Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  The expedition consisted of 20,000 men led by John Pope and was supported by Flag Officer Foote, who had seven iron-plated gunboats and a fleet of barges mounting big mortars. Pope put his men ashore at Commerce, Missouri, forty miles above New Madrid, marched down the river without opposition, and began to lay siege to New Madrid on March 3. It developed that this place was neither strongly fortified nor well manned, and Pope captured it in ten days, after which he moved some of his infantry and artillery ten miles downstream to Point Pleasant to keep the Confederates from sending men and supplies up the river by steamboat. He had finished the first half of his assignment. Now he had to get across the river, occupy Tiptonville, isolate Island Number Ten and compel it to surrender.

  The second half of the job was not going to be easy. To get over to the Tennessee shore Pope had to have transports, and to protect the transports he had to have gunboats, and to reach him these vessels would have to steam past Island Number Ten, which was obviously impossible. Foote, stumping about on crutches—the wound he had taken at Fort Donelson was refusing to heal—held his flotilla just upstream from the island, moored his mortar boats along the bank, opened a long-range bombardment, and studied his problem with rising pessimism. He was as tough as any man in the Navy, but he refused to run in close and hammer these fortifications the way he had hammered the forts on the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Island Number Ten was far too strong; furthermore, the river ran in the wrong direction. At Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Foote’s fleet had fought facing upstream, and a disabled boat would drift back to safety. Here the fleet would be facing downstream, and a disabled boat would drift down to certain capture—a thing which seemed all the more likely because the gunboats were sadly underengined, so that even moderate battle damage could make it impossible for them to steam against the strong current of the Mississippi. Foote devoted himself to the bombardment; it went on for three weeks and was most spectacular to see and hear, but it did the Confederates little real damage. Meanwhile, General Pope kept on calling for gunboats and transports.1

  At this point Pope’s engineer officers had a bright idea. The place where Foote’s fleet was lying was twelve or fifteen miles from New Madrid by water, but it was not half that distance in an air line, and the long peninsula that lay between the fleet and the army was half a marsh, covered with second-growth timber and cut by innumerable sluggish bayous. It ought to be possible (said the engineers) to make some sort of waterway across this peninsula, so that shallow-draft steamers could leave the river and go cross-lots to New Madrid. Since there appeared to be no other way to get transports, Pope accepted the proposal, sent back to Cairo for tugboats, barges, and incidental equipment, and put six hundred men to work to create a canal. While Foote went on with his bombardment, Pope’s engineer troops went off into the bayous and got to work.

  They dug a ditch across a cornfield, came up to a submerged forest, and began felling trees. Here they had to work afloat, devising ingenious ways to cut through the tree trunks four and one half feet below the surface of the water, rooting out stumps, hoisting submerged logs and snags out of the way, pulling and chopping and digging and sawing all at the same time. While they labored, other details worked to convert empty coal barges into floating batteries, hoping that if the gunboats could not get downstream Pope could be given something that would float and carry guns. Day after day the work on the waterway continued: a non-military job done by energetic Westerners who knew how to improvise and who were exercising the national aptitude for changing the face of the landscape. In a little less than three weeks the work was done, and there was a waterway six miles long, fifty feet wide and a little more than four feet deep. Now Pope could have his transports.2

  He still could not have his gunboats, as they drew too much water for this canal, and without the gunboats the transports would be of no use. (The business of making floating batteries out of coal barges was a forlorn hope, at best.) The Confederates had planted batteries along the Tennessee shore of the river above Tiptonville, covering every feasible landing place, and the river here was a mile wide. Federal guns on the Missouri shore could not hope to silence these batteries, and unless one or two sturdy fighting ships could come in and pound them the transports would have to stay at New Madrid. Desperately, Pope wired Halleck asking that Foote be required to give two of his gunboats, minus crews, to the Army; Pope would man them with soldiers and try to run them past Island Number Ten in spite of the odds.3

  Perhaps if Andrew Foote had been well he would have been bolder, but his health was atrocious and much of his old drive was gone. He was impatient with his enforced inaction, however, and the idea of turning his ships over to the Army and letting soldiers try to do what sailors could not do was altogether too much; and so when Commander Henry Walke, skipper of the gunboat Carondelet, insisted that he could take his boat down the river Foote told him to go ahead. Walke had felt all along that it ought to be possible to run past Island Number Ten. He wanted just two things: a barge loaded high with bales of hay, to lash to the portside for protection against gunfire, and a night dark enough to give him a fair chance to go down the river unseen. He got both, presently, and on the night of April 4 Carondelet left her moorings and drifted downstream to run the gantlet.

  She was moving slowly, just fast enough for steerageway. The high-pressure engines of river steamboats normally fed their exhaust into the smokestacks, making a noisy, locomotive-like puff-puff which could be heard miles away; to muffle the sound Walke had his engineers rearrange things so that the exhaust went into the paddle box, and he would not try to make any speed until the Confederates discovered him. Slipping down with the current, ungainly with the clumsy barge fastened to her port side, Carondelet went on toward Island Number Ten.

  Carondelet had been afloat for less than four months, but she was a veteran; had fought at Fort Henry, had opened the bombardment at Fort Donelson, and had been hit so hard there that she had to go back to Cairo and go into drydock for repairs; all in all she had seen about as much close action as any vessel afloat. Walke was ready for anything. If the boat should run aground or become disabled he would resist boarders: cutlasses and muskets were served out, and hoses were attached to the boilers so that scalding water could be directed at hostile parties, and if worse came to worst he was prepared to scuttle his vessel rather than let the Confederates have her. The night was dark as the inside of his pocket, with a thunderstorm building up, and Carondelet reached the upstream end of Island Number Ten without being seen.

  Then the storm came, and the midnight blackness suddenly dissolved into vivid moments of daylight as enormous flashes of lightning broke out of the clouds, throwing river and gunboat into startling relief: black boat on a glistening river, spectral green trees for a background, blue-white lightning winking on and off like an erratic spotlight in some prodigious theater. The Southern lookouts saw it, and, on Carondelet, Walke could hear the Confederate drums beating the long roll, calling the gunners to their stations, and rockets arched up into the sky as Island Number Ten notified batteries on the Tennessee shore that there was a Yankee gunboat on the water. Walke cracked on steam, and Carondelet surged ahead, dragging the heavy barge, running heavily like a man in a nightmare. The dry soot in the gunboat’s stacks, ordinarily kept damp by the exhaust steam, took fire and sent tall jets of revealing flame high out of each pipe: and with these flares as beacons, while great sheets of lightning lit the river and the rockets shot up toward the dripping clouds, Carondelet kept on coming.

  The Confederates manned their guns and opened fire, the crash of the guns mingling with the crash of thunder, deafening noise and the constant off-and-on of the lightning flashes bewildering everybody. Walke had his pilot steer close to the shore of the island, hoping that the Confederate gunners would overshoot their target; Carondelet almost ran aground as a result but sheered away just in time, the heavy shells passed overhead, flash of the guns and flash of bursting shell punctuating the thunderstorm—and at l
ast, in spite of everything, Carondelet passed the island unhurt and went pounding down the reverse stretch of the big bend in the river. A couple of solid shot hit the hay barge, minié balls spattered here and there without harm, and then the firing ended and Carondelet came steaming down to New Madrid at midnight, the thunderstorm tapering off, Pope’s troops lining the waterfront to cheer. The gunboat drew up to a mooring, Army officers came aboard to offer congratulations, and Walke as an Old Navy man issued the traditional order: Splice the main brace. Nobody on his boat had been hurt, the thing that he thought could be done had been done, and from this moment on, Island Number Ten was helpless.4

  Nothing remained now but to pick up the pieces. On the morning of April 5—the beautiful spring day when the soldiers around Shiloh were firing their guns to see how rain had affected loaded muskets—Pope had transports and one gunboat on the river below New Madrid and he could get on with the job, which he promptly did. Troops went aboard the stern-wheelers that had come down through the cutoff, Walke discarded his hay barge and his hot-water hoses, and the Federals went down to cross the river. Carondelet’s guns knocked the Confederate river batteries to bits, and before long John Pope had soldiers over on the Tennessee shore around Tiptonville and Island Number Ten had been cut off. The Confederates along the river took to the brush to escape capture, Foote sent U.S.S. Pittsburgh down to join Carondelet—once Walke had done it, everybody could see how simple it was—and late on the evening of April 7 Island Number Ten surrendered and the victory that had just been won at Shiloh was made complete. To all intents and purposes, the Confederacy had lost the middle Mississippi.

  Which is to say that they had lost the one stretch they had a chance to hold. They still possessed a strong point called Fort Pillow, on a Tennessee bluff forty-five miles above Memphis, and ever since the fall of New Madrid they had been strengthening the place; and Pope and Foote made plans for an Army-Navy assault. But Fort Pillow could be allowed to die on the vine. Once Beauregard was driven out of Corinth, Fort Pillow would be cut off and would fall of its own weight, just as the great fort at Columbus had fallen after the conquest of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Halleck correctly judged that there was no point in fighting for Fort Pillow, and he ordered Pope to put his army on transports, steam back to Cairo, and come up the Tennessee to join Grant and Buell at Pittsburg Landing. The major effort would be the advance on Corinth, and Halleck would have more than 100,000 men; the Navy could be left to clean up the fragments along the Mississippi. Shortly after Pope left, Andrew Foote was compelled to go on sick leave,5 which would be followed by undemanding shore-side assignments in the east. He had fought his last fight, contributing mightily to Union victory in the west, burning himself out in the process, and he had just over a year to live. Welles sent in another good man, Captain Charles Henry Davis, to replace him, and the fleet and the mortar boats dropped downstream and began a desultory bombardment of Fort Pillow. In effect they were marking time until the advance of Halleck’s army one hundred miles to the southeast made its effect felt.

  John Pope had done a first-rate job, and the human cost of it had been remarkably low. From first to last, Pope had had fewer than a hundred casualties; he had been fighting the river rather than the Confederates, and he had fought it with much skill and intelligence. He had captured several thousand prisoners, had taken many heavy guns and a great deal of ammunition, and he had opened all of the upper half of the Mississippi River; vastly aided by the fact that the Confederate defense had been most inept. Beauregard wrote after the war that the attempt to hold New Madrid was “the poorest defense made of any fortified post during the whole course of the war,” and late in March he had sent in a new man, Brigadier General W. W. Mackall, replacing Brigadier General John P. McCown, to pull things together. Mackall reported that the undersized army which was trying to hold the river was in deplorable shape: “One good regiment would be better than the force I have. It never had any discipline. It is disheartened—apathetic.”6 If Pope had done well it must be added that he had not had much besides the river itself to beat.

  Here was one more symptom of the ominous weakness that was disturbing Jefferson Davis so greatly. The Confederacy was discovering it could not meet all of its vital commitments. To hold that segment of the big river which lies one hundred miles north of Memphis was essential, and the high command in the west knew it perfectly well. In February, Beauregard had told Polk that New Madrid was all-important and must be “watched and held at all costs,” and a month later Polk wrote that “it is of the highest importance to hold Island Ten and Madrid Bend to the last extremity. It is the key of the Mississippi valley.”7 But the high command had been compelled to meet two essential needs with means adequate for only one. The major effort had gone to the attempt to regain the offensive in the Tennessee Valley, and the Mississippi had had to take what was left. What was left was not nearly enough. As Mr. Lincoln had foreseen, when the Federal power put on the pressure everywhere something was bound to collapse.

  Ominous symbol of this fact was the presence in the middle river of five unarmored Confederate gunboats from New Orleans commanded by Commodore George N. Hollins. Everybody understood that the Federal drive down the river was finally aimed at New Orleans, largest city in all the South, and New Orleans was under threat from two directions—from upstream, where Grant and Pope and Foote were pressing their offensive, and from the Gulf, where Flag Officer Farragut had been assembling a powerful fleet of deep-water vessels backed by 10,000 soldiers under Ben Butler, who were roosting uncomfortably on a Gulf Coast sandspit named Ship Island. Between New Orleans and the mouth of the river were two strong forts, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, which were supposed to be powerful enough to stop Farragut. Butler might try to come up by land, but his force was not very large and anyway Butler was no soldier; he was just an old-time Democratic politician, who less than two years earlier had tried to get Jefferson Davis made President of the United States, and the Confederate Army commander in Louisiana remarked that Butler was “a harmless menace,” explaining: “A Black Republican dynasty will never give an old Breckinridge Democrat like Butler command of any expedition which they had any idea would result in such a glorious success as the capture of New Orleans.” This appeared to make sense, although the Confederacy then had much to learn about Butler’s extreme adaptability to the demands of Black Republicanism; and the people at Richmond, who had many worries anyway, made up their minds to defend New Orleans in Tennessee, most of the troops were sent north to fight at Shiloh, and Hollins was ordered to take his flotilla along to stop Foote.8 If the Federals did try to come up from the Gulf the Confederates would rely on the two forts, on a collection of converted river steamers in which nobody had much confidence, and on two ironclads which were being built at New Orleans and which, if the Yankees just waited long enough, might some day be formidable warships.

  Hollins believed this was a serious blunder. His ships were not strong enough to stop Foote’s river squadron, but with the aid of the river and the forts they might be able to stop Farragut. Hollins was in his sixties, a veteran of nearly half a century in the Old Navy, and he understood both the deep-water steam sloops of war which were Farragut’s principal reliance and the troubles Farragut was likely to have getting these ships over the oozy sandbars which lay at the mouth of the Mississippi.

  Nearly a hundred miles below New Orleans, as the winding river ran, there was a place known as the Head of the Passes, where the river forked and sent a number of separate outlets down through the muddy delta to the open sea. Three of these passes were deep enough to be used by shipping—Southwest Pass, South Pass, and Pass a Loutre, which angled off to the east—and at the mouth of each one there was a sandbar, offering problems to ships of deep draft. To get over these bars, no matter which pass he used, Farragut would have to take guns and stores out of his biggest ships and bring the ships in unarmed, towed by lesser craft, inching along one at a time, moving arms and equipment up in barges
and putting the ships back into fighting trim after they had reached the Head of the Passes. Hollins believed that his little flotilla, if it hovered in the lower river ready to make a quick dash down to the shallows, could greatly interfere with this tedious operation, could perhaps make it impossible. As an alternative, he believed, he could keep his vessels up by the forts in a position where they could get a crippling raking fire on the Federal fleet if it tried to bombard or run past the forts. Either way, he argued, his little flotilla would be of some value if it stayed below New Orleans; if it went north of Memphis it would be wasted.9

  Hollins may have overstated the case, but his argument illustrated the dilemma which confronted the authorities at Richmond. No matter where they looked, this spring, they saw a crisis. Added together, these crises had overwhelming weight. It was not possible to deal with all of them at once. They had to be met one at a time, with a harassed President and cabinet trying desperately to guess which one should be met first. In this case they guessed that the Federal offensive in the upper river was more dangerous than the one at the river’s mouth, and they acted accordingly. It developed finally that they had guessed wrong, but they would have been just about as wrong if they had guessed the other way. No good guess was open to them.

  Basically, they were gambling on the assumption that Forts Jackson and St. Philip were strong enough to keep the Federal fleet from coming up to New Orleans. These forts were of prewar construction, solidly built of masonry; good enough, apparently, to justify the belief that wooden ships could not make a stand-up fight with first-class forts. The stronger of the two, Fort Jackson, lay west of the river, twenty miles upstream from the Head of the Passes. Fort St. Philip was on the opposite bank a few hundred yards farther up the river. If the fleet came up to attack these forts it would be under fire from both sides at once. The forts could stand a great deal of hammering and the wooden warships could not. As long as the forts held out the lower river was closed to anything but a hit-and-run raid, and if one or two ships did slip through they would be isolated and could offer no real threat to New Orleans. If the new ironclads were finished in time the river would be sealed beyond any question, but even without them the defenses ought to hold.