Your are kind of smoking me out here. When I read this account there were several questions that came to my mind that I was hoping that I would draw some commentary on.

My first main questiion is that this is a little known detail of the Arkansas Post fight. Certainly Admiral David Porter should have some knowledge about these details, BUT he wasn't there and these details had to have come from reports he read or conversations that he had with the people who were there. Certainly WHY the "Blackhawks" gun crews didn't fire to surpress the confederates in the fort from firing on Sherman's infantry surely would have caused a stink among the different commanders involved.

So can Admiral Porters account here be relied upon?

Second, The matter of the surrender to the Navy. I know that there is a listing of prisoners who surrendered to the Navy and who were paroled and never went to a Military Prison Col. Dunnington was ome of those "Navy" Prisoners. Bryan H. at one time posted that list on this board I believe, or maybe he sent it to me in an e-mail. Anyway I can't remember seeing more than maybe 2 dozen names on that list. Certainly not 450 names which Porter seems to indicate were surrendered to the "Blackhawk". One of the things that leads me to believe there were more than two dozen who TRYED to surrender as Confederate Navy is Porter's comment of the number of "Seaman", "Ordinary Seaman", "coal haulers" and "fireman" that surrendered to the "Blackhawk".

Now as you know from my research that as you said about 175 men of Crawfords batt. and the 24th did make a force march from St Charles to Arkansas Post only to be surrendered, A force of about 200 from the same commands were left at St. Charles to Move the two 8 inch columbian guns at St Charles to Deval's Bluff where they were eventually captured by the USS St. Louis.

I have always figured that the 200 from St. Charles were the main body of those who eventually became Hardy's 19th/24th Arkansas Regiment. BUT there seem to be a large number of those men in Hardy's Regiment who somehow made it back to Pine Bluff from Arkansas Post, or who were sich in hospital at Sulphur Springs. These number of men seems to be much too large for that. Or to have excaped Arkansas Post, since most of the ones who did excape seemed to have been Cavalry, and I was looking if this may have been an explaination.