by shallow ditches which did duty for rifle-pits, could not be carried without being breached by cannon. A fruitless attack upon one of them soon demonstrated this. The pa, called Okaihau, though strong in front, was weak in the rear.
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