Fort Tyler: The Last Fort to Fall

On April ninth, eighteen sixty-five, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Seven days later, on April sixteenth, a battle was still being fought here along the Chattahoochee River. The men inside Fort Tyler had not yet heard the war was over.

Fort Tyler was an earthen fortification built to guard the strategic railroad bridge and military depot at West Point, Georgia. Its garrison numbered fewer than three hundred men, a mix of regular Confederate soldiers, local militia, and wounded veterans, commanded by Brigadier General Robert C. Tyler. Tyler himself was a remarkable figure: he had lost a leg at Missionary Ridge and commanded from this post on crutches.

The Union force sent against them was enormous by comparison. Colonel Oscar Hugh La Grange led thirty-five hundred cavalry troopers, veterans of General James Wilson's deep raid through Alabama. They came with artillery. The assault began in the morning. What followed was eight hours of fighting that defied all military logic. The small Confederate garrison beat back charge after charge, inflicting serious casualties on a force more than ten times their size.

But the numbers were insurmountable. By afternoon the fort's walls were breached. General Tyler was killed in the final assault, making him the last Confederate general to die in combat east of the Mississippi River. Fort Tyler became the last Confederate fortification captured by Union forces in the entire war.

Nineteen Confederate soldiers died that day and twenty-eight were wounded. On the Union side, seven were killed and twenty-nine wounded. Two days later, word arrived that Lee had already surrendered. The war these men were fighting for had already ended before a single shot was fired on April sixteenth.

The restored earthworks of Fort Tyler still stand in West Point, Georgia, a small green mound beside the river, marking the place where the Civil War's final defiance played out in a battle that history had already made pointless before it began.