The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Though at first it seemed an unnecessary flourish—he knew the rebels had nothing afloat to match the Queen—that final reservation was prophetic. Setting out on the night of February 10, accompanied by an ex-Confederate steamboat, the DeSoto, which had been captured by the army below Vicksburg, Ellet began his career as a commerce raider in fine style, slipping past the Warrenton batteries undetected and going to work at once on enemy shipping by destroying skiffs and flatboats on both banks. He burned or commandeered hundreds of bales of cotton, taking some aboard for “armoring” the wheelhouse, destroyed supply trains heavily loaded with grain and salt pork being sent to collection points, and in reprisal for a sniper bullet, which struck one of his sailors in the leg, burned no less than three plantation houses, together with their outbuildings, apparently undismayed even when one planter’s daughter sang “The Bonny Blue Flag” full in his face as the flames crackled. His greatest single prize, however, was the corn-laden packet Era No. 5, which he captured after passing Natchez and entering the Red River. But at that point, or just beyond it—seventy-five miles from the mouth of the river and with Alexandria in a turmoil less than half that far ahead—he and the Queen ran out of luck. On Valentine’s Day, approaching Gordon’s Landing, where a battery of guns had been reported, the ram stuck fast on a mud flat and was taken suddenly under fire by enemy gunners who yelled with delight at thus being offered a stationary target at a range of four hundred yards. In short order the boat’s engine controls were smashed, her escape-pipe shot away, her boiler fractured. As she disappeared in hissing clouds of steam—one survivor later claimed to have avoided scalding his lungs because “I had sufficient presence of mind to cram the tail of my coat into my mouth”—officers and men began to tumble bales of cotton over the rail, then leap after them into the river, clinging to them in hope of reaching the DeSoto or the Era, a mile below. By now it was every man for himself, including the wounded, and the youthful skipper was not among the last to abandon the Queen in favor of a downstream ride astride a bale of cotton.

  Picked up by the DeSoto, Ellet and the others were alarmed to discover that in the excitement she had unshipped both rudders and become unmanageable; so they set her afire and abandoned her, too, in favor of the more recently captured Era. Their career as raiders had lasted just four days. From now on, their only concern was escape, which seemed unlikely because of reports that the Confederates had at Alexandria a high-speed steamboat, the William H. Webb, which would surely be after them as soon as the news arrived upriver. She mounted only one gun, they had heard, and would never have dared to tackle the Queen, but now the tables were more or less turned; the pursuers became the pursued. “With a sigh for the poor fellows left behind, and a hope that our enemies would be merciful,” a survivor wrote, “the prow of the Era was turned toward the Mississippi.” They made it by daylight, after a race through stormy darkness unrelieved except for blinding flashes of lightning, and started north up the big river, heaving overboard all possible incidentals, including rations, in an attempt to coax more speed from their unarmed boat. Next morning, February 16, just below Natchez, with the Webb reportedly closing fast on their stern, they were startled to see an enormous, twin-stacked vessel bearing down on them from dead ahead. Their dismay at the prospect of being ground between two millstones was relieved, however, when the lookout identified her as the Indianola. The latest addition to the ironclad fleet and the pride of the Federal inland-waters navy, she mounted two great 11-inch smoothbores forward and a pair of 9-inch rifles amidships, casemated between her towering sidewheel-boxes, while for power she boasted four engines, driving twin screws in addition to her paddles, and she had brought two large barges of coal along, one lashed to starboard and one to port, to insure a long-term stay on the previously rebel-held 250-mile stretch of river above Port Hudson. Porter had sent her down past the Vicksburg batteries three nights ago, intending for her to support the Queen and thus, as he said, “make matters doubly sure.”

  Learning from Ellet that the Queen had been lost, Lieutenant Commander George Brown, captain of the Indianola, decided at once to proceed downriver, accompanied by the Era. Presently they sighted the Webb, in hot pursuit, and once more the tables were turned; for the Webb took one quick look at the iron-clad monster and promptly made use of her superior speed to withdraw before coming within range of those 11-inch guns, two short-falling shots from which only served to hurry her along, as one observer said, “for all the world like a frightened racehorse.” Brown gave chase as far as the mouth of Red River, up which the rebel vessel disappeared, but there he called a halt, Porter having warned him not to venture up that stream without an experienced pilot, which he lacked. While Brown continued on patrol, guarding against a re-emergence of the Webb, Ellet took off northward in the Era with the unpleasant duty of informing Porter that he had lost the Queen. Two days later, still on patrol at the mouth of the Red, Brown received astounding news. The Confederates had resurrected the Queen of the West, patching up her punctured hull and repairing her fractured steam drum. Even now, in company with the skittish Webb and two cottonclad boats whose upper decks were crowded with sharpshooters, she was preparing to come out after the Indianola. Brown thought it over and decided to retire.

  He would have done better to leave without taking time to think it over; the fuze was burning shorter than he knew. However, he was in for a fight in any event because of the two coal barges, which he knew would decrease his upstream speed considerably, but which he was determined to hold onto, despite the fact that the Indianola’s bunkers were chock-full. Partly this decision was the result of his ingrained peacetime frugality, but mostly it was because he wanted to have plenty of fuel on hand in case Porter complied with his request, forwarded by Ellet, that another gunboat be sent downriver as a replacement for the Queen. Brown left the mouth of the Red on Saturday, February 21, and stopped for the night at a plantation landing up the Mississippi to take on a load of cotton bales, which he stacked around the ironclad’s low main deck to make her less vulnerable to boarders. Next morning he was off again in earnest, all four engines straining to offset the drag of the two barges lashed alongside. He did not know how much of a head start he had, but he feared it was not enough. In point of fact, it was even less than he supposed; for the four-boat Confederate flotilla, including the resurrected Queen, set out after him at about the same hour that Sunday morning, ninety miles astern of the landing where the lndianola had commandeered the cotton. The race was on.

  It was not really much of a race. Major Joseph L. Brent, commanding the quartet of rebel warships, each of which was in the charge of an army captain, could have overtaken Brown at almost anytime Tuesday afternoon, the 24th, but he preferred to wait for darkness, which would not only make the aiming of the ironclad’s big guns more difficult but would also give the Grand Gulf batteries a chance at her as she went by. Held to a crawl though she was by the awkward burden of her barges, the lndianola got past that danger without mishap; but Brown could see the smoke from his pursuers’ chimneys drawing closer with every mile as the sun declined, and he knew that he was in for a fight before it rose again. He also knew by now that no reinforcing consort was going to join him from the fleet above Vicksburg, in spite of which he held doggedly to his barges, counting on them to give him fender protection from ram attacks. As darkness fell, moonless but dusky with starlight, he cleared for action and kept half of his crew at battle stations: “watch and watch,” it was called. At 9.30 he passed New Carthage, which put him within thirteen miles of the nearest west-bank Union battery, but by that time the rebel boats were in plain sight. Abreast of Palmyra Island, heading into Davis Bend—so called because it flowed past the Confederate President’s Brierfield Plantation—Brown swung his iron prow around to face his pursuers at last, thus bringing his heavy guns to bear and protecting his more vulnerable stern.

  As the Queen and the Webb came at him simultaneously, the former in the lead, he fired an 11-inch shell point-blank at e
ach. Both missed, and the Queen was on him, lunging in from port with such force that the barge on that side was sliced almost in two. Emerging unscathed from this, except for the loss of the barge, which was cut adrift to sink, the Indianola met the Webb bows on, with a crash that knocked most of both crews off their feet and left the Confederate with a gash in her bow extending from water line to keelson, while the Federal was comparatively unhurt. Nevertheless the Webb backed off and struck again, crushing the remaining barge so completely as to leave it hanging by the lashings. Meanwhile the Queen, having run upstream a ways to gain momentum, turned and came charging down, striking her adversary just abaft the starboard wheelhouse, which was wrecked along with the rudder on that side, and starting a number of leaks along the shaft. Likewise the Webb, having gained momentum in the same fashion, brought her broken nose down hard and fair on the crippled ironclad’s lightly armored stern, starting the timbers and causing the water to pour in rapidly. All this time the Indianola had kept throwing shells into the smoky darkness, left and right, but had scored only a single hit on the Queen, which did no considerable damage to the boat herself though it killed two and wounded four of her crew. Brown, having done his worst with this one shot, was now in a hopeless condition, scarcely able to steer and with both of his starboard engines flooded. After waiting a while in midstream until the water had risen nearly to the grate-bars of the ironclad’s furnaces, planning thus to avoid her capture by making sure that she would sink, he ran her hard into the more friendly west bank and hauled down his colors just as the two cottonclads came alongside, crowded with yelling rebels prepared for boarding. Quickly they leaped down and attached two ropes by which the steamers could haul the Indianola across the river to the Confederate-held east bank, barely making it in time for her to sink in ten feet of water. As soon as they got their prisoners ashore they went to work on the captured dreadnought, intending to raise her, as they had raised the Queen of the West the week before, for service under the Stars and Bars.

  Though he had heard the heavy nighttime firing just downriver, Porter did not know for certain what had happened until two days later, when a seaman who had escaped from the Indianola during her brief contact with the western bank came aboard his flagship Black Hawk and gave him an eyewitness account of the tragedy. Coming as it did on the heels of news of the loss of the Queen—which in turn had been preceded, two months back, by the destruction of the Cairo—the blow was hard, especially since it included the information that the Queen had been taken over by the enemy and had played a leading part in the defeat of her intended consort, which was now about to be used in the same manner as soon as the rebels succeeded in getting her afloat. What made it doubly hard, for Porter at any rate, was the contrast between his present gloom and his recent optimism. “If you open the Father of Waters,” Assistant Navy Secretary G. A. Fox had wired the acting rear admiral in response to reports of his progress just two weeks ago, “you will at once be made an admiral; besides we will try for a ribboned star.… Do your work up clean,” Fox had added, “and the public will never be in doubt who did it. The flaming army correspondence misleads nobody. Keep cool, be very modest under great success, as a contrast to the soldiers.” At any rate, such strain as there had been on Porter’s modesty was removed by the awareness that all he had really accomplished so far—aside from the capture of Arkansas Post, which had had to be shared with the army—was the loss of three of his best warships, two of which were now in enemy hands. What filled his mind just now was the thought of what this newest-model ironclad, the former pride of the Union fleet, could accomplish once she went into action on the Confederate side. Supported as she would be by the captured ram, she might well prove invincible in an upstream fight. In fact, any attempt to challenge her en masse would probably add other powerful units to the rebel flotilla of defected boats, since any disabled vessel would be swept helplessly downstream in such an engagement. Far from opening the Father of Waters, and gaining thereby a ribboned star and the permanent rank of admiral, Porter could see that he would be more likely to lose what had been won by his predecessors. Besides, even if he had wanted to launch such an all-out attack, he had no gunboats in the vicinity of Vicksburg now; they had been sent far upriver to co-operate in another of Grant’s ill-fated amphibious experiments.

  Porter was inventive in more ways than one, however, and his resourcefulness now stood him in good stead. If he had no available ironclad, then he would build one—or anyhow the semblance of one. Ordering every man off the noncombatant vessels to turn to, he took an old flat-bottomed barge, extended its length to three hundred feet by use of rafts hidden behind false bulwarks, and covered it over with flimsy decking to support a frame-and-canvas pilothouse and two huge but empty paddle-wheel boxes. A casemate was mounted forward, with a number of large-caliber logs protruding from its ports, and two tall smokestacks were erected by piling barrels one upon another. As a final realistic touch, after two abandoned skiffs were swung from unworkable davits, the completed dummy warship was given an all-over coat of tar. Within twenty-four hours, at a reported cost of $8.63, the navy had what appeared, at least from a distance, to be a sister ship of the lndianola. Belching smoke from pots of burning tar and oakum installed in her barrel stacks, she was set adrift the following night to make her run past the Vicksburg batteries. They gave her everything they had, but to no avail; her black armor seemingly impervious to damage, she glided unscathed past the roaring guns, not even deigning to reply. At daybreak she grounded near the lower end of Sherman’s canal, and the diggers pushed her off again with a cheer. As she resumed her course downriver, the Queen of the West, coming up past Warrenton on a scout, spotted the dark behemoth in the distance, bearing down with her guns run out and her deck apparently cleared for action. The ram spun on her heel and sped back to spread the alarm: whereupon—since neither the Queen nor the broken-nosed Webb was in any condition for another fight just yet—all four of the Confederate vessels made off southward to avoid a clash with this second ironclad. Aboard the Indianola, still immobile and now deserted by her new friends, the lieutenant in charge of salvage operations was for holding onto her and fighting it out, despite repeated orders for him to complete her destruction before she could be recaptured. At a range of about two miles, the dreadnought halted as if to look the situation over before closing in for the bloody work she was bent on. Still the lieutenant held his ground until nightfall, when he decided to comply with the instructions of his superiors. After heaving the 9-inch rifles into the river, he laid the 11-inch smoothbores muzzle to muzzle and fired them with slow matches. When the smoke from this had cleared, he came back and set fire to what was left, burning the wreckage to the water line and ending the brief but stormy career of the ironclad Indianola.

  Next morning, seeing the black monster still in her former position, some two miles upriver—one observer later described her as “terrible though inert”—a party of Confederates went out in a rowboat to investigate. Drawing closer they recognized her for the hoax she was, and saw that she had come to rest on a mudbank. Nailed to her starboard wheelhouse was a crudely lettered sign. “Deluded people, cave in,” it read.

  “Then, too,” Grant added, continuing the comment on his reasons for keeping McPherson’s men sawing away at the underwater stumps and snags clogging the Bayou Baxter exit from Lake Providence even after he knew that, in itself, the work was unlikely to produce anything substantial, “it served as a cover for other efforts which gave a better prospect of success.” What he had in mind—in addition, that is, to Sherman’s canal, which was not to be abandoned until March—was a fifth experimental project, whose starting point was four hundred tortuous miles upriver from its intended finish atop the Vicksburg bluff. In olden days, just south of Helena and on the opposite bank, a bayou had afforded egress from the Mississippi; Yazoo Pass, it was called, because it connected eastward with the Coldwater River, which flowed south into the Tallahatchie, which in turn combined with the Yalobusha, f
arther down, to form the Yazoo. Steamboats once had plied this route for trade with the planters of the delta hinterland. In fact, they still steamed up and down this intricate chain of rivers, but only by entering from below, through the mouth of the Yazoo River; for the state of Mississippi had sealed off the northern entrance, five years before the war, by constructing across the mouth of Yazoo Pass a levee which served to keep the low-lying cotton fields from going under water with every rise of the big river. Now it was Grant’s notion that perhaps all he needed to do, in order to utilize this old peacetime trade route for his wartime purpose, was cut the levee and send in gunboats to provide cover for transports, which then could be unloaded on high ground—well down the left bank of the Yazoo but short of Haines Bluff, whose fortifications blocked an ascent of that river from below—and thus, by forcing the outnumbered defenders to come out into the open for a fight which could only result in their defeat, take Vicksburg from the rear. Accordingly, at the same time he ordered McPherson down from Memphis to Lake Providence, he sent his chief topographical engineer, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Wilson, to inspect and report on the possibility of launching such an attack by way of Yazoo Pass.