Admiral Farragut

Convinced of the inutility of his own presence at Vicksburg, and preoccupied with the risks threatening his squadron from the unguarded state of the river and its dangerous navigation, it is not wonderful that Farragut, who was the senior of the two flag-officers, thought little of the single ironclad vessel in his neighborhood. He was not prone to exaggerate danger, and his experience had not led him to entertain any high opinion of the enemy's rams. To these circumstances he owed one of the most mortifying incidents of his career.

On the 15th of July a reconnoitering expedition was sent into the Yazoo, composed of two vessels of Davis's squadron, accompanied by one of the rams which at that time formed an independent organization upon the upper Mississippi under the command of Colonel Ellet. It was a fortunate move, for to this circumstance was due that the squadrons had any notice of the approach of the Arkansas. The detached vessels met her about six miles within the Yazoo, when a running fight ensued between her and the Carondelet, to the disadvantage of the United States vessel; but the sustained cannonade attracted betimes the attention of the fleet, and the Tyler, a small unarmored boat, after supporting the Carondelet to the best of her ability through the action, preceded the combatants down stream, bringing tidings of the ram's approach. There was not time to raise steam—only to cast loose the guns for action. When the Arkansas reached the fleet her smoke-stack had been so often perforated by the Carondelet's shot that her boilers could scarcely supply any steam. Her speed was thereby reduced to one knot, powerless to ram and scarcely sufficient to steer. At that rate, with the favor also of the current, she passed through the United States vessels, suffering from their successive fires much injury, though not of a vital kind, and took refuge under the guns of Vicksburg. It was a most gallant exploit, fairly comparable in daring to the passage of the Mississippi forts, but resulting in no decisive effect upon the issues of the war.

It became immediately advisable for Farragut to rejoin the three ships which lay below the town, and were consequently in a condition favoring an attack by the ram, whose apparent immunity under the fire of the two squadrons showed her an enemy not to be despised. He determined to follow her down at once, again passing the batteries, and endeavoring to destroy her with the guns of his squadron as it went by. The execution of the plan was set for the late afternoon, and the Mississippi flotilla took up a position to support the movement by engaging the upper batteries. Unfortunately, time was lost in forming the order of battle, and the passage was effected in the dark. The uncertainty of aim thus caused was increased by the precaution of the enemy, who shifted his position after nightfall. Two shots only found her, injuring several of her people and setting fire to the cotton bulwarks. Beyond this she received no injury at this time, but she had been severely shaken by the hammering of the morning. A week later, on the 22d of July, Davis sent down the Essex, one of his heavy ironclads, accompanied by one of Ellet's rams, to attack the Arkansas at her moorings. The effort was unsuccessful, although the enemy's vessel received some further injury. The ram rejoined the upper squadron; but the Essex, from her indifferent speed, was unable to return against the current, exposed unsupported to the fire of all the batteries. She therefore became thenceforth a member of the lower squadron, together with a ram called the Sumter, which had run down with Farragut on the 15th.

On the 20th of the month Farragut had received orders from the Navy Department, dated July 14th, directing him to get the part of his fleet above Vicksburg below that place with as little injury and loss of life as possible. The circumstances that have been narrated caused him to receive this dispatch below the town; and on the 24th, two days after the descent of the Essex, he departed for New Orleans. Davis assured him that the Essex and Sumter should look out for the river between Vicksburg and Baton Rouge. To them were joined three of Farragut's gunboats; and the five vessels took an active part in supporting the garrison of Baton Rouge when an attack was made upon the place by the Confederates on the 5th of August. In this the Arkansas was to have co-operated with the enemy's troops, and she left Vicksburg on the 3d for that purpose; but her machinery broke down, and while lying helpless against the river bank the Essex came in sight. Resistance in her then plight was hopeless. She was set on fire by her commander, the crew escaping to the shore. Farragut himself reached Baton Rouge shortly after this happened. He had with much difficulty succeeded in getting the heavier ships to New Orleans on the 28th of July; and there he had lingered, unwilling to leave the river, though desirous of doing so, until affairs seemed on a reasonably secure basis. The chief element of anxiety was the Arkansas, concerning whose power to harm quite exaggerated notions prevailed. While thus lying before New Orleans word was brought him of the attack on Baton Rouge, and he at once retraced his steps with the Hartford, Brooklyn, and some smaller ships. On the 7th he reached the scene of action, and learned the destruction of the Confederate vessel. The same day he wrote to the Department: "It is one of the happiest moments of my life that I am enabled to inform the Department of the destruction of the ram Arkansas; not because I held the iron-clad in such terror, but because the community did." It must have been an additional element of satisfaction to him that the disappearance from the waters of the Mississippi of the last hostile vessel capable of offensive action released him from the necessity of remaining himself, or of keeping a large force there, during the unhealthy season.

Before leaving Vicksburg the crews of the fleet had suffered severely from the sickness common in that climate. The Brooklyn had sixty-eight sick out of a total of three hundred; and as this proportion was less than in the upper river flotilla, where the sick numbered forty per cent of the total force, it is probable that it fairly represents the general condition of Farragut's ships. Among the troops accompanying the expedition there were but eight hundred fit for duty out of over three thousand. It was not considered well to maintain for a longer time in Baton Rouge the small garrison hitherto stationed there. It had honorably repulsed the enemy's attack; but, in the general cessation of offensive movements by the United States army, the Confederates were continually strengthening their forces on the line of bluffs south of Vicksburg, to the importance of which their attention, never entirely diverted, had been forcibly drawn by the advance of the fleet in the previous months. Fruitless as that ill-judged advance had been, it reminded the enemy of the serious inconvenience they would suffer if the United States ships could freely patrol that part of the Mississippi, and impressed upon them the necessity of securing a section of it, by which they could have undisturbed communication between the two shores. This could be done by fortifying two points in such strength that to pass them from either direction would involve a risk too great to be lightly undertaken. The points chosen were Vicksburg and Port Hudson, two hundred miles apart, and embracing between them the mouth of the Red River. The latter is the great artery of the region west of the Mississippi, and also, by means of the Atchafalaya Bayou, offers direct communication for light-draught vessels with the Gulf of Mexico. Port Hudson being less than twenty miles from Baton Rouge, the presence in the latter of a small garrison, which could undertake no offensive movement and which there were no troops to re-enforce, became purposeless. On the 16th of August, 1862, the post was abandoned, and the troops occupying it withdrew to New Orleans.

CHAPTER IX.

THE BLOCKADE AND PORT HUDSON.

1862-1863

Operations in the Mississippi having now temporarily ceased, Farragut was at liberty to give his undivided attention for a time to the coast blockade. The important harbor of Pensacola had been evacuated by the Confederates in May, less than a month after the capture of New Orleans. Its abandonment was due to want of troops to garrison it properly; the pressure of the United States armies in Kentucky and Tennessee, after the fall of Fort Donelson in the previous February, having necessitated the withdrawal of all men that could be spared from other points. Before the war Pensacola had been the seat of a well-equipped navy yard with a good dry-dock, the only naval station of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the evacuation the buildings in the yard had been destroyed and the dry-dock injured; but the fine harbor, the depth of water—twenty-two feet—that could be carried over the bar, and the nearness of the port to Mobile, the most important center of blockade running, all combined to make it the headquarters of the fleet for repairs and supplies. Farragut arrived there on the 20th of August. Just before leaving New Orleans he received his commission as rear admiral, dated July 16, 1862. Three other officers were promoted at the same time to the active list of this grade, which had never before existed in the United States; but as Farragut was the senior in rank of the four, he may be said to have been the first officer of the navy to hoist an admiral's flag.

The admiral remained in Pensacola for three months, superintending from there the affairs of his squadron. During this period the harbors of Galveston and of various other smaller ports on the coast of Texas and Louisiana were occupied by detachments of vessels, as the surest way of enforcing the blockade. The admiral had early announced that he should carry on the blockade as far as possible inside; and these successes enabled him to say in December, 1862, that he now held the whole coast except Mobile. During his stay in Pensacola he received a visit from his son, who found him in the best of spirits, all having gone well on the coast; the only mishap having been the success of a Confederate cruiser, the Oreto, in running into Mobile. She had availed herself of her close resemblance to some of the British cruisers in the Gulf to hoist the British flag; and as visits of these vessels to the blockaded ports were authorized and not infrequent, the ruse induced the United States ship that overhauled her to withhold its fire for a few critical moments. During these the Oreto gained so far on the other that, although struck three times by heavy projectiles, she received no vital injury and succeeded in gaining the shelter of the forts.

The period of the admiral's stay in Pensacola was one of the deepest depression to the Union cause, and his letters bear evidence of the anxiety which he shared with all his fellow-countrymen in that time of distress. The reverses of McClellan in the peninsula, followed by the withdrawal of his army from thence and its transference to northern Virginia, the defeats suffered by Pope, and the first invasion of Maryland, occurred either immediately before or during the time that Farragut was in Pensacola. His own bootless expedition up the Mississippi and subsequent enforced retirement conspired also to swell the general gloom; for, although thinking military men could realize from the first that the position into which the fleet was forced was so essentially false that it could not be maintained, the unreflecting multitude saw only the conversion into repulse and disaster of a substantial success, of a conquest as apparently real as it was actually phantasmal. In the West, Grant was so stripped of troops that he feared the possibility of the Union forces being obliged to withdraw behind the Ohio, as they had in the East recrossed the Potomac. "The most anxious period of the war to me," he afterward wrote, "was during the time the army of the Tennessee was guarding the territory acquired by the fall of Corinth and Memphis, and before I was sufficiently re-enforced to take the offensive"—from July 15 to October 15, 1862.

The Confederate forces which confronted Grant in northern Mississippi during these anxious months interposed between him and Vicksburg, and belonged to the department charged with the defenses of the Mississippi river. As they touched Grant, therefore, on the one side, on the other they were in contact with Farragut's command. The summer passed in various movements by them, threatening Grant's position at Corinth, which culminated on the 3d of October in an attack in force. This was repulsed after hard fighting, and re-enforcements to Grant beginning to come in, the Confederates themselves were thrown on the defensive. The approach of winter, bringing with it higher water and healthier weather on the line of the Mississippi, warned them also that the time was at hand when they might have to fight for the control of the water communications, upon which they no longer had, nor could hope to have, a naval force. Reports therefore began to reach the admiral in Pensacola, from the senior naval officer in the river, that the Confederates were with renewed energy building batteries above Baton Rouge and strongly fortifying Port Hudson.

As there seemed no speedy prospect of obtaining the land force, without whose co-operation an attack upon Mobile would be a fruitless enterprise, Farragut felt his proper position was now in the Mississippi itself. Important as was the blockade service, it was of a character safely to be trusted to a subordinate; whereas the strictly military operations of the approaching campaign, whatever shape they might finally take, would be for the control of the river. It therefore behooved the commander-in-chief of the naval forces to be at hand, ready to support in any way that might offer the effort to obtain control of a region of which the water communications were so characteristic a feature. To push far up a narrow and intricate river a force of ships, whose numbers are insufficient even to protect their own communications and insure their coal supplies, is one thing; it is quite another to repair to the same scene of action prepared to support the army by controlling the water, and by establishing in combined action a secure secondary base of operations from which further advances can be made with reasonable certainty of holding the ground gained. There was no inconsistency between Farragut's reluctance of the spring and his forwardness in the autumn. The man who, to secure New Orleans and compass the fall of the forts, had dared to cut adrift from his base and throw his communications to the winds, because he had an object adequate to the risk, was the same who, six weeks later, had testified his anxiety about communications stretched too far and to no purpose; and now, half a year after that reluctant ascent of the river against his better judgment, we find him eagerly planning to go up again, establishing under the protection of the army an advanced base, from which, with the supplies accumulated at it, further movements may be contemplated with a good chance of final success.

On the 14th of November Farragut reported to the Navy Department his return to New Orleans. The Government, however, had taken warning by the fiasco of the previous season; and, far from urging the admiral on, now sought to impress him with the need for caution. As the great object of opening the Mississippi and obtaining control of it remained, and necessarily must remain, the first of the Government's aims in the Southwest, the result of these instructions was to give Farragut the discretion which had before been denied him. He retained fully his convictions of the summer. "I am ready for anything," he writes to the Department, "but desire troops to hold what we get. General Butler urges me to attack Port Hudson first, as he wishes to break up that rendezvous before we go outside. It will take at least five thousand men to take Port Hudson." In the same spirit he writes home, "I am still doing nothing but waiting for the tide of events, and doing all I can to hold what I have"; and again, a week later, "As Micawber says, I am waiting for something to turn up, and in the mean time having patience for the water to rise." Readiness to act, but no precipitation; waiting for circumstances, over which he had no control, to justify acting, may be described as his attitude at this moment.

On the 16th of December the arrival from the north of General Banks to relieve General Butler—an event which took Farragut much by surprise—gave him the opportunity to show at once his own ideas of the proper military steps to be taken. Banks had brought re-enforcements with him; and three days after his coming the admiral writes to the Department: "I have recommended to General Banks the occupation of Baton Rouge.... It is only twelve or fifteen miles from Port Hudson, and is therefore a fine base of operations. He has approved of the move, and ordered his transports to proceed directly to that point. I ordered Commander James Alden, in the Richmond, with two gunboats, to accompany them and cover the landing." Baton Rouge is on the southernmost of the bluffs which in rapid succession skirt the Mississippi below Vicksburg. With an adequate garrison it became a base of operations from which the army could move against Port Hudson when the time came; and under its protection the colliers and supplies necessary for the naval vessels in the advance could safely remain.

While waiting for the new commander of the army to get fairly settled to work and ready for the combined movement which Farragut was eager to make, the latter was called upon to endure some sharp disappointments. On the 1st of January, 1863, the military forces in Galveston were attacked by Confederate troops, and the naval vessels by a number of river steamboats barricaded with cotton to resist shells fired against them, and loaded with riflemen. The garrison was captured, one of the gunboats blown up by her own officers, and another surrendered after her captain and first lieutenant had been killed on her decks. The other vessels abandoned the harbor. The affair was not only a disaster; it was attended with discreditable circumstances, which excited in the admiral indignation as well as regret. Shortly afterward, two sailing vessels of the squadron, charged with the blockade of Sabine Pass, were also taken by cotton-clad steamers; which to attack availed themselves of a calm day, when the ships were unable to manœuvre. An unsuccessful attempt was made after this to take Sabine Pass; but both that place and Galveston remained in the power of the enemy, and were not regained until the final collapse of the Confederacy. Farragut dispatched one of his most trusted and capable officers, Commodore Henry H. Bell, formerly his chief-of-staff, to re-establish the blockade of Galveston. Arriving off the port toward night, Bell sent one of his detachment, the Hatteras, a light side-wheel iron steamer bought from the merchant service, to overhaul a sail in the offing. Unfortunately, the stranger proved to be the Confederate steamer Alabama, far superior in force to the Hatteras, and after a short engagement the latter was sunk.

All this bad news came in rapid succession, and was closely followed by tidings of the escape from Mobile of the Oreto, which a few months before had eluded the blockading squadron through the daring ruse practiced by her commander. Known now as the Florida, and fitted as a Confederate cruiser, she ran out successfully during the night of January 15th. Here again, though the discredit was less than at Galveston, the annoyance of the admiral was increased by the knowledge that carelessness, or, at the best, bad judgment, had contributed to the enemy's success. From a letter written home at this time by his son, who had not yet returned from the visit begun at Pensacola, it appears that in the intimacy of family life he admitted, and showed by his manner, how keenly he felt the discredit to his command from these events. Though conscious that they were not due to failure on his part to do his utmost with the force given to him, and seeing in the escape of the Oreto a further justification of his own opinion that the lower harbor of Mobile should have been early seized, he nevertheless was "very much worried." This inside view of the effect, visible to those from whom he had no concealments, is supplemented by the description of the admiral's bearing under these reverses given by Captain (now Rear-Admiral) Jenkins, who at this time became his chief-of-staff. "These disasters," he writes, "were sore trials to the admiral, and a less well-poised man would have given way; but they seemed only to give him greater strength of will and purpose.... I myself had the misfortune, after months of watching, to see the Oreto run out the first night after I had been relieved of the command of the Oneida and ordered to report to the admiral as his fleet-captain. I had to bear him these bad tidings. Though no stoic, he bore the news as one accustomed to misfortune." It may seem, indeed, that these events, considered individually, were but instances of the hard knocks to be looked for in war, of which every general officer in every campaign must expect to have his share; and this view is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless, occurring in such rapid succession, and all in that part of his extensive command, the blockade, to which at that moment it seemed impossible to give his principal attention, the effect was naturally staggering. His first impulse was to leave the river and repair in person to the scene of disaster in Texas; but reflection soon convinced him that, however unfortunate the occurrences that had taken place there and elsewhere on the coast, they had not the same vital bearing on the issues of the war as the control of the Mississippi, and therefore not an equal claim upon the commander-in-chief.

At the same time, the effect was to intensify the desire to act—to redeem by success the blot which failures had brought upon his command; and the state of affairs elsewhere on the river was becoming such as to justify enterprise by the reasonable hope of substantial results. A series of circumstances which have been often narrated, and nowhere in a more interesting manner than by General Grant in his personal memoirs, had led to the abandonment of the movement by land upon Vicksburg by the Army of the Tennessee, following the Mississippi Central Railroad. Instead of this original plan of campaign, the Mississippi River was now adopted as the line of advance and of communications. The first move along this new line had been made by General Sherman, who brought with him 32,000 troops, and on the 26th of December, 1862, had landed on the low ground between the mouth of the Yazoo and Vicksburg. On the 29th the army assaulted the works on the hills before them, but were repulsed. Sherman, satisfied that the position there was too strong to be carried, had determined to change his point of attack to the extreme right of the enemy's line, higher up the Yazoo; but the heavy rains which characterized the winter of 1862-'63 in the Mississippi Valley made untenable the ground on which the troops were, and it became necessary to re-embark them. The transports were then moved out into the Mississippi, where they were joined by General McClernand, the senior general officer in the department under Grant himself.

McClernand now decided to attack Arkansas Post, on the Arkansas River, which enters the Mississippi from the west about two hundred miles above Vicksburg. The Post was primarily intended to close the Arkansas and the approach to the capital of the State of the same name; but although fifty miles from the mouth of the river, it was, by the course of the stream, but fifteen by land from the Mississippi. The garrison, being five thousand strong, was thus dangerously placed to threaten the communications by the latter river, upon which the army was to depend during the approaching campaign; and it had already given evidence of the fact by the capture of a valuable transport. This post was reduced on the 11th of January, and McClernand next day started troops up the White River, a tributary of the Arkansas. From this ex-centric movement, which seemed wholly to ignore that Vicksburg and the Mississippi were the objective of the campaign, McClernand was speedily and peremptorily recalled by Grant. The latter, having absolutely no confidence in the capacity of his senior subordinate, could dispossess him of the chief command only by assuming it himself. This he accordingly did, and on the 30th of January joined the army, which was then encamped on the levees along the west bank of the river above Vicksburg.