The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  None of the crew of Calhoun paid the reporter any attention, so he turned his beady eyes to Josephine, who wished he would shut up so she could take in every detail of the drama still playing out in front of them.

  “It won’t be long now,” Ludd continued. “We’ll set off downriver at once.”

  “Do you know something?” Josephine asked.

  “Only that we’re going to drive those cowards out of the river. I have no idea how they’ll do it, but I’m sure Hollins has a good plan.”

  Josephine had no idea how they’d do it, either, and it seemed quite unlikely from where she stood. Six small boats, plus an untested ram, against four of the Union’s massive sloops of war. Any one of the federal ships should be able to whip the Confederates single-handed. In fact, if she’d known how to send a message downriver to warn them, they could set out a trap and bag the whole of the mosquito fleet. Maybe a fisherman could take Josephine down.

  No, she decided. That would end any chance she had to spy in Confederate territory, and surely the Union ships would have no difficulty, warning or no.

  They didn’t set off at once. Instead, when morning came, Hollins had the new crew of Manassas steam up and down the river trying to get a feel for the ram. It was sluggish and poorly maneuverable. After about an hour of watching this, Josephine was given the opportunity to go to shore at Fort Jackson to meet with the defenses. Figuring the commodore wouldn’t set off for Head of Passes until dark, she took the opportunity to do some additional scouting.

  To her dismay, the fort had been transformed since her visit in August. Slaves were at work reinforcing the earthwork, while engineers had already put in a new water battery and bombproofs—rooms, powder stores, and storehouses covered with thick sod roofs. The thickest beams and dirt berms reinforced the new magazine, which made it less likely that a single shell would blow the whole thing to kingdom come. Older quarters had been renovated and new ones constructed. The garrison had increased to nearly three hundred men and growing. Several dozen flat, barge-like fire rafts loaded with pitch-soaked wood sat moored upstream of the forts, ready to be lit and towed into service should enemy craft approach.

  Major Dunbar also seemed transformed. Gone was the dour, thin-lipped man of August, replaced by a man in a better uniform with a better attitude, and now confident of his own defenses. He praised General Lovell’s new leadership and happily showed Josephine that many of the old cannons had been sent out, replaced by heavy-caliber rifled guns. He told her about the new entrenchments being planned, the earthen breastworks that would be thrown up to protect the water battery, and showed her the dilapidated hulks of old ships being towed to form an unbreakable barrier chained across the river.

  Josephine was worried. What would have been easily run by a Union armada a few short weeks ago was now a strong, dangerous gauntlet of fortifications and guns, and growing stronger by the day. She hid her dismay and took furious notes. When Dunbar warned her not to publish specifics in the paper, she nodded her agreement and kept writing. The only thing enemy spies would take from her article, she assured him, was that the forts were now impregnable.

  “You are a true patriot and a fine lady, Miss Breaux,” the major told her. “May I have the honor of your company in the officer’s hall for supper?”

  She looked him over. Dunbar was a handsome man in his early thirties and, with his position and manners, would be considered a fine catch for any young lady. Assuming Union troops didn’t storm the fort and shoot him dead, of course. But she remembered the hanging of Caleb Freedman. It was an unnecessary death, and this man had let it happen. She hardened her heart.

  “You are too kind, Major, but I need to be on Calhoun by dark,” she said. “The commodore hasn’t told me when he’s leaving, and I can’t risk missing what is sure to be a glorious victory. My publisher would never forgive me.”

  Major Dunbar looked momentarily disappointed, then inclined his head slightly. “Perhaps another time. Best wishes, and stay safe.”

  Josephine felt momentarily sorry for turning down his invitation, but by the time Hollins’s men were rowing her back to Calhoun, the excitement of the pending battle swept aside all other thoughts.

  Commodore Hollins waited until after midnight, when the moon went down, and then he ordered the mosquito fleet to pull anchor and make for Head of Passes, towing a number of fire rafts.

  A lieutenant made a halfhearted attempt to talk Josephine into going to shore for her own safety, but when she pointed out that nobody was sending away her rival from the Picayune, he let her stay. The man had seemed more motivated by chivalry than any real fear for her life. The crew of Calhoun was in good spirits, and nobody expected anything but success.

  These men were still naïve, untested by battle. Josephine remembered too well the hell of the battle at Manassas, the dead and groaning wounded. Put together with her memory of the explosion on Cairo Red, it was easy for her imagination to construct a number of terrifying scenarios.

  Head of Passes was only ten miles downstream from the forts, and all too soon Hollins ordered lights extinguished as they came drawing around the last bend. To Josephine’s surprise, there had been no Union pickets to send up signal rockets, but it was unclear whether the dark and cool mist over the river had shielded them, or if the Union had simply neglected to send out men to watch.

  Ludd also seemed nervous and had been pacing back and forth across the deck, stopping periodically to ask Josephine if she’d heard or seen anything. She had pieced together the commodore’s battle plan by asking pointed questions of the crew, but she wasn’t going to explain it to her rival, so she shrugged and claimed ignorance. At last, the tension seemed too much for Ludd, and he fled belowdecks where he supposed he’d be safer.

  Near as she could tell, the plan was simple. Hollins would send Manassas in first, to seek out the biggest Union warship and ram it. The instant the ram made contact, its captain was to send up three signal rockets to notify the rest of the mosquito fleet, after which the men on Ivy, McRae, and Tuscarora would light their fire rafts and send them downstream. There, the chains that held the rafts together would hopefully close them against the prow of one of the other Union ships and set it on fire. When that happened, and with Manassas continuing to sow fear and confusion, the rest of the mosquito fleet would steam into battle, firing with everything they had.

  Calhoun pulled in behind the ram, which could no longer be seen in the darkness. Here Hollins ordered the crew to maintain position, the paddle wheels holding them steady in the current, while he waited for Manassas to do its work.

  From ahead came a burst of sparks from the single stack of Manassas. They’d kept her fires damped, but now, Josephine knew, they were throwing in pitch, sulfur, and tallow to stoke the engines as they gained speed. All stealth was gone. Now was the time to play out the battle.

  From the Union forces ahead came a red signal light, followed by another. Dark, menacing shapes formed a V across the river downstream. Suddenly, the night exploded with the flash and roar of cannon fire. Illuminated was a big Union warship, and the dark, low-slung shape of Manassas thrusting toward it, seemingly unharmed by all the shells blasting in its direction. A second Union warship let loose with a roar of cannon.

  There was a terrific grinding, splitting sound. Metal tearing through wood. Three signal rockets went up, and a cheer went up from the deck of Calhoun. The ram had struck true.

  Hollins shouted orders. Men went running everywhere. Someone tried to drag Josephine below, but she resisted, and he soon gave up. One by one the fire rafts of the Confederate force were lit, and they drifted downstream, their flames illuminating the night in garish orange and yellow light.

  Now all four of the powerful Union warships were blasting away, shooting at Manassas, at the fire rafts, and into the darkness, as if they could sense the Confederates lurking upstream. One of the Union sloops came steaming upriver. It dwarfed Manassas below and would soon overtake it. But then the Union crew s
eemed to see the fire rafts drifting toward it, and the sloop reversed course and fled back downstream. Now it was Manassas that seemed likely to be caught by the burning rafts. Josephine had a vision of the rafts entangling the iron ram and cooking all the men inside like frogs boiling in an iron kettle, but at the last moment the ram steered toward the shore, as if attempting to ground itself among the knees of bald cypress trees.

  The Union ships continued to launch broadsides, and shells came raining down all around. The smaller boats from the mosquito fleet returned fire, but it was obvious that if the Union could get around the fire rafts, their superior size, guns, and speed would make short work of the Confederates. For the first time, the men of Calhoun seemed close to panic.

  But as the fire rafts of the Confederates drifted into the Union anchorage, the big sloops raised sail, fired up their boilers, and headed downstream to escape the conflagration. Only a couple of smaller, auxiliary ships kept up the fight.

  Unfortunately for the Confederates, both Manassas and Tuscarora had run themselves aground in the chaos of battle and the small Union vessels remaining were enough to fight the mosquito fleet to a standstill. Once again, Josephine was shocked that the more powerful Union warships had not stayed to fight. If they had, the Confederates would have been in trouble.

  The next few hours were a chaos of short, running battles. The mosquito fleet, trying to organize itself, eventually pulled upriver to regroup. When dawn came, word came that only a couple of small Union boats remained at Head of Passes, and Hollins ordered the mosquito fleet to regroup and charge back downriver. They came around a bend in the southwest passage and discovered that one of the federal sloops and a small side-wheel steamer had come upriver again. In the Confederate fleet, Ivy had the biggest gun and seemed to be scoring direct hits against the main Union warship, but it was shortly driven off again by the Union ship’s big guns.

  Finally, the Union fleet seemed to be retreating for good, and Hollins ordered his forces to pull back upriver to lick their own wounds. They’d taken too much damage and expended too many shells to keep up the fight. Several of the Confederate guns had been knocked off their carriages, two boilers had taken damage, and the ram Manassas was crippled, its stack knocked off, and it needed to be towed upriver. Still, Hollins’s men were celebrating on the decks. Rumors were flying that they’d sunk one of the big Union warships and crippled two others that would be lucky to make it into the Gulf without going down. The blockade was as good as broken.

  Josephine hadn’t seen that. She’d seen a battle won only through the incompetence and lack of command from the Union side, and through sheer luck by the only slightly less disorganized Confederate mosquito fleet. None of the Union ships had been lost. She was sure of that.

  But later, as she filed a jubilant report, she reported the misinformation that would also soon be appearing in the Picayune as well. She filed two more, longer stories, sent upstream by courier, while she stayed behind at the forts to do reconnaissance and to meet with the crew of Manassas.

  On October 23, the crippled ram finally arrived in New Orleans under tow, a full week and a half after the battle. Josephine traveled with the towing boat, writing and writing and writing during the entire trip. Far from discouraged by the Union loss, she was energized by what she’d seen and learned.

  From the docks, she made her way straight to the house of Mrs. Dubreuil in the Garden District, armed with a fully realized plan for the Union capture of New Orleans.

  Mrs. Henry J. Dubreuil, neé Margaret O’Reilly, was a statuesque beauty, her hair still black and lustrous even though she appeared to be over fifty. She had one of those interesting faces that made Josephine wish she had studied portraiture so she could paint it, with a strong chin, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes flecked with green.

  The woman seemed momentarily surprised when the doorman admitted Josephine, but quickly recovered. She said she had another guest in the back parlor, but if Josephine could wait in the music room, she would return shortly. Meanwhile, she would send in tea for Josephine while she waited.

  Mrs. Dubreuil lived in a handsome two-story brownstone with wrought-iron fencing protecting its sumptuous gardens. The fireplace was marble, the furniture of black walnut, upholstered in damask. Thick burgundy carpets covered the floors. A beautiful green-lacquered grand piano sat in one corner. The tea arrived served in fine china, with silver teaspoons imported from England. Josephine ate the cucumber sandwiches, wishing she’d taken the time to return to the hotel to change and clean up before rushing over.

  She was hungry, however, and after two weeks living with sailors and soldiers, seemed to have lost her manners. She’d devoured the entire plate of sandwiches before she caught herself. What was keeping that woman? It must have been forty minutes.

  Unbidden, Josephine’s thoughts turned to that night in Congo Square at the end of September, when she’d spied the Colonel and Francesca arm in arm. They’d spotted her, too. Josephine had studiously avoided thinking about them, but now she couldn’t help it as she considered who Mrs. Dubreuil might be meeting with.

  The first shock had been seeing the Colonel with her mother’s former dancing companion. Josephine couldn’t remember anything more than friendly, cordial behavior between the two women during the time on Crescent Queen, but of course Josephine had been thirteen years old at the time. Maybe the Colonel and Francesca had been lovers all along. They must have found some way to connect after the Colonel was caught cheating at cards. He’d been persona non grata on Crescent Queen.

  Never mind that. How and when they’d ended up together wasn’t as important as figuring out why they were in New Orleans. Francesca must have recognized Josephine during the crossing on the blockade-runner. Probably not at first, or she wouldn’t have changed her story to claim she was French, and not Spanish. But eventually she had recognized her, maybe during that dinner at the Paris Hotel. Francesca then traveled upriver to Memphis to tell her husband, the so-called “great patriot.”

  After that, the two of them must have come to New Orleans with the express purpose of searching for Josephine. But why? To look for the gemstones the Colonel had hidden in the lacquered box? Or did he mean to worm his way into her affections again? Hah. Josephine could not, would not forgive him for what he’d done. And if Francesca was his wife or mistress, that made her an enemy, too.

  Josephine was starting to think about that horrible night of her mother’s death. With the memory of the river battle at Head of Passes so fresh, it was easy enough to recall the way the fire reflected off the river. The heat, the noise. And that brought the memory of screams, the scent of burned flesh. The panic when the drowning man threw his arm around her neck and pulled her under.

  To distract herself, she picked up her leather satchel and took out the thick sheaf of papers—the work of two weeks, and, she was convinced, information and analysis vital to the war effort. She was engrossed in rereading it when the door to the music room opened. It wasn’t Mrs. Dubreuil, but it wasn’t the Colonel, either, thank God.

  Instead, she found herself facing Franklin Gray. The young Pinkerton agent looked trim and in good health, and pleased to see her. She rose to her feet, her relief giving way to embarrassment at her bedraggled appearance.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Oh, was it you Mrs. Dubreuil was meeting with on the other side of the house?”

  “She wasn’t meeting with anyone. That was to keep you still while she sent for me. When I heard, I came as fast as I could.” Franklin shook his head, looking disappointed. “We have a system for sending information. Why didn’t you follow it?”

  “That system led to the ridiculous lost opportunity at Head of Passes. I had advance notice of rebel intent, but no way to warn the fleet. If I’d had a way to send a telegraph—”

  “You could have sent a telegraph straight to Washington and it wouldn’t have done any good. The fleet had no way to receive it. Anyway, what’s the rush now? You weren’t supp
osed to make direct contact with Mrs. Dubreuil.” Franklin held out his hand for the papers, but she was reticent. “Come on, hand them over,” he said.

  “This has to get through. And to be honest, I don’t trust you to do the job.”

  “I would never censor your observations.”

  “It’s not my observations that will make you balk, it’s my analysis.”

  “Oh, right.” He looked irritated. “More from the petticoat general.”

  Her face flushed with heat. “Why, you devil! How dare you?”

  “It’s your own fault.” Franklin held up his hands to head off her huffy reply. “We agreed that you would equivocate last time around. Instead, you sent the same ‘do this, do that’ report that you showed me in the first place.”

  Some of her anger deflated. “I tried to rewrite it, but I couldn’t manage. All that equivocating larded up the prose. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s flabby writing.”

  “It wasn’t a question of writing, good or bad—”

  “It’s always about the writing,” she interrupted.

  “It’s a question of politics. You can’t tell these generals what to do. You have to let them believe they came up with the idea themselves. That goes doubly if you’re a woman.”

  Josephine grunted. “So what happened? They dismissed it out of hand?”

  “Worse than that. I was ordered to send you back to Washington so they could find someone more tractable.”

  “I’m not going back. I don’t care what they say.”

  “Now, hold on. It didn’t end there. I protested—there was some argument. Somehow the whole business found itself on the president’s desk. He threw sand on the fire, and that was the end of it. You’ll stay in New Orleans.”

  Josephine sat down with a sigh. She thought about all the hours she’d spent writing her military suggestions. No doubt it would be tossed in the rubbish bin as soon as it arrived in Washington, if the couriers even risked carrying it via the network of trains and riders necessary to travel the breadth of enemy territory. And this was not the sort of information that could be sent by telegraph.