by Bruce Catton
The trouble was that everything depended on the forts, and they were not actually as strong as the people in Richmond thought they were. Their construction, to be sure, was solid enough. Fort St. Philip had been built by the French in 1746, had been strengthened by the Spanish in the 1790s, had been brought up to date by the Americans in 1812, and had withstood a British bombardment in 1815, when General Pakenham tried to take New Orleans and failed, making an undying legend out of Andrew Jackson and the Tennessee riflemen. Fort Jackson was more modern, having been finished in 1831, a solid brick pentagon surrounded by a moat, with enclosed casemates, and with a water battery close to the edge of the river. Between them these forts mounted more than a hundred guns, with seventy-five or eighty arranged so that they would bear on the river passage. Unfortunately, most of these guns were not nearly heavy enough. More than half of the total were mere 24-pounders, and there were hardly any of the ponderous Columbiads, the ship-killers whose immense shells could break a wooden warship into fragments.10
In addition, there was Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut. Farragut was an old-timer: born in Tennessee in 1801, he had gone to sea at the age of nine as midshipman under one of the half-forgotten heroes of the War of 1812, the Commander David Porter who took U.S.S. Essex on her famous cruise into the Pacific. Farragut was a veteran of battle action before he reached his fifteenth birthday and had stayed in the Navy ever since, but the half-century of naval routine which had been his life had never fossilized him; now, in his early sixties, he was supple, buoyant, a kindly man with an imagination and a sense of humor, owning both a veteran’s understanding of the uses of sea power and a young man’s willingness to risk everything on one sudden thrust. He had no intention of playing this game the way the Confederates expected him to do. As he saw it, the forts did not need to be beaten into submission; they simply needed to be passed. A determined man, he believed, could run his fleet by the forts without taking crippling damage—the engagements along the Carolina sounds had taught that much—and once the fleet was beyond the forts, New Orleans, which had practically no garrison at all, would be at his mercy. When New Orleans fell the forts would be cut off and could do nothing but surrender even though they might still be in perfectly good fighting trim.
Farragut had been given a ponderous flotilla of schooners carrying enormous mortars which could throw terrible 13-inch shells, this flotilla being led by a pushing, ambitious junior, Commander David Dixon Porter, son of the man under whom Farragut had served as a boy in Essex; and the general understanding, supported vigorously by Porter, was that a proper bombardment by these mortars would blast the forts into helplessness before Farragut made his advance. But Farragut took very little stock in this. He had been given the mortar flotilla against his will and he strongly doubted that it would accomplish anything. He would let Porter make his bombardment, but he understood that in the end everything would depend on his own ability to rush past the forts, taking a pounding but banking on the faith that he could get most of the fleet upstream.11 Now, in mid-April, he was assembling and refitting his vessels at the Head of the Passes, preparing for the big moment.
He was full of confidence, and he sent home a wholly characteristic letter: “As to being prepared for defeat, I certainly am not. Any man who is prepared for defeat would be half defeated before he commenced. I hope for success; shall do all in my power to secure it, and trust to God for the rest.”12
So, before long, he would strike the blow that would either lose a fleet or win the largest city in the Confederacy.
5: Fire on the Waters
The Confederate defenders at New Orleans faced a simple problem. They had to make Farragut stop and fight when his fleet reached the forts. There were two ways to do this, and both would be tried. If either way worked the city would be saved.
One way was to block the river itself. If a huge raft, bound together with heavy chains, firmly moored to the banks and anchored to the river bottom, could be placed in the waterway between the forts, the fleet would have to stop under fire and clear the channel. It would be pinned down, compelled to take the prolonged shelling that no wooden warships could endure, and its fighting craft would be splintered long before the obstruction could be removed.
The other way was to follow Secretary Mallory’s new book: build, man, and equip one or more invulnerable ironclads which could come down between the forts and do to Farragut’s ships what Virginia had done to Cumberland and Congress. Farragut had no Monitors and it would be a long time before he could get any, and this would be checkmate.
Two chances, then, and either one might work; yet the odds really were very bad. To block the river the defenders had to conquer the Mississippi itself, so that the floating barricade would stay where it was supposed to stay despite the great twisting current and the unending succession of floating logs which came down like battering rams; and to get the ironclads into action the Confederacy had to overcome its own profound industrial weakness and do an intricate job of manufacturing without enough materials, machine shops, skilled workers, or time. In the end, the defenders did their devoted best on both of these attempts, and failed. If their problem was simple, it was also insoluble. What they needed was a man who could work miracles, and they had no such person.
The man who was appointed to try to work miracles was Major General Mansfield Lovell, a thirty-nine-year-old West Pointer with pleasing manners who had fought in the Mexican War, taking two wounds and winning a brevet promotion for gallantry, and who had left the Army in 1854, to go into business in New York. He had become, a few years later, deputy Commissioner of Streets in New York City, his superior there being the Gustavus W. Smith who now was one of Joe Johnston’s principal subordinates in Virginia. During the months after Fort Sumter, Lovell had concluded that his ties ran South rather than North. He resigned, went to Richmond, got a major general’s commission from Jefferson Davis, and, in October 1861, he was given the top command in New Orleans, replacing the aged Major General David E. Twiggs whose years and failing health had rendered him incompetent.
When Lovell first reached New Orleans he was appalled to see how little had been done to put the city’s defenses into shape. Conditions were so bad, he said later, that he was afraid to give the War Department all of the details for fear the news would leak out and encourage the Yankees. Guns were lacking, ammunition was scanty, subsidiary equipment was in bad shape, and although New Orleans was aflame with patriotism there were hardly any arms for recruits. Lovell took hold with vigor, arranging with New Orleans foundries to cast some heavy guns, building a powder factory to make ammunition, harassing Richmond with demands for everything from saltpeter and rifles to a little attention, and making unending tours of inspection of his forts and military camps.1
Before coming to New Orleans Lovell had stopped in Manassas to talk with General Beauregard, who urged him to get busy on the job of blocking the river, and when Lovell saw how few heavy guns were in the forts he concluded that this job must have top priority. He got busy, and by the beginning of the winter he had an immense raft in place—a formidable affair of forty-foot cypress logs bound together by chains, crisscrossed with heavy timbers, firmly moored to each bank, with as many anchors as Lovell could find used to tie it to the bed of the river, which at this place was 130 feet deep with a bottom of soft mud. As long as this raft stayed in position no ship could pass, but the raft’s security after all was up to the Mississippi, which was rising constantly, pressing on it with increasing force, pounding it day after day with the tons of driftwood that came down on its boiling current.
Early in March the raft gave way, anchors tearing out of the river bottom, chains snapping like so much thread, logs and timbers coming apart and floating harmlessly downstream. A new barricade was hastily created, with the help of $100,000 voted by the New Orleans city council, and the gap was closed; but the river kept on rising, Farragut was hauling his big ships over the shallows at its mouth, and just as the defenses in Tennessee
caved in this second raft also collapsed and the waterway was clear again. Lovell rounded up a number of schooner hulks, tied them together with chains as well as might be, moored them in midstream, and hoped for the best.2
The best began to look worse, week by week. It was impossible to get Richmond to realize how much pressure was on here. The Tennessee line was being lost, McClellan’s huge army was in front of Yorktown, there were half a dozen urgent calls for every man and gun the Confederacy possessed, and Lovell would have to look out for himself. He called for heavy guns, over and over, without getting them. Almost all of the infantry he had was up in Tennessee. Lovell’s only solace was that the Yankees were going to attack by water rather than by land, which meant that he could not do very much with infantry even if he had it. Hollins and his gunboats were long gone, and when Hollins came back alone, looked at the situation, and frantically wired the Navy Department for permission to bring his little fleet back he was curtly ordered to report to Richmond for duty on a shore-side board which was inquiring into naval matters on the James River. The people of New Orleans, feeling the cold shadow of Farragut growing longer and darker, reflected that this General Lovell was after all a Northerner and that the city had been denuded of soldiers, and began to complain that something must be wrong with the man’s loyalty. Early in March he told Richmond that he was being accused of “sending away all troops so that the city may fall an easy prey to the enemy.”3 Rarely has a conscientious soldier been more frustrated.
A good deal was going to depend, obviously, on the ironclads, and the big question here was whether they could be finished in time. The desperate attempt to create them illustrated the crippling handicaps which beset the Confederate Navy Department. In its original decision to upset the naval balance by building ironclads the Department had shown courage and ingenuity, and it had acted with commendable promptness; by the time General Lovell reached New Orleans, in October, the Department had contracted for the construction of two ironclads there, Louisiana and Mississippi, and by the middle of the winter these were shaping up as powerful monsters, stronger even than Virginia, fully capable of wrecking Farragut’s entire fleet. With any luck at all, the Department should be able to put them into action by the time Farragut was ready to rush past the forts.
Unfortunately, the Department had not one shred of luck at any time. There were two contractors—E. C. Murray, for construction of Louisiana, and the brothers Asa and Nelson Tift for Mississippi—and these men quickly found that they were living in the exact center of a contractor’s nightmare. Every day brought new delays. It was even hard to get the white pine timber out of which the hulls were to be built; the South had plenty of lumber, to be sure, but not much of it was in New Orleans, the river was closed at the mouth and in Tennessee, and the mere business of getting lumber transported to the shipyards was infernally difficult. It was even harder to get iron for armor. Murray used railroad rails—Richmond made a special dispensation permitting the tearing-up of railroad tracks—and the Tifts, after much difficulty, finally contracted with a mill in Atlanta for iron plates; and agents went all across the South to round up bolts, angle irons, and other bits of hardware. It was hard to find shops capable of building machinery and even harder to find skilled mechanics to work in them, and it was almost impossible (as the Tift brothers learned) to find, anywhere in the Confederacy, a shop that could make suitable propeller shafts. Money was an unending problem. Approved bills for materials and services went unpaid for months, some shops flatly refused to accept government orders because of this, and when the Navy Department did attend to the financial end it usually sent, instead of cash, drafts for Confederate bonds payable in Richmond, which were not acceptable in New Orleans. (This was not the Navy Department’s fault; these drafts were all it could get from the Treasury Department, which had troubles of its own and which in any case was under orders to give Army claims priority over those of the Navy.) A citizens’ committee raised some money to pay workers and satisfy the most pressing of the other demands, and (except for a five-day strike for higher wages, in November) work never actually came to a standstill, but it went with maddening slowness. When Farragut had his fleet ready for action and Porter was about to open his bombardment of the forts, Louisiana and Mississippi were still unfinished.4
This was especially trying to General Lovell because this major element in the defense of the city was entirely out of his control. When he urged Richmond to find some way to speed the work on the ironclads he was informed by the President and the War Department that he had no jurisdiction over naval matters and must not concern himself with such things. The government did, however, present him with a white elephant. In mid-winter Congress voted $1,000,000 for an oddly conceived river-defense fleet, a strange assortment of ordinary tugboats and river steamers which were to be bought, entrusted to veteran steamboat captains with civilian crews, piled with cotton bales to protect their engines, and used as rams, pure and simple, to butt the Yankee warships out of the river; and all of this was to be under the Army’s direction. (The same idea had occurred to Secretary Stanton, in Washington, and a similar collection of Federal rams was getting ready to go into action above Memphis; and it can only be said that Stanton had much better luck with this unorthodox variant than Lovell ever had.) The money was spent, the steamboats were bought and were considered weapons, the steamboat captains proved too individualistic and unmilitary to respond to anybody’s control, and in the end this flotilla was of no use at all. But it was an idea, no doubt.… Early in April Richmond sent stern orders: Louisiana was to go upriver to fight the Federal gunboats that had just passed Island Number Ten. Lovell protested vehemently, and so did the governor of the state, T. O. Moore, and they were icily informed by President Davis that although the Federals in the lower river had nothing but wooden ships, which the forts could handle, they had ironclads up above Memphis and only Louisiana could stop them. Since Louisiana still lacked motive power, and could not move one foot under her own steam, she stayed at her wharf, with workmen swarming around to get her propulsive machinery in order, and nothing came of this: but the fact that the order was issued shows how Richmond was thinking.5 Doom was building up just ninety miles to the south, but the authorities were really concerned about the remote threat hundreds of miles to the north.
Part of this was Lovell’s fault. Commander William C. Whittle, ranking naval officer at New Orleans, told Secretary Mallory that from his chats with Lovell he was convinced that the Army believed it could stop Farragut at the forts. Late in March, Lovell assured the War Department that Farragut’s thrust looked like “a diversion for the column descending from Cairo,” and even by April 15, when Porter’s mortars were testing the ranges and Farragut’s big ships were getting ready for the crucial test, Lovell wrote that “if we can manage to obstruct the river so as to retain them thirty minutes under our fire I think we can cripple the fleet.” Nobody quite saw how deadly Farragut’s fleet was going to be. The extenuating circumstance is that nobody could have done much about it even if there had been better foresight.6
The real problem was Farragut himself. If he had given the Confederates one more week, they would have had Louisiana ready for him, and in another week or so they would have had Mississippi ready too, and he would have been a dead duck. But Farragut was in a hurry. After half a century of service he commanded a fleet and he was going to use it. He wrote to his wife: “I have now attained what I have been looking for all my life—a flag—and having attained it all that is necessary to complete the scene is a victory. If I die in the attempt it will be only what every officer has to expect. He who dies in doing his duty to his country, and at peace with his God, has played out the drama of life to the best advantage.” His flagship was U.S.S. Hartford, a steam sloop of war, square-rigged with auxiliary steam, a wooden ship that could easily kill the flag officer and everybody else on board if enemy shell fire lasted very long, but Hartford was going to go upstream just as soon as the flag officer cou
ld manage it and the extra week or two that the Confederacy needed so desperately was not going to be available. It appears that Hartford was what sailors call a taut ship. An enlisted Marine made note that on a day when the flagship took on coal, any Marine who showed up for duty with a soiled white belt was going to answer for it next morning.7
Farragut was on the spot, although it does not seem to have bothered him. His orders from Secretary Welles said that he was to reduce the defenses and take New Orleans, and added: “As you have expressed yourself satisfied with the force given you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can commence operations, the Department and the country will require of you success.”8 It was laid on the line, in other words. Farragut had no room for an alibi if anything went wrong. (The river between the forts was 130 feet deep, after all: plenty of room there for a flag officer who could not quite make it.)
He was not just an old man full of dash; he was a good executive and a careful planner, and his final instructions to his captains were detailed. The captains were to strike their topgallant masts and land all spars and rigging except what was needed to operate under topsails, foresail, jib, and spanker; one or two guns must be mounted on poop and forecastle to fight enemy gunboats, because the ships would fight head- to the current and broadside guns could not hit targets more than three points forward of the beam. Grapnels must be handy to hook on to fire and tow them away if necessary. All ships must be trimmed slightly by the head so that if they ran aground they would not swing bows-on down the river; if a ship’s machinery should be disabled the captain must drop anchor and let his vessel drift slowly downstream: in no case could anyone turn around and steam back for the Head of the Passes. Spare hawsers must be ready so that if a captain had to tow another ship he could do it. No matter what happened, no ship could pull out of action without the flag officer’s permission. And, finally: “Hot and cold shot will no doubt be freely dealt to us, and there must be stout hearts and quick hands to extinguish the one and stop the holes of the other. I shall expect the most prompt attention to signals and verbal orders.”9