The Richmond, carrying sixteen guns, encountered some problems crossing the delta sandbars before reaching the small bay that was the Head of the Passes, but she made it. As of September 29 all four Federal warships were on station—a cork in the river’s mouth. The South would either strike back—try to drive off the enemy warships—or tamely accept their presence as a choke-point to commerce in and out of New Orleans.
As one indication of the trouble soon to come, the Confederate gunboat Ivy, a small steam-powered towboat mounting a single fifteen-pounder gun, had taken on the four Federal warships by herself on October 9 and left their gun crews fiercely gritting teeth since her lone gun outranged all forty-one guns aboard the Union ships. She withdrew, no harm done to either side, but the Federals learned a lesson.
Meanwhile, to the north up in New Orleans was a busy man planning the real trouble for the Federals, former U.S. Navy officer Hollins. Just entering his sixties, the Baltimore native had been going to sea with the U.S. Navy since he was fifteen, but that didn’t stop him from immediately quitting his hard-earned rank as a naval captain to join the Confederate naval service…also as a captain, but with no assurances for his future security. Hollins, a veteran of the Barbary Coast Wars and other conflicts, was a man of action. Before taking up his Confederate posting to New Orleans in mid-1861, he had spent a short interval leading a raid against the Federal steamship Nicholas on the Potomac River. Former subordinates would have been startled to see their one-time commander dressed as a woman and boarding the vessel to surprise those defending it.
After arriving in New Orleans and taking note of the scanty naval resources available to the Confederacy there (as, indeed, everywhere else), Hollins did not hesitate when he heard a local entrepreneur was building an ironclad ram with plans to hire it out to the Confederate Navy for a handsome profit. Wasting no time on troublesome details, Hollins simply sent his steamer, the McRae, alongside the ram and had it seized by a boarding party.
The addition of the ram Manassas rounded out a small flotilla consisting of the ironclad; Hollins’s own flagship, the McRae; and a handful of seagoing tugs and river towboats with only a few guns among them. The chief weapon of the Manassas, though, was not her immovable thirty-two-pound bow gun but her ram of heavy armor.
It all along had been the intention of Hollins and his superiors at New Orleans to clear the Federals out of the Head of the Passes. But until all was ready in mid-October of 1861, the Rebels had not been able to offer much protest to the Union blockade. With the “acquisition” of their ram, the time for action had come.
In the early-morning darkness of October 12, 1861, Manassas slipped into the Head of the Passes undetected, Rebel gunboats strung out behind her like Cub Scouts marching behind their scout master. Aboard the Federal ships, all was quiet, all was calm. “Despite the lateness of the hour [it was about 3:45 a.m.],” wrote John D. Pelzer in the December 1994 issue of Military History magazine, “a supply schooner had been lashed alongside the squadron’s flagship, the USS Richmond, and the warship’s crewmen were busy onloading coal.” Nearby, on the sloop-ofwar Preble, Commander Henry French, the skipper, was asleep in his cabin.
Things would not remain so quiet for very long.
On Preble, a midshipman burst into his skipper’s cabin to announce, “Captain, there’s a steamer alongside of us!” Indeed, as French saw moments later from a gunport, there was a shape in the darkness just twenty yards away—“like a huge whale in the water,” he later said.
It was the ram Manassas, and the monster was headed for the unsuspecting Richmond beyond Preble. In fact, it was almost immediately that Manassas crunched into the port side of the Richmond. She backed off, then tried again, but by now the Richmond and her naval companions were firing at the ram—and moving on, aiming for the South West Pass and the open sea beyond.
The gunfire presented quite a spectacle to onlookers such as a Confederate aboard the McRae, a mile distant. “Instantly the heavy broadsides of the United States ships blazed forth as they shot holes in the darkness,” he said.
As the Northern vessels picked up speed, the ungainly Manassas—armored by plating made from rail ties and somewhat damaged by her own ramming lunge—fell behind and, in fact, ran afoul of a marsh.
That left her Cub scouts to pursue the heavy Federal ships alone, and they did, releasing three fire rafts in the process. The rafts didn’t do much, but the speedy little Confederate gunboats could chase and brave the fire of the behemoth Federal warships ahead because the Ivy had on October 9 already shown that the Federals didn’t have long-range guns. The smaller Reb boats could pursue fairly closely without fear of retaliation, and their own few guns might score a lucky hit or two.
It was then that disaster struck for the Federals. Reaching the same sandbars that had been crossed with difficulty coming into the river delta, the Yankee Richmond and Vincennes both beached on the sandbars—helpless prey.
“While return fire from the Northern warships fell well short, the Confederate rounds burst all around the stranded Northern ships,” wrote Pelzer. “Only the tiny steamer Water Witch, with its rifled 12-pound howitzer, had sufficient range to engage the enemy.”
In short order, the captain and crew of Vincennes abandoned their ship. But then the fortunes of war again intervened. The river current turned Richmond so that her broadside faced the Rebel gunboats, while outside the bar the onlooking Federal Santee maneuvered and fired upon the smaller Reb gunboats.
The Confederates were forced to turn back, but with both the Richmond and the Vincennes knocked out of action for a time—and the Head of the Passes cleared for Southern river traffic—Hollins and his flotilla had achieved a resounding victory. A “gallant exploit,” proclaimed the New Orleans Daily Picayune.
The euphoria would burst when the great port city fell to the Yankees in April 1862, but for the time being the Confederacy had a naval feat to rank alongside its victory at Bull Run, just north of Manassas, Virginia—the very reason, of course, for the name given the ironclad ram whose actions brought about the Federal rout below New Orleans.
Heart in the Throat
HE STARTED OUT AS THE MODERATOR AT A MEETING OF WAR-FEVERED CITIZENS IN Galena, Illinois. It was not so much the firing on Fort Sumter that stirred things up, but Lincoln’s appeal for seventy-five thousand troops. “As soon as the news of the call for volunteers reached Galena,” he wrote, “posters were stuck up calling for a meeting of the citizens at the courthouse in the evening.”
They say people in the South were hot—fire-eaters. Well, one should look at Galena and, by extrapolation, much of the North. “Business ceased entirely; all was excitement; for a time there were no party distinctions; all were Union men, determined to avenge the insult to the national flag.”
It was no surprise, then, that the courthouse that night was packed. But who would lead the meeting?
“Although a comparative stranger,” continued Ulysses S. Grant many years later in his Personal Memoirs, “I was called upon to preside; the sole reason, possibly, was that I had been in the army and had seen service [at West Point and in the Mexican War of the 1840s].”
And so, with “much embarrassment and some prompting,” Mexican War veteran Grant “made out to announce the object of the meeting,” then subsided while others, the postmaster and a pair of local politicians, made speeches. Afterward, the townsmen formed a company of volunteers and elected their officers and noncoms. Grant turned down a captaincy before the vote but offered to help in any way he could.
A few days later, Grant went with the volunteers when they traveled to the state capital at Springfield for duty assignments. In the meantime, he had already been helpful—by drilling the locals and advising the townswomen on how to design the U.S. Army infantry uniforms they volunteered to make for their menfolk. Grant was so busy after that first courthouse meeting, in fact, that he never returned to the family leather-goods store where he had worked as a clerk—not even “to put up a pack
age.”
At Springfield he and the men from Galena found a governor and his legislature so overwhelmed with volunteers that they authorized the creation of ten short-term regiments. This was in addition to the six that had previously been established as the state’s quota for a somewhat longer term. The new regiments were to serve one month paid by the state, but they would be available to go into Federal service if needed.
The Galena company was soon swallowed up by the 11th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and Grant prepared to return home, his duties done. Or so he thought.
He was staying at the same hotel in Springfield as Governor Richard Yates. The very evening that Grant was ready to leave, the governor stopped Grant at the front door after supper and asked him to come see him the next morning. When Grant did, he was offered a post in the State Adjutant General’s office— his first job would be mustering in the ten new regiments. Grant took the post and over the next few weeks did the mustering required, visited St. Louis for a few days, sought a more permanent Federal post from the U.S. Army’s Adjutant General in Washington, tried to see fellow West Pointer George McClellan (already considered a Union Army “comer”) and generally stirred around looking for a way to reunite himself with the U.S. Army.
Finally, after Lincoln called for three hundred thousand more troops to serve a full three years or the duration of the war, Grant was appointed colonel of one of the ten new regiments—the 21st Illinois—since its men didn’t have confidence in the commander they had selected beforehand. Grant had from about June 15 until mid-July to work with his new command before he and his men were sent into camp in Missouri, close by the Mississippi River. After a quiet two weeks, Grant next was ordered to “move against” a Southern colonel’s command at Florida, Missouri, about twenty-five miles south.
Even though he had seen considerable combat during the Mexican War, Grant was anxious as he marched his men southward. Noting the countryside and houses along the way were all deserted, Grant felt “anything but easy.” The only sign of life he and his men saw on the entire march was two horsemen on an intersecting road. “As soon as they saw us they decamped as fast as their horses could carry them,” he wrote later.
Grant and his men marched on, over hill and dale, quite literally, expecting the worst at every step. They followed a creek, with ominous hills on each side that insisted upon rising “considerably,” to a hundred or more feet.
They neared their goal at last. “As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see [Confederate Colonel Thomas] Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.”
So it was that Ulysses S. Grant, future leader of all the Union armies in the Civil War—the general most widely credited with bringing about the victory over the South—so it was that he and his command of a thousand marched right over the brow of the hill into the unknown.
And what did they find? Nothing. Harris and his own command were gone. The marks of their encampment were still visible, but they had decamped for parts unknown, as Grant immediately realized.
“My heart resumed its place,” he later wrote. And it did so for the remainder of the Civil War. For Grant suddenly realized his potential enemy had been “as much afraid of me as I had been of him.”
Here was a valuable lesson that Grant would never forget: “From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting the enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety.”
Good Times … and Bad
FOR CANDIS GOODWIN OF CAPE CHARLES, VIRGINIA, SLAVERY APPARENTLY wasn’t half bad. In fact, once recalling the games of her childhood, she said years later, “Dem was good ole times.”
Her white people, she said in an interview in the 1930s, were good to her. They didn’t beat their slaves. As a child, she was just like one of their own children. She played with them, ate with them, slept with them.
Her mother worked in the kitchen, and Candis had no work except “nursin’ de babies.” The white and black children often played in the woods together. They would make houses out of brown pine needles and “grass” out of the needles that were still green. Then they’d go over to the Missus’ dairy and “steal anything we want an’ tek it to our houses in de woods.”
Candis used to play all sorts of pranks on “ole Massa Scott.” At night, she said, everybody would be sitting around the big fireplace in the living room, including her. It would get late, and Mr. Scott would leave his chair to wind up his clock. Candis would slip up behind his chair, “an’ quick sneak his cheer f’om un’er him.” And when he finished with the clock and eased himself back down…there was no chair! And, “he set smack on de flo’.”
Then there would be trouble—but not really. “‘Doggone you lil cattin’. I gwan switch you,’” he’d threaten. “I jes’ fly out de room. Won’t scared though, ‘cause I knows Massa wont goin’ do nottin’ to me.”
Candis knew about slave whippings—elsewhere. Her Massa Scott, she said, allowed none of that on his place. “He say tain’ right.”
Nancy Williams of Norfolk, Virginia, on the other hand, had a “singing” uncle in the slave days—an uncle Jimmy who “usta sing an’ pray all de time he wukin‘ in de fiel’s” and who wasn’t so fortunate. Her uncle Jimmy might have been born of God, she recalled in a 1930s interview, but like Jesus Christ Himself, Uncle Jimmy paid a high price for his devotion.
Her uncle lived and worked on a plantation next to her own, she related. He belonged to a master so mean he couldn’t find overseers to “treat de niggers mean ‘nough.” None were so mean as the master himself. And all the time, there was her uncle Jimmy who sang and prayed as he worked the fields.
Most of the overseers who came and went at “Ole” Tom Covington’s plantation didn’t bother the singing slave man named Jimmy. But Covington eventually found an overseer who was mean enough. One day this “ole mean devil” was sitting on a stump as the blacks worked a field, Nancy Williams herself among them. Her uncle Jimmy as usual was “jes a-singin’ an’ praisin’ his God.” The new overseer didn’t like that. He told the slave man to stop the singing; he said Uncle Jimmy wasn’t working, he just was singing.
“Uncle Jimmy ain’ said nottin’—jes’ keep on plowin dat cawn an’ a-singin’.”
The overseer became obviously mad, but before doing anything about it, he went up to the main house to consult his boss, the master. Nancy Williams, who couldn’t have been present there, too, but who possibly had sources, relates their conversation:
—I got a nigger down in the field who can’t be working ’cause he’s just singing all the time.
—Kill the nigger if he won’t work. Go back down there and kill him! What’s a nigger for if he won’t work?
As the other slaves watched, the overseer returned to the cornfield, all right. He returned and took Uncle Jimmy across the field to a place near the fence. There he made the slave dig a hole in the ground with his bare hands. Then he had others put straw in the bottom of the hole, and then poured in some tar. And then the overseer “chained” Uncle Jimmy, threw him into the hole, and lit a match to the whole business. Nancy and unnamed others stood watching— “peepin’ threw a crack in de fence.”
And even as they watched the flames lick up, the fire didn’t “stop” Uncle Jimmy. “Ise fixin’ t’ die to live agin’ in Chris’,” he said. And as the flames mounted and mounted, he began to preach and to pray. The flames grew hotter and hotter, and Uncle Jimmy sang. He sang:
God is de spring of all my joy.
De life of my delight.
And as the song faded away and the other slaves watched through the fence, Uncle Jimmy died.
Staggering Stats
CONSIDER THIS: THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR EN COMPASSED, BY BEST ESTIMATES,
10,455 battles, fights, engagements, actions, skirmishes, shooting affairs—whatever you wish to call them. By state, the leader far and away was Virginia, with 2,154 such military events recorded, while many states, chiefly in the North, had none.
Next to Virginia, the fratricidal war’s most fought-over state was Tennessee, with 1,462 official “events.” In descending order after Tennessee (and some of these may surprise) were: Missouri, with 1,162; Arkansas, with 771; West Virginia, with 632; Louisiana, with 566; Georgia, with 549; Kentucky, with 453; and Alabama, rounding out the top ten with 336. The famous “valley of humility between two mountains of conceit” did not make the top ten with her 313 combats, although North Carolina can be ranked as number 11 in this category, while her sister state, South Carolina, one of the two “mountains,” ranked next with 239 combat affairs. Finishing out the eighteen states that hosted the most Civil War battles are Maryland, with 203; Florida, with 168; Texas, 90; Indian Territory, 89; California, 88; and the New Mexico Territory, last with 75. (Despite Gettysburg, Pennsylvania hardly ranked in the number of battles fought on its soil.)
Those are the statistics for the states as ranked and listed by historical compiler (and researcher for Bruce Catton) E. B. Long in his The Civil War Day by Day, An Almanac 1861–1865, which cites events of the war on a daily basis from start to finish. Consider also that the roster he cites is not really complete until you add odd, sporadic items such as the guerrilla actions in Kansas, John Hunt Morgan’s raid into Ohio, or the Confederate bank robbery in a small Vermont town near the Canadian border.
Still, the stats of the war contribute much to our understanding of how and why it ended—had to end—the way it did. Consider horses, until the modern age an indispensable item for any army on the move (forward or backward). In horses alone, the North began the war with roughly 163 million to the South’s 84 million.
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 9