The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

It was with this utterly inadequate and motley crew of serviceable and unserviceable and positively detrimental ships that Farragut was ordered to reduce the defenses of New Orleans, overthrow its naval resistance and conquer the city.

Farragut was fully aware of the utter inadequacy of the means given to him. He perfectly knew that the effective vessels at his disposal were far fewer and far less formidable than the task set him required. But it was his habit to undertake desperate enterprises with inadequate means, and he had waited a long time for any opportunity, however meager, to serve his country. So, in the great generosity of his mind, he expressed to the Navy Department his willingness to undertake the desperate enterprise with the obviously insufficient, and in part the absurdly worthless, force assigned to him to command.

Then came his orders from the civilians, who, without experience or knowledge, or skill, or any other recognizable qualification for command, controlled the Navy Department. These orders were insulting in their tone and manner. It was quite a matter of course that so old, so tried, so skilful an officer as David Glasgow Farragut would do the very best that was possible with the means placed at his command. Yet the Navy Department people suggested doubt of this by the very terms of the orders they gave him.

These orders instructed him to reduce the defenses of the Mississippi and take possession of New Orleans. They took no account of difficulties. They reckoned not upon things in the way. They merely ordered a thing done as one might order a carpet cleaned or a load of wood sawed into stove lengths. Then those orders went on to say: "As you have expressed yourself perfectly satisfied with the force given to you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can commence operations, the department and the country require of you success."

Could there have been anything more impertinent than this, from a purely civilian department to an officer who for half a century had been accustomed to make success the keynote of all his reports of action? Could there have been anything more insolent or more insulting than the suggestion that David Glasgow Farragut might do less than lay within his power to do toward the accomplishment of any purpose to which he might be commissioned? Could anything be more insolent than the reminder that in consenting to undertake the expedition he had declined to criticise the composition of the fleet concerning which he had not been consulted and had expressed himself as "satisfied" to undertake the expedition with the means provided to his hand?

Now let us consider the terms and conditions of Farragut's problem, the nature of the work he had to do, the tools he had to do it with, and the difficulties he must overcome in order to achieve the success "required" of him.

The Mississippi river is the greatest waterway in the world. It is the middle thread of a system embracing more than sixteen thousand miles of practically navigable rivers, bayous and creeks. In its ramifications it drains no less than twenty-eight states of the Union. In its course it flows from the Rocky Mountains on the one side, the Alleghenies on the other, and the Cumberland, the Ozark, and the Missouri ranges, into a single great stream.

New Orleans lies in a bend of that tortuous stream within about one hundred miles from its mouths.

But this greatest of rivers, dividing the eastern from the western United States, and, in its great tributaries dividing the north from the south, instead of broadening in its course toward the sea after the usual manner of rivers, narrows itself below New Orleans to a width of half a mile or less.

Here the Confederates had established their defenses, or more properly speaking, here they had made themselves masters of defenses created by the National Government before a thought of civil war had arisen in any mind.

So far as the "back door" approach was concerned – the approach by way of Lake Borgne and the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain – New Orleans was adequately defended by the shallowness of the water at critical points. Unless a special fleet of shallow-draught gunboats should be built at Ship Island or elsewhere there was no possibility of reaching the chief city of the Confederacy by that route. Farragut's only hope lay, therefore, in ascending the Mississippi river.

His first obstacle was encountered in the mouth of the Mississippi itself. The great river carries with it to the sea a limitless quantity of mud which it deposits in whatever spot there may be ready to receive it. It is credited by the geologists with having created in this way all the low-lying lands from Cairo to the gulf, a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the river's course. At the several mouths of the stream it is still depositing mud and still pushing the land out into the gulf. Very naturally its mud deposits create bars at the several mouths. Long after the war was over, Captain Eads with his jetties undertook to compel the current to wash out channels in the principal mouths and thus to render easy the approach of ships to New Orleans. But nothing of that kind had been done in the early sixties, and the Federal fleet that was charged with the duty of reducing the forts and capturing the city must first force its way through shifting mud banks in order to get into the river. The useless mortar schooners entered easily by the Pass á l'Outre, but the vessels that were to do the effective fighting had far greater difficulty. It required three weeks of strenuous night and day exertion to force them through the Southwest Pass – the principal mouth of the river – and even then one of them, the Colorado, had to be left outside.

Having thus passed the first and purely natural defense of New Orleans, Farragut had next to encounter the artificial defenses of the river itself. These consisted of two forts at the narrowest part of the stream, together with some adjunctive defenses presently to be mentioned.

These forts were two very imperfectly armed works – Fort St. Philip on the eastern bank, and Fort Jackson on the western. They mounted about 109 effective guns, some of them of obsolete pattern, only a few of which – estimated at fourteen – were protected by casemates. Captain Mahan, in his "Life of Farragut," tells us that these forts had been largely stripped of their armament, and were very imperfectly equipped for the defensive work required of them.

In the river above the forts lay a Confederate war fleet of fifteen vessels, including an iron-clad ram and an iron-clad floating battery, both carrying heavy guns. This fleet had been stupidly weakened by the withdrawal of Hollins's gunboats for inconsequent service at Memphis.

Below the forts was a great chain barrier stretched across the river and supported by hulks anchored in the stream for that purpose. For the protection of this barrier the shores were lined with Confederate sharpshooters – riflemen accustomed to hit whatever they might shoot at.

Having got his fleet into the river after weeks of toil – leaving one very important vessel behind – it was Farragut's task to assail and overcome these defenses and force his way through a strong fleet, up the narrow river to the city he was ordered to capture.

Farragut, as has been said already and as he had bluntly told the Navy Department, had no confidence whatever in the effectiveness of the mortar fleet, which was in charge of its originator, David D. Porter. He would have preferred to leave that part of his squadron behind as an entirely useless and embarrassing incumbrance; but he was a man of generous mind and never arrogantly opinionated. So he gave Porter the fullest possible opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his mortar fleet.

There were twenty-one of the mortar schooners, each carrying a mortar of thirteen inches caliber, which threw shells weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds each. These shells were filled with such charges of gunpowder as made them, in theory at least, terrible engines of destruction when they exploded. It was Porter's firm conviction that by their fire alone he could compel the Confederates to abandon their forts and leave the way clear for the fleet to sail on up the river with only the Confederate war vessels to contest their passage. Farragut did not expect any such result, but he gave Porter every opportunity.

Securely anchored in a position of Porter's own selection, the mortar schooners opened fire on the eighteenth of April. For six consecutive days and nights they threw their fearful missiles, each in itself a mine, into the forts. They threw in all six thousand of these shells, weighing in the aggregate no less than eight hundred and fifty-five tons. They killed or wounded only fifty men – a picket guard in numbers – or, as Dr. Rossiter Johnson has curiously calculated, they killed or wounded about one man to every sixteen tons of iron hurled into the forts.

This was at the rate of only eight casualties a day, a bagatelle in war and very naturally a bombardment so slightly effective utterly failed to render the forts untenable or to drive out the brave men who were set to defend them. On the contrary the Confederate fire in response to the mortars sank one of the schooners and disabled one of the steamers.

Thus was again taught the familiar lesson of war, that the terrific is not necessarily the effective fire in battle.

So far from abandoning their forts under this fearful rain of metal and explosives the Confederates were busying themselves night and day in determined and intelligently directed efforts to destroy their adversary's fleet. They sent down the river a multitude of blazing fire-rafts, and it required not only all of Farragut's wonderful foresight and ingenuity but constant and very earnest exertions on the part of his crews to ward off this danger.

At last the mortar experiment was done. It had utterly failed to accomplish its intended purpose of reducing the forts or compelling their evacuation. Farragut was dealing with an enemy of his own determined kind, an enemy as resolute, as daring, and as patiently enduring as he himself was.

He decided at last to push his fleet past the forts at all hazards, and, leaving those works as an enemy in his rear, to try conclusions in a decisive battle with the Confederate fleet that lay in wait for him in the river above. It was a dangerous and a daring thing to do. Indeed, it was almost desperately daring. But Farragut's habit of mind was daring. Moreover his orders on this occasion offensively and insultingly "required" success at his hands. It was his fixed purpose either to achieve that success or to sink beneath the muddy waters of the Mississippi in a determined effort to achieve it.

His first care was to sever the chain barrier across the river. To that end he sent a force up the stream which gallantly boarded one of the hulks, cut the chain, and rendered that defense useless.

On the morning of April 24, at 3.30 o'clock, the fighting part of the fleet advanced in full force, engaging the enemy to the right and left, but meanwhile pushing its way up the river without waiting for results at the point of obstruction.

The forts were quickly passed and then ensued one of the most picturesque water battles ever fought. The Confederates knew their business and they did it with a skill and determination which excited Farragut's admiration, as he was afterwards accustomed to testify in glowing words of recognition.

Captain Theodorus Bailey, with eight vessels, was the first to pass the forts. He immediately became involved in a desperate encounter with the Confederate fleet. His flagship, the Cayuga, was engaged at once by three Confederate vessels, each determinedly trying to board and capture her; for this was a battle of giants in which every officer and every man on either side was ready for any conceivable deed of "derring-do," and in which personal courage of the most dauntless sort was the one military equipment which both sides possessed in absolutely limitless supply.

Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the destruction.

That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey. Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its purpose the Oneida and the Varuna came to the rescue. The Oneida rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The Varuna had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and running ashore, sank helplessly.

The Pensacola sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their precincts.

The Mississippi, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by the Confederate iron-clad Manassas. But, by way of revenge, the Mississippi's guns riddled the ram and destroyed it.

In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, ran aground upon a mud bank and for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position.

If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight" he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other, are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody work they were set to do.

The net result of the contest was the destruction of the Confederate fleet. With that out of the way Farragut pushed on to New Orleans and with guns out for action, demanded the city's surrender.

Only one issue was possible, of course. The city was at Farragut's mercy. He could easily destroy it should it resist. It only remained for him to hoist the National flag over it and to send for General Butler's land force to occupy and possess the chief city of the South, which he did on the first of May.

Butler's rule in the city, where the white population at that time consisted chiefly of women and children, was harsh and even brutal – so harsh and so brutal in its attitude toward women as to offend sentiment both North and South, and in Europe.

He issued one order which could not have come from the headquarters of any man of soldierly instincts or gentle associations. By way of resenting the attitude and conduct of women toward a conquering soldiery, he put forth a decree in these words:

General Orders No. 28

Headquarters, Dept. of the Gulf,New Orleans, May 15, 1862.

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

By order of Major-General Butler.

George C. Strong,

Assistant Adjutant General and

Chief of Staff.

It needs no argument and no exposition to show that in issuing this order Benjamin F. Butler deliberately gave license and authority to the most brutal impulses of the most degraded men under his command, – authorizing them to judge for themselves when they should choose to think themselves insulted "by word, gesture, or movement," and upon every such occasion, without further inquiry, and upon their own initiative, to treat every woman who had occasion to venture into the streets as "a woman of the town plying her avocation."

With the cynicism that had equipped him for practice in the criminal courts of Boston, Butler afterwards explained his order by saying that the only right way to treat "a woman of the town plying her avocation," is to pass her by unnoticed. But he perfectly knew that that was not what his order meant to his soldiery or what he meant it to mean.

The rigor of Butler's rule in New Orleans was in some other respects salutary. He wantonly imprisoned many citizens – men and women indifferently – without warrant or just cause, but apart from that he ruled the city to its advantage. In mortal dread of yellow fever, he cleaned New Orleans as it had never been cleaned before, and throughout a hot summer he kept the city healthier than it had ever been in all its history.

Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every Confederate port.

To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult, and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile.

The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay. They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson.

Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey. But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness, quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the maintenance of their armies in the field.

Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did, the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of its official head.

Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg, where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and Sherman were ready to do it well.

This judgment does not rest upon the opinion of the author of this history. It is supported in every detail by the skilled criticism of no less a naval authority than Captain Mahan. In his "Farragut," page 116 et seq., that highest authority in naval criticism has written:

"The principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above New Orleans. Nor was this the worst. The time thus consumed in marching up the hill in order at once to march down again threw away the opportunity for reducing Mobile before its defenses were strengthened. Had the navy been large enough, both tasks might have been attempted; but it will appear in the sequel that its scanty numbers were the reason which postponed the attack on Mobile from month to month until it became the most formidable danger Farragut ever had to encounter."

In other words, the policy of setting a Gideon Welles to direct the naval operations of a Farragut, resulted in making a difficult task out of a very easy one. The fall of New Orleans served to warn the Confederates of the danger in which Mobile lay, and while Welles was keeping Farragut uselessly and against his will in the Mississippi, skilled Confederate engineers were strengthening the Mobile defenses and planting the harbor of that port with destructive mines and torpedoes, so that Farragut's task of closing that port, when months later he was reluctantly permitted to undertake it, was difficult and perilous in the extreme, where it had been simple, easy, and scarcely at all dangerous to ships or seamen at the time when he had asked permission to proceed to its accomplishment.

But the Pinafore practice of setting an untrained, inexperienced and ignorant politician to direct the scientific and strictly professional work of highly trained naval officers, is too firmly imbedded in our system of administration to be disturbed by considerations of mere common-sense. When war is on, the country pays the penalty of this folly.

CHAPTER XXVI

McClellan's Peninsular Advance

We have already seen from his own reports what McClellan thought of the force he was called upon to command at and near Washington after the disastrous defeat of McDowell at Manassas. There was, he said, "no army to command – a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home… Washington was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority."

Slowly, patiently, painfully, McClellan brought order out of this chaos of demoralization. Out of the broken and utterly dispirited fragments of McDowell's army and out of the new, raw levies sent to him he created that Army of the Potomac which fought the great campaigns of the war.

In the meantime an ignorant and impatient popular clamor and an unintelligent press "opinion" – for there is a certain type of newspaper editor who is apt to regard his own hasty and ill-informed judgment of things that he knows little or nothing about, as an "opinion" – hounded and persecuted the man who was expected to retrieve the Manassas defeat. Even Mr. Lincoln, with all his patience, became impatient of McClellan's inaction – which was excessive perhaps – and almost angrily urged him to action. He called the general's attention to the fact that he had under his command a force greatly superior in numbers to any that the Confederates could muster and that the country was impatient for an advance.

McClellan seems to have had no thought of making his way to Richmond by the route of Centreville and Manassas, where Johnston lay behind impregnable fortifications. He knew the easier road of approach up the James river from Fortress Monroe as a base of operations. But, at all hazards, the Government, the press and the people insisted, Washington city must be covered and protected, and so McClellan's first care was to feel of the works at Centreville and Manassas before transferring his army down the Potomac and the Chesapeake to Fortress Monroe. Accordingly, on the tenth of March, 1862, he pushed a column forward toward Centreville and Manassas only to find those strongly fortified positions already abandoned. General Johnston had interpreted McClellan's plans aright, and was transferring his army to the Peninsula east of Richmond in order to meet his adversary's confidently-expected advance in that quarter.