The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (112 page)

Other casualties followed, one among them being Brown himself. Most of the shots from dead ahead struck the inclined shield and were deflected back and upwards, ricocheting, but presently one did not carom high enough and Brown received what he later called “a severe contusion on the head.” He thought he was done for until he drew a handful of clotted blood from the wound and failed to find any particles of brain mixed in. He stayed at his post, continuing to direct both the gunnery and the navigation. Just then, however, the
Tyler
dropped back to help the crippled
Carondelet
, her riflemen firing volleys at Brown, the only live target outside the shield. A minie struck him over the left temple, tumbling him down a hatchway and onto the forward guns. When he regained consciousness, the aid men were laying him among the dead and wounded below deck. He promptly got up and returned to his place on the shield.

The
Carondelet
was much closer now, he saw, and so was the mouth of the river. Just as she reached it, and just as he was about to ram her stern, she veered into bank, leaking steam and frantic survivors from all her ports. Brown did not stay to complete her destruction or force her surrender. Instead, he took up pursuit of the
Tyler
, which by now had entered the Mississippi and was doing all she could to overtake the
Queen
. Aboard the fleet, the sailors had heard the firing, but had assumed that the boats were shelling snipers in the woods. Now they saw better, though they still did not understand what they saw. Observing the gunboat returning with a strange red vessel close on her heels, one officer remarked: “There comes the
Tyler
with a prize.”

They soon learned better. Within range of the fleet—“a forest of masts and smokestacks,” Brown called it; “In every direction, except astern, our eyes rested on enemies”—noting that the army rams were
anchored behind the bigger ships, in position to dart out through the intervals, the Confederate skipper told his pilot: “Brady, shave that line of men-of-war as close as you can, so that the rams will not have room to gather headway in coming out to strike us.” Brady gave him what he asked for, and the second battle opened.

At its beginning, steam down, guns unloaded, not a single Federal vessel was prepared for action; but this was presently so thoroughly corrected that Brown could later say, “I had the most lively realization of having steamed into a real volcano.” Guns were flashing, and as he advanced “the line of fire seemed to grow into a circle constantly closing.” Even so, he saw one definite advantage to fighting solo from an interior position, and the
Arkansas
was not neglectful of it, “firing rapidly to every point of the circumference, without the fear of hitting a friend or missing an enemy.”

Now, though, she was taking about as much punishment as she gave. The big ocean-going sloops had run their guns out, and the Davis ironclads were firing for all they were worth. The
Arkansas
took hits from all directions. An 11-inch solid broke through her casemate armor and laid a sixteen-man guncrew dead and dying on her deck. A rifle bolt laid out eleven more. Shrapnel quickly gave her stack the look of a nutmeg grater, so that for lack of draft the pressure dropped from 120 pounds to 20, barely enough to turn the engines. The temperature in the fire-room soared to 130°, and the engineers worked fifteen-minute shifts, by the end of which they had to be hauled up, half-roasted, and relieved by men from the guns. Sixty dead and wounded men were in her; her cast-iron snout was broken off; one whole section of plating was ripped from her flank; her boats were shot away and dragging. However, she still was giving as good as she got, or better. Out on the shield, where he had had his spyglass shot from his hands, her captain had never stopped calling orders to the pilot house and guns. A ram broke into the clear at last, driving hard in a final effort to block the way; “Go through him, Brady!” Brown shouted. But one of the bow guns averted the need for a collision by putting a shell through the Federal’s boiler. Steam went up like a geyser and the bluejacket crew went overboard.

That was the final round. The
Arkansas
was into the clear, past the outer rim of the volcano. Limping badly, but unpursued, she held her course for Vicksburg, where a crowd had assembled on the bluff to greet her. Soldiers and townspeople alike, they tossed their hats in joy and admiration, but the cheers froze in their throats when they looked down and saw the carnage on her gundeck.

Farragut was infuriated. He had been sleeping late that morning, and when the cannonade erupted he appeared on the
Hartford’
s deck in his nightshirt. However, the flagship’s engines were under repair; there was nothing he could do but watch and fire at the strange vessel as it
went by. When the action was over he surveyed the wreckage—which was not only considerable, but was largely self-inflicted by cross fire—then returned to his cabin, muttering as he went: “Damnable neglect, or worse, somewhere!”

The more he thought about it, the madder he got. By the time he came back on deck again, fully dressed, he had made up his mind to steam down to Vicksburg with all his ships and attack the
Arkansas
in broad open daylight, hillside batteries and all. His staff managed to dissuade him from this—at least give the fleet captains time to wash the blood from their scuppers, they said—but, even so, the old man would not be put off any longer than nightfall: Porter’s mortar schooners, together with the
Brooklyn
and the two laggard gunboats, were still below the city, where the apparently unsinkable rebel ironclad might engage them any minute. He ordered all guns loaded with solid and suspended his heaviest anchor from the tip of the
Hartford’
s port main-yardarm, intending to drop it through the
Arkansas’
deck and bottom when he got alongside her. The Davis gunboats and the Porter mortars would give covering fire, above and below, while he went in and dragged the upstart monster from its lair. Just before sunset he hoisted the familiar pennant for attack, and the fleet moved downriver.

It did not work out at all the way he intended. For one thing, in the ruddy murk between sunset and dusk, the rust-red boat was almost invisible under the red clay bank. The first each skipper saw of her as the ships came past in single file, taking in turn a pounding from the batteries overhead, was the flash of her guns as he crossed her line of fire. By then it was too late to attempt to check up and grapple; all there was time for was one quick broadside in reply, before the current swept him out of range. Aboard the
Arkansas
, dismay at having to fight the day’s third battle, tied to bank and with less than half her crew still functional, gave way to elation as the action progressed. One by one, the ships glided past with their towering spars in silhouette against the glow of the western cloudbank, and one by one they took them under fire, as if in a gigantic shooting gallery. But when the
Hartford
stood in close, groping blindly with the anchor swaying pendulous from her yardarm, and they loosed a broadside at her, she thundered back with a tremendous salvo. An 11-inch solid pierced the side of the
Arkansas
just above the waterline, crashed through the engine room, killing and mangling as it went, and lodged in the opposite casemate armor, making what one of her officers called “a bulging protuberance outside.” She kept firing until the river stopped sending her targets. Then once more there was silence.

Farragut was where he wanted to be, south of the infernal bluff, and he had made the downstream run with fewer casualties than before—5 killed, 16 wounded: only a handful more than his adversary had suffered—but he was far from satisfied. He wanted that ram, and he intended to have her, whatever the cost. At daylight he sent an urgent
message to Davis, proposing that both fleets go in together at high noon and fight the rebel to a finish. Davis declined the invitation, counseling prudence and self-control. “I have watched eight rams for a month,” he replied, “and now find it no hard task to watch one.”

He continued to resist the pressure which Farragut kept applying. Five days later, July 21—the
Arkansas
having ventured out meanwhile on a sortie that was aborted by another engine failure—he agreed to make an attempt next morning with the ironclad
Essex
and the
Queen of the West
. The plan was for the gunboat to shove the rebel vessel hard against bank and hold her there, sitting-duck fashion, so that the ram could butt a hole in her side and send her to the bottom. But this did not work either. Brown had the
Arkansas
moored with her head upstream, and when he saw the
Essex
coming at him he slacked his bow-line and presented his sharp armored prow to the blunt-nosed gunboat, which swerved at the last minute to avoid being sliced in two, taking and giving punishment as she passed. The
Queen
, following close behind, anxious to redeem her performance up the Yazoo the week before, could manage no more than a glancing blow. She worked her way back upstream, rejoining Davis, but the
Essex
went with the current, her engines badly shot up in the melee, and joined the fleet below.

Farragut threw up his hands at this. Fuel was low, and what with the need for keeping up steam in case the
Arkansas
staged another sudden appearance, was getting considerably lower every day. Sanitation was also a problem, as Halleck had foreseen. The swampy Mississippi heat had nearly half of Farragut’s sailors on the sick list, along with three quarters of the canal-digging soldiers. The falling river seemed about to make good its threat to strand him up here, out of circulation for the rest of the year. Besides, a message from Welles—sent before the Secretary learned of the rebel ram’s emergence—had just arrived: “Go down the river at discretion.” That was what Farragut did, and he did it without delay. Starting south on July 26, he dropped the orphaned
Essex
and two of the smaller wooden gunboats off at Baton Rouge, along with Williams’ shovel-weary soldiers, and put into New Orleans for repairs that would fit the rest of his salt-water ships for more agreeable blockade duty along the Gulf. Back in his native element at last, able to breathe all the way to the depths of his lungs, he said goodbye to the Mississippi—forever, he hoped.

Davis pulled out northward that same day, transferring his base to Helena, two hundred miles upstream. Vicksburg was delivered, along with a great stretch of the river between Napoleon and Natchez.

Welles was extremely angry when he heard the news. He told Farragut, “It is an absolute necessity that the neglect or apparent neglect of the squadron should be wiped out by the destruction of the
Arkansas.”
Nothing came of this as far as Farragut was concerned; he was downstream and he stayed there. But it was an event that rankled in
the Secretary’s memory ever after—worse than Donelson, worse than Hampton Roads; worse, even, than Head of the Passes or Plum Run Bend. Bitter and chagrined, Welles later wrote: “The most disreputable naval affair of the war was the descent of the steam ram
Arkansas
through both squadrons, until she hauled into the batteries of Vicksburg, and there the two Flag Officers abandoned the place and the ironclad ram, Farragut and his force going down to New Orleans, and Davis proceeding with his flotilla up the river.”

On Vicksburg’s bluff, conversely, there was rejoicing and there was pride, not only because the naval siege had been raised, but also because of the manner in which the feat had been accomplished. The combined might of two victorious Union fleets had been challenged, sundered, and repulsed by a single homemade ten-gun ironclad, backed by the industry and daring of her builder and commander. Coming as it did, after a season of reverses, this exploit gave the people of the Lower Mississippi Valley a new sense of confidence and elation. They were glad to be alive in a time when such things could happen, and they asked themselves how a nation could ever be conquered when its destiny rested with men like those who served aboard the
Arkansas
under Isaac Newton Brown.

In the Transmississippi, too, there was the discomfort of indigestion, proceeding from a difficulty in assimilating all that had been gained.

Sam Curtis was glad to have the Davis rams and gunboats with him: almost as glad as he had been to receive the division from Grant, which reached Helena the week before and brought his total strength to 18,000. This was the largest force he had yet commanded, half again larger than the army with which he had won the Battle of Pea Ridge; but, as he saw it, he had need of every man and gun he could get, ashore or afloat. Looking back on that savage conflict, which involved the repulse of a slashing double envelopment by Price and McCulloch, with Van Dorn hovering wild-eyed in the background and swarms of painted Indians on his flank, he perceived a hundred things that might have spelled defeat if they had gone against instead of for him. It seemed to him now in late July that events were building up to another such encounter, in which the scales—balanced against him, he believed, as they had been in early March—might tip the other way.