Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (86 page)

When the Confederates evacuated their Gibraltar at Columbus in February, they left a garrison of 7,000 men and fifty-two big guns at Island No. 10 fifty miles downriver. This strongpoint blocked northern shipping as completely as Columbus had done. Halleck ordered Andrew Foote's river fleet to shell the island batteries while John Pope's newly formed Army of the Mississippi closed in by land from the Missouri side of the river. Foote's seven ironclads and ten mortar boats (large scows, each mounting a thirteen-inch mortar) bombarded the rebel defenses at long range without much effect. Meanwhile Pope gained control of the Missouri bank below the island and brought several shallow-draft transports through a cutoff canal dug by his troops with the aid of contrabands. This penned in the Confederates from three sides, leaving open only a precarious supply line through the swamps on the Tennessee bank of the river. Pope pleaded with Foote for a gunboat to run the gauntlet of guns on the island and protect a downriver troop crossing to close this fourth side. The
Carondelet
did so during a spectacular thunderstorm on the night of April 4 and was followed by a second gunboat two nights later during another storm. Spearheaded by the gunboats, Pope's army crossed the Mississippi, surrounded the garrison, and on April 7 captured its 7,000 men along with guns and equipment the South could ill afford to lose. With only a handful of casualties, Pope achieved what Halleck considered a more brilliant success than Grant at Donelson, and the North acquired a new hero.

After this success, Halleck ordered Pope to join Grant and Buell at

30
. Alexander K. McClure,
Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times
(Philadelphia, 1892), 193–96; Catton,
Grant
Moves
South
, 259–60.

Pittsburg Landing, where Halleck took personal command of the combined armies numbering more than 100,000 men. Assembled there was the greatest concentration of military talent in the war, including four future generals in chief of the United States army: Halleck, Grant, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan (then a captain); and five other present or future commanders of whole armies: Buell, Pope, Rosecrans, George H. Thomas, and James B. McPherson. Halleck could scarcely find a use for all this talent, particularly for Grant. Old Brains still undervalued Grant's worth and put him on the shelf by appointing him to a meaningless post as second in command of the combined forces. An unhappy Grant requested transfer, but in the end he stayed on.

Halleck inched forward toward Corinth, entrenching the whole army at every skirmish with Confederate outposts. If Halleck's precautions made sure that Beauregard could not attack him, they made equally sure that he could not effectively attack Beauregard. Halleck waged war by the book—his book. It was an eighteenth-century Jominian war of maneuver and siege against "strategic points," not a modern war of all-out combat to destroy or cripple an enemy army. Halleck would be happy if he could maneuver Beauregard out of Corinth without a fight. Grant, for one, could not see "how the mere occupation of places was to close the war while large and effective rebel armies existed." But Halleck wanted no part of Grant's kind of war.
³¹

Confederate leaders also considered Corinth a crucial strategic point. "If defeated here," wrote Beauregard two weeks after Shiloh, "we lose the whole Mississippi Valley and probably our cause."
³²
The South scraped up reinforcements from eastern Tennessee and from as far away as the south Atlantic coast. Van Dorn brought 15,000 from Arkansas. By the beginning of May Beauregard had 70,000 men at Corinth. But many were still recovering from their Shiloh wounds, and thousands of others fell ill from typhoid or dysentery. With an inadequate water supply befouled by the army's refuse, Corinth was becoming an ecological trap. As many soldiers died there of disease as had been killed at Shiloh. Faced with this wastage and the prospect of being surrounded by a siege, Beauregard changed his mind about the need to hold Corinth at all costs. As Halleck was extending his lines around the city and hauling forward his siege guns, Beauregard on May 25 decided to pull out. He did so with great skill and stealth, leaving behind only a few stragglers

31
. Grant,
Memoirs
, I, 381.

32
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 403.

and a pestilential town as spoils for Halleck. Fifty miles to the south at his new base in Tupelo, Mississippi, Beauregard pronounced the evacuation of Corinth "equivalent to a great victory."
³³
But Jefferson Davis was shocked and angered by the news. Another such victory would sink the Confederacy. Although Beauregard talked of resuming the offensive, Davis had enough of his Napoleonic plans and Lilliputian execution. When Beauregard took an unauthorized leave of absence to recuperate his broken health, Davis seized the opportunity and replaced him with Braxton Bragg.

With the capture of Corinth, the Union army stood astride the railroad to Memphis. Before Halleck's bluecoats could take the Confederacy's fifth largest city, however, a hybrid fleet on the river did the job. It had not been easy. After the loss of Island No. 10, the next rebel strongpoint on the Mississippi was Fort Pillow, fifty miles above Memphis. In addition to the fort's forty guns, the southerners had a new river defense fleet of eight steamboats converted into armed rams. On May 10 this makeshift navy had surprised the Union fleet at Plum Run Bend above Fort Pillow with a hit and run attack that put two ironclads temporarily out of action with gaping holes below the waterline. The elated southern fleet captain assured Beauregard that the Yankees "will never penetrate farther down the Mississippi."
³⁴

But the bluejackets soon got some rams of their own. The ram concept was a revival of naval tactics from the days of galleys, before the advent of gunpowder and sailing ships (which could rarely be maneuvered to ram another ship) had converted navies to broadside firepower. But the development of steam propulsion made ramming feasible again. Several hundred tons of warship with a reinforced prow moving at even a slow speed could be far more lethal than any shot or shell then in existence. The
Virginia
had proved this at Hampton Roads, and the Confederate river fleet proved it again at Plum Run Bend. The most enthusiastic proponent of ram power was a thin, frail-looking, fifty-seven-year old civil engineer from Pennsylvania, Charles Ellet. Having failed to interest the Union navy in his ideas, Ellet took them to Secretary of War Stanton, who expressed enthusiasm. Stanton made Ellet a colonel and sent him west to develop a ram fleet for river fighting.

Ellet rebuilt nine steamboats according to his own calculations for maximum strength. Preferring riverboat men to naval personnel for his

33
. Williams,
Beauregard
, 155.

34
.
O.R. Navy
, Ser. I, Vol. 23, p. 57.

crews, he signed them up for special service. Ellet commanded the flag-boat himself, and placed his brother Alfred in command of the second boat. Seven other Ellets—brothers, nephews, and a son—also joined the enterprise, some as captains. This remarkable family and its even more remarkable flotilla wanted to prove their mettle by attacking the rebel fleet at Fort Pillow. Beauregard forestalled them by ordering the evacuation of the fort when his withdrawal from Corinth made it vulnerable to land attack. But the Confederates decided to make a stand at Memphis. At sunrise on June 6 the southern river fleet steamed out to challenge five Union ironclads and four of Ellet's rams. Thousands of Memphis residents lined the bluffs to cheer on their side.

But in less than two hours the home team had lost. Charles and Alfred Ellet headed their rams downriver at fifteen knots against the rebel van. The shock of collision between Charles's boat and the leading Confederate ram could be felt on the bluffs. Charles's attack punched a huge hole in the rebel bow, while Alfred's boat squeezed between two southern rams converging on her, causing them to collide with each other. Alfred then circled back and rammed the rebel boat that had survived this crash. Meanwhile the Union gunboats had gotten into the action. Their salvos finished off two crippled Confederate boats, sank another, and captured three others after disabling them. Only one southern vessel escaped downriver. The rebel fleet existed no more. Residents of Memphis watched in sullen silence as Ellet's son Charles, Jr., led a four-man detachment to raise the stars and stripes over the post office. His doughty father, the only significant Union casualty of the conflict, died of his wound two weeks later. Charles, Jr., became the army's youngest colonel at nineteen and subsequently took command of the ram fleet. A year later he too was dead.

The Yankees occupied Memphis and turned it into a base for future operations, while the fleet steamed 300 miles downriver to the Confederacy's next bastion at Vicksburg. Meanwhile the spectacular achievements of the river fleet had been eclipsed by the salt-water navy, which captured New Orleans and pushed upriver to plant the American flag deep in the heart of Dixie.

The capture of New Orleans illustrated the strategic wisdom of Lincoln's desire to attack several places simultaneously. Union pressure in Tennessee had forced southern leaders to strip Louisiana of an army division (which fought at Shiloh) and eight gunboats (the fleet destroyed at Memphis). Left to defend New Orleans were 3,000 short-term militia, some river batteries just below the city where Andrew Jackson had beaten the British in 1815, a mosquito fleet of a dozen small gunboats, two unfinished ironclads, and two forts mounting 126 guns astride the Mississippi seventy-five miles below the city. The defenders relied mainly on these forts, which were expected to blow out of the water any wooden warships foolish enough to breast the three-knot current in an attempt to pass them. But the Union navy had already shown that enough ships with enough big guns commanded by an intrepid sailor were more than a match for brick forts. The navy was about to prove it again; the sailor this time was the most intrepid of all, Flag-Officer David Glasgow Farragut.

Sixty years old, Farragut had gone to sea at the age of nine and fought in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Like Grant, he possessed great force of character rather than a subtle intellect. Although born in Tennessee and married to a Virginian, Farragut's loyalty to the flag he had served for half a century was unswerving. When fellow southerners tried to persuade him to defect, he rejected their entreaties with the words: "Mind what I tell you: You fellows will catch the devil before you get through with this business."
³⁵
They would catch much of it from Farragut himself. In February 1862 he took command of a task force comprising eight steam sloops (frigates drew too much water to get over the bars at the mouth of the Mississippi), one sailing sloop, and fourteen gunboats. Accompanying this force were nineteen mortar schooners to soften up the forts with high-angle fire before the fleet ran past them. To deal with any resistance on land, transports carried to the Gulf 15,000 soldiers commanded by the ubiquitous Benjamin Butler.

By early April, Farragut got his fleet over the bars and up to an anchorage a couple of miles below the forts. From there the mortar schooners began to pound the forts at the rate of 3,000 shells a day. Although this blitz dismounted a few guns and created a great deal of rubble, it did little to reduce enemy firepower. Farragut had never believed much in the mortar attack; after six days of it he decided to run the gauntlet without further delay. Two Union gunboats crept up under the forts one night to cut the chain holding a boom of hulks across the river; though discovered and fired upon, their crews succeeded in making an opening large enough for the fleet to squeeze through single file. At 2:00 a.m. on April 24, seventeen of Farragut's warships weighed anchor and began to steam upriver. The forts opened fire with eighty or

35
. David D. Porter, "The Opening of the Lower Mississippi,"
Battles and Leaders
, II, 22.

ninety guns; the ships replied with twice as many; the mortar fleet recommenced its bombardment; the Confederate ironclad
Louisiana
, moored to the bank with her engines not yet working, cut loose with as many of her sixteen guns as would bear. Three of the rebel gunboats entered the fray and tried to ram Union warships (one of them succeeded, sinking the ten-gun sloop
Varuna
) while the civilian captains of the other rebel boats fled upstream or scuttled their craft. Confederate tugs pushed fire-rafts heaped with flaming pine and pitch into the current to float down on Yankee ships. With all this happening in a space of scarcely a square mile, it was the greatest fireworks display in American history.

Every Union ship that got through, as well as the four that did not, took a heavy pounding; the fleet lost thirty-seven men killed and 147 wounded during the hour and a half it took to pass the forts. The rebels suffered fewer casualties but their mosquito fleet was gone, the unfinished ironclads were destroyed by their crews to prevent capture, the garrisons in the forts later mutinied and surrendered, and the militia scampered for the hinterland. On the morning of April 25, Farragut's ships silenced the river batteries below New Orleans with a broadside or two. The fleet then steamed up to a city filled with burning cotton and cursing mobs brandishing pistols against the eleven-inch guns trained on their streets. A lad of seventeen at the time, George Washington Cable later recalled that on this bleak day "the crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the
Hartford
, standing with lanyard in hand beside a great pivot-gun, so plain to view that you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech and blandly grinned."
³⁶
In a comic-opera scenario of "negotiations," the mayor declined the honor of surrendering the South's largest city. Tiring of this farce, Farragut on April 29 sent the marines to raise the flag over public buildings. Two days later Butler entered New Orleans at the head of his unscathed troops to begin an efficient but remorseless rule of the occupied city.