Thieves of Mercy

by James L. Nelson

  THIEVES OF MERCY

  A Novel of the Civil War at Sea

  JAMES L. NELSON

  TO

  JONATHAN BONAVENTURE NELSON,

  MY BEAUTIFUL BOY

  Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valor, and in the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy….

  SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, ACT IV, SCENE 6

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  It was nighttime in the shipyard, the working day long…

  ONE

  It was a month before the burning of the Tennessee,…

  TWO

  Even before the shooting started, Bowater guessed that his blue-water…

  THREE

  Wendy Atkins looked at the letter in her hand. Crumpled…

  FOUR

  Samuel Bowater ran forward, reached the bottom of the ladder…

  FIVE

  Wendy let Molly lead the way to the train station.

  SIX

  The morning after the brawl, Bowater woke with an unaccustomed…

  SEVEN

  Wendy Atkins had a disconnected, free-floating feeling, like one of…

  EIGHT

  Hieronymus Taylor found himself wandering about the decks of the…

  NINE

  Wendy Atkins had been in a play once. She had…

  TEN

  Second Master Thomas B. Gregory, United States Navy, in command of Mortar…

  ELEVEN

  When your sanctuary becomes your hell, there’s no damned place…

  TWELVE

  The tug rolled along under a perfect blue sky, the…

  THIRTEEN

  The Union fleet was getting under way, but Wendy and…

  FOURTEEN

  By the time they dragged Hieronymus Taylor back on board…

  FIFTEEN

  The next morning, Samuel Bowater went to Shirley’s yard and…

  SIXTEEN

  The Norwegians were kindness itself to the pair of exhausted-looking,…

  SEVENTEEN

  In the dark, Wendy saw Molly make her move for…

  EIGHTEEN

  Samuel Bowater felt like Noah’s less-enlightened neighbor.

  NINETEEN

  Samuel Bowater had seen his share of theaters and opera…

  TWENTY

  They stepped tentatively through the iron gates of the shipyard,…

  TWENTY-ONE

  Samuel Bowater walked stiffly uphill to the hospital. He was…

  TWENTY-TWO

  Flag Officer Josiah Tattnall stared through field glasses at the…

  TWENTY-THREE

  Mississippi Mike steadfastly refused to allow his literary doppelgänger to…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Wendy could feel her confidence and her boat-handling ability growing…

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Midshipman Hardin Littlepage brought the news: Lieutenant Jones’s boat was…

  TWENTY-SIX

  Wendy saw Newcomb running up the trail toward them. It…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was some time after the death of CSS Virginia…

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  For Bowater, stepping into command was like pulling on an…

  TWENTY-NINE

  Flag Officer Charles Davis, United States Navy, looked around his…

  THIRTY

  There was going to be a battle. A fight on…

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Union ironclad fleet had let loose with a full…

  THIRTY-TWO

  The impact tore Taylor’s fingers from the throttle valve and…

  THIRTY-THREE

  Wendy Atkins was riding the same emotional seesaw as the…

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Bowater slept fitfully and not long, lurching along on the…

  EPILOGUE

  By June 30, 1863, the Battle of Memphis was a…

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES L. NELSON

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  The completion of the iron-clad gunboat at Memphis, by Mr. Shirley, is regarded as highly important to the defenses of the Mississippi. One of them at Columbus would have enabled you to complete the annihilation of the enemy.

  STEPHEN R. MALLORY, SECRETARY OF THE CONFEDERATE NAVY, TO GENERAL LEONIDAS POLK

  It was nighttime in the shipyard, the working day long over. But there were men there still, nearly fifty men, standing around in the dirt and sawdust. The air was damp and warm, alive with summer bugs and the sounds of frogs and the lap of water. Just to the north, the lights that climbed up the steep banks and low hills along the Mississippi showed where the city of Memphis was still awake, like the soldiers at Agincourt, too restless to sleep on the eve of battle. To the men in the shipyard, the city might as well have been Agincourt, it felt so far removed.

  The men were shipwrights and house carpenters. They were blue-water sailors and river men and black gang. They were from Charleston and New Orleans, Yazoo City and Memphis and Richmond and Mobile, all the states that now formed the Confederate States of America, and a few transplant Yankees thrown in.

  There was John Shirley, dancing from one foot to another. There was Ruffin Tanner, his wounded arm still bound with a white bandage. There was Hieronymus Taylor, chief engineer, leaning on a crutch, his splinted leg thrust out in front of him. The glow of his cigar looked like a signal lantern. Red at the masthead.

  At the head of them stood Lt. Samuel Bowater, Confederate States Navy. Thirty-five years old, a fifteen-year veteran of the United States Navy, where, after some brief action as an ensign during the Mexican War, he had spent his time visiting foreign ports and seeing that the various ships aboard which he served as lieutenant were clean to navy standards. There had not been much more to do in the old navy.

  Bowater smoothed his moustache and goatee, stepped off to the right to get a better look at the ship. The half-dozen men behind him carried torches that spilled their light over the shipyard, the sawmill, the piles of unused timber, the hastily built shacks to house the blacksmith’s and carpenter’s shops, the looming hull of the vessel.

  Good. She looks good, Bowater thought. But she was not finished. She had been slated for completion in December of ’61, and now it was June of ’62 and she was far from done.

  It was not for want of trying. It was for want of everything else: iron plate, bolts, machinery, wood, manpower. Timber came from five different sawmills, iron from all over the Confederacy. The first load of bolt and spike iron was taken before it even arrived, not by Yankees, but by officers of the Confederate States Navy who reckoned they had a better use for it.

  Despite the pleas of contractor John Shirley to Stephen Mallory, and Stephen Mallory’s pleas to the army to detail a minimum of one hundred men with shipbuilding experience to the project, the shipwrights arrived in Memphis in twos and threes. Shirley made use of house carpenters, day laborers, anyone who knew which end of the hammer to hold.

  Given all that, it was something of a miracle what Shirley had accomplished. Two ironclads, nearly complete, built in Memphis on the low banks of the Mississippi. The Arkansas and the Tennessee.

  Of the two, the Arkansas was much further along, her woodwork all but done, her iron plating bolted on as far as the main deck, her engines on board, if not in place. Bowater looked at the empty ways on which she had been built. The grease from her launch still shone in
the light of the torches. They had slid Arkansas into the river and towed her south to Yazoo City. Away from the onrushing Yankees, General Halleck and Commodore Davis and his fleet of ironclad river gunboats coming down from the north, Farragut coming up from the south. Towed her to the heart of the Confederacy, away from the anaconda, squeezing tighter.

  But the Arkansas was not Bowater’s concern. His was the Tennessee. His third command.

  It was just over a year before that he had joined the Confederate Navy, right after witnessing the bombardment of Fort Sumter in his native Charleston. Bowater was a Southern man, a Southern gentleman, but at the time he was also an officer of the United States Navy. He had sworn an oath to that service, and gentlemen of the South did not break oaths easily.

  He went with his state, in the end, and with his new country, and had been given command of the CSS Cape Fear, an armed tug, which had been shot out from under him in the naval skirmish in Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. He and his men had been transferred en masse to Yazoo City to form the crew of the ironclad Yazoo River, which had met her death at New Orleans, fighting to stop Farragut’s fleet from pushing up from the delta to take the Crescent City.

  Now Farragut was at New Orleans, that city in Yankee hands, and once again Bowater’s men had been moved as a unit to their next ship. The Tennessee.

  The white pine planking of her hull looked orange in the light of the torches, her topsides all but lost in the dark. She was framed in oak and planked with pine but there was no iron plate on her yet. The iron was not even there—it was still on the Arkansas side of the river, still waiting for payment. Tennessee was a turtle without a shell.

  She was not huge, by ironclad standards. One hundred and sixty-five feet long, more than one hundred feet shorter than the CSS Virginia, the former Merrimack. Thirty-five feet wide. Her waterline, scribed in the planking, was visible six feet above Bowater’s head. She was not huge, but she would have been powerful. She might have changed the entire strategic situation on that part of the river.

  Son of a bitch, Bowater muttered. He was dragging his feet now, and there was no call for it.

  He was not the only Confederate officer there. The provost marshal for the city of Memphis stood nearby, watching, his gray frock coat unbuttoned in the warm night, arms folded with mounting impatience. It was by his order that they were there, doing the job they were doing. But it was not the provost’s ship. He did not share Bowater’s feelings. He coughed impatiently.

  “All right, you men.” Bowater turned to his crew behind him. “Go ahead.”

  The men with the torches stepped forward, solemn, as if they were part of some religious service. They spread out along the length of the hull and thrust the flames into the bales of cotton stacked under the wooden hull, cotton soaked in turpentine.

  All along the length of the Tennessee the flames of the torches swelled into flames like campfires and then like bonfires as the cotton was engulfed. The flames rose up and threw their light all over the shipyard, lighting up the watching men so they were all bright light and dark shadow, flickering over the far ends of the shipyard.

  Bowater stepped back. The heat was already too much to bear. He could see the planking on what would have been the ship’s wetted surface turn black. The caulking between the planks began to burn and then the planks themselves flared as the heavy timbers began to catch fire.

  Bowater heard the limping gate of Hieronymus Taylor as the chief engineer stepped up beside him. “Well, goddamn me, Cap’n,” Taylor said around his cigar, his accent thick New Orleans. “There goes your third ship.” He pulled out a flask of whiskey, took a drink, handed it to Bowater. Bowater took it, put it to his lips, and took a big mouthful, a thing he would have considered unthinkable a year before. Captains did not drink with the crew. Samuel Bowater did not drink whiskey from a flask. He did not drink with the likes of Hieronymus Taylor.

  It had been a long year.

  “Seems the life span of your ships just gets shorter and shorter all the damn time,” Taylor observed, taking the flask back.

  “Don’t see how it could get much shorter than this, Chief.” They had been there for less than a month, working like madmen to get the ship in the water. Finishing her was not even a consideration, they hoped only to get her floating, so that like her sister ship Arkansas she might be towed away.

  It was June fifth, and the Tennessee was still on the stocks and the Yankees were just up the river. The following day there would be a battle, a river battle that would determine whether Memphis would be in Union or Confederate hands.

  If the Confederates won, and if they could hold the Yankees at bay, then there was still a chance that they could get the Tennessee in the water and downriver to safety.

  But if the Union won, then Yankee shipwrights would complete the Tennessee with an efficiency that the South could not match, and the trim little ironclad would be used against her own people.

  It was a gamble over who would win the river fight, and everyone knew which side was the odds-on favorite, so before the battle even started they burned the ship on the ways.

  ONE

  Latitude, elevation and rainfall all combine to render the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.

  HARPER’S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863

  It was a month before the burning of the Tennessee, and ten hours after he met the man, that Samuel Bowater first saw someone smash a chair over Mississippi Mike Sullivan’s head.

  The one doing the smashing was Ruffin Tanner, a blue-water sailor of nearly twenty years’ experience, who had been with Bowater since Bowater had commanded the Cape Fear in Norfolk.

  Tanner was a powerful man, certainly as strong as Sullivan, though not nearly as big. The chair, however, was a meager affair, with thin turned legs and a cane seat, and it shattered over Mike’s thick head and wide shoulders like a china figurine and did little more than slew his slouch hat around, leaving Tanner red-faced and gripping the two smashed back rails.

  It was two days before that chair-smashing, all-hands-in brawl that Bowater finally heard from the Navy Department in Richmond.

  After the Battle of New Orleans, after the Yazoo River had been battered to death by Farragut’s big ships, Bowater and his remaining men had returned to Yazoo City. They had no other place to go, and the Yankees were still far from that Yazoo, so it seemed like a good choice. Bowater began to send telegraphs off to Richmond, looking for instructions.

  On the third of May, word arrived.

  Lt. Samuel Bowater, CSN

  Yazoo City, Mississippi

  Sir:

  You and those men still under your command will proceed with all possible dispatch to Memphis, Tennessee, where you will assume command of the ironclad Tennessee currently building there. You will exert all possible effort in the completion and fitting out of that vessel. Recent events along the Mississippi have made it imperative that this ironclad sloop of war be readied to meet the enemy.

  Respectfully,

  Stephen Mallory

  Secretary of the Navy

  Bowater read the words with some skepticism. Sometimes it seemed as if Mallory believed that calling a ship an ironclad would make it so. The last time Mallory had ordered him to command an “ironclad” it had turned out to be a broken-down side-wheeler with pine board and cotton bale bulwarks, a “cottonclad.” It was a near miracle that they had managed to turn her battered topsides into an iron casement, and Bowater reckoned that his supply of miracles was pretty well played out.

  And so he stood in the telegraph office and looked for a long time at the words, until he heard the telegraph operator start to clear his throat in a nervous sort of way.

  Ironclad…recent events…

  Bowater could not fault Mallory for his understanding of the tactical situation, even if the Secretary had been mistaken in thinking the chief threat to New Orleans was from the north, and
not the Gulf. It was true that Farragut’s big men-of-war, built for fighting the British on the high seas, were utterly unsuited for river work. But the Union admiral had managed to drag his heavy squadron bodily over the shallow bar at the mouth of the river and blast his way past the forts and the smattering of Confederate ships defending the river below the city.

  Now Farragut was probing upriver, but the farther north he came, and the more the water level continued to fall, the more unwieldy his fleet became.

  Flat-bottomed, paddle-wheel-driven, ironclad gunboats. Those were the ships for this river fight. A new vessel for an unprecedented type of warfare.

  Mallory knew it, was trying his level best to make it a reality. The Yankees knew it as well, and behind their effort was an almost unlimited industrial capacity. So, for the first year of the war, while the Confederacy struggled to get even one operational ironclad on the Father of Waters, the Union built seven. Those ships, the “City Class” gunboats, were fighting their way south, accompanying the Union Army sweeping along the shore.

  Bowater left the telegraph office, wandered along the streets of Yazoo City, still considering the “ironclad Tennessee.” What, he wondered, would greet him on his arrival in Memphis. How would he get there?

  “Reckon we best get to Vicksburg.” That was Hieronymus Taylor’s pronouncement, upon learning about the orders. Taylor was a riverboat man, an engineer out of New Orleans who had joined the navy to avoid a possible draft, and for the possibility of killing Yankees, which he found very appealing. He was a part of the world of the Mississippi River, as alien to Bowater as the moon.