He had opened his mouth to tell Jonathan that, that he was the proud owner of a six-pounder smoothbore-he could think of nothing else to say-when he stopped, and involuntarily he shifted his eyes to the Abigail Wilson, still tied to the dock. He ran his eyes over her bow, pictured the sweep of foredeck, then glanced back at the six-pounder.
“You looking to go to New Orleans, then?” Wilson asked.
The gunboat USS Itasca, 150 feet long, five hundred tons, steamed up the Mississippi River, farther than any Yankee had come in a year.
Lieutenant C.H.B. Caldwell, commanding the Itasca, stood by the big wheel, aft. He had been charged by Admiral Farragut with removing the heavy chain, supported by half a dozen derelict schooners, which the Confederates had stretched across the river. He and his consort, Pinola, had labored for hours under the fire of Forts Jackson and St. Philip. They had managed to pull one schooner free. Their mission so far, a failure. Caldwell was not ready to report as much to Farragut, doubted he ever would.
The mortar flotilla was firing a covering fire, trying to distract the Confederate gunners, keep their minds off the two Yankee gunboats moving upriver. Streaks of light arched up high overhead, dropped into the wide area between the walls of Forts St. Philip and Jackson, made great billows of light as they exploded.
The forts were firing too, blasting at the riparian intruders with rifled shells. Exploding ordnance tore up the river, peppered the Itasca and Pinola with iron, but Caldwell was too angry to care. He steamed through the narrow opening left by the removal of that one schooner. He was playing his last hand.
He turned to the midshipman beside him. “Go down to the engine room, give the chief my compliments, and tell him that when I ring full ahead again, I want every ounce of steam I can have. Tell him to throw pitch, turpentine, whatever on the fires. I need it all.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” The mid saluted, ran off.
Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred yards upriver the Itasca steamed, until the line of schooners was lost to sight, and visible only in the light of exploding ordnance. The shells dropped all around the gunboat, screamed down the deck, took off the head of the mainmast; it was like steaming into a hornet’s nest.
“Port your helm, hard aport!” Caldwell said. Fort St. Philip, which had been right ahead, its walls bristling points of light where the guns were firing at them, was now on the port side, now astern, as the gunboat turned to run with the stream.
Caldwell grabbed the telegraph, swallowed hard, rang full ahead.
The deck vibrated as the engineer stoked the fires up and the prop churned the water and the speed built. The gunboat was moving fast now, with the current, covering the distance that she had just steamed. Against the stars overhead Caldwell could see great quantities of smoke rolling out of the stack, and he wondered what the chief was throwing on down there.
Fort Jackson to starboard was firing madly, but Caldwell could see the schooners now, the chain between them, could see the point he intended to hit, the place where the chain hung lowest between two hulks.
“I’ll take this,” he said softly to the quartermaster, and the surprised man stepped aside, let the captain take the wheel. Caldwell gave a half turn, brought the helm amidships. He could not risk the possibility of the helmsman misunderstanding his command. They had one try, and one try only. No practice run, no drill.
They were coming on fast to the schooners, one, two, three, and between schooners three and four he pointed the bow of the gunboat. He could feel the engines throbbing below, could hear the sound of the hull pushed as fast as she could go through the water. And then they hit.
The bow of the Itasca hit the chain and kept going, up, up, as if she was leaping a wave, and the pounding engines drove the ship on, higher and higher. The gunboat seemed to be crawling out of the water as it lifted up, as it rode up on the chain.
And then it stopped and the throbbing engines could push her no more. She sat there, hung on the chain, and it dawned on Caldwell that they might remain in that position, hung up on the chain under the Confederate guns. The forts would blow them to pieces at first light, a failure on his part much worse than failing to break the raft.
The first tendrils of panic were creeping up his throat when the chain broke under them. The bow of the Itasca dropped down, sent the spray flying high over the rails, rocked the vessel with the waves created by her own impact.
The straining engines shoved the gunboat ahead. To port and starboard, the old schooners that had held the chain were now caught in the fast-flowing current. They swept downstream, swinging on the chain, making a gap in the obstruction like barn doors swinging open.
Caldwell smiled and would have shouted if he had not controlled himself. Forward, someone with less control whooped, and more followed suit.
Lieutenant Caldwell looked at the wide gap in the chain, big enough for the flagship, big enough even for the side-wheeler Mississippi. He had done his job. Now there was nothing but the forts and the Confederate mosquito fleet between Farragut’s big ships and the city of New Orleans.
44
I wish you to understand that the day is at hand when you will be called upon to meet the enemy in the worst form for our profession.
– Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, General Orders to Captains
They worked as hard and as fast as they could: Theodore Wilson, Jonathan Paine, Bobby Pointer, the crew and new volunteers of what “Captain” Wilson was calling the “CSS” Abigail Wilson. They removed the towing bitts, rigged up gun tackles, swayed the gun carriage and six-pounder aboard. They procured shot and powder, topped off potable water, brought aboard food and sundry other supplies.
The days ticked by: April 18, 19, 20…The Jonathan Paine of a year before would have been frantic, yelling at everyone to hurry, arguing with Wilson over every new thing he had to have aboard. The Jonathan of a year before would have made an insufferable pain of himself, would no doubt have been thrown off the boat.
The one-legged, sunken-cheeked Jonathan was no less frantic, though he kept it to himself now, and simply worked as hard as he was physically able.
He had picked up the story of his mother’s death, his father’s life, piece by piece, from dozens of sources, like reconstructing a mosaic from a disorganized heap of tiles. He did not like the picture forming.
The servants remaining at Paine Plantation told him how his father had cut the limbs off the tree, turned it into what it was, for what reason they did not know. He did it at the same time his mother took to her bed, never to rise again. It was at the same time, Jonathan surmised, that they had received word of the death of their sons.
He heard the rest-travel to New Orleans, spending money wildly, the boat, the fight with the Yankees at the Head of the Passes, the return to Yazoo City, the conversion of the ship into an ironclad. None of it, none of it, sounded like the methodical, stable, well-considered father he knew. When the mosaic was put together it revealed a picture of a man who had gone mad with grief, who was flinging himself at the enemy as a form of suicide.
And now, Jonathan knew, the enemy was coming in force at the river defenses below New Orleans. It was a good opportunity to die. Jonathan could not bear the thought of his father’s going to his grave without ever knowing the truth, without knowing that the Paine line would live on. So he worked until the stump of his leg throbbed in agony, and then he stuffed cotton between the stump and the wood and worked some more.
They took on coal on the 20th, ready to get underway that afternoon.
“Bobby,” Jonathan said. They stood on the landing as the coaling commenced. “If you wish, you are welcome to wait my return at Paine Plantation. You know how to get back there.”
“I was figuring on comin wit you, Missuh Jon’tin.”
“This is not going to be a fine thing, Bobby. As I understand it, there aren’t but a few Southern boats against all the Yankee fleet. I don’t know as any of us’ll come through this one.”
Bobby nodde
d. “But I do love a boat ride, and I ain’t never seen N’Awlins. I gets to do dem tings, I reckon I’m fit to die.”
Jonathan smiled, slapped Bobby on the shoulder. “Good,” he said. Bobby was part of the journey, part of the entire thing. Jonathan did not like the thought of undertaking the last part, playing the final act, without him.
An hour later they left the dock, steamed out into the stream. They were a day and a half getting to Vicksburg, with “Captain” Wilson putting the Abigail Wilson hard into the mud half a dozen times. They tied up at Vicksburg and the captain, in a tacit admission of incompetence, hired a river pilot to take them to New Orleans.
They were underway again just a few hours later, steaming downriver through the night. Wilson was anxious too, Jonathan could see, eager to get into the fight. Driving him, no doubt, was the thought that Robley Paine might die a hero in combat and Wilson himself would never see a shot fired. Whatever it was, Jonathan did not care, as long as they were steaming for New Orleans, and doing so with all dispatch.
The pounding of the forts by the mortar flotilla downriver had been frightening at first, in its lethal potential. The round thirteen-inch shells fell with uncanny accuracy, exploding as they hit, the Yankees having worked out the elevation, trajectory, charge, and fuses exactly. The shells exploded with a deep, angry-God sound, sent shards of iron screaming. One shell through the roof of the casement, which served as a hurricane deck for the Yazoo River, would be the end of them all.
For all the daylight hours and well into the night, the sky was slashed apart with the streak of burning fuses as the thirteen-inch mortars lobbed shell after shell into the forts. Twenty-one mortars all firing together; the sound of individual guns was lost until it was all one big rumble of mortar fire, whistle of shell, explosion of shell. The twilight hours, the night, were lit with the continuous flash of detonations, muted through the pall of smoke from expended power which hung permanently over the water.
The men of the Yazoo River could do no more than stand on the hurricane deck, watch the awesome fireworks, and shake their heads at the resources the Yankees were able to array against them. Twenty-one specially equipped ships just to blast two forts? Would they never run out of shells?
Finally, after a few days, when the wonder of it all had worn away, the shelling became simply monotonous, and soon they hardly heard it at all. None of the shells were being lobbed at the fleet, huddled upriver of Fort St. Philip. The Confederate Navy and the River Defense Fleet did not seem to be a great concern to the Yankees.
The storm was building, Hieronymus Taylor could feel it. Like so many times out on the Gulf, when the sky would get blacker and blacker and the water would turn a weird grayish blue and you could feel the change in the atmosphere, feel it on some primal level, and you knew when the sky opened, and the wind began to whistle, and the seas rose, that it was going to be bad.
That was how he felt, early evening, April 23, 1862, sitting on the hurricane deck of the Yazoo River, worrying the cigar in his mouth, looking downriver at the desultory fireworks. The bombardment had slowed around noon, for the first time in five days. There were rumors the ships of the Yankee fleet had shifted their anchorages around. Change. It meant something was going to happen. The storm had to break soon. The pressure was too great.
He turned and looked at the boats on the Confederate side. An odd assortment, and none too menacing. Besides the Yazoo River, there were the McRae and Jackson, old wooden steamers, veterans of the river war. There were two vessels from the Louisiana State Navy, the Governor Moore and the General Quitman, both wooden steamers mounting two guns each. There was part of the ad hoc River Defense Fleet, the commander of which, John Stephenson, had such an aversion to taking orders from a naval officer that Commander Mitchell finally decided to just ignore him and his boats.
There was the low, whale-backed ironclad ram Manassas, the oddest thing that Taylor had ever seen afloat. But she had proved her worth before, at the Head of the Passes, and Taylor hoped she would again, and perhaps with greater results.
Lastly there was the ironclad Louisiana. She was a massive affair, 264 feet long, sixty-two feet wide, with an eclectic collection of sixteen guns. She was potentially the greatest threat to the Union forces, another CSS Virginia, let loose among the wooden walls. Unfortunately, her odd combination of paddle wheels and screw propellers was inadequate to maneuver the huge vessel. She was unable to steam under her own power, and even with tugs could not get upriver against the current. She was tied up at the foot of Fort St. Philip, a floating iron battery, no more.
First Assistant Engineer Hieronymus Taylor sat for a long time on the hurricane deck, looking out over the water, thinking. There was much to ponder. The sun sank into the marshes. To the north lay his beloved New Orleans. Would there be Yankees in those narrow, ancient streets in the next week? The next day?
It was near midnight, most of the ship asleep, when he sighed, stood, tossed his cigar overboard. In the evening quiet he heard it hiss in the water. He stepped forward to the small pilothouse. The officers were maintaining watch as if at sea, and Bowater and the pilot Risley were standing on the pilothouse roof, talking in low tones about the river, the current, what they would be up against.
“Evening, Captain,” Taylor said, in a neighborly way, looking up at Bowater, standing on the four-foot-high roof.
“Good evening, Chief.” Bowater was in shirtsleeves, rolled up, his braces dark against the white shirt. He was smoking a cigar as well, the first time Taylor had ever seen him do so.
“Expecting some excitement tonight, Cap’n?”
“Could be. Could well be.”
Taylor nodded. “I think so too. Tonight’s the night. I can feel it in my bones.” With that he turned and climbed down to the deck, then through the small door into the casement. Only a few lanterns were lit. The guns lurked in the dark, and between them, men sleeping at quarters, like grown bears and their cubs, all hibernating.
Taylor threaded his way through the men, found Acting Master’s Mate Ruffin Tanner lying on his back, mouth open, snoring. He nudged him with his toe, nudged harder until the sailor woke up.
“What the hell…?” Tanner muttered, looked up through half-closed eyes.
“Tanner, you awake?” Taylor asked.
“Am now, you son of a bitch…”
“Good. I need ya to get a couple of your sailor boys, launch the starboard boat.”
“Starboard…why? This on the cap’n’s orders?”
“No, it’s on my orders, and I would be damned grateful if you would stop arguing and do it.”
Tanner climbed to his feet, stretched, looked Taylor over. Then he nodded. “Starboard boat.” They understood one another, the sailor and the engineer. Taylor knew he could count on the man.
Taylor opened the hatch to the engine room and climbed down, climbed into the familiar heat and Stygian atmosphere.
“Jones! Where the hell you at? You hidin in the damn coal bunker again?”
Moses Jones, fireman of the watch, stepped out from behind the engine, an oil can in his hand. “I’se here, boss. What da hell you needin now?”
“I need you to round up all the darkies we got in the engineering division. They’s you and Tommy, they’s William and Noah and Caesar we got up in Yazoo City…” The men from Yazoo City were slaves whose owners had hired them out to the navy as coal heavers. Taylor wondered if their masters thought themselves patriots for such sacrifice. “What other darkies we got aboard?”
Moses cocked his head, squinted at him, trying to divine the man’s motives. “What you wants ta know for?”
“Will you stop yer damned arguing, you black son of a bitch?”
“They’s the two fellas in the steward’s division and Johnny St. Laurent.”
Johnny St. Laurent. Taylor wondered how he could have forgotten him.
“All right, see here. You round up all them fellas from the engineering division, Tommy and them new hands from Yazoo Cit
y, an y’all meet me on the fantail. Just do it,” he added to Moses’s forming question.
Taylor climbed back up into the casement, made his way aft to the makeshift galley where Johnny St. Laurent slept. He shook the sleeping cook until he got a response.
“Johnny, come with me,” Taylor said, and Johnny, who had been with Taylor on many a misadventure, stood and followed without question.
They met on the fantail, Hieronymus Taylor and a cluster of black men in Confederate sailor’s garb. On the starboard side, Tanner and two seamen held one of the Yazoo River’s boats against the ironclad hull.
“All right, you boys,” Taylor began, and then he was interrupted by footsteps in the casement, stepping through the door. Captain Bowater.
“Chief, what are you doing?” Bowater asked. It was not a friendly tone: anger, confusion, but mostly suspicion.
“I’m lettin’ the darkies go, Cap’n. They ain’t got a dog in this fight.”
“You are…what?”
“Letting the darkies go. Givin them a boat. Let ’em sail on down to the Yankees. We don’t need ’em, don’t need no divided loyalties for the fight we got comin.”
“What makes you think their loyalties are divided?”
“Well, let’s jest see.” Taylor turned to the men on the fantail. “Any you men don’t want to go over to the Yankees, wants to remain in the Confederate Navy, stay and fight, step on over there.”
Taylor pointed to the port rail. There was a long pause. No one moved.
“Who is going to pass coal, Chief?”
“I can pass coal. Burgess can pass coal. Got two white coal passers, don’t need so damn many down there anyhow.”
Bowater was silent, clearly did not know which way to go on this.
“How ’bout you, Cap’n? You gonna let your boy Jacob go?”
Glory In The Name Page 46