Terrible Swift Sword (37 page)

John
Pope had done a first-rate job, and the human cost of it had been remarkably
low. From first to last, Pope had had fewer than a hundred casualties; he had
been fighting the river rather than the Confederates, and he had fought it with
much skill and intelligence. He had captured several thousand prisoners, had
taken many heavy guns and a great deal of ammunition, and he had opened all of
the upper half of the Mississippi River; vastly aided by the fact that the
Confederate defense had been most inept. Beauregard wrote after the war that
the attempt to hold New Madrid was "the poorest defense made of any fortified
post during the whole course of the war," and late in March he had sent in
a new man, Brigadier General W. W. Mackall, replacing Brigadier General John

P. McCown, to pull things together.
Mackall reported that the undersized army which was trying to hold the river
was in deplorable shape: "One good regiment would be better than the force
I have. It never had any discipline. It is disheartened—apathetic."
⁶
If Pope had done well it must be added that he had not had much besides the
river itself to beat.

Here was one more
symptom of the ominous weakness that was disturbing Jefferson Davis so greatly.
The Confederacy was discovering it could not meet all of its vital commitments.
To hold that segment of the big river which lies one hundred miles north of
Memphis was essential, and the high command in the west knew it perfectly well.
In February, Beauregard had told Polk that New Madrid was all-important and
must be "watched and held at all costs," and a month later Polk wrote
that "it is of the highest importance to hold Island Ten and Madrid Bend
to the last extremity. It is the key of the Mississippi valley."
⁷
But the high command had been compelled to meet two essential needs with means
adequate for only one. The major effort h^ gone to the attempt to regain the
offensive in the Tennessee^Valley, and the Mississippi had had to take what
was left. What was left was not nearly enough. As Mr. Lincoln had forseen, when
the Federal power put on the pressure everywhere something was bound to
collapse.

Ominous symbol of
this fact was the presence in the middle river of five unarmored Confederate
gunboats from New Orleans commanded by Commodore George N. Hollins. Everybody
understood that the Federal drive down the river was finally aimed at New
Orleans, largest city in all the South, and New Orleans was under threat from
two directions—from upstream, where Grant and Pope and Foote were pressing
their offensive, and from the Gulf, where Flag Officer Farra-gut had been
assembling a powerful fleet of deep-water vessels backed by 10,000 soldiers
under Ben Butler, who were roosting uncomfortably on a Gulf Coast sandspit
named Ship Island. Between New Orleans and the mouth of the river were two
strong forts, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, which were supposed to be
powerful enough to stop Farragut. Butler might try to come up by land, but his
force was not very large and anyway Butler was no soldier; he was just an
old-time Democratic politician, who less than two years earlier had tried to
get Jefferson Davis made President of the United States, and the Confederate
Army commander in Louisiana remarked that Butler was "a harmless
menace," explaining: "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." This appeared to make sense, although the Confederacy then had
much to learn about Butler's extreme adaptability to the demands of Black
Republicanism; and the people at Richmond, who had many worries anyway, made up
their minds to defend New Orleans in Tennessee, most of the troops were sent
north to fight at Shiloh, and Hollins was ordered to take his flotilla along to
stop Foote.
⁸
If the Federals did try to come up from the Gulf the
Confederates would rely on the two forts, on a collection of converted river
steamers in which nobody had much confidence, and on two ironclads which were
being built at New Orleans and which, if the Yankees just waited long enough,
might someday be formidable warships.

Hollins believed this was a serious
blunder. His ships were not strong enough to stop Foote's river squadron, but
with the aid of the river and the forts they might be able to stop Farragut.
Hollins was in his sixties, a veteran of nearly half a century in the Old Navy,
and he understood both the deep-water steam sloops of war which were Farragut's
principal reliance and the troubles Farragut was likely to have getting these
ships over the oozy sandbars which lay at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Nearly a hundred
miles below New Orleans, as the winding river ran, there was a place known as
the Head of the Passes, where the river forked and sent a number of separate
outlets down through the muddy delta to the open sea. Three of these passes
were deep enough to be used by shipping—Southwest Pass, South Pass, and Pass a
Loutre, which angled off to the east—and at the mouth of each one there was a
sandbar, offering problems to ships of deep draft. To get over these bars, no matter
which pass he used, Farragut would have to take guns and stores out of his
biggest ships and bring the ships in unarmed, towed by lesser craft, inching
along one at a time, moving arms and equipment up in barges and putting the
ships back into fighting trim after they had reached the Head of the Passes.
Hollins believed that his little flotilla, if

it hovered in the lower river ready to
make a quick dash down to the shallows, could greatly interfere with this
tedious operation, could perhaps make it impossible. As an alternative, he
believed, he could keep his vessels up by the forts in a position where they
could get a crippling raking fire on the Federal fleet if it tried to bombard
or run past the forts. Either way, he argued, his little flotilla would be of
some value if it stayed below New Orleans; if it went north of Memphis it would
be wasted.
⁹

Hollins may have
overstated the case, but his argument illustrated the dilemma which confronted
the authorities at Richmond. No matter where they looked, this spring, they saw
a crisis. Added together, these crises had overwhelming weight. It was not
possible to deal with all of them at once. They had to be met one at a time,
with a harassed President and cabinet trying desperately to guess which one
should be met first. In this case they guessed that the Federal offensive in
the upper river was more dangerous than the one at the river's mouth, and they
acted accordingly. It developed finally that they had guessed wrong, but they would
have been just about as wrong if they had guessed the other way. No good guess
was open to them.

Basically, they were
gambling on the assumption that Forts Jackson and St. Philip were strong enough
to keep the Federal fleet from coming up to New Orleans. These forts were of
prewar construction, solidly built of masonry; good enough, apparently, to
justify the belief that wooden ships could not make a stand-up fight with
first-class forts. The stronger of the two, Fort Jackson, lay west of the
river, twenty miles upstream from the Head of the Passes. Fort St. Philip was
on the opposite bank a few hundred yards farther up the river. If the fleet
came up to attack these forts it would be under fire from both sides at once.
The forts could stand a great deal of hammering and the wooden warships could
not. As long as the forts held out the lower river was closed to anything but a
hit-and-run raid, and if one or two ships did slip through they would be
isolated and could offer no real threat to New Orleans. If the new ironclads
were finished in time the river would be sealed beyond any question, but even
without them the defenses ought to hold.

The trouble was that everything depended
on the forts, and they were not actually as strong as the people in Richmond
thought they were. Their construction, to be sure, was solid enough. Fort St.
Philip had been built by the French in 1746, had been strengthened by the
Spanish in the 1790s, had been brought up to date by the Americans in 1812, and
had withstood a British bombardment in 1815, when General Pakenham tried to
take New Orleans and failed, making an undying legend out of Andrew Jackson and
the Tennessee riflemen. Fort Jackson was more modern, having been finished in
1831, a solid brick pentagon surrounded by a moat, with enclosed casemates, and
with a water battery close to the edge of the river. Between them these forts
mounted more than a hundred guns, with seventy-five or eighty arranged so that
they would bear on the river passage. Unfortunately, most of these guns were
not nearly heavy enough. More than half of the total were mere 24-pounders, and
there were hardly any of the ponderous Columbiads, the ship-killers whose
immense shells could break a wooden warship into fragments.
¹⁰

In addition, there was Flag Officer David
Glasgow Farra-gut. Farragut was an old-timer: born in Tennessee in 1801, he had
gone to sea at the age of nine as midshipman under one of the half-forgotten
heroes of the War of 1812, the Commander David Porter who took U.S.S.
Essex
on her famous cruise into the Pacific.
Farragut was a veteran of battle action before he reached his fifteenth
birthday and had stayed in the Navy ever since, but the half-century of naval
routine which had been his life had never fossilized him; now, in his early
sixties, he was supple, buoyant, a kindly man with an imagination and a sense
of humor, owning both a veteran's understanding of the uses of sea power and a
young man's willingness to risk everything on one sudden thrust. He had no
intention of playing this game the way the Confederates expected him to do. As
he saw it, the forts did not need to be beaten into submission; they simply
needed to be passed. A determined man, he believed, could run his fleet by the
forts without taking crippling damage—the engagements along the Carolina sounds
had taught that much—and once the fleet was beyond the forts, New Orleans,
which had practically no garrison at all, would be at his mercy. When New
Orleans fell the forts would be cut off and could do nothing but surrender even
though they might still be in perfectly good fighting trim.

Farragut
had been given a ponderous flotilla of schooners

carrying enormous mortars which could
throw terrible 13-inch shells, this flotilla being led by a pushing, ambitious
junior, Commander David Dixon Porter, son of the man under whom Farragut had
served as a boy in
Essex;
and
the general understanding, supported vigorously by Porter, was that a proper
bombardment by these mortars would blast the forts into helplessness before
Farragut made his advance. But Farragut took very little stock in this. He had
been given the mortar flotilla against his will and he strongly doubted that it
would accomplish anything. He would let Porter make his bombardment, but he
understood that in the end everything would depend on his own ability to rush
past the forts, taking a pounding but banking on the faith that he could get
most of the fleet upstream.
¹¹
Now, in mid-April, he was assembling
and refitting his vessels at the Head of the Passes, preparing for the big
moment.

He was full of confidence, and he sent
home a wholly characteristic letter: "As to being prepared for defeat, I
certainly am not. Any man who is prepared for defeat would be half defeated
before he commenced. I hope for success; shall do all in my power to secure it,
and trust to God for the rest."
¹²

So, before long, he would strike the
blow that would either lose a fleet or win the largest city in the Confederacy.

5.
Fire on the Waters

The Confederate defenders at New Orleans
faced a simple problem. They had to make Farragut stop and fight when his fleet
reached the forts. There were two ways to do this, and both would be tried. If
either way worked the city would be saved.

One way was to block the river itself.
If a huge raft, bound together with heavy chains, firmly moored to the banks
and anchored to the river bottom, could be placed in the waterway between the
forts, the fleet would have to stop under fire and clear the channel. It would
be pinned down, compelled to take the prolonged shelling that no wooden
warships could endure, and its fighting craft would be splintered long before
the obstruction could be removed.

The
other way was to follow Secretary Mallory's new book: build, man, and equip one
or more invulnerable ironclads which could come down between the forts and do
to Farra-gut's ships what
Virginia
had
done to
Cumberland
and
Congress.
Farragut
had no Monitors and it would be a long time before he could get any, and this
would be checkmate.

Two chances, then, and either one might
work; yet the odds really were very bad. To block the river the defenders had
to conquer the Mississippi itself, so that the floating barricade would stay
where it was supposed to stay despite the great twisting current and the
unending succession of floating logs which came down like battering rams; and
to get the ironclads into action the Confederacy had to overcome its own
profound industrial weakness and do an intricate job of manufacturing without
enough materials, machine shops, skilled workers, or time. In the end, the
defenders did their devoted best on both of these attempts, and failed. If
their problem was simple, it was also insoluble. What they needed was a man who
could work miracles, and they had no such person.

The man who was
appointed to try to work miracles was Major General Mansfield Lovell, a
thirty-nine-year-old West Pointer with pleasing manners who had fought in the
Mexican War, taking two wounds and winning a brevet promotion for gallantry,
and who had left the Army in 1854, to go into business in New York. He had
become, a few years later, deputy Commissioner of Streets in New York City, his
superior there being the Gustavus W. Smith who now was one of Joe Johnston's
principal subordinates in Virginia. During the months after Fort Sumter, Lovell
had concluded that his ties ran South rather than North. He resigned, went to
Richmond, got a major general's commission from Jefferson Davis, and, in
October 1861, he was given the top command in New Orleans, replacing the aged
Major General David E. Twiggs whose years and failing health had rendered him
incompetent.

When Lovell first reached New Orleans he
was appalled to see how little had been done to put the city's defenses into
shape. Conditions were so bad, he said later, that he was afraid to give the
War Department all of the details for fear the news would leak out and
encourage the Yankees. Guns were lacking, ammunition was scanty, subsidiary
equipment was in bad shape, and although New Orleans was aflame with patriotism
there were hardly any arms for recruits. Lovell took hold with vigor, arranging
with New Orleans foundries to cast some heavy guns, building a powder factory
to make ammunition, harassing Richmond with demands for everything from
saltpeter and rifles to a little attention, and making unending tours of
inspection of his forts and military camps.
¹

Before coming to New Orleans Lovell had
stopped in Manassas to talk with General Beauregard, who urged him to get busy
on the job of blocking the river, and when Lovell saw how few heavy guns were
in the forts he concluded that this job must have top priority. He got busy,
and by the beginning of the winter he had an immense raft in place—a formidable
affair of forty-foot cypress logs bound together by chains, crisscrossed with
heavy timbers, firmly moored to each bank, with as many anchors as Lovell could
find used to tie it to the bed of the river, which at this place was 130 feet
deep with a bottom of soft mud. As long as this raft stayed in position no ship
could pass, but the raft's security after all was up to the Mississippi, which
was rising constantly, pressing on it with increasing force, pounding it day
after day with the tons of driftwood that came down on its boiling current.

Early in March the raft gave way,
anchors tearing out of the river bottom, chains snapping like so much thread,
logs and timbers coming apart and floating harmlessly downstream. A new
barricade was hastily created, with the help of $100,000 voted by the New
Orleans city council, and the gap was closed; but the river kept on rising,
Farragut was hauling his big ships over the shallows at its mouth, and just as
the defenses in Tennessee caved in this second raft also collapsed and the
waterway was clear again. Lovell rounded up a number of schooner hulks, tied
them together with chains as well as might be, moored them in midstream, and
hoped for the best.
²

The
best began to look worse, week by week. It was impossible to get Richmond to
realize how much pressure was on here. The Tennessee line was being lost,
McClellan's huge army was in front of Yorktown, there were half a dozen urgent
calls for every man and gun the Confederacy possessed, and Lovell would have to
look out for himself. He called for heavy guns, over and over, without getting
them. Almost all of the infantry he had was up in Tennessee. Lovell's only
solace was that the Yankees were going to attack by water rather than by land,
which meant that he could not do very much with infantry even if he had it.
Hollins and his gunboats were long gone, and when Hollins came back alone,
looked at the situation, and frantically wired the Navy Department for
permission to bring his little fleet back he was curtly ordered to report to
Richmond for duty on a shore-side board which was inquiring into naval matters
on the James River. The people of New Orleans, feeling the cold shadow of
Farra-gut growing longer and darker, reflected that this General Lovell was
after all a Northerner and that the city had been denuded of soldiers, and
began to complain that something must be wrong with the man's loyalty. Early in
March he told Richmond that he was being accused of "sending away all
troops so that the city may fall an easy prey to the enemy."
⁸
Rarely
has a conscientious soldier been more frustrated.

A good deal was going to depend,
obviously, on the ironclads, and the big question here was whether they could
be finished in time. The desperate attempt to create them illustrated the
crippling handicaps which beset the Confederate Navy Department. In its
original decision to upset the naval balance by building ironclads the
Department had shown courage and ingenuity, and it had acted with commendable
promptness; by the time General Lovell reached New Orleans, in October, the
Department had contracted for the construction of two ironclads there,
Louisiana
and
Mississippi,
and by the middle of the winter these were
shaping up as powerful monsters, stronger even than
Virginia,
fully capable of wrecking Farragut's entire
fleet. With any luck at all, the Department should be able to put them into
action by the time Farragut was ready to rush past the forts.

Unfortunately,
the Department had not one shred of luck at any time. There were two
contractors—E. C. Murray, for construction of
Louisiana,
and the brothers Asa and Nelson Tift for
Mississippi
—and
these men quickly found that they were living in the exact center of a
contractor's nightmare. Every day brought new delays. It was even hard to get
the white pine timber out of which the hulls were to be built; the South had
plenty of lumber, to be sure, but not much of it was in New Orleans, the river
was closed at the mouth and in Tennessee, and the mere business of getting lumber
transported to the shipyards was infernally difficult. It was even harder to
get iron for armor. Murray used railroad rails— Richmond made a special
dispensation permitting the tearing-up of railroad tracks—and the Tifts, after
much difficulty, finally contracted with a mill in Atlanta for iron plates; and
agents went all across the South to round up bolts, angle irons, and other bits
of hardware. It was hard to find shops capable of building machinery and even
harder to find skilled mechanics to work in them, and it was almost impossible
(as the Tift brothers learned) to find, anywhere in the Confederacy, a shop
that could make suitable propeller shafts. Money was an unending problem.
Approved bills for materials and services went unpaid for months, some shops
flatly refused to accept government orders because of this, and when the Navy
Department did attend to the financial end it usually sent, instead of cash,
drafts for Confederate bonds payable in Richmond, which were not acceptable in
New Orleans. (This was not the Navy Department's fault; these drafts were all
it could get from the Treasury Department, which had troubles of its own and
which in any case was under orders to give Army claims priority over those of
the Navy.) A citizens' committee raised some money to pay workers and satisfy
the most pressing of the other demands, and (except for a five-day strike for
higher wages, in November) work never actually came to a standstill, but it
went with maddening slowness. When Farra-gut had his fleet ready for action and
Porter was about to open his bombardment of the forts,
Louisiana
and
Mississippi
were still unfinished.
⁴

This
was especially trying to General Lovell because this major element in the
defense of the city was entirely out of his control. When he urged Richmond to
find some way to speed the work on the ironclads he was informed by the President
and the War Department that he had no jurisdiction over naval matters and must
not concern himself with such things. The government did, however, present him
with a white elephant. In mid-winter Congress voted $1,000,000 for an oddly
conceived river-defense fleet, a strange assortment of ordinary tugboats and
river steamers which were to be bought, entrusted to veteran steamboat captains
with civilian crews, piled with cotton bales to protect their engines, and used
as rams, pure and simple, to butt the Yankee warships out of the river; and all
of this was to be under the Army's direction. (The same idea had occurred to
Secretary Stanton, in Washington, and a similar collection of Federal rams was
getting ready to go into action above Memphis; and it can only be said that
Stanton had much better luck with this unorthodox variant than Lovell ever
had.) The money was spent, the steamboats were bought and were considered
weapons, the steamboat captains proved too individualistic and unmilitary to
respond to anybody's control, and in the end this flotilla was of no use at
all. But it was an idea, no doubt. . . . Early in April Richmond sent stern orders:
Louisiana,
was
to go up-river to fight the Federal gunboats that had just passed Island Number
Ten. Lovell protested vehemently, and so did the governor of the state, T. O.
Moore, and they were icily informed by President Davis that although the Federals
in the lower river had nothing but wooden ships, which the forts could handle,
they had ironclads up above Memphis and only
Louisiana
could stop them. Since
Louisiana
still lacked motive power, and could not move
one foot under her own steam, she stayed at her wharf, with workmen swarming
around to get her propulsive machinery in order, and nothing came of this: but
the fact that the order was issued shows how Richmond was thinking.
⁵
Doom was building up just ninety miles to the south, but the authorities were
really concerned about the remote threat hundreds of miles to the north.