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Southerners. Baxter was engaged in hot skirmishes at the Tallapoosa River, the Chattahoochee, and on the outskirts of Columbus, but his sharpest engagement in these final days of the war came near the town of West Point, Georgia, just across the state line on the Chattahoochee River.
Here had been built a makeshift redoubt some 35 yards square, surrounded by a ditch 12 feet wide and 10 feet deep. This defense stood on a commanding elevation fronted by an impacted?? abatis, with a log stockade to serve as a command post. Two field guns and a 32 pounder were its only artillery; the defenders a handful of state militia, conscripts, and casuals en route to rejoin their units.
In command was Brig. Gen. Robert C. Tyler (the redoubt had been named Fort tyler). Gen. Tyler had lost a leg at Missionary Ridge in November 1863, convalesced at a Confederate hospital at West Point, and afterwards had remained in command of the Southern forces in the area.
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About 10 a.m., on A^ril 16, Baxter and his fellow soldiers heard skirmishing and then saw in the distance the advance party of Col. Oscar H. La Grange?s brigade, part of Wilson?s cavalry corps. Gen. Tyler, alerted to the oncoming Union soldiers, stepped out in front of the log stockade. A single well-aimed shot from a Yankee sharpshooter struck him and ended his life, but the fort did not fall with his death. Perhaps the Confederates fought all the harder because of Tyler?s death. The fight was desparate, with heavy casualties on both sides. But Marion Baxter came through the carnage at Fort Tyler unharmed. He and the Confederate remnants fell back to La Grange Station, Georgia, where on April 17 a brief skirmish occurred.
But the activity at this point was meaningless. In every sense of the word, the war was over. A week before the engagement at Fort Tyler, General Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant. The day before Fort Tyler, Lincoln had died from an assassin?s bullet. And shortly afterwards, General Johnston, at the Bennett house in North Carolina, accepted Sherman?s surrender terms (the same terms Grant gave Lee at Appomattox).
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