The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (44 page)

All the way downstream, from Deer Creek through Black Bayou, the sailors took a ribbing from the soldiers who stood along the banks to watch them go by, in reverse and rudderless. “Halloo, Jack,” they would call. “How do you like playing mud turtle?” “Where’s all your masts and sails, Jack?” “By the Widow Perkins, if Johnny Reb hasn’t taken their rudders away and set them adrift!” But an old forecastleman gave as good as he got. “Dry up!” he shouted back at them. “We wa’n’t half as much used up as you was at Chickasaw Bayou.” So it went until the gunboats regained Steele Bayou and finally the mouth of the Yazoo, where they dropped anchor—those that still had them—and were laid up for repairs. Within another week they were supplied with new chimneys and skylights and woodwork; they glistened with fresh coats of paint, and according to Porter, “no one would have supposed we had ever been away from a dock-yard.” By then, too, the officers had begun to discuss their share in this sixth of Grant’s Vicksburg failures with something resembling nostalgia. There was an edge of pride in their voices as they spoke of the exploit, and some even talked of being willing to go again. But they did so, the admiral added, much “as people who have gone in search of the North Pole, and have fared dreadfully, wish to try it once more.”

•  •  •

Despite the high hopes generated during the preliminary reconnaissance up Steele Bayou, Grant was no more discouraged by this penultimate failure, reported in no uncertain terms by a disgusted Sherman, than he had been by the preceding five. Now as before, he already had a successive experiment in progress, which served to distract the public’s attention and occupy his mind and men. Besides, for once, he had good news to send along to Washington with the bad—the announcement of the first real success achieved by Federal arms on the river since his arrival in late January—although his pleasure in reporting it was considerably diminished by the fact that it had been accomplished not in his own department but in Banks’s, not by the army but by the navy, and not by Porter but by Farragut.

Banks himself had been having troubles that rivaled Grant’s, if not in number—being limited by a lack of corresponding ingenuity and equipment in his attempts to come to grips with the problem—then at any rate in thorniness. Port Hudson was quite as invulnerable to a frontal assault as Vicksburg, so that here too the solution was restricted to two methods: either to attack the hundred-foot bluff from the rear or else to go around it. He worked hard for a time at the latter, seeking a route up the Atchafalaya, into the Red, and thence into the Mississippi, fifty miles above the Confederate bastion. At first this appeared to be ready-made for his use, but it turned out to be impractical on three counts, 1) He had only one gunboat designed for work on the rivers; 2) a large portion of the Atchafalaya basin was under water as a result of breaks in the neglected levees; and 3) he became convinced that to leave the rebel garrison alive and kicking in his rear would be to risk, if not invite, the recapture of New Orleans. This last was so unthinkable that it no sooner occurred to him than he abandoned all notion of such an attempt. As for attacking Port Hudson from the rear, he perceived that this would be about as risky as attacking it from the front. Knowing nothing of Grant’s success or failure upriver, except the significant fact that something must have happened to delay him, Banks did not know but what the Confederates would be free to concentrate against him from all directions, including the north, as soon as he got his troops ashore; which would mean, at best, that he would lose his siege train in a retreat from superior numbers, and at worst that he would lose his army. Thus both methods of approaching a solution to the problem seemed to him likely to end in disaster; he did not know what to do, at least until he could get in touch with Grant upstream. Consequently, he did nothing.

This reverse approach, with its stress on what the enemy might do to him, rather than on what he intended to do to the enemy, had not been Grant’s way of coming to grips with the similar problem, some three hundred miles upstream; nor was it Farragut’s. The old sea dog—approaching
sixty-two, he was Tennessee-born and twice married, both times to Virginians, which had caused some doubt as to his loyalty in the early months of the war—had surmounted what had seemed to be longer odds below New Orleans the year before, and he was altogether willing to try it again, “army or no army.” In early March, when he received word that the rebels, by way of reinforcing their claim to control of the whole Red River system, along with so much of the Mississippi as ran between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, had captured the steam ram
Queen of the West
, he took the action as a challenge to personal combat; especially when they emphasized it by sinking and seizing the ironclad
Indianola
, which for all he knew was about to join the
Queen
in defying the flag she once had flown. He promptly assembled his seven wooden ships off Profit’s Island, seven miles below Port Hudson, intending to take them past the fortified heights for a showdown with the renegade boats upriver. He had with him the three heavy sloops-of-war
Hartford, Richmond
, and
Monongahela
, the old side-wheeler
Mississippi
, and three gunboats. All were ocean-going vessels, unarmored but mounting a total of 95 guns, mostly heavy—the flagship
Hartford
alone carried two dozen 9-inch Dahlgrens—with which to oppose the 21 pieces manned by the Confederates ashore. This advantage in the weight of metal would be offset considerably, however, by the plunging fire of the guns on the hundred-foot bluff and by the five-knot current, which would hold the ships to a crawl as they rounded the sharp bend at its foot. In an attempt to increase the speed and power of his slower and larger ships, Farragut gave instructions for the three gunboats to be lashed to the unengaged port sides of the three sloops; the
Mississippi
, whose paddle boxes would not allow this, would have to take her chances unassisted. It was the admiral’s hope that the flotilla would steam past undetected in the moonless darkness, but a greenhorn chaplain, watching the gun crews place within easy reach “little square, shallow, wooden boxes filled with sawdust, like the spittoons one used to see in country barrooms,” was shocked to learn that the contents were to be scattered about the deck as “an absorbent” to keep the men from slipping in their own blood, when and if the guns began to roar and hits were scored. At 9.30 p.m. March 14, the prearranged signal—two red lights described by the same impressionable chaplain as “two distinct red spots like burning coals”—appeared just under the stern of the flagship in the lead, and the run began.

At first it went as had been planned and hoped for. Undetected, unsuspected, the
Hartford
led the way up the long straight stretch of river leading due north into the bend that would swing the column west-southwest; she even cleared the first battery south of town, her engines throbbing in the darkness, her pilot hugging the east bank to avoid the mudflat shallows of the point across the way. Then suddenly the night was bright with rockets and the glare of pitch-pine bonfires
ignited by west-bank sentinels, who thus not only alerted the gun crews on the bluff, but also did them the service of illuminating their targets on the river down below. The fight began as it were in mid-crescendo. Still holding so close to the east bank that the men on her deck could hear the shouts of the enemy cannoneers, the flagship opened a rolling fire which was taken up in turn by the ships astern. The night was misty and windless; smoke settled thick on the water, leaving the helmsmen groping blindly and the gunners with nothing to aim at but the overhead muzzle flashes. In this respect the
Hartford
had the advantage, steaming ahead of her own smoke, but even she had her troubles, being caught by the swift current and swept against the enemy bank as she turned into the bend. Helped by her gunboat tug, she backed off and swung clear, chugging upstream at barely three knots, much damaged about her top and spars, but with only three men hit. Attempting to follow, the
Richmond
was struck by a plunging shot that crashed into her engine room and caromed about, cracking both port and starboard safety valves and dropping her boiler pressure below ten pounds. Too weak to make headway, even with the assistance of the gunboat lashed to her flank, she went with the current and out of the fight, leaking steam from all her ports, followed presently by the
Monongahela
, which suffered the same fate when her escort’s rudder was wedged by an unlucky shot, one of her own engines was disabled by an overheated crankpin, and her captain was incapacitated by a shell that cut the bridge from under him and pitched him headlong onto the deck below. Between them, the two sloops and their escorts lost 45 killed and wounded before they veered out of range downriver. But the veteran frigate
Mississippi
—Commodore Matthew Perry’s flagship, ten years ago, when he steamed into Tokyo Bay and opened Japan to the Western world—took the worst beating of the lot, not only from the Confederates on the bluff, but also from the gunners on the
Richmond
, who, not having gotten the word that the sloop had turned in the opposite direction, fired at the flashes of the side-wheeler’s guns as they swept past her. Blind in the smoke, pounded alike by friend and foe, the pilot went into the bend and put the ship hard to larboard all too soon: with the result that she ran full tilt onto the mudflats across the way from the fuming bluff. Silhouetted against the glare of bonfires and taking hit after hit from the rebel guns, she tried for half an hour to pull loose by reversing her engines, but to no avail. Her captain ordered her set afire as soon as the crew—64 of whom were casualties by now—could be taken off in boats, and it was only through the efforts of her executive, Lieutenant George Dewey, that many of her wounded were not roasted, including a badly frightened ship’s boy he found hiding under a pile of corpses. Burning furiously, the
Mississippi
lightened before dawn and drifted off the flats of her own accord, threatening to set the other repulsed vessels afire as she passed unmanned among them and piled up at last on the
head of Profit’s Island, where she exploded with what an observer called “the grandest display of fireworks I ever witnessed, and the costliest.”

It had been quite a costly operation all around. Thirty-five of the flotilla’s 112 casualties were dead men—only two less than had been killed in the venture below New Orleans by a force almost three times as large—and of the seven ships that had attempted to run Port Hudson, one was destroyed and four had been driven back disabled. As a box score, this gave the Confederates ample claim to the honors of the engagement; but the fact remained that, whatever the cost, Farragut had done what he set out to do. He had put warships north of the bluff on the Mississippi, and he was ready to use them to dispute the rebel claim to control of the 250 miles of river below Vicksburg. Dropping down at dawn to just beyond range of Port Hudson’s upper batteries, he fired the prearranged three-gun signal to let the rest of the flotilla know that he was still afloat, then set out upriver and anchored next morning off the mouth of the Red, up which he learned that the renegade
Queen
and the fast-steaming
Webb
had taken refuge after their flight from Porter’s dummy ironclad. Both were too heavily damaged, as a result of their ram attacks on the
Indianola
, to be able to fight again without extensive repairs. So he heard; but he was taking no chances. Lowering the
Hartford’s
yards to the deck, he lashed them there and carried a heavy anchor chain from yard tip to yard tip, all the way round, to fend off attackers. Still unsatisfied, he improvised water-line armor by lashing cypress logs to the sides of the vessel and slung hawsers from the rigging, thirty feet above the deck, with heavy netting carried all the way down to the rail to frustrate would-be boarders. Then, accompanied by her six-gun escort
Albatross
, the
Hartford
—whose own builders would scarcely have recognized her, dressed out in this manner—set out northward, heading for Vicksburg in order to open communications with the upper fleet.

Passing Grand Gulf on March 19 the two ships came under fire that cost them 2 more killed and 6 more wounded, almost three times the number they had lost five nights ago; otherwise they encountered no opposition between Port Hudson and the point where they dropped anchor next morning, just beyond range of the lower Vicksburg batteries. Porter was up Steele Bayou, but conferring that afternoon with Grant and A. W. Ellet, the ram fleet commander, Farragut asked that he be reinforced by units from the upper flotilla. Ellet volunteered to send two of his boats, the
Switzerland
and the
Lancaster
, respectively under C. R. Ellet, the former captain of the
Queen
, and his uncle Lieutenant Colonel J. A. Ellet. They made their run at first light, March 25. The
Lancaster
was struck repeatedly in her machinery and hull, but she made it downstream, where a week’s patchwork labor would put her back in shape to fight again. Not so the
Switzerland;
she received
a shell in her boilers and others which did such damage to her hull that she went to pieces and sank, affording her nineteen-year-old skipper another ride on a bale of cotton. Unperturbed, Grant reported her loss as a blessing in disguise, since it served to reveal her basic unfitness for combat: “It is almost certain that had she made one
ram
into another vessel she would have closed up like a spy-glass, encompassing all on board.”

In point of fact, whatever the cost and entirely aside from his accustomed optimism, he and all who favored the Union cause had much to be joyful about. As a result of this latest naval development, which would establish a blockade of the mouth of the Red and deny the rebels the use of their last extensive stretch of the Mississippi, Farragut had cut the Confederacy in two. The halves were still unconquered, and seemed likely to remain so for no one knew how long, but they were permanently severed one from the other. When the
Hartford
and the
Albatross
passed Port Hudson and were joined ten days later below Vicksburg by the steam ram
Lancaster
, the cattle and cereals of the Transmississippi, together with the goods of war that could be smuggled in through Mexico from Europe, became as inaccessible to the eastern South as if they were awaiting shipment on the moon.