Family Affair
ELLET, ELLET, ELLET, AND ELLET SOUNDS LIKE A FIRM OF BARRISTERS OR SOLICITORS out of a Charles Dickens novel. But no, these Ellets more accurately can be associated with operations on the Mississippi River during the Civil War.
All four Ellets, a father and son, a brother of the father, and a nephew, were associated, more precisely, with the Union’s ram fleet on the Mississippi. Their tale begins with the birth of the first Ellet, Charles, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1810. Called Charles Ellet Jr., he grew up to be an engineer, railroader, inventor, and bridge-builder. As one engineering feat, for instance, he built the first wire-suspension bridge in the United States—across the Schuylkill River at Fairmount, Pennsylvania. He then spanned the Niagara River (below the famous falls), and at Wheeling, Ohio, in 1849, he erected a bridge of 1,010 feet over the Ohio River—at that time the world’s longest single-span bridge.
While helping to build a Virginia rail line across the Blue Ridge in the 1850s, he also had on his mind an odd naval vessel—sort of an ironclad ram. No one in the United States seemed interested until the Confederacy produced the ironclad Virginia in 1862 (previously the Merrimac) along lines suggested in Ellet’s published proposals.
Suddenly Washington and the Lincoln administration awoke to the possibilities of Ellet’s design. In short time he was dispatched by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to the Mississippi River (where he had worked before on flood control projects) to establish a fleet of rams. This he did by fitting out nine steam vessels with armor and rams, then moving them down the Ohio River to join the Union Navy’s Captain Charles H. Davis and his Mississippi Flotilla.
Ellet managed to skim safely by Fort Pillow on June 5, 1862. The next day he took on eight Confederate vessels guarding Memphis, Tennessee. Four of them were sunk by the Union rams, with Ellet’s own Queen of the West ramming and sinking the enemy’s General Lowell. The remaining Rebel vessels fled downriver with the Union craft in close pursuit. Ellet’s ships managed to sink another of the Rebel vessels and capture two more, a total of seven Confederate ships eliminated in one fell swoop.
The Union that day suffered but one casualty—a mortal wound inflicted upon the man behind the Union rams, Charles Ellet Jr. He died on June 21.
The Ellet name, however, did not die with him. Far from it!
The inventor’s son, Charles Rivers Ellet, a medical student at Georgetown when the Civil War erupted, had just joined his father in time to bypass the Rebel batteries at Fort Pillow and was with him for the river battle at Memphis the next day. In fact, the elder Ellet had dispatched son Charles, officially a medical cadet, and two fellow Union men on the dangerous mission of going ashore in Memphis and demanding the city’s surrender. They faced an angry mob (but no Confederate soldiers) and had to ignore hurled bricks and even stray shots, but they did it. They marched to the post office, took down the Confederate flag, and raised the U.S. flag in its place.
The younger Ellet would soon risk his life again by crossing disputed territory on foot outside besieged Vicksburg on his way to inform Admiral David G. Farragut that Memphis had fallen into Union hands. Soon, too, the younger Ellet had been raised to colonel’s rank and placed in command of his late father’s ram fleet.
As a riverboat commander, he didn’t do so badly. Four times in the next four months he ran the Vicksburg batteries. On the fourth such excursion— February 2, 1863—he attacked and rammed the Rebel Vicksburg at the city’s south landing. The next day he and the redoubtable Queen captured three Confederate supply vessels at the mouth of the Red River.
It was on another occasion at the Red River, however, that the younger Ellet ran into misfortune. Ascending the river, the Queen of the West ran aground and came under fire by a hidden shore battery, and he and the crew had to abandon their ram. Worse, he had gone ahead of his supporting gunboat, Indianola. When it appeared, the Rebels turned the Queen’s own guns on Indianola, which also became a casualty of the day’s activities. Ellet had to escape on board the accompanying De Sota.
Although this young and relatively untried “sailor” had been promoted to the rank of colonel, he was not really a sailor (neither was his late father) but was an Army officer. Technically, he was commander of the Mississippi Marine Brigade. The Red River incident only inflamed Army-Navy rivalries over control of the small ram fleet and the Marines.
That odd situation also involved the younger Ellet’s uncle. The brother of the late Charles Jr., Alfred Washington Ellet was a brigadier general of volunteers who had been second to his brother in command of the ram fleet. He had been present for the Memphis battle and had taken command after his brother was mortally wounded. He was briefly in command of the Marine Brigade itself, but after a time he was sent with brigade infantry elements to join Union General William Rosecrans on the Tennessee River.
Adding to the not-always-so-clear muddle was a fourth Ellet who served on the Mississippi, John A. Ellet, a nephew to both older Ellets and cousin to the younger Charles. This younger Ellet, often in conflict with naval authorities, was also an Army officer. He served as second in command to Cousin Charles with the Marine Brigade. He had lost the ram Lancaster, and eventually he would command the Union Switzerland, which Cousin Charles had taken over for a time after the Queen had been lost.
Soon John Ellet ran afoul of Union Admiral David Porter. When Porter gave him orders, Ellet would not obey them without first checking with his Army uncle, General Alfred Ellet. Young John avoided Porter’s threats of arrest and court-martial by joining Farragut downriver and strictly obeying the latter officer’s dictates.
Meanwhile, young Charles, replaced earlier by Cousin John in command of the Switzerland, went with the Marine Brigade’s infantrymen to join Rosecrans. He then became ill, retired to his uncle Alfred’s farm in Illinois, and died in the fall of 1863, at age twenty or twenty-one.
Miss Kate’s Brief Run
SHE WAS YOUNG, VIVACIOUS—THE BELLE OF THE BALL AMONG WASHINGTON society during the Civil War. Kate Chase, daughter and official hostess for the widowed secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase. Poor, star-crossed Kate Chase Sprague, as events later turned out.
With the eruption of the war and the departure of so many prominent political figures hailing from the South, the Federal capital lost the prime movers of its social circles. For years Washington society had been Southern-tilted, peopled by luminaries such as Varina Davis, wife of the new Confederate president now ensconced in Richmond. In the past four decades, in fact, a majority of presidents had been Southern-born slaveowners. As recently as the Zachary Taylor administration (he died in office in 1850), the White House itself had been home to slaves. In his case, the slaves were sequestered in the attic rooms and kept to the private family quarters to avoid ruffling ever-more-sensitive feelings in Washington.
Under Lincoln, with the Union split in two, the social order was far different. As Union officer James A. Garfield (destined, himself, to be a future White House occupant) wrote in 1862: “This is the transition period between the old, slaveholding, aristocratic social dynasty and the New Republican one.” It was a leap from one social order to the next, he added in a letter to his wife, Lucretia. Further, “The old social dynasty has been one of the most powerful political elements in Washington and is the secret of a great many successes for the South. From the days of General [Andrew] Jackson…it has been a great power.”
Where was Garfield when he wrote that thought in the fall of 1862? At the home of fellow Ohioans Salmon P. Chase and daughter Kate. They were a perfect match, too, since the Chase duo and Garfield were all politically ambitious. (Garfield soon would be serving the first of nine terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.) “Mr. Chase and his daughter Kate,” wrote Garfield to his wife on September 27, 1862, “have insisted that I shall stay with them while I remain in Washington, and so I came here this evening with all my luggage.”
Garfield had previously stayed at Willard’s Hotel, progenitor to to
day’s Willard at the same site, just two blocks from the White House. After leading his regiment, the 42nd Ohio Infantry, in battle, the young colonel was in Washington in hopes of securing a new command that would advance his political agenda after the war—if, as he himself wrote, he didn’t get killed in the meantime.
Soon, Garfield and Kate were taking “sightseeing” sojourns into the war-torn Virginia countryside, as well as enjoying the social gatherings that took place in the Chase home on many an evening, with the high and mighty of wartime Washington much in evidence. One Friday early in October they set out to visit Union troops quartered near Fairfax Court House and to view the site of the Second Battle of Bull Run. “On Friday last,” Garfield wrote to his brother Harry, “Miss Kate Chase and I took their carriage and pompous liveried driver and, allowing him to change his tall plug for a comfortable slouch, we set out for General [Franz] Siegel’s headquarters at Fairfax Courthouse. Miss Chase had prepared two large baskets of provisions, partly for a present to the General and partly for our use if we should go on to the battlefield.”
On Sunday morning the outing continued, with Garfield riding a borrowed horse in borrowed boots and Kate traveling in a carriage with another German general’s wife, Mrs. Carl Schurz. Another foreign general, Hungarian-born Julius Stahel, quartered in nearby Centreville, Virginia, furnished a cavalry troop “to see that the country was clear and safe for us to go to the battlefield.”
What the visitors found there, almost within earshot of Washington and just a month after the second Union debacle at Bull Run, was no pretty sight.
“We went on,” wrote Garfield, “across Bull Run to the limit of the late battle for about five miles beyond Centreville…and General Schurz, who was in the engagement, gave us a fine description of the whole two days’ work and the shameful and unnecessary retreat which followed. We saw hundreds of graves, or rather, heaps of earth piled upon the bodies where they lay. Scores of heads, hands and feet were protruding, and so rapid had been the decomposition of 34 days that naked, eyeless skulls grinned at us as if the corpses had lifted their heads from their deathbeds to leer at us as we passed by. Shells and round shot lay scattered all over the field and broken muskets and dismantled gun carriages were very plenty. Hats, caps, coats, equipment, letters, and all that lately belonged to life were scattered around.
“I picked up a joint promissory note of $1,000, which would probably be valuable to the heirs of some poor skeleton. ‘Your loving wife til death’ was the conclusion of a letter which lay near the bones of a skeleton arm which reached through the side of its grave, and had doubtless one day not long ago clasped the loving wife, but now the ‘til death’ has opened for him the portal of the world where ‘there is neither marrying nor giving in the grave.’
“We followed the path of where the fierce giants struggled and saw their battle tracks thick with graves. At last we stopped and took a glass of milk with the old Negro who lives on the eastern marge of the field on the bank of Bull Run (to be a sadly famous stream hereafter) and who saw both battles—of 1861 and 1862. All along the road from the Run to Centreville, and even far this side toward Fairfax, are wrecks of burned wagons and artillery carriages.”
Garfield and Miss Kate returned to the capital the next day, crossing the Potomac by way of the Chain Bridge, but not before enjoying another night as guests of the German officers and a rousing sing-song with them and Mrs. Schurz. The day before Garfield also saw the “formidable” fortifications that Confederate General Beauregard had built on a “lofty ridge” at Centreville as well as “the thousands of log huts [previously] built and occupied by the rebels….”
After writing about such adventures with the popular Miss Kate, Garfield soon heard a plaintive response from a piqued Mrs. Garfield back in Ohio. “From your letters to others,” she wrote, “I learn that you and Miss Kate are taking dinners out, visiting camps, etc., and I have a good deal of woman’s curiosity to hear about some of those doings; and is Miss Kate a very charming, interesting young lady?”
To which Garfield hastily replied that his socialite hostess Kate Chase “is a woman of good sense and pretty good culture, has a good form but not a pretty face, its beauty being marred by a nose slightly inclined to pug.” Nonetheless, Garfield added, “She has probably more social influence and makes a better impression generally than any other Cabinet lady.”
Garfield soon departed from the Washington scene for a time to become chief of staff to General William S. Rosecrans. He would become a hero, it also would transpire, at the Battle of Chickamauga, even though it was a defeat for Rosecrans and his Union forces.
After Garfield’s leave-taking, Kate Chase continued her heady social life. A major figure in that unfolding drama was William Sprague, the thirty-oneyear-old governor of Rhode Island who had come to Washington to fight as a militia colonel. He had allegedly irritated his Regular Army colleagues for his inexperienced blundering at First Bull Run, and he also had taken part in a minor way in the ill-fated Peninsular campaign against Richmond. He apparently preferred the nation’s capital to his own state capital, since he officially left his governorship behind to serve in the U.S. Senate as of March 1863, a Democrat considered supportive of the Lincoln administration. One reason for such support on his part may have been his relationship with Cabinet member Salmon Chase’s daughter Kate, whom he married in the fall of 1863.
With his money—he had considerable—her father’s prestige, and Kate’s reputation as a vivacious Washington hostess, it should have been a marriage made in heaven, at least for the politically ambitious. But it wasn’t.
Secretary Chase, allied with the Radical Republicans, was briefly considered a possible rival to Lincoln himself for the 1864 Republican presidential nomination, just as he had been in 1860. Chase left the Cabinet in June 1864, only to receive a surprise appointment from Lincoln at year’s end as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. There he was considered a Lincoln ally, ironic in light of their earlier rivalry.
Daughter Kate weathered the intrigues of the Civil War period as the socialite whose marriage in late 1863 had been a high point of that winter’s social season. Five years later she was still active on her father’s behalf in stirrings aimed at giving him the party’s presidential nomination for 1868, but to no avail.
Her husband, meanwhile, had become too fond of the bottle, it is said. In time, Kate was linked by capital whispers to another Senate member. Her fourth child was mentally disabled, and her husband lost his fortune. Her father died, and by 1882 she was a divorced woman with little to show for all the glamour and glitter she once had known. Even her family’s old friend Garfield, nine times a congressman and then president, could be of no help since he had been assassinated shortly after taking office as president in 1881.
At the end of her life (1899) Kate Chase Sprague was managing her own small dairy and poultry farm. Her onetime husband, Sprague, lived longer. A twoterm senator, he lived to the age of eighty-five; at the time of his death in Paris, France, in 1915, he was the last governor of the Civil War era still surviving.
Escape from Success
THE ENEMY’S FIRE, SAID COMMANDER WILLIAM B. CUSHING LATER, “WAS VERY severe,” so severe that in one instance, “the whole back of my coat was torn out by buckshot, and the sole of my shoe was carried away.” And in another: “My clothing was perforated with bullets as I stood in the bow, the heel-jigger in my right hand and the exploding-line in the left.”
In seconds, though, he had placed his torpedo device, primitive by today’s standards, and set it off. “The explosion took place at the same instant that 100 pounds of grape [grapeshot], at 10 feet range, crashed among us, and the dense mass of water thrown out by the torpedo came down with choking weight upon us.”
Cushing, a daring young officer of the Union Navy, had achieved his aim of delivering a mortal blow to the last of the Confederate ironclads, the CSS Albemarle. To accomplish the feat, he and his volunteer crew ran a steam launch eight miles up
the Roanoke River in North Carolina to Plymouth, a hotbed town of Rebel soldiery and sailors.
The Union men came at night, of course, late on October 16, 1864, and they weren’t spotted until close to the “dark mountain of iron” looming in front of them. Once Cushing and his men were seen, however, it seemed every gun in the world was shooting at them. At this point, too, Cushing discovered his target was surrounded at its mooring by a ring of logs meant to keep away intruders like himself.
Undeterred and still under fire, Cushing slowed his launch to a full stop, backed off to give himself room to make speed, then went at the log booms head-on, “trusting to their having been long enough in the water to have become slimy—in which case my boat, under full headway, would bump up against them and slip over into the pen with the ram.”
And that’s exactly what Cushing managed to do, blowing up the Albemarle at the end of his scoot over the logs. It was quite a feat of dexterity, to say nothing of coolness under fire, since Cushing in his standing position at the bow had his boat to control, his spar torpedo to place, and his lines to yank and pull in order to detach and then trigger the torpedo. And it was accomplished with a dangerous penalty: Once his craft vaulted the log boom, Cushing knew that while he might succeed in blowing up the enemy ship, his steam launch “would never get out again.”
The huge explosion that rent the Albemarle resolved any doubts. Cushing’s Union vessel was instantly swamped and began to sink. And at this time of year the water was cold.
Cushing shouted to his men to save themselves, then struck out in the water for the opposite shore. “The whole surface of the stream was plowed up by grape and musketry, and my nearest friends, the [Union] fleet, were 12 miles away.”
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