The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (75 page)

Two of the three were from the Confederate flotilla: the 7-gun former Mexican revenue cutter, which was reduced to kindling by the
converging fire of three Union men-of-war as soon as she came within their range, and the low-riding armored ram
Manassas
, which headed downriver as soon as the guns began to roar and gave one of the heavy sloops an ineffectual glancing bump, firing her Cyclops cannon as she struck. (Aboard the sloop the cry went up, “The ram, the ram!” and the captain saw a rebel officer come out of the iron hatch and run forward along the port gunnel to inspect the damage, if any. Suddenly he whirled with an odd, disjointed motion and tumbled into the water. Hardly able to believe his eyes, the captain called to the leadsman in the chains, asking if he had seen him fall. “Why, yes sir,” he said: “I saw him fall overboard. In fact, I helped him; for I hit him alongside the head with my hand-lead.”) The
Manassas
backed off and continued downriver, intending to do better with the next one, but took a terrific pounding from the guns of both forts, whose cannoneers mistook her for a disabled Federal vessel. She came about, staggering back upstream, her armor pierced, her engines smashed, and was pounded again by four of the enemy warships. Avoiding a fifth, which charged to run her down, she veered into bank and stuck there, smoke curling from her hatch and punctures. What was left of her crew jumped ashore and scurried to safety while the Union gunboats flailed the brush with canister and grape.

Third to accept the challenge was the unarmored sidewheel steamboat
Governor Moore
, one of two vessels sent by the state of Louisiana to make up a third division of the fleet defending New Orleans. When the firing began she moved upriver, adding rosin to her fires to get up steam before turning to join the fight. As she moved through the darkness she saw the 1300-ton screw steamer
Varuna
, the fastest ship in the Federal fleet, coming hard upstream in pursuit of the fugitive gunboats. The
Moore
carried two guns, one forward and one aft; the
Varuna
carried ten, eight of them 8-inchers; but the former, undetected against a dark backdrop of trees along the bank, had the advantage of surprise. She opened fire at a hundred yards—and missed. Startled, the Federal replied, strewing the steamboat’s decks with dead and wounded. The
Moore
was now too close to bring her forward gun to bear, her bow being in the way, but the captain ordered the piece depressed and fired it through his own deck. The first shot was deflected by a hawse pipe, but the second, fired through the hole in the deck and bow, burst against the
Varuna’
s pivot gun, inflicting heavy casualties. The third came as the
Moore
rammed her opponent hard amidships, receiving a broadside in return. She backed off, then fired and rammed again. That did it. The
Varuna
limped toward bank; whereupon one of the fleeing Confederate gunboats, seeing her distress, turned and gave her another bump before she made it. She went down quickly then, leaving her topgallant forecastle above water, crowded with survivors.

The
Moore’
s captain, having his blood up, ordered a downriver
course, intending to take on the whole Yankee fleet with one broken-nosed steamboat. The crew seemed willing, what there was left—well over half were dead or dying—but the wounded first lieutenant at the helm had had enough. “Why do this?” he protested. “We have no men left. I’ll be damned if I stand here to be murdered.” And with that he slapped the wheel hard to starboard, making a run for the west bank. Five Union ships, within range by now, cut loose at her with all their guns; she seemed almost to explode. All told, her crew of 93, mostly infantry detachments and longshoremen, lost 57 killed and 17 wounded. The rest were captured or escaped through the swamps when she struck bank, already ablaze, her colors burning at the peak.

Dawn glimmered and spread through the latter stages of the fighting. When the sun came up at 5 o’clock the Federal ships broke out their flags to greet it and salute their victory. All being safely past the forts except the sunken
Varuna
and three of the lighter gunboats—one had taken a shot in her boiler, losing her head of steam; another had got tangled in the barricade; a third had turned back, badly cut up by the crossfire—Farragut ordered them to anchor, wash down, and take count. Casualties were 37 dead and 149 wounded, nearly twice the clerk’s hopeful estimate and more than three times the losses in the forts: 12 dead and 40 wounded. On the other hand, the Confederate flotilla was utterly destroyed, including the fleeing gunboat which had given the
Varuna
a final butt; her skipper burned her at the levee in New Orleans.

Below the boom, Porter’s anxiety was relieved as he watched the charred remnants of the rebel fleet come floating down the river. When his demand for immediate surrender of the forts was declined, he put his mortar crews back to work, firing up the remainder of their shells.

New Orleans was in a frenzy of rage and disappointment at the news from downriver. Other cities might accept defeat and endure the aftermath in sullen silence; but not this one. All afternoon and most of the night, while crowds milled in the streets, brandishing knives and pistols and howling for resistance to the end, drays rattled over the cobbles, hauling cotton from the presses for burning on the quays, where crates of rice and hogsheads of molasses were broken open and thrown into the river. This at least won the people’s approval; “The damned Yankees shall not have it!” they cried, and the night was hazed with acrid smoke that hid the stars.

They were no less violent next morning when they heard the guns of the enemy fleet make short work of the Chalmette batteries, then come slowly into view around Slaughterhouse Bend as a drizzle of rain began to fall; “silent, grim, and terrible,” one among the watchers called the warships, “black with men, heavy with deadly portent.”
Their great hope had been the ironclads, built and launched in their own yards. One had already gone downriver, powerless, and been by-passed. Now here came the other, the unfinished
Mississippi
, drifting helpless, set afire to keep her from falling into Federal hands. The crowd howled louder than ever at the sight, shouting “Betrayed! Betrayed!” and screaming curses at the Yankee sailors who watched from the decks and yardarms. Aboard the
Hartford
, one old tar grinned broadly back at them as he stood beside a 9-inch Dahlgren, holding the lanyard in one hand and patting the big black bottle-shaped breech with the other. The rain came down harder.

Despite the threats and invective from the quay, Farragut’s strength was so obvious that he didn’t have to use it. Two officers went ashore and walked unescorted through the hysterical mob to City Hall, where the mayor was waiting for them. Lovell had retreated, leaving New Orleans an open city. However, if the citizens were willing to undergo naval bombardment, he offered to “return with my troops and not leave as long as one brick remained upon another.” The offer was declined: as was the navy’s demand for an immediate surrender. “This satisfaction you cannot obtain at our hands,” the mayor told the two officers. He would not resist, but neither would he yield; if they wanted the city, let them come and take it.

Farragut wanted no pointless violence; he had had enough violence the day before, when, as he told a friend, “I seemed to be breathing flame.” Saturday, while negotiations continued, he ordered his captains to assemble their crews at 11 o’clock the following morning and “return thanks to Almighty God for his great goodness and mercy for permitting us to pass through the events of the past two days with so little loss of life and blood. At that hour the Church pennant will be hoisted on every vessel of the fleet, and their crews assembled will, in humiliation and prayer, make their acknowledgments thereof to the Great Disposer of all human events.” That would be ceremony enough for him, with or without a formal surrender by the municipal authorities.

The occupation problem still remained, but not for long. Monday the garrisons of Forts Jackson and St Philip—they were “mostly foreign enlistments,” the commandant said; “A reaction set in among them,” he explained—mutinied, spiked the guns, and forced their officers to surrender. Still powerless, the
Louisiana
was blown up to forestall capture. Butler’s 18,000 men ascended the river unopposed and marched into the city on the last day of the month. “In family councils,” a resident wrote, “a new domestic art began to be studied—the art of hiding valuables” from looters under the general known thereafter as “Spoons” Butler. One cache he uncovered with particular satisfaction: 418 bronze plantation bells collected there in answer to Beauregard’s impassioned pleas for metal. Sent to Boston, they sold for $30,000
to mock the rebels from New England towers and steeples. Other aspects of the occupation were less pleasant for the visitors. Not only was southern hospitality lacking, the people seemed utterly unwilling to accept the consequences of defeat: particularly the women, who responded to northern overtures with downright abuse. Butler knew how to handle that, however. “I propose to make some brilliant examples,” he wrote Stanton.

Farragut now was free to continue his trip upriver, and in early May he did so. Baton Rouge fell as easily as New Orleans, once the guns of the fleet were trained on its streets and houses; the state government had fled the week before to Opelousas, which was safely away from the river. Natchez was next, and it too fell without resistance. Then in mid-May came Vicksburg, whose reply to a demand for surrender was something different from the others: “Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler can teach them, let them come and try.” The ranks were wrong; Butler was a major general, Farragut a captain; but the writer seemed to mean what he was saying. The guns frowned down from the tall bluff—“so elevated that our fire will not be felt by them,” Farragut said—and there were reports of 20,000 reinforcements on the way from Jackson. Deciding to label this first attempt a mere reconnaissance, he left garrisons at Baton Rouge and Natchez, and was back in New Orleans before the end of May. Vicksburg was a problem that could wait. In time he intended to “teach them,” but just now it needed study.

Welles was angry, hotly demanding to know why the attack against Vicksburg’s bluff had not been pressed, but the feeling in the fleet was that enough had been done in one short spring by one upriver thrust. New Orleans was now in northern hands and a second southern capital had fallen—both delivered as outright gifts to the army from the navy. Southerners agreed that it was quite enough, though some found bitter solace in protesting that the thing had been done by mechanical contrivance, with small risk and no gallantry at all. The glory was departing. “This is a most cowardly struggle,” a Louisiana woman told her diary. “These people can do nothing without gunboats.… These passive instruments do their fighting for them. It is at best a dastardly way to fight.” Then she added, rather wistfully: “We should have had gunboats if the Government had been efficient, wise or earnest.”

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The North had found a new set of western heroes—Farragut, Curtis, Canby, Pope, Ben Butler: all their stars were in ascendance—but some
of the former heroes now had tarnished reputations: Grant, for instance. If the news from Donelson had sent him soaring like a rocket in the public’s estimation, the news from Shiloh dropped him sparkless like the stick. Cashiered officers, such as the Ohio colonel who cried “Retreat! Save yourselves!” at first sight of the rebels, were spreading tales back home at his expense. He was incompetent; he was lazy; he was a drunk. Correspondents, who had come up late and gathered their information in the rear—“not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front,” Grant remarked—were soon in print with stories which not only seemed to verify the rumors of “complete surprise,” but also included the casualty lists. Shocking as these were to the whole country, they struck hardest in the Northwest, where most of the dead boys were being mourned.