The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (141 page)

In point of fact, the general-in-chief was standing by him now, even to the extent of deferring to his military judgment: and that, too, was part of the cause for his red-haired exuberance. He had just made Georgia howl. Now he was about to make the Carolinas shriek.

Originally — that is, in orders he found waiting for him when he reached the coast — Grant had intended for Sherman and his Westerners to proceed by water “with all dispatch” to Virginia, where they would help Meade and Butler “close out Lee.” He was to establish and fortify a base near Savannah, garrison it with all his cavalry and artillery, together with enough infantry to protect them and “so threaten the interior that the militia of the South will have to be kept at home,” then get the rest aboard transports for a fast ride north to the Old Dominion. “Select yourself the officer to leave in command, but you I want in person,” Grant told him, adding: “Unless you see objections to this plan which I cannot see, use every vessel going to you for the purpose of transportation.”

Sherman did have objections, despite the compliment implied in this invitation to be in on the kill of the old gray fox at Petersburg, and was prompt to express them. He much preferred a march by land to a boatride up the coast for the reunion, he replied, partly because of the damage he could inflict en route and the effect he believed an extension of his trans-Georgia swath would have on the outcome of the war. Besides, there was a certain poetic justice here involved. “We can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of people in Georgia hoped we would do. I do sincerely believe that the whole United States, North and South, would rejoice to have this army turned loose on South Carolina, to devastate that state in the manner we have done in Georgia.” He was convinced moreover, he said in closing, that the overland approach “would have a direct and immediate bearing upon the campaign in Virginia,” and he went into more detail about this in a letter to Halleck, invoking his support. “I attach more importance to these deep incursions into the enemy’s country,” he declared, “because this war differs from European wars in this particular: We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who have been deceived by their lying newspapers to believe that we were being whipped all the time now realize the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.” In short,
he told Old Brains, “I think the time has come when we should attempt the boldest moves, and my experience is that they are easier of execution than more timid ones.… Our campaign of the last month, as well as every step I take from this point northward, is as much a direct attack upon Lee’s army as though we were operating within the sound of his artillery.”

To his surprised delight, Grant readily agreed: so readily, indeed, that it turned out he had done so even before his friend’s objections reached him. In a letter written from Washington on the same date as Sherman’s own — December 18: he was about to return to City Point: Fort McAllister had fallen five days ago, and Savannah itself would be taken in three more — the general-in-chief sent his congratulations “on the successful termination of your campaign” from Atlanta to the Atlantic. “I never had a doubt of the result,” he said, though he “would not have intrusted the expedition to any other living commander.” Then he added a few sentences that made Sherman’s ears prick up. “I did think the best thing to do was to bring the greater part of your army here, and wipe out Lee. [But] the turn affairs now seem to be taking has shaken me in that opinion. I doubt whether you may not accomplish more toward that result where you are than if brought here, especially as I am informed, since my arrival in the city, that it would take about two months to get you here with all the other calls there are for ocean transportation. I want to get your views about what ought to be done, and what can be done.… y own opinion is that Lee is averse to going out of Virginia, and if the cause of the South is lost he wants Richmond to be the last place surrendered. If he has such views, it may be well to indulge him until we get everything else in our hands.… I subscribe myself, more than ever, if possible, your friend.”

This reached Sherman on Christmas Eve, three days after the occupation of Savannah, and lifted his spirits even higher. Here, in effect, was the go-ahead he had sought for himself and his bummers, whom he described as being “in splendid flesh and condition.” Promptly that same evening he replied to Grant at City Point, expressing his pleasure at the change in orders; “for I feared that the transportation by sea would very much disturb the unity and morale of my army, now so perfect.… In about ten days I expect to be ready to sally forth again. I feel no doubt whatever as to our future plans. I have thought them over so long and well that they appear as clear as daylight.”

Chief among those “other calls … for ocean transportation” were the ones that had secured for the Butler-Porter expedition, whose mission was the reduction of Fort Fisher, the largest number of naval vessels ever assembled under the American flag. Packed with 6500 troops in two divisions, Butler’s transports cleared Hampton Roads on December 13, and five days later joined Porter’s fleet of 57 ironclads,
frigates, and gunboats at Beaufort, North Carolina, ninety miles up the coast from their objective. Next morning, December 19, they arrived off Wilmington to find bad weather making up and the surf too rough for a landing. This obliged the transports to return to Beaufort for shelter, but the warships remained on station, riding out the storm while the admiral studied the rebel stronghold through his telescope. Unlike prewar forts, which mostly were of masonry construction, this one had walls of sand, piled nine feet high and twenty-five thick, designed to withstand by absorption the fire of the heaviest guns afloat, and was laid out with two faces, one looking seaward, close to 2000 yards long, and the other about one third that length, looking northward up the narrow sand peninsula, formerly called Federal Point but renamed Confederate Point by the secessionists when they began work on the place in 1861. Defended by a total of 47 guns and mortars, including a battery posted atop a sixty-foot mound thrown up at the south end of the seaward face to provide for delivering plunging fire if the enemy ventured close, the fort seemed all but impossible to reduce by regular methods; nor could the ships run past it, as had been done at New Orleans and Mobile, since that would merely cram them into Cape Fear River, sitting ducks for the rebel cannoneers, who would only have to reverse their guns to blow the intruders out of the water. Porter however had in mind a highly irregular method in which by now he placed great faith. This was the ingenious Butler’s powder ship, brought along in tow from Norfolk and primed at Beaufort for the cataclysmic explosion the squint-eyed general claimed would abolish Fort Fisher between two ticks of his watch.

Porter was inclined to agree, though less emphatically, having made a close inspection of the floating bomb. She was, or had been, the U.S.S.
Louisiana
, an overaged iron gunboat of close to three hundred tons, stripped of her battery and part of her deckhouse to lighten her draft and make her resemble a blockade runner. In a canvas-roofed framework built amidships, as well as in her bunkers and on her berth deck — all above the water line, for maximum shock effect — 215 tons of powder had been stored and fuzed with three clockwork devices, regulated to fire simultaneously an hour and a half after they were activated. The plan was for a skeleton crew to run the vessel in close to shore, anchor her as near as her eight-foot draft would allow to the seaward face of the fort on the beach, set the timing mechanisms, then pull hard away in a boat to an escort steamer that would take them well offshore to await the explosion; after which the fleet, poised twelve miles out for safety from the blast, would close in and subject what was left of the place to a heavy-caliber pounding, while troops were being landed two miles up the peninsula to close in from the north. Some said the result of setting off that much powder — which, after all, was more than fifty times the amount used near Petersburg, five months ago, to
create the still-yawning Crater — would be the utter destruction of everything on or adjoining Federal or Confederate Point. Others — mainly demolition “experts,” who as usual were skeptical of anything they themselves had not conceived — discounted such predictions, maintaining that the shock would probably be no worse than mild. “I take a mean between the two,” Porter declared judiciously, “and think the effect of the explosion will be simply very severe, stunning men at a distance of three or four hundred yards, demoralizing them completely, and making them unable to stand for any length of time a fire from the ship. I think that the concussion will tumble magazines that are built on framework, and that the famous Mound will be among the things that were, and the guns buried beneath the ruins. I think that houses in Wilmington [eighteen miles away] will tumble to the ground and much demoralize the people, and I think if the rebels fight after the explosion they have more in them than I gave them credit for.”

In the fort meantime, during what turned out to be a three-day blow, the garrison prepared to resist the attack it had known was coming ever since the huge assembly of Union warships bulged over the curve of the eastern horizon. Determined to hold ajar what he termed “the last gateway between the Confederate States and the outside world,” Fort Fisher’s commander, Colonel William Lamb, had at first had only just over 500 men for its defense, half the regular complement having been sent to oppose Sherman down in Georgia. Blockade runners kept coming and going all this time, however, under cover of the storm, and on December 21 — when four of the swift vessels made outward runs after nightfall, all successful in slipping through the cordon of blockaders off the coast — some 400 North Carolina militia showed up, followed two days later by 450 Junior Reserves, sixteen to eighteen years of age. This total of 1371 effectives, most of them green and a third of them boys, were all Lamb would have until the arrival of Hoke’s division, which had begun leaving Richmond two days ago, detached by Lee in the emergency, but was delayed by its necessarily roundabout rail route through Danville, Greensboro, and Raleigh.

The gale subsided on the day the Junior Reserves marched in, December 23, and though the wind remained brisk all afternoon, the night that followed was clear and cold. Despite the heightened visibility, which greatly lengthened the odds against blockade runners, the fast steamer
Little Hattie
, completing her second run that month, made it in through the mouth of the Cape Fear River, shortly before midnight, and soon was tied up at the dock in Wilmington, unloading the valuable war goods she had exchanged in Nassau a week ago for her outbound cargo of cotton.

Although no one aboard knew it, she had overtaken and passed the
Louisiana
coming in, and the signals flashed from Fort Fisher in
response to those from the
Hattie
were of great help to the skeleton crew on the powder ship, groping its way through the darkness toward the beach. Encouraged by improvement in the weather, Porter had ordered the doomed vessel in at 11 o’clock that night, and had also sent word to Beaufort for the transports to return at once for the landing next day. Lightless and silent, the
Louisiana
dropped anchor 250 yards offshore, just north of the fort, and her skipper, Commander A. C. Rhind — told by the admiral, “You may lose your life in this adventure, but the risk is worth the running.… The names of those connected with the expedition will be famous for all time to come” — started all three clockwork fuzes ticking at precisely twelve minutes short of midnight. Finally, before abandoning ship, he set fire to half a cord of pine knots piled in the after cabin on instructions from Porter, who had little faith in mechanical devices; after which Rhind and his handful of volunteers rowed in a small boat to the escort steamer waiting nearby to take them (hopefully) out of range of the explosion, due by then within about an hour. Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

Twelve miles out, crews of the nearly sixty warships watched and waited too, training all available glasses on the starlit stretch of beach in front of the rebel earthwork. Started at 11.48, the ticking fuzes should do their job at 1.18 in what by now was the morning of Christmas Eve; or so the watchers thought, until the critical moment came and went and there was no eruption. By then, however, the pinpoint of light from Rhind’s fire in the after cabin had grown to a flickering glow, and Porter felt certain all 215 tons of powder would go as soon as the flames reached the nearest keg. He was right, of course, though the wait was hard. 1.30: 1.35: 1.40: then it came — a huge instantaneous bloom of light, so quickly smothered in dust and smoke you could almost doubt you’d seen it. Just under one minute later the sound arrived; a low, heavy boom, a
New York Times
reporter was to say, “not unlike that produced by the discharge of a 100-pounder.” Moreover, there seemed to be no accompanying shock wave, only the one deep cough or rumble, and a colleague aboard the press boat saw a gigantic cloud of thick black smoke appear on the landward horizon, sharply defined against the stars and the clear sky. “As it rose rapidly in the air, and came swiftly toward us on the wings of the wind,” he later wrote, “[it] presented a most remarkable appearance, assuming the shape of a monstrous waterspout, its tapering base seemingly resting on the sea. In a very few minutes it passed us, filling the atmosphere with its sulphurous odor, as if a spirit from the infernal regions had swept by us.”

If this was anticlimactic — which in fact was to put the measure of Porter’s disappointment rather mildly — what followed, over the course of the next two days, was even more so. Subsequent testimony would show that, while there were those who claimed to have felt the
shock as far away as Beaufort, the monster explosion had done the fort no damage whatever, producing no more than a gentle rocking motion, as if the earth had twitched briefly in its sleep. A sentinel on duty at the time made a guess to the man who relieved him that one of the Yankee ships offshore had blown her boiler. Many in the garrison, veterans and greenhorns alike, said later that they had not been awakened by the blast, though this was denied by one of the boy soldiers, captured next day in an outlying battery. “It was terrible,” he said. “It woke up nearly everybody in the fort.” Daylight showed no remaining vestige of the
Louisiana
, but Fort Fisher was unchanged, its flag rippling untattered in the breeze. Only in one respect did Butler’s experiment work, even approximately, and that was in the disguise he had contrived for the vanished powder vessel. Lamb recorded in his diary that morning: “A blockader got aground near the fort, set fire to herself, and blew up.”