The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (117 page)

The answer came from Lieutenant William B. Cushing, who presented two plans for getting rid of the iron menace. One involved the use of India-rubber boats, to be packed across the swamps to within easy reach of the objective, then inflated for use by a hundred-man assault force that would board the ram under cover of darkness, overpower her crew, and take her down to join the fleet at the mouth of the river, eight miles off. Plan Two, also a night operation, called for the boarding party to move all the way by water in a pair of light-draft steamers, each armed with a bow howitzer and a long spar tipped with a torpedo, to be used to sink the rebel warship if the attempt to seize her failed. He submitted his proposal in July, and when the Hampton Roads authorities chose the second plan and passed it on to Washington — where Welles approved it too, though with misgivings, since it seemed likely to cost the service one of its most promising young officers, not to mention the volunteers he proposed to take along — he left at once for New York, his home state, to purchase “suitable vessels” for the undertaking up the Roanoke.

No one who knew or knew of Cushing, and he was well known by now on both sides of the line, would have been surprised, once they learned that he was the author of the plan, at the amount of risk and verve its execution would require. Wisconsin-born, the son of a widowed schoolteacher, and not yet twenty-two — the age at which his brother Alonzo had died on Cemetery Ridge the year before, a West Pointer commanding one of the badly shot-up batteries that helped turn Pickett’s Charge — he already had won four official commendations for similar exploits he had devised and carried out in the course of the past three years. Perhaps this was compensatory daring; he had been at Annapolis until midway through his senior year in 1861, when he was permitted to resign and thus avoid dismissal for unruly conduct and a lack of what the authorities called “aptitude for the naval service.” He volunteered as an acting master’s mate, in reaction to Sumter, and was restored to the rank of midshipman within six months. “Where there
is danger in the battle, there will I be,” he informed a kinsman at the time, “for I will gain a name in this war.” By now he had done so, and had won promotion to lieutenant, first junior, then senior grade, as well as those four commendations signed by Welles. None of this was enough; he wanted more; nothing less, indeed, than the highest of all military honors. “Cousin George,” he wrote as he left New York in mid-October to keep his appointment with the
Albemarle
near Plymouth, “I am going to have a vote of thanks from Congress, or six feet of pine box by the next time you hear from me.”

He had secured two open launches originally built for picket duty, screw-propelled vessels thirty feet long and narrow in the beam, of shallow draft and with low-pressure engines for quiet running, his notion being that one could stand by to provide covering fire and to pick up survivors if the other was sunk in the assault. As it turned out, this duplication was useful much sooner than he had expected; for one was lost in a Chesapeake storm on the way down, and he decided to go ahead with a single boat rather than wait for a replacement. Steaming in through Hatteras Inlet — whose bar no Union monitor could cross to ascend the Roanoke and engage the homemade iron ram — he joined the fleet riding at anchor fifty miles up Albemarle Sound. Two days he spent reconnoitering and drilling his volunteer crew, including fourteen men in the launch with him and another twelve in a towed cutter, the latter group to be used to silence rebel lookouts posted aboard the wreck of the
Southfield
, sunk in April a mile downstream from the dock where the
Albemarle
was moored. Soon after moonset, October 26, Cushing began his eight-mile run, the cutter in tow, only to be challenged just beyond the mouth of the river by Federal pickets who nearly opened fire when they heard the launch approaching. He turned back, warned by this apparent mishap that the expedition would have failed, and next day had a carpenter box-in the engine to muffle its sound, then set out again the following night, having added a tarpaulin to reduce the noise still more.

This time all went well on the run upriver. A rainstorm afforded such good additional cover that the launch chugged past the grounded
Southfield
undetected, thus enabling Cushing to keep the cutter with him in hope of using its dozen occupants to help overpower the crew of the ram when he went aboard. But that was not to be. Challenged by a sentry as he drew within hailing distance of the wharf, he changed his plan in mid-career; “Ahead fast!” he called out, and cast the cutter loose with orders to return downriver and deal with the pickets on the
Southfield
. As he approached the ram, a signal fire blazed up ashore and he saw by its light that the ironclad was surrounded by a pen of logs chained in position to shield her from just such an attack as he was about to make. Hailed by a sailor on her deck, he replied with a shot from his howitzer and ran within pistol range for a better look at the
problem. The logs were placed too far out for him to reach the ram with the torpedo attached to the tip of its fourteen-foot spar, although closer inspection showed that they perhaps were slimy enough for the launch to slide onto or even over them if it struck hard, at a direct angle. (Getting off or out was of course another matter, but that was no part of the plan as he had revised it.) He came about, under heavy fire from the enemy ship and shore, and picked up speed for the attempt. The launch struck and mounted and slithered across the encircling pen of logs, and Cushing found himself looking into the muzzle of one of the big rifles on the
Albemarle
, which he later described as looming before him like a “dark mountain of iron.”

Then came the hardest part. To control and produce the explosion he had three lines tied to his wrists: one to raise or lower the long spar goose-necked to the bow of the launch, another to arm the torpedo by dropping it into a vertical position, and a third to activate the firing mechanism. All three required the coolness and precision of a surgeon performing a delicate operation, since too sudden a pull on any one of the lines would result in a malfunction. In this case, moreover, the surgeon was grievously distracted, having lost the tail of his coat to a blast of buckshot and the sole of one shoe to a bullet. Working as calmly under fire as he had done while rehearsing the performance in the quiet of his quarters, Cushing maneuvered the spar and swung the torpedo under the overhang of the ram’s iron deck to probe for a vital spot before he released the firing pin. As he did so, the big rifle boomed, ten feet ahead, and hurled its charge of grape across the bow and into the stern of the stranded launch, which then was swamped by the descent of a mass of water raised by the explosion, nearly strangling all aboard. “Abandon ship!” the lieutenant cried, removing his shoes and shucking off his coat to go over the side.

The river was cold, its surface lashed by fire from the shore and the now rapidly sinking ram, whose captain would later testify that the hole blown in her hull was “big enough to drive a wagon through.” Cushing struck out for the opposite bank, intent on escape, and as he did, heard one of his crew, close behind him, give “a great gurgling yell” as he went down. Ceasing fire, the Confederates came out in boats to look for survivors; Cushing heard them call his name, but continued to go with the current, paddling hard to keep afloat until he made it to shallow water, half a mile below. Exhausted, he lay in the mud till daylight, then crept ashore to take cover in the swamp. Later he found an unguarded bateau, and at nightfall began a stealthy trip downstream.

“Ship ahoy! Send a boat!” the crew of a Union patrol ship heard someone call from the darkness of the mouth of the river before dawn. An armed detail sent to investigate presently returned with Cushing and the news that he had sunk the
Albemarle
. Cheers went up, as did rockets, fired to inform the other ships of the triumph scored two nights ago,
and before long the weary lieutenant, who had been reported lost with all his crew, was sipping brandy in the captain’s cabin. A few days later he was with Porter at Hampton Roads. “I have the honor to report, sir, that the rebel ironclad is at the bottom of the Roanoke River.”

By then Plymouth, untenable without the protection of the ram, was back in Federal hands, having been evacuated after its works were taken under bombardment by the fleet on October 31. Upriver, the two unfinished ironclads were burned in their stocks when the whole region passed from rebel occupation. Cushing was promptly rewarded with a promotion to lieutenant commander, along with the thanks of Congress, upon Lincoln’s recommendation, for having displayed what Porter called “heroic enterprise seldom equaled and never excelled.” Much was expected of him in his future career, and he gave every sign of fulfilling those expectations. Before he was thirty, six years after the conflict ended, he would become the youngest full commander in the U.S. Navy. But that was as far as he went. He died at the age of thirty-two in a government asylum for the insane, thereby provoking much discussion as to whether heroism and madness, like genius and tuberculosis, were related — and, if so, had insanity been at the root of his exploits? or had the strain of performing them, or even of having performed them, been more than a sane man could bear? In any case Farragut himself, in a subsequent conversation with Welles, stated flatly that “young Cushing was the hero of the war.”

*  *  *

Westward to the Mississippi and north to the Ohio, Confederates did what they could to offset the loss of Atlanta by harassing the supply lines that sustained its Federal occupation. John Morgan was not one of these, for two sufficient reasons. One was that his command had by no means recovered from its unauthorized early-summer excursion into Kentucky, which had cost him half of his “terrible men,” along with at least as great a portion of what remained of a reputation already diminished by the collapse of his Ohio raid the year before. The other was that he was dead — shot down in a less-than-minor skirmish on September 4, two days after Atlanta fell and nine months short of his fortieth birthday.

Informed that a blue column had set out from Knoxville for a strike at Saltville and the Southwest Virginia lead mines, he left Abingdon on September 1 and two days later reached Greeneville, Tennessee, where he prepared to confront the raiders when they emerged from Bull’s Gap tomorrow or the next day. Down to about 2000 men, he deployed them fanwise to the west, covering three of the four roads in that direction, and retired for the night in the finest house in town, which as usual meant that its owner had Confederate sympathies. Greeneville, like many such places in East Tennessee, was a town with divided
loyalties; Longstreet had wintered here, awaiting orders to rejoin Lee, and Andrew Johnson had been its mayor in the course of his rise from tailor to Lincoln’s running mate in the campaign now in progress. Around sunup, after a rainy night, Morgan was wakened this Sunday morning by rifle fire, spattering in the streets below his bedroom window, and by a staff captain who brought word that the Union advance guard had arrived by the untended road. He pulled on his trousers and boots and went out by a rear door in an attempt to reach the stable and his horse, but was cut off and had to turn back, taking shelter in a scuppernong arbor that screened the walkway from the house.

“That’s him! That’s Morgan, over there among the grape vines!” a woman called from across the street to the soldiers pressing their search for the raider.

“Don’t shoot; I surrender,” Morgan cried.

“Surrender and be God damned — I know you,” a blue trooper replied as he raised and fired his carbine at a range of twenty feet.

“Oh God,” Morgan groaned, shot through the breast, and collapsed among the rain-wet vines, too soon dead to hear what followed.

“I’ve killed the damned horse thief!” the trooper shouted, and he and his friends tore down an intervening fence in their haste to get at Morgan’s body, which they threw across a horse for a jubilant parade around the town before they flung it, stripped to a pair of drawers, into a muddy roadside ditch. Two captured members of the general’s staff were allowed to wash and dress the corpse in the house where he had slept the night before, and others, returning after the enemy withdrew, reclaimed the body and sent it back to Abingdon, where his widow — the former Mattie Ready, pregnant with the daughter he would never see — had it removed to a vault in Richmond, to await the time when it could be returned in peace to the Bluegrass region he had loved and raided. That was the end of John Hunt Morgan.

It was otherwise with Forrest. Not only was he still very much alive, he now also had a department commander who would use him for something more than repelling Memphis-based raids into North Mississippi; would use him, indeed, on raids of his own against Sherman’s life line up in Middle Tennessee. One of Richard Taylor’s first acts, on assuming command at Meridian in early September, was to notify his presidential brother-in-law of this intention, while summoning the cavalryman to headquarters for instructions. Davis approved, and Forrest arrived by rail on September 5, “a tall, stalwart man, with grayish hair, mild countenance, and slow and homely of speech.”

Taylor saw him thus for the first time, two weeks after his Memphis strike — three days after Atlanta fell and the day after Morgan died — though he knew him, of course, by reputation: nothing in which had prepared him for the Wizard’s initial reaction to the news that he was to be sent at last “to worry Sherman’s communications north of the
Tennessee River.” Forrest responded more with caution than with elation, inquiring about the route prescribed, the problem of subsistence, his possible lines of retreat in case of a check, and much else of that nature. “I began to think he had no stomach for the work,” Taylor later wrote. But this was in fact his introduction to the Forrest method; for presently, he noted, “having isolated the chances of success from causes of failure with the care of a chemist experimenting in his laboratory,” the Tennessean rose and brought the conference to an end with an abrupt transformation of manner. “In a dozen sharp sentences he told his wants, said he would leave a staff officer to bring up his supplies, asked for an engine to take him back north to meet his troops, informed me he would march with the dawn, and hoped to give an account of himself in Tennessee.”