Glory In The Name sb-1

by James L. Nelson

  And so it was, on a grim 1st of May, 1862, that Samuel Bowater and Hieronymus Taylor and Ruffin Tanner found themselves seated on an old oak log, staring out over the remains of what had once been their shipyard, out at the slow-moving Yazoo River. Telegrams had been dispatched to Mallory, reports, lists of dead, wounded, missing. They waited on orders.

  Taylor sparked a cigar to life. Tanner took a long pull from a bottle of whiskey, which he then handed to Taylor, who drank and then handed it to Bowater. Bowater drank, returned to his thoughts of Wendy, handed the bottle back to Tanner.

  New Orleans was lost. The Confederate Army had been beaten at Pittsburg Landing, and the Yankees were pushing downriver, closing the gap between the head and tail of the snake. The Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf were blockaded. McClellan was on the Yorktown Peninsula with more than 120,000 men and marching for Richmond. Soon the Gosport naval yard would have to be abandoned. Banks was chasing Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley with crushing superiority in numbers. McDowell threatened Fredericksburg and Richmond.

  The elation that had followed Manassas was gone. In one year the swaggering confidence of the men who had fired on Fort Sumter had been changed to something else. Acceptance of war, a long war. Resignation. Despondency, in some cases.

  But not defeat. Never defeat. The fire of resistance burned on, and it was not close to burning itself out.

  The bottle came around again. Bowater took a pull, handed it back to Tanner. “Know what Robley Paine said to me? There when we were abandoning the ship?”

  The others murmured no.

  “He said he was the lucky one. Said he was getting what he wanted. The rest of us, we would have to keep fighting, fight on and on.”

  The three men were silent.

  “That’s what he said,” said Samuel.

  Taylor took the bottle. Lifted it high. “Here’s to Robley Paine.” He took a drink, handed it to Bowater.

  Bowater lifted the bottle. “Here’s to getting what you want.” He drank, passed it back to Tanner.

  Ruffin Tanner lifted the bottle, looked at the reflection of the abandoned shipyard in the glass and dark liquid. “Here’s to fighting,” he said. “Here’s to fighting, on and on.”

  Wendy Atkins brushed the tears away, gulped a deep breath. Happiness, relief, sadness, loneliness were all mixed together. She sat on the edge of her iron bed, read the letter again.

  Postmarked Yazoo City. May 1st. A brief sketch of the Battle of New Orleans, assurance that he, Samuel Bowater, was safe, had come through with just the usual bruises and scrapes. But they had lost, the Union fleet had brushed them aside. They would make a stand elsewhere, Samuel said. Once he received orders.

  She felt the tears come again, and now they were all sadness, now that his survival was assured, and the relief that came with that passed into memory. She cried because she read the profound sadness in the words. She cried because the loneliness was palpable and because she knew about loneliness, could take it herself, but could not endure the thought of Samuel, her Samuel, having to suffer so.

  Wendy Atkins knew about loneliness. She had known about it all her life. But when Samuel Bowater left for Mississippi, she learned that there was a whole other level of which she had not been aware, like discovering a room in a house which you had not suspected was there.

  She put the letter down, took a deep breath. Looked around the little carriage house, now crammed with a year’s accumulations. She looked down at the bed and remembered their night together.

  Wendy stood and knelt by the bed, ran her hands underneath. At last they fell on what she was looking for and she pulled it out; an oversize carpet bag, empty now. She set it on the bed, opened it, considered what to pack.

  It was just growing light when Jonathan Paine rose, sat up in the bed he had occupied since the time he had been taken from the family cradle, deemed old enough for a real bed. He looked around the familiar room. It was all gray-and-blue shadows in the weak light, but he did not need any light at all to know what was there. He was like an old man, visiting the scene of his youth, the shadowy remains of a life he had once had.

  He swung his one leg over the edge of the bed. He fastened his prosthetic leg in place, pulled his pants on and his shirt. He did not wear his uniform anymore, the only clothes he had known for more than a year. He did not have to. All of his things were there, just as he had left them. His clothes fit loose now, but they fit.

  All his things were there. Only his family was gone.

  Jonathan stood, limped across the room and down the stairs. He could hear Jenny moving about in the kitchen. Bobby would be rising soon. He would want to help, but Jonathan did not want his help this time. Later, perhaps, but now it was his task alone.

  He stepped quietly out the front door, climbed down the steps. The morning light was spreading, the scraps of fog hanging low over the river and twisting around the clumps of trees on the bank. Jonathan walked around the house, up the slight hill to the family plot. He stood for a long moment, looking at the place where his mother was buried, the fresh-turned earth beside it that marked his father’s grave.

  Robley had died before the Abigail Wilson tied up. Jonathan had seen the body carried back with him. His father had been born and raised on Paine Plantation, had known all his greatest joys on that patch of land. When his body rotted away and mixed again with the soil, it had to be that soil, it could be no other.

  At last Jonathan tore his eyes from the twin headstones, walked back down the hill. In the shed he found a big felling ax. He swung it over his shoulder, headed back to the house.

  Jonathan hobbled past the porch, up to the old oak, the earthly remains of his beloved tree. He looked it up and down, the horrible thing his father had created there. But not his father, not really. The gargoyle had been cut by a man driven mad by grief, and that man may well have looked like Robley Paine, but it was not him.

  Jonathan hefted his ax, let it rest on his shoulder as he adjusted his grip, then brought it back and swung it at the base of the tree. He felt the good, sharp steel bite into the ancient wood. He wiggled it free, brought the ax back, and chopped again, and this time a chip flew.

  It would not be easy. It would take a long time. He was alone now, with only Bobby to help him. His family was gone and the Negroes had mostly all run to the Yankees. But still he knew he would not stop until he had cut down this terrible thing that had once been the Paines’ precious tree, this nightmare the war had made. Rip the stump out, roots and all.

  And then he would plant a new oak. It would not be the same-it could never be the same-but it too would grow tall and strong. He would raise it up from the ground, this new and beautiful and good thing.

  Historical Note

  How much I owe of the pleasure of my life to these much reviled writers of fiction.

  – Mary Boykin Chesnut, February 25, 1861

  Glory in the Name is fiction, of course. There never was a Samuel Bowater or Hieronymus Taylor, the ships that they sailed did not exist. The men, however, and their ships are based on real men and vessels of the period. Further, the situations in which they are involved, the battles, the trials, of the Confederate Navy, are all real, and portrayed as accurately as I was able, basing my depictions on copious primary source evidence. Other than Bowater and company, the people and events are described as they were.

  Here, then, are a few comments on the action covered in this book.

  In early 1861, months before the firing on Fort Sumter, which is generally considered the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederate government began its military organization. Initially, already existing militia units were formed into Southern regiments, their numbers swelled by the thousands of men who rushed to join.

  For the Confederate Navy, things were not so simple. Officially established on February 20, 1861, the navy had no ships and little means of obtaining them. Sailors were scarce, since the Southern states had never possessed much of a merchant marine. The only thing that
the Confederate Navy had enough of was officers, and that was only because they had so few ships that needed them.

  The Confederacy had enough officers, but they did not have a glut of them. Officers of the United States Navy showed a greater reluctance to resign and support their home states than did their brother officers in the United States Army. In the spring of 1861 there were 1,385 active-duty officers in the navy, including the midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Of those, only 375 chose to join the Confederacy, and a third of those were Academy midshipmen. Only twelve of seventy-eight captains joined the South. Clearly there was, as Mary Boykin Chesnut put it, “an awful pull in their divided hearts.”

  Perhaps the foremost example of that divided heart was Franklin Buchanan, who had entered the navy as a midshipman during the War of 1812. Thinking his home state of Maryland would secede, Buchanan tendered his resignation. Then when Maryland stayed in the Union, “Old Buck” tried to take his resignation back. But it was too late in the eyes of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles.

  Buchanan’s predicament illustrates the kind of uncertainty that was rampant in the early months of 1861. With five states seceded from the Union within months of his taking office, Abraham Lincoln wanted very much not to make things any worse than they were. That was the thinking behind the administration’s handling of the threat to Gosport Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, which turned into a debacle for the Union.

  In April, Virginia, the most influential of the Southern states, was still teetering on the brink of secession. Lincoln and his cabinet were afraid that any little offense might tip the state into the Confederate camp. So, despite clear threats to the naval yard, Lincoln and Gideon Welles did nothing to defend the place, since that, they felt, would be seen as an act of aggression against Virginia. Nor did they send the ships off to the safety of Fortress Monroe or Washington.

  To make matters worse, the yard was commanded by the old and uncertain Charles McCauley, and many of the officers under him were Southern men whose real objective was to see the valuable navy yard in Southern hands. The growing tension both inside and outside the yard and the threat of state militia massing in Norfolk finally reached the boiling point on April 20, 1861. Swept by panic, the Union officers decided to scuttle and burn the ships and flee from the shipyard, burning it in their wake. Even this was poorly done. A wealth of ordnance was left intact, and the fires did not do nearly the damage intended. The sailing vessel Cumberland , all but obsolete in the age of steam propulsion, was towed to safety, while the Merrimack was burned and sunk. A year later, the Merrimack , reborn as the Confederate ironclad Virginia (and commanded by Franklin Buchanan), would batter the Cumberland to death, killing nearly half her crew.

  It would be some months after fighting began before the United States Navy could organize itself enough to bring its power to bear. But when the first hammer blow fell, it fell on Hatteras Island in North Carolina.

  Hatteras Island is one of the barrier islands that line the southern coasts of the United States like a castle wall. Behind Hatteras Island lies Pamlico Sound, which connects to the north with Albemarle Sound. Apart from being an ideal spot for privateers to lurk and dash out at Union ships rounding Cape Hatteras, the sounds connect to five major rivers which run into the heart of North Carolina and southern Virginia. Strategically, it was a valuable spot, and it was here that the United States Navy chose to bring its overwhelming force to bear for the first time.

  Forts Clark and Hatteras were no marvels of construction, and they were weakly defended. In fact, the Confederate government never made any great effort to defend the valuable sounds, perhaps because they recognized from the onset that it would be impossible in light of Federal naval superiority, which it certainly was.

  On August 27, 1861, a little more than a month after the First Battle of Bull Run, the United States Navy arrived off Hatteras Inlet. Steaming in an oval pattern, they poured their fire into the forts, while the forts’ guns could not even fire far enough to hit back.

  In his report to Secretary Mallory, written while he was a prisoner aboard the flagship Minnesota , Samuel Barron wrote:

  They the Union ships, after some practice, got the exact range of the IX, X, and XI-inch guns, and did not find it necessary to alter their positions, whilst not a shot from our battery reached them with the greatest elevation we could get.

  With the situation hopeless, Barron ordered the white flag run up.

  It was not until February of the following year that the Union forces followed up their victory at Cape Hatteras with the obvious move on Roanoke Island, which would close off Albemarle Sound and threaten Norfolk from the south. When they did come, they once more came in overwhelming strength, and brushed aside the three thousand Confederate troops and the small mosquito fleet that the Confederate government allocated for defense of the island and sound.

  The naval battle at Elizabeth City, a fleet action fought by two fleets of small gunboats, was one of the only such naval fights in the Civil War. Indicative of the changing nature of warfare at sea, it is also one of the few instances of hand-to-hand fighting during naval combat in that war.

  In the Gulf of Mexico, Confederates and Federals played at the same game, with the Union navy attempting to further its stranglehold on Southern ports, and the Confederacy resisting with all means available, which, in the largely agricultural South, was not much. Many of the ambitious ironclad projects begun by the Confederate Navy ended up as bonfires on the ways before the ships were ever in the water. Delays were epidemic, with so few facilities in the South able to manufacture the many elements that went into an ironclad vessel.

  One ship that did become operational, the first ironclad ever built in the United States, was the Manassas , built as a privateer and commandeered for naval service. In the end she proved to be more of a psychological threat than a physical one, and though she did deliver a few good hits, and stove in some planks, she was never able to sink a Union vessel. Nonetheless, she was enough to frighten Captain John Pope into abandoning the Head of the Passes, in one of the most shameful of all Civil War naval episodes, known today as Pope’s Run.

  Despite that one victory, the small fleet of gunboats and even the two big forts south of New Orleans were not enough to stop Farragut’s heavy ships from fighting their way past. Had the ironclad Louisiana been operational, she might have tipped the balance in the South’s favor, but like so many of the Confederacy’s naval efforts, she was hampered by design and manufacturing problems. In the end she was no more than a floating battery, and not a terribly effectual one at that.

  Like the fledgling United States Navy during the Revolution, facing the might of the Royal Navy, the Confederate Navy had an impossible task from the onset. Eighty years after the Revolution, the problem was exacerbated by technological advances that made it more difficult to compete with the industrialized North. Benedict Arnold could build a fleet of ships in the woods of New York and take on the British on Lake Champlain, but by the mid-nineteenth century, naval warfare was too sophisticated for that sort of thing. The brave men of the Confederate Navy stood up to the Union juggernaut with whatever they had that would float and mount a gun, but in the end they could do no more than delay the inevitable.

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