by Bruce Catton
He had another problem, although he did not know about it. Commander Porter, who had the mortar flotilla, was persistently undercutting him in letters to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox, with whom he was on familiar terms. Porter worked methodically to damn the flag officer with faint praise: Farragut was probably the best man of his rank, but after all he was an old man and “men of his age in a seafaring life are not fit for the command of important enterprises, they lack the vigor of youth” (which Porter, obviously, had in great measure). Farragut, said Porter, failed to say what his plans were, and indeed “he talks very much at random at times, and rather under-rates the difficulties before him, without fairly comprehending them.” It was really hard for a man of Farragut’s years, finding himself in command of a large fleet for the first time in his life; “he is full of zeal and anxiety, but he has no administrative qualities, wants stability, and loses too much time in talking.”10 In the end this did Farragut no harm, but the ambitious junior was getting plenty of edged words on the record for ready reference in case the expedition failed.
Although Porter was not above angling for his superior’s job he was an efficient operator on his own hook, and by the middle of April he had his twenty mortar schooners moored along the river banks about a mile and a half below Fort Jackson, with coastal survey experts triangulating the ranges; the fort could not be seen from the schooners’ decks, and everything must be done by indirect fire, with observers at the mastheads spotting the fall of the shells. For camouflage, the masts were dressed with leafy branches. A couple of days were used for sporadic firing to test the ranges and to see whether the return fire from the forts would be damaging. (Mostly, it was not: Porter lost one schooner, and his attendant gunboats suffered minor casualties.) On April 18 everything was ready and the flotilla began its bombardment in earnest, throwing 200-pound shells in high, arching parabolas and dropping a fair percentage of them inside Fort Jackson, the principal target.
The bombardment was spectacular, and it went on day and night, at the rate of more than a thousand shells every twenty-four hours. Porter had boasted that he would reduce the forts in two days, and at first it looked as if he might have been right: woodwork in Fort Jackson caught fire and sent up dense clouds of smoke, parapet gunners took refuge in the protected casemates, and so many shells burst inside the works that optimistic sailors in the rigging of the Federal ships felt that the end must be near. But although the bombardment was a sore trial to the nerves of the Confederates in the forts, it never came close to putting the forts out of action. Their return fire was inaccurate but it was always spirited. At night they sent flaming fire rafts downstream, putting an eerie flickering light on the river, causing Farragut’s gunboats Sciota and Kineo to collide, with crippling damage, when they tried to evade one of these blazing drifters. The bombardment went on and on, past Porter’s forty-eight hours, drawing out at last to six full days, the forts still full of fight. Ben Butler came aboard Hartford once to watch, and wrote of “that superbly useless bombardment,” and Farragut grew more and more impatient. He had never believed that the forts could be reduced in this way, and he grew tired of waiting. He made up his mind, at last: enough was enough, the fleet would go up regardless.11
On the night of April 20 he sent Commander Henry H. Bell upstream with gunboats Pinola and Itasca to blast an opening in the floating barrier. They found the barrier to consist of six floating hulks, anchored about a hundred yards apart, supporting a huge chain which blocked passage; but the line of hulks ended some distance short of the right bank, the gap being filled by a raft which could be drawn aside to create an opening in case of need. The forts opened fire, shooting wildly in the darkness; Bell’s men went aboard one of the hulks and planted powder charges, but the charges failed to explode, one of the gunboats ran aground and had trouble getting off, and in the end all that could be done was to cut loose the raft. Bell got his two vessels back unharmed, but most of the barrier was intact. The place where the raft had been was open, but the opening was too narrow to let the fleet do more than go up in single file close to Fort Jackson. Furthermore, lookouts in the fleet next morning reported that a new chain had been strung across the opening, and Farragut sent a boat up late one night to find out. The boat rowed through the opening, took soundings, found no chain, came back and reported; and finally, at two in the morning of April 24, Hartford hoisted two red lanterns to the mizzen peak and the big fleet got under way.12
It was a black night, with no wind to ripple the water, and although the moon was about to rise there would be smoke to hide it, coal smoke from the ships’ funnels, powder smoke from scores upon scores of great guns, with deadly flashes of light from guns and shells and fire ships to break the darkness; and there was a four-mile current in the river so that a crippled ship (or a ship whose captain faltered) would drift downriver, helpless. Here was the old sailor who did not propose to waste the chance his flag had given him, a man whose chief underling had warned that he “lacked the vigor of youth” and whose superior had warned that success would be expected, and who in his own turn had told his wife that death coming out of duty well done would make a good end to life’s drama—and ship after ship brought its anchors up and steamed north against the river, with the silent forts waiting beyond the chained hulks. The fleet would be sunk if it had to stand and fight, but it was not going to stop. It had certain advantages; the barrier had been broken, the ironclads were not quite ready, and on Hartford’s poop deck it had a lanky flag officer, stalking up and down on springy legs, knowing exactly what he was going to do and what he was going to make other people do—and, altogether, this was it.
One by one the ships went through the gap in the barrier. One or two missed their bearings and crashed into the chain itself, hung in midstream briefly, then broke loose and went on; and the Confederate gunners discovered what was happening and opened fire, long ranks of guns on parapet and in casemate flashing incessantly on the rim of the night. On Hartford, Farragut had the gun crews lie down until their guns would bear, and the men sweated it out while shell and solid shot snapped shrouds and backstays and splintered the bulwarks. The fleet drew abreast of Fort Jackson, and Fort St. Philip was just upstream on the other side, and the gun crews sprang into action. Then the whole fleet was firing broadsides to port and to starboard while the forts slammed back with everything they had, and the heavy smoke rolled and coiled over the river to blind everybody. Far downstream Porter’s mortars opened an all-out bombardment, and a few men whose duties allowed them to look aloft saw a terrifying marvel—red glow of the lighted fuses of the great shells soaring high into the night, blinking on and off as they revolved slowly, hanging motionless for a moment and then coming down fast to explode in blinding light and stupefying noise over the forts and the water and the echoing marshes.
Men could see too much and too little. Gunners could make out their targets only as quick bursts of fire, and the Confederate cannoneers could do little more than blaze away at what they supposed was the middle of the river. Ship captains had to steam up a channel that had no shores and no beacons, nothing visible anywhere except the stabbing flames from gun muzzles and bursting shell. One of Butler’s staff officers, on the flagship, said later that the business was like “all the earthquakes in the world and all the thunder and lightning storms together, in a space of two miles, all going off at once.” Captain Thomas T. Craven, on U.S.S. Brooklyn, confessed that he never expected that he or his ship or the fleet itself would live through it, and old Farragut wrote that the fight “was one of the most awful sights and events I ever saw or expect to experience.”13
In mid-passage Hartford ran aground under the guns of Fort St. Philip, a doughty Confederate tug captain rammed a fire raft hard alongside, a sheet of flame ran up Hartford’s bulwarks and rigging, the fort’s gunners fired as fast as they could handle their pieces, and for a moment it looked as if flagship and flag officer had reached the end of the run. But tug and raft were driven
off, the flames were put out, the Confederate gunners fired just a little too high, and at last Hartford wrenched her hull out of the mud and went on with minor damage. There was a Confederate ram in the river—Manassas, a converted tugboat with a flimsy turtleback covering of thin iron plating—and this craft rammed both Mississippi and Brooklyn, hurting them but not crippling either one; was driven away and finally was sunk by gunfire. U.S.S. Varuna got safely above the forts, fought two unarmored rams, Governor Moore and Stonewall Jackson, and was sunk, the only Federal ship casualty of the night; her two assailants were disposed of as the rest of the fleet came up. Three gunboats failed to make the passage: Itasca, disabled by a round shot through her boilers, and Kennebec and Winona, which got entangled in what remained of the floating barrier, were badly shot up, and had to go back to the original anchorage. But the fleet as a fighting unit never stopped moving, and as daybreak came in over the swamps Farragut had thirteen warships safely past the forts, a fleet that was somewhat cut up but perfectly capable of doing everything it was supposed to do.
He had his ships anchor a few miles upstream from the forts, at the old quarantine station, to bury the dead, attend to the wounded, wash down the decks, make hasty repairs, and count losses. Altogether he had lost thirty-seven men killed and 149 wounded, all of his ships had been hit hard, and the forts themselves had suffered only minor damage—but he done exactly what he had believed he could do, the big danger had been met and passed, and New Orleans was entirely at his mercy. All he had to do now was go on and take it.14
He went on and took it. One of his gunboats achieved the improbable by overawing and then capturing a battalion of infantry near the quarantine station, and just below New Orleans there were men with field pieces prepared to make a fight. A few blasts from the heavy guns dispersed them; and then the fleet came up to the New Orleans waterfront in a drizzling rain, saw angry crowds shaking fists and uttering impotent curses in front of lifeless warehouses, cowed them with the threat of the terrible guns, anchored—and New Orleans was gone, United States flag flying, mayor stoutly refusing to surrender but confessing that if the Yankees wanted the city they had it, General Lovell leading a handful of third-rate troops off into the hinterland, the greatest city in Dixie caving in while the scarred black warships anchored in the river just offshore.
Lovell was helpless. When the ships passed the forts he had fewer than 3000 troops to defend New Orleans, and the troops were of no use to him. He had certain militia regiments drawn up on the “inner line” of defenses just below the city, but he gave them no ammunition, and he explained why. They could not fight warships no matter how they tried, and anyway “they had in some regiments manifested such an insubordinate disposition that I felt unwilling to put ammunition in their hands”;15 and whatever Lovell did, Farragut could and would bombard the city unless it gave in, so Lovell took his useless handful out of town and let the Federals have it. Farragut saw the United States flag run up and then, still somewhat shaken, wrote a letter to his wife: “I am so agitated that I can scarcely write & shall only tell you that it has pleased Almighty God to preserve my life & limb, through a fire of 2 days, that the world has scarcely known—I shall return publicly my thanks as well as all those of our Fleet for his Goodness & mercies.” Along the waterfront great stacks of baled cotton were burning, not to mention ranks of steamboats which nobody wanted the Yankees to have, and the old man felt a sailor’s grief over it: “all the beautiful Steamers & Ships were set on fire & consumed.”16
There were, of course, the Confederate ironclads, and the fight had come just a little too soon for them. Lacking the ability to move, Louisiana had been towed downstream and tied to the bank near Fort St. Philip, where she had been able to do no more than add a few guns to that fort’s battery; her crew blew her up and sent her to fragments a few days after Farragut had gone by. At a New Orleans wharf there was Mississippi, two of her three propellers still lying on the dock, her iron armor not yet fastened, no guns aboard, workmen fighting for time that had been denied them. The naval officer who had been sent down to fit her out and fight her confessed, desperately, that when Farragut passed the forts “I did not know, in the name of God, what to do with her”; in the end he did the only possible thing and set the hulk on fire, and the blazing wreck drifted harmlessly down past Farragut’s grim fleet while the city’s fate was being settled.17
Farragut’s final point proved itself. Once he had New Orleans it was the forts and not the Federal fleet that were isolated; distracted by the long bombardment, hopeless because everything else was gone, the garrison in Fort Jackson mutinied, and not long after Farragut had taken New Orleans the forts surrendered and everything was finished. The Federal power held both ends of the Mississippi, and the old flag officer had won. After the news got to Washington, Farragut was made rear admiral, first of that grade in the U. S. Navy.
6: Brilliant Victory
The movement of the Army of the Potomac to Hampton Roads was an impressive display of the irresistible strength of the North. More than 400 transports were on the water—ocean liners, bay and harbor steamboats, schooners, laboring tugs hauling heavy barges—going from the Potomac wharves at Alexandria to the landing stages under the guns at Fort Monroe. The business had been organized by men who knew exactly what they were doing, and although at times two dozen ships anchored in the lower bay, awaiting their turns to unload, there were no real delays. In the final weeks of March the North moved more than 75,000 soldiers and an almost infinite variety of equipment that embraced everything from siege guns to observation balloons and the apparatus to generate hydrogen gas, and did it without accident or confusion. (Without serious accident, anyway: eight mules were lost when a barge foundered.) Never on earth had anyone seen a water-borne military movement so prodigious. An admiring British writer remarked later that the whole affair had been “the stride of a giant.”1
But there was no second stride. Having made the first, the giant paused, irresolute, muscle-bound, anxious to avoid a fall. The war was about to take a strange turn.
As far as any Northerner could see in the middle of April, 1862, the war was almost won. The Confederacy was losing the Mississippi River and all of the west, its Atlantic coastline was being sealed off, and it was obviously hard pressed. Secretary Stanton was so confident that on April 3 he closed the Army’s recruiting offices and ordered all recruiting details back to their regiments.2 Now the North’s largest army, carefully trained for eight months and equipped with everything an army could use, was coming down to crush a Confederate capital whose outnumbered defenders were still trying to reorganize their troops all the way down to company and regimental levels. This, surely, would be the final blow. It had to be.
And yet … four months later, after this army had done its level best, the war had turned topsy-turvy and it was the North rather than the South which seemed to be in danger of defeat. Once the Army of the Potomac went into action the tide began to flow in the other direction. The beginning of the long war—the all-out, all-destroying, disastrous war that finally went beyond control—dates from this army’s advance up the Virginia peninsula.
Did this happen because the Army of the Potomac advanced, or in spite of it?
Cause and effect are curiously mixed, and the area of sheer coincidence has vague boundaries. It was coincidence, for example, which determined that when the campaign approached its climax the army would have to fight a military genius immeasurably more skillful than its own leadership. But other troubles were home-grown. The army had stayed too long in Washington. It had the touch of the parade ground; it had known too many grand reviews and too little reality. It would presently be remarked that although this was the best-drilled of all the Union armies, its regiments straggled most atrociously on a route march, so that sometimes the drifters by the roadside visibly outnumbered the plodders in the ranks.3 During the months in Washington the army had almost come to seem less a military instrument than a tool of politics, the means by
which one faction or another would control the destiny of the nation. Its strategy might be less significant than its political philosophy. Its commanding general was beset by uncertainties and misunderstandings, some of them his own, some of them not his own.
The army’s very name was significant. It was the Army of the Potomac, the river of the national capital. It might campaign to the gates of Richmond, but all that it did would be controlled by what it had left behind. Of all the country’s armies, this was the one—as everyone knew, all too clearly—that could most quickly and certainly lose the war: and so at times it was hard to see that this was the army, also, which could most quickly and certainly win it. A general who took the offensive with this army needed to be bold, determined, and uncommonly clear-minded.