Thieves of Mercy

by James L. Nelson

  Four months… Bowater wondered if any ship in the history of naval warfare had done so much, had so influenced strategic thinking, had changed the very nature of shipbuilding as profoundly in a career that had lasted just four months. He did not think so.

  Four months… It seemed more like four years, four times four years, since he had stood beside that granite dry dock in Virginia. Since he had been able to spend evenings with Wendy Atkins, enjoy the trappings of civilization, far from the barbaric shores of the Mississippi.

  But no, it had only been four months since then, and less than a month since the Battle of New Orleans. Now the army under Ben Butler, whom they were calling “Beast,” was in charge in the Crescent City, and Farragut was coming north.

  And Bowater, by order of Secretary Mallory, was not concerned with what was happening downstream. It was the enemy upstream, pushing south, that he was there to help stop. Squeezed from both sides, and the pressure was becoming terrific.

  He did not know how much fighting he would be doing with the Tennessee. They were planking her like mad, but the army would not send any shipwrights, and even house carpenters were getting scarce. The men Bowater had brought with him were good for heavy lifting but not much else.

  Construction dragged its tedious way along. Two lots of lumber for deck plank sat at the Memphis and Charleston Railroad depot, but the manpower was not there to transport it to the shipyard. The iron plate still sat on the Arkansas side of the river, finished but unpaid for, and despite all Bowater’s prodding, Shirley could not be induced to take possession of it.

  The shipbuilder had any number of excuses: he did not want to waste time before the iron was needed, he did not want to clutter up the yard, the boats were not available to bring it over. But Bowater had a good idea of the real and unstated reason for his reticence. Shirley did not want to pay for iron plate for a ship that he believed would never be launched.

  And then there were the engine and shafting, sent downriver with the Arkansas. At some point soon it would be time to put them in, and all work would stop until that was done. They couldn’t seal up the casemate without first installing the shaft, at least. And if it was not there, then what?

  It was all very depressing, so Bowater made a point of not thinking about it.

  Noah, he reflected, had built the whole damned ark by himself in less time than it was taking them to finish this gunboat. And just as Noah had his neighbors to taunt him, so Bowater had Mississippi Mike Sullivan.

  The ships of the River Defense Fleet moved up and down the river, staying mostly under the guns of Fort Pillow but sometimes dropping down to Memphis. Sullivan did not miss a chance to come by the yard to inspect the half-built Tennessee, a look of barely suppressed amusement spread across his bearded face.

  The River Defense Fleet was quite literally on the front lines of this fight. The fleet and Fort Pillow formed the levee holding back the Yankee flood. That was it. Remove even one of them and the Yankees would be swarming over Memphis in a few days, and the Mississippi River would be in Federal hands from Cairo, Illinois, clear down to Vicksburg. The very fate of the Confederacy, perhaps, was being decided one hundred miles upriver, and Bowater could do nothing but struggle to finish a ship that no one, himself included, believed could be finished. It was intolerable.

  Bowater understood—and he hated the fact—that if he hoped to get into the fast-approaching battle, it would have to be at Mississippi Mike’s side.

  And that was why, on that perfect morning on the third of June, Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, CSN, found himself just outside the now familiar wheelhouse of the General Page, half a mile upriver from Fort Pillow and a good hundred miles from where he was supposed to be.

  He watched the sunlight play over the surface of the river and the scrubby vegetation on the bank, and his thoughts drifted off to how he might paint that scene, how desperately he missed painting, how the intense focus of rendering a scene on canvas gave him, for the time it took, a reprieve from the myriad other thoughts that plagued him. He had given Hieronymus Taylor his music back, and it had made a world of difference to the engineer’s recovery. He could use a similar diversion.

  He shook his head. The guilt over his jaunts upriver with Mississippi Mike was bad enough. He could never bring himself to open a paint set, not then. Such self-indulgence was not in his nature.

  To the north, hidden by the humps of land and the wild turns of the Mississippi River, the first Union mortar of the day fired with a faint, dull thud. Bowater watched the black streak of the shell against robin’s-egg blue, watched it arc neatly into Fort Pillow just to the south and go off with a flash and a sharp crack. Just as they had done to the forts below New Orleans, the Union mortars were pounding away at Fort Pillow, and with equally indifferent results.

  Fort Pillow was in grave danger, to be sure, but not from the Union mortars.

  Nine days before, on the twenty-fifth of May, General P. G. T. Beauregard’s seventy-thousand-man army, crippled by dysentery and typhoid and still recovering from their wounds at Shiloh, had abandoned Corinth, Mississippi, in the face of the Union forces creeping toward them. The Confederate line moved fifty miles south, to Tupelo. Fort Pillow, eighty miles west of Corinth, was left flapping in the breeze. The Union gunboats might not dare to face the fort’s artillery, but the Union Army would have little difficulty in sweeping over their defenses in a land assault.

  The Federals did not know it yet, but Fort Pillow would soon be theirs. And then it was only the River Defense Fleet between them and Memphis.

  And Bowater and Sullivan continued their strange dance.

  “Now, Cap’n,” Sullivan said, leaning on the rail, trying to meet Bowater’s eyes as Bowater drank his coffee, stared out over the water, and tried to ignore him. “Comes a time a fella gots to face the truth. Even if ya do git yer boat built, git her planked up and ironclad an all, you ain’t got no engines. If ya ain’t got engines, ya don’t need no engineer.”

  This was the one point on which Mississippi Mike was persistent. He had given up his hope of snatching Bowater’s men, but he was still agitating for Hieronymus Taylor, as if Taylor were a chattel slave for Bowater to dispose of as he pleased.

  “Ask him yourself,” Bowater said. “I have no authority over his warrant.” Taylor, much improved over the past weeks, had actually accompanied them on this trip. If Bowater took a few steps forward and leaned over the rail he would be able to see the engineer up at the bow, sitting on one of the bollards, his leg, bound in a lighter splint now, thrust out before him.

  “Ah, come on now, Cap’n,” Sullivan said. “I can’t go poachin in another man’s engine room, it ain’t right. It’d be like me askin yer sister to marry, without I asked yer pa first.”

  Bowater found that analogy particularly revolting. “Oh, I see. That’s why you don’t ask him yourself. And here I thought it was because you know Taylor wouldn’t sail with you even if the fate of the Confederacy depended on it.”

  “Taylor’s pleased to make like he don’t care fer me. It’s his way. Not like the kind of worshipfulness he shows you….”

  Bowater ignored the irony. “You have an engineer.”

  “Call that little skunk an engineer? Know what he done this mornin? I ring down three bells, he tells me he ain’t got the steam. Ain’t got the steam, my Royal Bengal. So I jest goes right down to the engine room, jest to have a look-see. He got so much goddamned steam he’s blowin it through. Load of horseshit. And you’d think I walked in on his weddin night, the way he’s screamin about me goin down ta the engine room, like I ain’t got no right to be down there. Come at me with a wrench and I laid him out good.”

  Sullivan grew madder and madder as he told the story, his normal flip attitude deserting him, and Bowater felt a genuine spark of empathy. He had had run-ins enough with engineers over the course of his career. But always the strict discipline and order of the United States Navy had prevented the black gang from running amuck. The River Defens
e Fleet enjoyed no such discipline or order.

  Taylor was a pain in the Royal Bengal, to be sure, but he was also an extraordinary engineer. Nothing in his engine room was ever in disrepair. And while Bowater suspected that Taylor had, in the past, flanked him with that “ain’t got enough steam” bit, the instances were few, and never at a critical time. None of that could be said of Spence Guthrie.

  Bowater sympathized with Sullivan. But he would not give him Taylor.

  “Cap’n, would you jest talk to Taylor, then? See if he don’t want to sail with us? I’ll put that peckerwood Guthrie on the beach in a second.”

  From below them, as if it were rising from the deck, came a sound—part shriek, part triumphant shout, part cry of wounded pride—a noise that could only come from the throat of Spence Guthrie.

  “Sullivan, you bastard, I knew you was tryin to git me off this boat!”

  They still could not see him—he was on the side deck right under their feet. Bowater wondered how long he had been standing there listening, if he had crept up there for just that purpose.

  Now they could hear his feet clapping on the deck boards as he ran forward, raced up the stairs, made a fast walking charge across the hurricane deck to where they stood, his arm held out straight, an accusatory finger like a lance pointing at Sullivan.

  “I knew you was plottin agin me, you fat son of a bitch, and now I gots my proof!” Guthrie’s skin was very white and the black smudges of coal dust stood out vividly. His hair made his head look like a porcupine that had suffered some internal explosion, his scraggly beard like an afterthought. It was hard to imagine what color his shirt and pants had originally been.

  “Git the hell off this deck, you little bastard, or I’ll kick you clean down to the boiler room,” Sullivan growled. It was the first time Bowater could recall seeing Sullivan, genuinely angry—red-faced, eye-bulging, fist-balled angry. He had seen Mississippi Mike get punched, kicked, threatened with knives, shot at, jumped by a mob, arrested, seen chairs broken over his head, but he had never, in all that, actually seen him get seriously angry. Until now. And it was not pretty.

  But Guthrie was angry too, angry enough to be oblivious to the clear and present danger that a furious Mike Sullivan represented. “You the one gonna leave this here boat, Sullivan. Gonna leave her in a pine box, you hear? Hit me when I ain’t lookin, like you done this mornin, I’ll teach you, you son of a bitch.”

  “You will, huh?” Sullivan stepped away from the rail, made fighting room around himself, pushed up his sleeves. He towered over Spence Guthrie, weighed as much as two of him, but Guthrie was undeterred. He stepped back as well. A few more men appeared on the hurricane deck. Bowater saw Hieronymus Taylor clomping awkwardly up the ladder at the forward end. Buford Tarbox stepped out of the pilothouse, leaned on the side, cheroot in mouth.

  Bowater did not think this would provide much entertainment. How long did they think Guthrie could stand up to the ursine Mississippi Mike, going slug for slug?

  And then the knives came out.

  Charles Ellet Jr., steaming down the Mississippi River in the ram Queen of the West, felt like Agamemnon of old. Agamemnon, playing the utter fool at Troy.

  Ellet, in his former life, was a civil engineer, and had been for many years. He was not a young man. Early in the war he had come up with an idea for fitting out fast steam vessels as rams that could dash at an enemy vessel and sink it faster than it could be sunk with gunfire.

  He had been pushing the idea for almost as long as the war had been going on. He went first to the navy, but the navy showed no interest in his ideas, so he took them to the War Department. The War Department was not very enthusiastic either.

  But then, on the eighth of March, 1862, the Confederate steamer Virginia demonstrated to a skeptical world just how effective a steam ram could be. Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, was ready to listen to Charles Ellet Jr.

  So now he was Colonel Charles Ellet, United States Army, in command of an odd assortment of nine army ram vessels, with little in common save for their strengthened bows, the wooden bulwarks protecting their boilers, and the built-up iron rams bolted to their stems. Urged on by Stanton, he had rushed his rams to Plum Point in the wake of the Confederate attack that had sunk two ironclads and, to Ellet’s morbid satisfaction, proved the worth of the ram as a weapon of river warfare.

  He personally had arrived on board the Switzerland, the last of the fleet, ten days earlier. He was brimming with plans for attacks, runs by Fort Pillow, fights with the Rebels. But Flag Officer Charles Davis showed no interest in his ideas. He would not join Ellet, would not offer one gunboat for the protection of the rams, or any naval officers to man them. He did not return Ellet’s correspondence. He did not seem overeager to do much of anything.

  Colonel Ellet could stand it no more. He was, after all, army, and not under Davis’s command. He could do as he wished, by order of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, as long as it did not interfere with Davis’s plans. And Davis did not seem to have any plans.

  Scout boats had reported a single Rebel ram tied up north of the guns at Fort Pillow. The night before, Ellet had determined to act.

  He devised a ruse: steam within gunshot of the Rebel, and when the Rebel attacked, retreat upriver, where more of his ram fleet waited to spring the trap.

  But, like Agamemnon at Troy, Ellet had decided that before going into battle he would put his crew’s temper to the test.

  He called the men together, told them his intentions. “It’s a dangerous thing we’re doing here,” he said. “Steaming right up to the Rebel fleet, right under the guns of Fort Pillow. I won’t make a man of you go against your will. If any don’t care for that kind of risk, he can just step over to the starboard side, and we’ll see you put off on another boat.”

  He had folded his arms, triumphant in his speech, but felt the triumph melt like ice as more than half his men, including the captain, two out of three of the pilots, the first mate, all the engineers, and nearly all the crew, shuffled to the starboard side and stared up at him with blank faces. A good part of the morning was lost as the unwilling men collected their gear and the second mate brought the Queen alongside a barge to let them off.

  He was Agamemnon, old and foolish, but he had no Odysseus to correct his blunders. So instead he begged men from the rest of his fleet and got under way, the Monarch following in his wake.

  He stood now in the wheelhouse, watching the banks of the Mississippi slide by. This was as personal as it could be. He had conceived the idea of the ram fleet and through undaunted will had pushed it through the bureaucracies of Washington, pushed and did not stop until it became a reality floating on the Mississippi River. His passion for the rams was so powerful that it had sucked a significant portion of his family into its vortex. Between brothers, nephews, and son, there were six Ellets sailing as part of the ram fleet.

  Just ahead of them, but unseen around the river bend, the day’s first mortar fired, arched its shell high into the air to drop unseen on Rebel heads. Ellet felt his muscles tighten. He tapped his fingernail on the sill of the wheelhouse window. The Rebel steamer would be not too far now, and Ellet prayed to God that it would still be there, tied to the bank, ready to show the same kind of grit the Confederate fleet had shown the month before.

  He turned and caught a glimpse of Monarch before a bend in the river hid her from sight. Monarch was commanded by his brother, Alfred W. Ellet. Alfred had also given his men the option of going ashore, but every one of them had elected to stay with the boat, and Charles wondered why that was, when his own men did not.

  Glad to weed out that bad material, in any event, Ellet thought and then thought no more on the matter. He stepped out of the wheelhouse and looked fore and aft and saw that everything was in readiness. Not that there was much to do to prepare. The rams had not a single gun on them, beyond small arms. Ordnance was not what they were about.

  “Sir?” An ensign called down the deck from the wheelhouse and
Ellet hurried back.

  The Queen’s new captain, standing by the big wheel, pointed downriver. “There, sir.” Half a mile away, a Rebel steamer lay against the western bank, the thread of smoke creeping from her chimneys. To the east, and still out of sight, the water batteries of Fort Pillow, and climbing up the steep shore the higher gun em-placements that could drop plunging fire on them.

  “Excellent. Let’s slow to one bell and give them a chance to get under way.”

  The captain grabbed the cord, rang one bell, got a jingle in response. The Queen of the West slowed as the engineer below let the steam pressure drop. Ellet looked astern. He could just see the Monarch farther upstream, which was as it should be. Alfred would be waiting, ready to dash out and hit the Rebel broadside as the Queen lured it upriver.

  They stood on. Field glasses revealed little about the Rebel ship. Stern-wheeler, walking beam engine. Some sort of bulwark on the bow with a gun there. That was about it. There were men on the hurricane deck, or so it seemed, but the appearance of the Queen seemed to generate no excitement.

  “Rebels aren’t too damned observant,” Ellet growled at the captain. “I wonder if they’re even awake.”

  The captain was nodding his concurrence when the first of Fort Pillow’s guns fired from one hundred and fifty yards away. The sudden blast in the still morning made Ellet start. The shell screamed past, missing the wheelhouse by no more then twenty feet.

  “Reckon they’re awake now,” the captain said.

  It would not have been much of a fight with fists, but knives were something else entirely. With knives, Sullivan’s bulk worked against him, while the quickness that Guthrie enjoyed with his wiry frame more than compensated for Mississippi Mike’s greater reach.

  They circled, crouching low, arms out, crablike. They each held in front of them one of the huge bowie knives with the full hand guard so beloved by the Westerners. They took tentative swipes at each other, feeling the other’s distance, the speed of his reaction.