Our boys are rapidly approaching the works. There they go into the ditch; now up on the embankment! There they lie within 10 feet of the enemy, waiting for the rest of the brigade to get up close as they are. While in the ditch lighted fuse shells are thrown over among our boys, but they prove boomerangs in every instance for our boys pitch them back into the fort, where they explode….Then they threw over great rocks, and some of our boys are badly bruised by them….The Bugler is sounding the charge. Up they spring to the top of the embankment like a swarm of bees. Up goes the white flag [the Rebels] have surrendered!

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Confederate W.J. Slatter later wrote, ‘A large, fine looking Indian was the first to enter the fort. He carried an ax and cut down the pole from which floated our flag. En route home after my parole from prison, I met that same Indian, the Orderly Sergeant of his company, and he told me that Gen. Lagrange had offered a furlough to the one who first entered the fort, and he secured it.’ The garrison surrendered at 6 p.m.

When the Union soldiers entered Fort Tyler, they were surprised that so few Confederates had held it for so long. ‘You fought like demons,’ one Yankee remarked. ‘We thought you had at least two companies.’

The Federal victory over Fort Tyler gave the Union army control of the West Point bridges, which they promptly burned. The victorious troops also destroyed several hundred railroad cars that were loaded with quartermaster and commissary stores. Although the troops destroyed most of the goods, they gave seven hogsheads of sugar, two thousand sacks of corn, ten thousand pounds of bacon, and other stores to the mayor of West Point, so the Union and Confederate wounded and any destitute civilians could be fed.

The Federal success at West Point cost them seven men killed and twenty-nine wounded. The defeated garrison lost eighteen killed and twenty-eight wounded. LaGrange’s report noted that most of the Confederate dead and wounded were ‘mostly shot through the head.’ Several hundred Rebels were captured at the fort and the hospital.The night of the surrender, the bodies of General Tyler and Captain Gonzales were placed in the home of the Potts family, in West Point. This saved the Potts home.

Apparently, at least one member of the Potts clan had been involved in the fighting. Early in the day, one of the Potts daughters had climbed into a rifle pit and fired twice at the Federal skirmishers. When Union troops reported this to General LaGrange, after the fighting ceased the angered Union commander decided to burn the Potts home, but changed his mind when he learned that the two bodies had been placed there. ‘Were it not for the honored dead that lie in the house I would teach the female sharpshooter a lesson,’ LaGrange said. The next day, both soldiers were buried in the same plot in the town’s Pinewood Cemetery. Tyler, fighting his gallant but futile last-ditch defense, was the last Confederate general to be killed in Civil War action.

This article was written by Stuart W. Sanders and originally published in the Spring 2006 edition of MHQ. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today!

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