The Crescent Spy (29 page)

The two lead Union ships each fired another shot. These also fell short. They followed the third boat in drifting slowly back downriver. And that was the end of the engagement.

But alarming news soon reached Fort Jackson from Hollins’s boats. Farragut had seized Head of Passes and run up the Stars and Stripes at Pilottown. He’d sent fast picket boats upriver, and when Hollins’s steamers came down with the hope of sinking an unwary enemy vessel, they’d found the Union navy well organized and with an aggressive posture.

More information came from a pair of fishermen Hollins’s men had picked up in the river. Much of Farragut’s fleet had crossed, although the larger, deeper-draft ships remained in the Gulf. Some of these ships drew as many as twenty feet and needed to be lightened before they could be forced over the bar. Meanwhile, General Benjamin Butler was waiting on Ship Island off the coast of Mississippi with an invasion force of twenty thousand men. An argument broke out among the officers at dinner as to whether it would be possible to get the heavier Union ships upriver, and whether they’d be effective even if they could cross the bar.

Not if
Louisiana
and
Mississippi
could be brought to the fight, it was decided. The huge ironclads would blast the wooden Yankee vessels straight to hell. Why the devil were they still upriver, unable to move under their own power, unable to fight?

The next morning, Josephine returned to New Orleans with the first steamer, composing articles about the breaking river barrier, the brief battle downriver from the fort, and her speculation about how the Confederates would win the struggle.

She returned to her lodging at Nellie Gill’s house to discover a messy stack of correspondence, most of it relating to her work with the
Crescent
, but also a short, cryptic letter.

You are a cold, cruel person, harder than any man and more cunning than any woman. You have abandoned us to poverty and ruin. I would remind you of your mother’s prior affections, but your heart is as cold and unfeeling as iron. May you gain the reward you so richly deserve.

F. D.

Josephine didn’t know what to make of it. The writing was neat, a woman’s hand. And the initials—F. D.—could only mean Francesca Díaz again. The woman’s attempts at blackmail having failed, she had apparently been reduced to begging. Yet there was no specific plea for money, no address to send such a sum should the note prick Josephine’s conscience.

And what of the accusation? Josephine didn’t know the predicament to which the woman alluded, and wouldn’t have been responsible for it if she had. No doubt it had something to do with the Colonel and his spendthrift ways, backed by some reference to the friendship that had existed between Francesca and Josephine’s mother while the two women traveled and performed on
Crescent Queen.
Beyond that, Josephine was baffled.

“I owe you nothing,” she said aloud. “You approached
me.
You threatened
me
.”

The note troubled Josephine for several days, but her work and the rapidly changing situation in the city soon put it out of her mind. General Lovell had placed the city under martial law. Men over the age of sixteen were required to take a loyalty oath or vacate the city at once. Travel between parishes was restricted to those with passports. Josephine had no trouble securing one.

By the end of March, New Orleans began to resemble Washington City after the Battle of Manassas the previous summer. Lovell had raised thousands of new recruits, and they were drilling endlessly on the parade ground and in the public squares. Every day barges carried heavy guns downstream to the forts, together with all of the other matériel of war. The boats of the mosquito fleet, clad in iron and bales of cotton, steamed south, carrying more men and supplies.

Josephine despaired that Farragut and Butler would arrive in New Orleans to find it filled with twenty thousand Confederates, hollering mad and ready to repel any invasion.

But on the sixth of April, word began trickling into New Orleans of a battle raging at a Tennessee church by the name of Shiloh. At first, the news brought jubilation. General Grant was routed, falling back under the assault of Johnston and Beauregard. By the seventh, it seemed that the battle had become a bloody stalemate between a hundred thousand men, with tens of thousands dead and wounded.

But within a few days, it became clear that while both sides had taken and delivered terrible blows, only one army remained standing when the battlefield cleared: the North. Meanwhile, Union gunboats had seized another large fortress on the Mississippi. Memphis was threatened.

A desperate President Davis telegraphed General Lovell to send his new troops north to defend Corinth and Memphis. Lovell had no choice but to comply. Men began streaming out of the city on their way to points north.

In New Orleans, the people knew. Only Fort Jackson and Fort Philip guarded the downriver approach to New Orleans. If they fell, so would the city.

O
n the evening of April 15, Josephine had retired to her room at Nellie Gill’s house to write her story for the next day, as well as put together more notes about the preparations, rumors, and attitude in the city, when a frantic knocking at the front door brought her to the window. Solomon Fein stood at the door, pounding. A carriage and driver waited in the street.

“Thank God you’re here,” he said when Josephine had thrown on a shawl and rushed downstairs. “It has started.”

“You mean the surveying?”

Word had been trickling into the city for the past two days that Farragut had sent crews of surveyors up near the forts under protection of gunboats. While the gunboats drove off Confederate sharpshooters, the Yankees planted flags in the brush and weeds along shore. The Confederates returned at night to seek out and pull up as many markers as they could find. The fear was that the Union intended to pull their mortar boats just beyond range of Fort Jackson’s guns, from which point they could bomb the fort to rubble.

“The surveying is done,” Fein said. “The enemy towed some bomb boats into position downriver and is testing his mortars.”

“What do you think, another feint?”

Fein shook his head. “Lovell is at the fort. He telegraphed New Orleans and said in no uncertain terms that the attack has begun. This is it—the big story. I’m going down to cover it myself. My boat leaves in thirty minutes. I want you to come with me, but I won’t force you. It will be risky. People will die.”

“I’m coming.”

Josephine’s heart was thumping along at a good pace now as she raced upstairs to pack a carpetbag. When she came outside, Fein was already in the cab, and he leaned out the door, beckoning urgently. All the way to the levee, he drummed his fingers on his knee, cracked his knuckles, double-checked his own writing supplies, took off his glasses to polish them, then repeated the drill.

They raced down the dock and reached the boat just as one man was untying the rope and another was preparing to haul up the gangplank. The river was calm and the air cool as they slipped downriver. The sounds of a brass band reached her ears from Jackson Square, but was shortly replaced by the throb of the boiler, the churn of the wheel, and the smooth, liquid sound of the river itself, sliding past the hull.

Within a few hours, Josephine heard a rumble as of distant thunder. The soldiers on deck leaned over the rail, listening quietly. Boats from the mosquito fleet eased by off port, and signal lights flashed between them.

The rumble grew louder as the night continued, and she remembered the battle of the previous summer, the pounding of artillery, the shaking ground. It would get worse. Her hands tightened around the railing. Soon, she could see flashes on the horizon.

Fein found her on deck and lit a cigarette. “I tried to sleep, but it’s no use.” He held up his hand, to show how it trembled. “I’m all nerves. I don’t know how you managed in Virginia.”

“They call it ‘seeing the elephant,
’
” she said. “The first time you’re in battle. You don’t know how you’ll fare—if you’ll fight, or if you’ll cower and be trampled.”

He gave a nervous laugh. “I’m thinking trampled.”

“Want me to ask the captain if he’ll put you to shore?”

“No. I won’t cower in New Orleans while good men give their lives. So I’ll have to go forward, coward or no. I only wish I were as brave as you.”

“I’m not brave,” she assured him. “I’m terrified.”

B
ut when they reached the forts in the morning, the attack had ceased. The Union had crept up to a loose raft in the barrier in the night and set off a submarine charge, which destroyed the raft and opened a gap in the barrier. Confederate steamers had assembled to repair the breach. Other than that, there was little evidence of an attack, only a few gaps in the earthworks where mortars had exploded.

Major Dunbar was talking to Ludd from the
Picayune
on the parapet when Josephine found him cheerfully pointing out the Union sloops downriver, out of range of Jackson’s guns.

When the major spotted Josephine, he excused himself from Ludd, who appeared visibly annoyed at her arrival, and led her along the parapet.

“There will be more trouble to come,” Dunbar said. “But we’ve weathered the first attack.”

She glanced to the center of the fort, where Ludd had descended to greet Fein in front of barracks newly bombproofed with sod. The conversation between the two men seemed cordial enough.

“We heard the enemy fire,” she said. “It sounded like mortars, but I only see cannons, and they’re out of range.”

Dunbar pointed downstream around the bend, opposite the Union sloops. “There’s a mortar flotilla behind the trees. If you look, you can spot one of the masts poking up. About four thousand yards. We could hit them with our rifled guns if not for the woods.”

It was exactly the stretch of woods she’d identified earlier, and she thrilled at the thought that her reconnaissance might have made it into Farragut’s plans. He was using the trees perfectly, lobbing mortars over the top while using them to shield his boats.

“Is the mortar fire accurate?” she asked.

“Cursedly so,” Dunbar said cheerfully. “But he has fired at least—”

His voice cut out as a thump sounded from downstream. The shell was moving slowly enough that she could see it rise above the woods, form a large arc, then begin to descend. All of a sudden she remembered reading about a Union soldier who’d watched a cannonball bouncing lazily toward him, thinking he’d had time to move, only to have his legs torn off.

Dunbar must have thought the same thing, because he threw his arms around her and dragged her to the ground, where he shielded her with his body until the shell hit and detonated somewhere on the opposite side of the fort.

Josephine rose and dusted herself off. “Was that necessary, sir?”

“My apologies, but it is better to be safe than . . . Good heavens!”

She followed his gaze. The mortar had landed on the drawbridge on the far side of the fort and had not only blown a hole in it and made it impassible to horse or cart, but had also snapped off a pole that strung the telegraph line in and out of the fort.

He raced off to see to repairs. No sooner had he departed than the Union “bummer” crews began launching a barrage of mortars that were soon falling every twenty to thirty seconds. Josephine retreated to one of the sod-covered bombproofs to wait out the attack.

When the barrage ended, soldiers came into the yard to put out fires.

T
hat night, she spoke with General Lovell, two colonels, and a captain from the mosquito fleet who came ashore expressly to meet with her.

“You’ve just come from New Orleans?” the captain asked. “Any news on the ironclads?”

“Neither can move under her own power. It will be weeks before they can leave the levee.”

He cursed, then hurried off, muttering something about towing them into place as floating batteries. The next morning, she met two other naval officers, and it was clear that they, too, were more pessimistic about the looming battle than the sanguine men of the forts.

The mortar fire continued on and off through the night of the sixteenth and into the following day. Commodore Hollins sent a few gunboats beyond the barrier to attack a group of Union surveyors, but two Union ships soon chased them back into the protection of Jackson’s guns.

The Confederates had by now assembled a large collection of fire rafts above Fort St. Philip of the same kind that had thrown chaos into the Union during the skirmish at Head of Passes last October. Each was the size of a Mississippi flatboat, and stacked high with hundreds of cords of fast-burning pine, together with cotton, tar oil, and other combustibles.

Not long after the incident with the gunboats and the surveyors, the Confederates lit four fire rafts, opened the barrier, and towed them through. They flamed so high as they passed the fort that Josephine could feel the heat from where she watched on the parapets. Once through the barrier, the rafts drifted lazily downstream toward the Union ships. Three floated harmlessly to one side, but a fourth came straight toward one of the big sloops.
Hartford
, she thought. Before it got too close, a Union gunboat took it in tow and hauled it away. Shells from the fort splashed short.

In the early afternoon, Hollins tried again, this time sending three steamers downriver. They took position in the middle of the river and shelled the mortar boats for several minutes before two of the bigger Union warships came upstream. Staying out of range of Jackson’s probing attacks, the Union ships traded blows with the undersized guns of the mosquito fleet. When one shot knocked over a mast of a Confederate steamer, Hollins’s remaining two boats were forced to take it in tow and retreat upriver.

Josephine watched and noted all of these events from the parapet, her paper on her satchel, where she wrote furiously during lulls in the action. She stuffed cotton into her ears for when shells exploded nearby, or when one of the fort’s big guns let off an exploratory shot, and she flattened on the ground every time a mortar came flying in. Otherwise, she didn’t let the fighting drive her inside. Every hour or so Fein came up to ask how she was faring, then light a cigarette with a shaky hand and let it smolder without smoking before he went below again.

Mortar fire continued into the night, but it was quiet enough in the small room they’d given her in one of the bombproofs, with only a dull rumble above, that she could almost believe those defenders who were still convinced that the Union action was a feint to draw attention away from the real action upriver.

So far, both attacks and defensive sallies had seemed probing, almost playful. She’d heard of no deaths, either in the fort or in Hollins’s mosquito fleet, and only a few reports of injuries. The Union could no doubt say the same thing, given the ineffectual Confederate fire.

Josephine was so tired that she slept soundly. Only direct hits woke her, and then only briefly, as the building shook, and dirt fell through the rafters from the sod above. But as she woke the next morning, she immediately sensed a change in the intensity of Union fire. She climbed the parapet to find Dunbar up top with a spyglass.

He glanced in her direction. “They’re closer, look.”

She took the spyglass. The Union bummers had towed their mortar schooners upriver to the places surveyed earlier, where they were still concealed by the trees. Only the forward-most boats lay within range of Jackson’s fire from the casemates, but even then, only partially exposed.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

It sounded like a distant drum, the drumhead in need of tightening. Dunbar grabbed her and dragged her down behind the parapet just as the bombs began to fall. They exploded overhead, and the walls shook. Smoke hung in the air when she lifted her head, and men were running, ducking across the yard below them. The nearest mortar had hit no more than thirty feet away, leaving a blackened crater on the parapet. She climbed back up, shaken, her head ringing.

Soon enough, she was forced to abandon the wall walk, as the mortar fire intensified, then intensified again. Josephine found relative safety with the men operating one of the eleven-inch cannons firing shells in response. A division of Union gunboats had come within range and now began to shell the fort, and this attracted the fire from the well-protected cannons inside.