Terrible Swift Sword (31 page)
Yet
the ground under his feet was getting shaky. Attorney General Bates was a
conservative, who was warning Mr. Lincoln to watch out for the machinations of
the radicals and to stand firm against "the pressure brought to bear for
the entire prostration of McClellan." But Mr. Bates was getting badly
disillusioned about General McClellan, feeling that the advance to Centreville
and the return therefrom was not unlike the uphill-downhill march of the noble
Duke of York, and in his diary he made the wry comment: "Upon the whole it
seems as if our genl. went with his finger in his mouth on a fool's errand and
that he had won a fool's reward."
18
On March 17, one day ahead of the
deadline set by Mr. Lincoln, the advance elements of McClellan's army embarked
at Alexandria for Hampton Roads.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Stride of a Giant
1.
The Ironclads
The two warships
swung
to their cables off Newport News Point, riding easily to the incoming tide at
the three-fathom line. The spring sky this morning held neither wind nor
clouds, and men who saw these ships said that they made an unforgettable
picture. Their black hulls had the final buoyant perfection of the last
designs before steam; their raked masts, going aloft just off the
perpendicular, carried yards precisely squared, with tarred rigging making
unobtrusive India ink patterns against the blue. U.S.S.
Cumberland
and U.S.S.
Congress
were enforcing the blockade at the mouth of
the James River, and if the job was important it was also simple. It could be
done at anchor, lower booms swung out, a cluster of small boats alongside,
crews indolently busy with odd jobs. On
Cumberland
the men had been doing their washing, and
they hoisted long fore-and-aft lines of scrubbed clothing to add a homely touch
to this naval picture.
Before
the day ended a good many people looked at these ships, because each ship was
about to die, dramatically and in the center of the stage. This was the last
morning: last morning for the ships, for many of their people, and for all
that the ships represented—a special way not merely of fighting on the sea but
of moving on it and understanding it, of combining grimness and grace in one
instrument. In a war that destroyed one age and introduced another, these
ships stood as symbols of the past.
They
had no engines and they were made all of wood, and of course they were entirely
out of date. But even obsolete warships can be useful as long as they are
stronger than anything the enemy has, and the rickety Confederate flotilla
that lived somewhere up the James was far too weak to come
down and fight. So
Cumberland
and
Congress
rode the tide, on a
morning so still that
Cumberland
loosed her sails and
let them hang for a thorough drying. The morning was warm, and inshore some
soldiers from the 20th Indiana infantry stripped off their uniforms and went
splashing about in the shallows: it was not every year that an Indiana boy
could go swimming as early as the eighth of March. Noon came, and the warships
piped their crews to dinner: roast beef and potatoes, and very good, too, an
old salt on
Cumberland
remembered.
While the men ate,
lookouts scanned the horizon, for routine, and just as the messcloths were
being put away they saw something: a business-like pillar of black smoke going
skyward over the Craney Island flats at the mouth of the Elizabeth River,
five miles off to the southeast. There was a film of haze over the water and
the low shores that day, making a mirage, and officers studied this development
carefully with their telescopes. The pillar of smoke looked stationary, at
first, but at last it could be seen that it was moving north out of the mouth
of the river and into the wide reach of Hampton Roads, and the base of the
pillar rested on a black hull.
Cumberland's
dangling sails were
brailed up and the lines of washing came down, the small boats were dropped
astern and the booms were rigged in. The drummers beat to quarters, and
officers passed the word along the decks:
Merrimack
is coming out!
1
Merrimack
had been a legend all
winter, and the lower deck had grown somewhat skeptical. It was known that the
burly steam frigate which had been burned and scuttled the previous spring,
when Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk was abandoned, had been raised, rebuilt, and
renamed; she was now C.S.S.
Virginia,
she had been
remodeled so radically that she looked like no ship that had ever floated
before, and she was sheathed all over in iron so that it just might be that
there was not a warship in the United States Navy that could do her any harm.
Now she was coming out, and the matter would be put to the test.
Cumberland
and
Congress
cleared for action
and stood by.
The new warship was as big a riddle to
her own people as to anyone else. She was completely untested. About all anyone
could say of her, for sure, was that she would float if the water were calm
enough, and that she was abominably uncomfortable. (Crowded quarters and lack
of ventilation caused much sickness; during her two months of life her crew of
three hundred always had been between fifty and sixty men in hospital ashore, besides
the ordinary sicklist aboard ship.) She was as sluggish as a dismasted hulk on
the verge of foundering, could steam at little more than five miles an hour,
needed at least thirty minutes to turn around, and drew between 22 and 23 feet
of water. On a 275-foot hull she had a central superstructure, or citadel, 160
feet long, with rounded ends and slanting sides; anyone who had ever looked
upon a river in flood was instantly reminded of a barn drifting downstream,
submerged to the eaves. Her citadel had wooden walls two feet thick covered
with four inches of iron, and the decks before and after it were completely
awash. She carried ten guns—four rifles, and six nine-inch Dahlgrens—and at her
bow, under water, she wore a massive cast-iron beak. While she was being
remodeled citizens who strolled up to watch told her constructor that she would
either capsize as soon as she left the docks, suffocate all hands, or deafen
everybody by the concussion of guns fired inside that cramped citadel. Now she
was going to fight, and Confederates as well as Yankees would learn something.
2
Her
skipper was Franklin Buchanan, a stalwart in his early sixties, a man of
distinction in the Old Navy. He had been an officer since 1815, had been made
first superintendent of the new Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1854, and carried
one of those odd tag-lines that sometimes cling to a man: he was said at one
time to be the third-strongest man in the Navy. He came from Maryland, and in
April of 1861 he resigned, believing that Maryland would quickly secede; he
tried unsuccessfully to withdraw the resignation when he found that the state
would not secede. If this indicated a lack of original fire for the Southern
cause no sign of it remained. He had become a captain in the Confederate Navy
in September and now was a flag officer commanding the James River Defenses,
with his flag in
Merrimack-Virginia.
He wanted to find out about his crew as
well as his ship. Most of his men were out-and-out landsmen—he had told the
Secretary of the Navy that two thirds of them had never even been seasick, and
one gun crew was composed entirely of a draft from a Norfolk artillery company.
As the ship came slowly out into the roads Buchanan called all hands for a traditional
now-hear-this pep talk. The eyes of the nation were upon them; every man must
do his full duty, and more; the Yankee warships must be taken, "and you
shall not complain that I do not take you close enough. Go to your guns!"
8
Virginia
came
out into Hampton Roads, made a ponderous left turn, and steamed up toward the
two sailing ships, while flag hoists blossomed at the yardarms of every Federal
warship within sight. The Indiana swimmers hurried back to camp to get their
clothing and their muskets, and the gunners in the batteries on the mainland
prepared to open fire.
Anchored close inshore, two or three
miles to the east of
Congress
and
Cumberland,
were
two of the most powerful warships in existence, U.S.S.
Minnesota
and
Roanoke;
huge
steam frigates rated at 3500 tons, mounting 44 heavy guns, sister ships to the
old
Merrimack
herself.
Roanoke
was
helpless with a broken propeller shaft that had been under leisurely repair for
weeks, and she signaled now for tugs to tow her into action, opening on
Virginia
at long range with such guns as would bear.
Minnesota
slipped her cable and prepared to steam into
the fray, but ran ingloriously aground and could do no more than call for tugs
and fire ineffectually at a distance of more than a mile.
Virginia
came
on, inexorably, in slow motion, ignoring this fire and the fire from the shore
batteries; drew abreast of
Cumberland,
then turned and came in bows-on, tricing up
one of her forward gunports, running out a seven-inch rifle, and opening fire.
Her first shell smashed through
Cumberland's
bulwarks, spraying jagged splinters all
about, and exploded amidships, killing nine Marines.
Virginia's
gunport blinked shut, and the big steamer
came on; then the port-lid went up again, the black muzzle of the rifle
reappeared, and a second shell was fired. This one knocked
Cumberland's
forward pivot gun out of action, and killed
or wounded the entire gun crew. (The gun captain, John Kirker, was carried
below with both arms gone at the shoulder. As he was laid on the deck in the
sick bay he begged a shipmate to draw his sheath knife and cut his throat.)
Virginia
came still nearer, firing with deadly
regularity, proving the grim truth of a point long suspected by naval men: a
wooden warship simply could not stand shell fire. Before long
Cumberland's
gun deck was so littered with dead bodies
that details worked frantically to stack the corpses somewhere out of the way
of the gun carriages. But this helped very little; fighting bows-on,
Cumberland
could bring hardly any of her guns to bear no
matter how she disposed of her dead.
Closer and closer
came
Virginia, ugly and black and irresistible,
coming in for collision; and at last, with a
jarring, splintering crash, she struck
Cumberland
in the starboard bow, breaking a huge hole
below the waterline. For a moment the two ships hung together; then they broke
apart,
Virginia's
iron
beak was wrenched off, and water came surging into
Cumberland's
orlop deck in a torrent. Wounded men on the
berth deck gaped at a sudden rush of odd-looking fugitives, men in red smocks,
swarming up the ladders from below, hurrying aft; powder-handlers, driven from
the forward magazine by the rising water.
Cumberland's
bow dipped lower; the two ships lay side by
side, a hundred yards apart, and a sudden cheer went up from
Cumberland's
gun deck—at last the guns could be trained on
their target.
Cumberland
fired
three broadsides, breaking the muzzles of two of
Virginia's
guns, exploding one shell in her smokestack
with an ear-splitting clang that made the Confederates think
a
boiler had blown up; yet doing no really
serious damage. The exasperated Federal gunners could see the 80-pound shot
they were firing bouncing high off the ironclad's sides and arching off to the
west to drop in the oyster beds on the far side of the James River, a mile away.
Even with her entire broadside in action at point-blank range,
Cumberland
could not seriously harm her opponent.
4
The
Federal warship sagged lower and lower, with water knee-deep on the berth deck,
wounded men calling for someone to help them; and from
Virginia's
upper deck Buchanan shouted
a
demand for surrender—getting a defiant
"No!" for answer, followed by a shot from one of
Cumberland's
guns. But if this defiance was gallant it was
also useless.
Cumberland
was
sinking fast by now, and at last one of her officers bawled an order down a
hatchway—"Every man for himself!" The most anyone could do was carry
a few of the wounded men up to the gun deck;
Cumberland's
boats were all adrift, far astern, and men
too badly hurt to swim had no hope. The ship lurched heavily to starboard, hung
briefly with her stern in the air, and then went to the bottom like
a
stone, most of the wounded going down with
her. The tip of one mast remained above water, flag still flying.
5
Virginia
moved up the James
and men on
Congress
cheered, thinking the
iron monster was out of the fight. But Buchanan was simply getting room to make
an ungainly turn, and presently the ironclad came back, heading straight for
Congress.
This
ship spread her sails to get into shallow water where
Virginia
could not follow and
ran hard aground, and
Virginia
took
station astern and opened a pitiless fire that wrecked the big frigate and set
it ablaze. Federal shore batteries hammered at the ironclad, and even the
infantry opened fire; Buchanan, going out on the open deck for a better view,
was wounded by a minie ball and had to be carried below. But
Congress
was helpless, and the
ironclad kept on pounding. The captain of the Federal ship was killed, the
flames were out of control, and at last
Congress
struck her flag in
surrender. The Confederate James River flotilla—wooden gunboats
Yorktown,
Jamestown,
and
Teaser
—had
come down to join Buchanan's flag, and now they steamed up to seize
Congress
and remove her crew,
but the Federal batteries ashore opened a heavy fire on them, happy to find
targets that could be hurt. An officer in one of these batteries, a lawyer in
civil life, raised a point:
Congress
had surrendered, and
therefore were not the Confederates legally entitled to board her? This meant nothing
to old Brigadier General Joseph K. F. Mansfield, who growled: "I know the
damned ship has surrendered, but
we
haven't," and
the fire was continued; the Confederate ships drew away,
Yorktown
under tow with a
disabled boiler and four men dead; and
Virginia,
now
commanded by her executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby R. Jones, steamed out of
range, accompanied by her consorts, and drifted with the tide, surveying the
situation.