The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (73 page)

The retirement board member was waiting for him, a smooth-shaven, square-built, hale-looking man with hazel eyes and heavy eyebrows, wearing his long side hair brushed across the top of his head to hide his baldness. Porter began by asking what he thought of his former associates now gone South. “Those damned fellows will catch it yet,” Farragut replied. Asked if he would accept a command to go and fight “those fellows,” he said he would. Porter then badgered him by pretending that the objective would be Norfolk, his wife’s birthplace. Farragut jumped up crying, “I will take the command: only don’t you trifle with me!”

Summoned to Washington, still without suspecting the purpose, he was questioned next by Fox, who asked—as if for a purely theoretical opinion—if he thought New Orleans could be taken from below. “Yes, emphatically,” Farragut told him. “The forts are well down the river; ships could easily run them, and New Orleans itself is undefended. It would depend somewhat on the fleet, however.”

“Well,” Fox said, “—with such a fleet as, say, two steam frigates, five screw sloops of the cities class, a dozen gunboats, and some mortar vessels to shell the forts from high angle?”

“Why, I would engage to run those batteries with two thirds of such a force.…”

“What would you say if appointed to head such an expedition?”

“What would I say?” Farragut cried. He leaped to his feet and began to prowl about the room. Now he understood. The goal was to be New Orleans, which he knew well from years of living in it, and he was to have the flag. “What would I say?” he cried, and broke into exclamations of delight.

So it was settled. He received his orders during the last week of the year and began at once to fit out the eighteen warships assigned to his fleet, including two steam frigates, seven screw sloops, and nine gunboats, all of wood and mounting 243 guns, most heavy. Porter meanwhile had been assembling his mortar flotilla of twenty
schooners; the weapons themselves were cast in Pittsburgh, along with 30,000 bomb-shells, while the beds were manufactured in New York. In late January Farragut dropped down to Hampton Roads, Porter coming along behind, and by mid-February reached Key West, where final orders from Welles were broken open: “This most important operation of the war is confined to yourself and your brave associates.… If successful, you open the way to the sea for the great West, never again to be closed. The rebellion will be riven in the center, and the flag to which you have been so faithful will recover its supremacy in every State.”

Convinced by inspection that the way to stop the small-time blockade runners working in and out of the coastal lakes and bayous was to intercept them with vessels adapted to the task, Farragut wrote to the Navy Department asking for some light ships of five-foot draft or less. Since he neglected to say what use would be made of them, Fox thought they were wanted for the upriver attack, which would have meant an unconscionable delay. Dismayed, the Assistant Secretary began to suspect that he had erred in his choice of a fleet commander. Instead of writing to Farragut, however, he wrote to Porter: “I trust that we have made no mistake in our man, but his dispatches are very discouraging. It is not too late to rectify our mistake. You must frankly give me your views.… I shall have no peace until I hear from you.”

Porter replied that it was too late for a change, but that he would do what he could to bolster the old man’s shaky judgment. “Men of his age in a seafaring life are not fit for important enterprises, they lack the vigor of youth. He talks very much at random at times and rather underrates the difficulties before him without fairly comprehending them. I know what they are, and as he is impressible hope to make him appreciate them also.” He added by way of consolation, “I have great hopes of the mortars if all else fails.”

Happily unaware of the distrust of his superiors or the condescension of his adoptive brother, Farragut proceeded to Ship Island for refueling and refitting. By mid-March he was off the mouths of the Mississippi, maneuvering for an entrance, which was finally effected by sending Porter’s mortars and the gunboats through Pass à l’Outre and taking the heavier frigates and sloops around to Southwest Pass. After much sweat and inch-by-inch careening—back-breaking labor that tried even Farragut’s sunny disposition—all got over the bar except the largest, a 50-gun frigate, twenty of whose guns were distributed among the other vessels of the fleet now assembled at Head of the Passes. There the schooners discharged their seagoing spars and made ready for the work they had been built to do.

By mid-April the preparations were complete. Butler’s soldiers were at hand: 18,000 of them, so persuasively had the former politician done his recruiting job in New England. The fleet was at anchor two
miles below the bend where the mortar schooners had tied up to both banks, the tips of their masts disguised with foliage lest they show above the trees that screened the vessels from the forts. Ranges were quickly established: 2850 yards to Fort Jackson, 3680 to Fort St Philip. Farragut was somewhat doubtful as to the efficacy of the snub-nosed weapons, but Porter declared confidently that two days of mortar bombardment would reduce both forts to rubble. April 18—Good Friday—he opened fire.

Holy Week was gloomy in New Orleans, the more so because of the contrast between the present frame of mind, with danger looming stark in both directions, and the elation felt six months ago at the comic repulse of the sloops from the Head of the Passes, which had seemed to give point to the popular conviction that “Nothing afloat could pass the forts. Nothing that walked could get through our swamps.” Since then a great deal had happened, and all of it bad.

For one thing, the blockade had tightened. Roustabouts no longer swarmed on the levee, for there were no cargoes to unload; the wharves lay idle, and warehouses formerly bulging with cotton and sugar and grain yawned hollow; trade having come to a standstill, ready money was so scarce that there was a current joke that an olive-oil label would pass for cash “because it was greasy, smelt bad, and bore an autograph.” For another, Foote’s gunboats and Pope’s soldiers were smashing obstacles so rapidly upriver that the danger seemed even greater from that direction, with neither forts nor swamps to slow them down. In the midst of these discouragements and fears, troops assigned to the city’s defense were called north to fight at Shiloh, and all that returned from that repulse were the members of the honor guard with Sidney Johnston’s body, following the muffled drums and the empty-saddled warhorse out St Charles Street to fire the prescribed three volleys across his crypt. Now there was this: Yankee ships once more across the bar, but in such strength that no small-scale attack, however ingenious and daring, could hope to budge them. For New Orleans, as for the South at large, the prospect was grim in this season of death and resurrection.

No one responsible for the city’s defense was more aware of the danger than the man who was most responsible of all: Mansfield Lovell, a thirty-nine-year-old Maryland-born West Pointer who had resigned as New York Deputy Street Commissioner to join the Confederacy in September. Impressed with the Chapultepec-brevetted artilleryman’s record as an administrator, Davis made him a major general and sent him to replace the over-aged Twiggs in New Orleans; which would not only give the city an energetic and efficient commander, but would also call widespread attention to the fact that willingness
to fight for the South’s ideals was by no means restricted to men of southern background, Lovell having spent most of his civilian years as a New Jersey ironworks executive. The new major general arrived in early October, and was appalled at the unpreparedness. There was plenty of Gallic enthusiasm, but it found release at champagne parties rather than at work. He wrote to Richmond, protesting that the city was “greatly drained of arms, ammunition, clothing, and supplies for other points.” Presently it was drained of fighting men as well, leaving him with what he called a “heterogeneous militia” of 3000 short-term volunteers, “armed mostly with shotguns against 9- and 11-inch Dahlgrens.”

The Creoles did not resent his criticisms. They found his intensity amusing and his presence ornamental. “A very attractive figure,” one pronounced him, “giving the eye, at first glance, a promise of much activity.” His horsemanship was especially admirable; they enjoyed watching him ride dragoon-style “with so long a stirrup-leather that he simply stood astride the saddle, as straight as a spear.” To add to the effect, he wore a facial ruff of hair much like Burnside’s, except that it was light brown and somewhat less flamboyant.

Despite his activity, no one was more surprised when the Union fleet showed its true intention. Not that he had not known it was assembling. Agents had kept him informed of its strength and location; but they had also relayed the loose talk about Mobile and Pensacola, and Lovell believed them—perhaps because he wanted to. What misled him most, though, was the presence of Ben Butler, who at the Democratic convention of 1860 had voted fifty-seven consecutive times for the nomination of Jefferson Davis before switching over to Breckinridge with the majority. “I regard Butler’s Ship Island expedition as a harmless menace so far as New Orleans is concerned,” Lovell had told Richmond in late February. “A black Republican dynasty will never give an old Breckinridge Democrat like Butler command of any expedition which they had any idea would result in such a glorious success as the capture of New Orleans.” Now he knew better; the warships were across the bar, above the Head of the Passes. But the knowledge came too late. He had been looking upriver all this time, where the Foote-Grant Foote-Pope amphibious teams were wrecking whatever stood in their way, ashore or afloat.

Hastening to meet the threat from above—his intelligence reports were quite good from that direction: too good, as it turned out—he had commandeered fourteen paddle-wheel steamers and converted them into one-gun gunboats, plating their outer bulwarks with inch-thick railroad iron to give them mass and rigidity for use as rams. Launched one by one between January and April, they made up the River Defense Fleet under J. E. Montgomery, a river captain, and were independent of Commander J. K. Mitchell, whose miniature
flotilla had thrown such a scare into Honest John Pope six months before. Lovell did not like the command arrangement, which left him no real control over either. Besides, the new gunboats were put in the hands of a notoriously independent breed of men; “fourteen Mississippi river captains and pilots will never agree about anything once they get under way,” he predicted. As fast as they came off the ways, eight of the boats were sent upriver to challenge the descending Union fleet at Memphis or Fort Pillow, though Lovell managed to hold onto six of them for the immediate protection of New Orleans. They would not amount to much in the way of a deterrent once the heavy-gunned armada below the forts broke into the clear, but anything that would delay or distract the Federal fleet, however briefly—even to the extent of making it pause to brush them aside—might be of enormous value because of something else that was going on inside the city. He had an ace in the hole; two, in fact. The question was whether he would have time to bring them out and play them.

Porter had heard aright in his talks with the pilots and oystermen; the Confederates were at work on two giant ironclads in the city’s shipyards, each of them more formidable than the
Merrimac-Virginia
, which had just completed her work of destruction in Hampton Roads against vessels as stout as any in Farragut’s fleet. The first, the
Louisiana
, mounting sixteen heavy rifles, had been launched and cased in a double row of T-shaped rails for armor, the inner rails bolted vertically to the bulwarks, the outer ones reversed and driven down the gaps. There had been various delays, including strikes—one lasted three full weeks—because the workers were unwilling to take Confederate bonds for pay, but the main trouble now was her power plant, which had been transferred from a steamboat. While Farragut was crossing the bar, mechanics were trying without success to coax the
Louisiana’
s engines into motion.

The other ironclad, the
Mississippi
, was an even more novel and formidable proposition, at least in prospect. Over 4000 tons in weight, 270 feet long and 58 feet in the beam, drawing only 14 feet and mounting 20 guns, she was a true dreadnought, designed to wear three-inch armor, have an iron snout set over a casing three feet thick, and be propelled by three engines at a speed of 14 knots; all of which would make her the most powerful and fastest warship ever built. The plan for her use was quite in scale with her proportions. She was to clear the Mississippi of enemy vessels, then the Gulf and the Atlantic, after which she would lay the northern coastal cities under levy. Improbable as this program sounded, it was by no means impossible; certainly nothing afloat or under construction could stand in her way. But first she would have to be finished, and she was still a considerable way from that. She had been launched, her timberwork completed, but so far she was armored only below the gun deck, and her vital
50-foot central drive shaft was too big a casting job for any southern rolling mill except the Tredegar in Richmond, which began work on the order in February. It would be weeks, or months, before delivery and installation of the shaft would permit her to move under her own power.