At half after eleven o’clock, the hour fixed on for the assault, the columns were in motion; but from delays made inevitable by the nature of the ground, it was twenty minutes after twelve before this commenced, when neither the morass, now overflowed by the tide, nor the formidable and double row of abattis, nor the high and strong works on the summit of the hill, could for a moment damp the ardor or stop the career of the assailants, who, in the face of an incessant fire of musketry and a shower of shells and grape-shot, forced their way through every obstacle, and with so much concert of movement, that both columns entered the fort and reached its centre, nearly at the same moment.  Nor was the conduct of the victors less conspicuous for humanity than for valor.  Not a man of the garrison was injured after the surrender; and during the conflict of battle, all were spared who ceased to make resistance.

The entire American loss in this enterprise, so formidable in prospect, did not exceed one hundred men.  The pioneer parties, necessarily the most exposed, suffered most.  Of the twenty men led by Lieutenant Gibbons of the Sixth Pennsylvania Regiment, seventeen were killed or wounded.  Wayne’s own escape on this occasion was of the hair-breadth kind.  Struck on the head by a musket-ball, he fell; but immediately rising on one knee, he exclaimed, “March on, carry me into the fort; for should the wound be mortal, I will die at the head of the column.”  The enemy’s loss in killed and captured amounted to six hundred and seven men.  This affair, the most brilliant of the war, covered the commanding general with laurels.

[Footnote 28:  An officer of the revolutionary army, and a conspicuous actor in the War of 1812; has written chiefly on military affairs.]

* * * * *

=_Charles Caldwell,[29] 1772-1853._=

From his “Autobiography.”

=_104._= A LECTURE OF DR. RUSH.

At length, however, though the class of the winter, all told, amounted to less than a hundred, a sufficient number had arrived to induce the professors to commence their lectures; and the introductory of Dr. Rush was a performance of deep and touching interest, and never, I think, to be forgotten (while his memory endures), by any one who listened to it, and was susceptible of the impression it was calculated to make.  It consisted in a well-written and graphical description of the terrible sweep of the late pestilence; the wild dismay and temporary desolation it had produced; the scenes of family and individual suffering and woe he had witnessed during its ravages; the mental dejection, approaching despair, which he himself had experienced, on account of the entire failure of his original mode of practice in it, and the loss of his earliest patients (some of them personal friends); the joy he felt on the discovery of a successful mode of treating it; the benefactions which he had afterwards the happiness to confer; and the gratulations with which, after the success of his practice had become known, he was often received in sick and afflicted families.  The discourse, though highly colored, and marked by not a few figures of fancy and bursts of feeling, was, notwithstanding, sufficiently fraught, with substantial matter to render it no less instructive than it was fascinating.