The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  Irritated that Ludd had beat him to the story, Fein ordered Josephine to crow in print about how her captured battle plan was playing out exactly as foretold—these were merely preparations for the Union coastal attack designed to divert Confederate naval attention from the real assault to come from the north, down the river. This she did, while wondering with twisting excitement in her belly if this were the invasion force meant to cross the bar and attack Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip.

  Meanwhile, the delays continued on the powerful Confederate ironclads being built in the city. Mississippi was supposed to be delivered by mid-December, and Louisiana on January 25, but by the end of the month, both boats remained unfinished at their respective yards.

  Louisiana finally skidded down the blocks into the river on February 6, sending water sloshing high up the levee, where Josephine watched with a throng of cheering spectators. She wondered what Franklin would have thought could he see the gunboat in the water. She constructed sly, cynical observations, and imagined whispering them in his ear in an attempt to raise a smile. But it had been more than five weeks since she’d seen him.

  As for the crowd, their enthusiasm was explosive as they cheered Louisiana floating proud and mighty in the river. No enemy ship could stand against her might. Josephine watched quietly, taking notes, and when she returned to the city reported what she’d seen with credulity, while noting privately that the ship had weeks, if not months ahead of her to be worthy of battle. Louisiana needed to be clad with iron, fit with her boiler and other machinery, and mounted with guns.

  Her sister ship, Mississippi, waited in the lot next door, also partially constructed. She had her boiler installed but was still lacking iron or guns and was missing the massive shaft to propel her through the water. The shaft was reportedly under manufacture at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, being refurbished after it had been salvaged from a shipwreck. When Josephine heard that, she knew without a doubt that any shipbuilding competition with the vast, smoking factories of the North was doomed to failure.

  The same day Louisiana slipped into the water, word came of a ferocious new struggle on the upper rivers. Supported by Flag Officer Andrew Foote’s gunboats, the so-called Pook’s Turtles, General Grant had transported thousands of troops below Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Union guns pummeled the fort until the Confederates withdrew to Fort Donelson, a dozen miles away on the Cumberland. At first it seemed as though the South would hold the line and possibly push federal troops out of Tennessee and off these two vital tributaries of the Mississippi, but after a series of bloody attacks and counterattacks, superior Union reinforcements carried the day. Fort Donelson surrendered on February 16.

  The Richmond newspapers had been preoccupied with the struggle in northern Virginia between McClellan and Lee, but now turned to the reverses in the West with a good deal of alarm that was noted bitterly in New Orleans, who felt that the entire western theater had been neglected. In the city itself, the mood was first somber, then alarmed as the implications trickled in. The remaining Confederates in Tennessee and Kentucky had been divided between Columbus and Nashville, two hundred miles apart, with a powerful and confident Union army between them that controlled both the rivers and the railroads.

  If there was any comfort to be had in New Orleans, it was that, while the way seemed open to the Union all the way into Alabama if they continued down the Tennessee, powerful forts continued to hold the Mississippi itself, together with Hollins’s mosquito fleet, which still roamed undefeated. That might buy time to raise more militia and strengthen forts upstream from New Orleans.

  Rumors continued to trickle in about Farragut’s ocean fleet, which increased the general anxiety in the city. Confederate currency collapsed, and people hoarded silver coins. Coffee hit a dollar a pound and continued to climb. Flour was twenty-two dollars a barrel. Many household items were only available on the black market, and then for outrageous sums. The warehouses and docks remained silent except for military traffic, but Exchange Alley was booming, as was the usual market in liquor and women.

  At the end of February, a runner somehow made his way past the blockade. He came to the office of the Crescent and insisted on speaking with Josephine. He then demanded five dollars to give her exclusive information about what he’d seen. She paid it.

  A massive Union fleet was gathering off the delta. There were so many support boats and transports that the runner simply ran up the Stars and Stripes and steamed through. The ships were from Farragut’s fleet, and they were evidently looking for a way to get their sloops of war over the bar and into the river.

  There was no disguising the information, so she wrote it as favorably as she could. The largest Union sloops, with their deep drafts, would founder getting over the bar, she insisted. Even if they did cross, Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson would easily repel any attack by wooden warships. General Lovell’s masterful defenses rendered these Gibraltars of the Mississippi impenetrable. What’s more, the mosquito fleet and its brave Southern fighting men had proven they could put superior Union forces to flight.

  That night she went to the Cabildo and looked at her pocket watch until her contact appeared. She went outside and tucked a message behind the box.

  Fleet Spotted Trying to Cross the Bar

  Rebels Alarmed But Unprepared

  Advise Continue As Planned

  It was hubris of the first order, thinking she could affect the course of the battle at all, much less at this late moment. Farragut was either in the Gulf trying to cross the bar, or he was not. He either had sufficient force to reduce the forts and steam past safely, or he did not. The army following on troop transports either had sufficient forces to occupy New Orleans, or they did not. At this point they were fully committed, and would not alter their course one iota based on a stray telegram from their agent in the city. But maybe the confident message from the heart of the rebel city would be enough to encourage men for the hard fighting sure to come.

  The battle would bring more bloodshed. She knew this, and it diminished the excitement she felt knowing that her strategy was soon to be tested. Less than a year had passed since the first shots at Fort Sumter, and any hopes that it would be a short, bloodless war had long since vanished, but perhaps the battle for New Orleans would break the back of the rebellion. God willing, the end of 1862 would see the end of the war. But first, many men would die. Some of them would be on the Union ships now trying to cross the bar.

  Was Franklin on one of those ships? She thought yes. Two months had passed since the attack on the arsenal, and he would be recovered from his injuries, his ribs and fractured leg mended. Pinkerton would want him back in New Orleans when it fell. The city would be surly, even hostile under occupying forces. The Confederates would be scheming to retake it. There would be more need for spies than ever.

  The next day, she went to Mrs. Dubreuil to leave another report on the military situation. This one, she suspected, might not make it to Washington and then down to the fleet before the battle commenced.

  On March 11, Josephine went downriver to Fort Jackson to interview Major Dunbar about the preparations and find out if Union ships had been spotted in the river. The river was at flood stage, and uprooted trees and other debris had piled up behind the chain and its hulks, and part of the barricade had already given way. Hundreds of men were in the river on boats and the barricade itself working to clear the debris.

  Dunbar showed her a new shipment of ten-inch columbiads that were beefing up the fort’s defenses, but her attention was on the drama playing out in the river. Some fifty men were at work trying to lever out one of the largest oak trees she’d ever seen, which had punched straight up through the deck of one of the main hulks. The hulk was now half-submerged and sinking. Other hulks had broken loose and were drifting away in the current.

  Two side-wheelers came downriver, waved flags at the spotters atop the ramparts of Fort Jackson, and picked their way through the gap in the barrier. Moving wit
h the current and under full steam, they quickly disappeared downstream.

  “Where are they going?” she asked.

  Dunbar lifted a hand to shield his eyes as he stared downriver. “Hollins sends a pair of boats once a week to make sure the enemy hasn’t reached Head of Passes.”

  “Why don’t we have forces there permanently?”

  “There’s nothing to fortify. It’s a mosquito-infested swamp. Pilottown is a dozen shacks on poles in the mud. Besides, last time the Yankees came, we drove them off easily enough.”

  Yet it was obvious from the frenetic pace of work at the forts that expectations were that a major attack was soon coming.

  She was still at the fort the next day when the rumble of heavy guns sent soldiers and civilians scrambling to the parapets. Hollins’s two side-wheelers came steaming into view from their downriver reconnaissance mission. Just as they reached the protection of Fort Jackson’s guns, three light-draft steamers came into view, stopping to lurk some two miles downriver. There was a flash of light, then another, followed several seconds later by rocking booms. A jet of water spouted into the air a few hundred yards short of the lowermost Confederate boat. The other shell slammed into the mud of the riverbank.

  “Twenty-pounders,” Dunbar said. “Good thing our boats pulled back when they did.”

  Josephine had no way of telling if his assessment of the guns was accurate, but her heart was pounding. She expected to see the entire Union fleet round the bend, Farragut’s sloops followed by mortar boats. By night, the forts would be aflame, the powder stores exploding, and she would be trapped within.

  The two lead Union ships each fired another shot. These also fell short. They followed the third boat in drifting slowly back downriver. And that was the end of the engagement.

  But alarming news soon reached Fort Jackson from Hollins’s boats. Farragut had seized Head of Passes and run up the Stars and Stripes at Pilottown. He’d sent fast picket boats upriver, and when Hollins’s steamers came down with the hope of sinking an unwary enemy vessel, they’d found the Union navy well organized and with an aggressive posture.

  More information came from a pair of fishermen Hollins’s men had picked up in the river. Much of Farragut’s fleet had crossed, although the larger, deeper-draft ships remained in the Gulf. Some of these ships drew as many as twenty feet and needed to be lightened before they could be forced over the bar. Meanwhile, General Benjamin Butler was waiting on Ship Island off the coast of Mississippi with an invasion force of twenty thousand men. An argument broke out among the officers at dinner as to whether it would be possible to get the heavier Union ships upriver, and whether they’d be effective even if they could cross the bar.

  Not if Louisiana and Mississippi could be brought to the fight, it was decided. The huge ironclads would blast the wooden Yankee vessels straight to hell. Why the devil were they still upriver, unable to move under their own power, unable to fight?

  The next morning, Josephine returned to New Orleans with the first steamer, composing articles about the breaking river barrier, the brief battle downriver from the fort, and her speculation about how the Confederates would win the struggle.

  She returned to her lodging at Nellie Gill’s house to discover a messy stack of correspondence, most of it relating to her work with the Crescent, but also a short, cryptic letter.

  You are a cold, cruel person, harder than any man and more cunning than any woman. You have abandoned us to poverty and ruin. I would remind you of your mother’s prior affections, but your heart is as cold and unfeeling as iron. May you gain the reward you so richly deserve.

  F. D.

  Josephine didn’t know what to make of it. The writing was neat, a woman’s hand. And the initials—F. D.—could only mean Francesca Díaz again. The woman’s attempts at blackmail having failed, she had apparently been reduced to begging. Yet there was no specific plea for money, no address to send such a sum should the note prick Josephine’s conscience.

  And what of the accusation? Josephine didn’t know the predicament to which the woman alluded, and wouldn’t have been responsible for it if she had. No doubt it had something to do with the Colonel and his spendthrift ways, backed by some reference to the friendship that had existed between Francesca and Josephine’s mother while the two women traveled and performed on Crescent Queen. Beyond that, Josephine was baffled.

  “I owe you nothing,” she said aloud. “You approached me. You threatened me.”

  The note troubled Josephine for several days, but her work and the rapidly changing situation in the city soon put it out of her mind. General Lovell had placed the city under martial law. Men over the age of sixteen were required to take a loyalty oath or vacate the city at once. Travel between parishes was restricted to those with passports. Josephine had no trouble securing one.

  By the end of March, New Orleans began to resemble Washington City after the Battle of Manassas the previous summer. Lovell had raised thousands of new recruits, and they were drilling endlessly on the parade ground and in the public squares. Every day barges carried heavy guns downstream to the forts, together with all of the other matériel of war. The boats of the mosquito fleet, clad in iron and bales of cotton, steamed south, carrying more men and supplies.

  Josephine despaired that Farragut and Butler would arrive in New Orleans to find it filled with twenty thousand Confederates, hollering mad and ready to repel any invasion.

  But on the sixth of April, word began trickling into New Orleans of a battle raging at a Tennessee church by the name of Shiloh. At first, the news brought jubilation. General Grant was routed, falling back under the assault of Johnston and Beauregard. By the seventh, it seemed that the battle had become a bloody stalemate between a hundred thousand men, with tens of thousands dead and wounded.

  But within a few days, it became clear that while both sides had taken and delivered terrible blows, only one army remained standing when the battlefield cleared: the North. Meanwhile, Union gunboats had seized another large fortress on the Mississippi. Memphis was threatened.

  A desperate President Davis telegraphed General Lovell to send his new troops north to defend Corinth and Memphis. Lovell had no choice but to comply. Men began streaming out of the city on their way to points north.

  In New Orleans, the people knew. Only Fort Jackson and Fort Philip guarded the downriver approach to New Orleans. If they fell, so would the city.

  On the evening of April 15, Josephine had retired to her room at Nellie Gill’s house to write her story for the next day, as well as put together more notes about the preparations, rumors, and attitude in the city, when a frantic knocking at the front door brought her to the window. Solomon Fein stood at the door, pounding. A carriage and driver waited in the street.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said when Josephine had thrown on a shawl and rushed downstairs. “It has started.”

  “You mean the surveying?”

  Word had been trickling into the city for the past two days that Farragut had sent crews of surveyors up near the forts under protection of gunboats. While the gunboats drove off Confederate sharpshooters, the Yankees planted flags in the brush and weeds along shore. The Confederates returned at night to seek out and pull up as many markers as they could find. The fear was that the Union intended to pull their mortar boats just beyond range of Fort Jackson’s guns, from which point they could bomb the fort to rubble.

  “The surveying is done,” Fein said. “The enemy towed some bomb boats into position downriver and is testing his mortars.”

  “What do you think, another feint?”

  Fein shook his head. “Lovell is at the fort. He telegraphed New Orleans and said in no uncertain terms that the attack has begun. This is it—the big story. I’m going down to cover it myself. My boat leaves in thirty minutes. I want you to come with me, but I won’t force you. It will be risky. People will die.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Josephine’s heart was thumping along at a
good pace now as she raced upstairs to pack a carpetbag. When she came outside, Fein was already in the cab, and he leaned out the door, beckoning urgently. All the way to the levee, he drummed his fingers on his knee, cracked his knuckles, double-checked his own writing supplies, took off his glasses to polish them, then repeated the drill.

  They raced down the dock and reached the boat just as one man was untying the rope and another was preparing to haul up the gangplank. The river was calm and the air cool as they slipped downriver. The sounds of a brass band reached her ears from Jackson Square, but was shortly replaced by the throb of the boiler, the churn of the wheel, and the smooth, liquid sound of the river itself, sliding past the hull.

  Within a few hours, Josephine heard a rumble as of distant thunder. The soldiers on deck leaned over the rail, listening quietly. Boats from the mosquito fleet eased by off port, and signal lights flashed between them.

  The rumble grew louder as the night continued, and she remembered the battle of the previous summer, the pounding of artillery, the shaking ground. It would get worse. Her hands tightened around the railing. Soon, she could see flashes on the horizon.

  Fein found her on deck and lit a cigarette. “I tried to sleep, but it’s no use.” He held up his hand, to show how it trembled. “I’m all nerves. I don’t know how you managed in Virginia.”

  “They call it ‘seeing the elephant,’” she said. “The first time you’re in battle. You don’t know how you’ll fare—if you’ll fight, or if you’ll cower and be trampled.”

  He gave a nervous laugh. “I’m thinking trampled.”

  “Want me to ask the captain if he’ll put you to shore?”

  “No. I won’t cower in New Orleans while good men give their lives. So I’ll have to go forward, coward or no. I only wish I were as brave as you.”