Lincoln's Admiral Page 7

  David Porter was given command of the mortar vessels he had so energetically maintained were needed for the successful reduction of the river forts. And as he was soon traveling to New York on business connected to the purchase of ships for conversion to that use, Welles instructed him to meet informally with his stepbrother to sound him out. The two met in Brooklyn’s Pierpont House for what Farragut thought was a congenial reunion.

  After a brief conversation covering personal matters, Porter went far beyond his instructions, as was his habit, and told Farragut he had been empowered to offer him “the best command in the Navy.” He asked Farragut if he would accept a command that would send him deep into enemy territory. Farragut hesitated, then expressed a desire not to be sent to Norfolk to fight against his own in-laws and close friends. Porter told him he was not the man the Navy Department was looking for, if he was reluctant to carry out whatever duty was assigned him. He then proceeded beyond all bounds, telling Farragut that Norfolk was the target of the campaign for which he was being considered. Tortured by the conflict between fighting his own relations and keeping his oath to his country, Farragut agonized over his response to Porter’s question. Finally, he said he would accept such a command and conduct it with no hesitancy. Porter then revealed that the actual target was New Orleans. Farragut must have been greatly relieved that he was not being offered a command that would send him against the city that had been his home, and in which his own house was located. When they parted, Porter told Farragut he would hear from the Navy shortly.

  The following day, Farragut received instructions to come to Washington for a conference. Upon arriving early in the morning on Saturday, December 21, he was met at the train station and taken to the home of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Navy Undersecretary Fox’s brother-in-law. Blair had been taken into the navy’s confidence concerning the proposed New Orleans expedition. Following breakfast, Fox outlined the project and asked Farragut if he thought the plan could succeed, to which the captain answered in the affirmative. Did he think he could accomplish the task of reducing the forts and taking New Orleans? Once again, the reply was affirmative.

  Fox told him he was to be given command of the squadron and was expected to succeed. Unable to hide his pleasure at the assignment, Farragut told the undersecretary, “I expect to pass the forts and restore New Orleans to the government, or never return. I may not come back, but the city will be ours.” Handed a list of the vessels already committed to the project, Farragut remarked that he could run the forts with fewer ships. Although he was not enthusiastic about the inclusion of Porter’s mortar boats, which he felt would only serve to advise the enemy of the approaching fleet and considerably and needlessly slow the operation down, he would accept them as planned.

  Fox, and later Welles, when the former reported the results of the meeting to him, were both satisfied they had selected the right man. Fox was impressed by Farragut’s enthusiasm for the project, and Welles by the modest self-reliance exhibited by Farragut, who nonetheless “saw himself equal to the emergency and to the expectation of the government.”

  Not everyone was pleased with the selection Welles had made. Some members of Congress questioned Farragut’s loyalty, others his lack of demonstrated ability to lead a wartime squadron. But Welles knew he had made the right decision. He was determined to stand firm, and refused to be swayed by what he regarded as biased views by politicians, some of whom had their personal candidates for the important assignment.

  Two days later a naval messenger arrived at the Hastings-on-Hudson cottage with instructions that Captain David Farragut prepare himself for orders to assume command of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron.

  The current commanding officer of the Gulf Blockading Squadron, Flag Officer William McKean, who was ill and awaiting relief from his command, was told that the squadron would be divided into two independent units. He would command the East Squadron centered on the Florida coast, and Farragut the West Squadron, covering the rest of the Gulf coast all the way to the Rio Grande.

  During the second week of January 1862, Farragut received the following communication from Welles.

  “Sir: You are hereby appointed to command the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron, and you will proceed to Philadelphia and report to Commodore Prendergast; and when the United States steam sloop-of-war Hartford shall be prepared in all respects for sea, you are authorized to hoist your flag on board that vessel.” Further instructions would follow, before his departure.

  Captain Farragut, soon to be Flag Officer Farragut, accompanied by his wife, Virginia, and their seventeen-year-old son Loyall, moved into Philadelphia’s Continental Hotel while the Hartford was being readied for service. He received his final orders on January 20, 1862. In addition to other details, it instructed him to “proceed up the Mississippi River and reduce the defenses which guard the approaches to New Orleans, when you will appear off that city and take possession of it under the guns of your squadron, and hoist the American flag therein, keeping possession until troops can be sent to you.”

  On January 23, the USS Hartford, with the square pennant of Flag Officer David Farragut snapping in the cold breeze, left Philadelphia and steamed down the Delaware River toward the open sea.

  THE USS HARTFORD was a beautiful sight as she glided down the Delaware River. A wooden-hulled sloop-of-war powered by steam engines and a full rigging of sail, she was 226 feet long, with a beam of forty-three feet, weighed 2,790 tons, and carried a compliment of twenty-two nine-inch smoothbore guns on her broadsides, and two twenty-pound Parrott rifles. Launched at Boston in 1858, the Hartford was a sister ship to the Brooklyn, which Farragut had commanded so ably during the Mexican civil war. His familiarity with this type of vessel proved extremely helpful, for the Hartford would be not only his headquarters, but his home while at sea for the rest of the war.

  The Hartford dropped anchor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on January 28, 1862, where the remainder of her crew was awaiting her arrival. It was one day after President Lincoln issued General War Order Number One, appointing February 22 “the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.” While there, Farragut wrote to his wife, Virginia, “You can better imagine my feelings at entering Hampton Roads as an enemy of Norfolk than I can. But, thank God, I had nothing to do with making it so.”

  Anticipating that the coming battle with the two river forts would result in many killed and wounded aboard his ships, Farragut decided to modify the frigate Potomac so she could serve as a hospital ship. This would mean that wounded, sick, and injured sailors and marines could receive quick professional medical care before they were transferred to a distant, land-based hospital. Explaining this decision, he wrote to Undersecretary Fox that the men under his command would be gratified to know that medical care was so readily available, for they all knew that “more men lose their lives from bleeding to death from want of early attention, than from the severity of their wounds.” He wanted large quantities of tourniquets and other medical supplies to stock on the Potomac.

  After a brief stopover at Havana, where he showed the flag and his impressive ship to several Confederate vessels and Spanish and French warships anchored at that neutral port, Farragut arrived at Ship Island, Mississippi, on February 20. Flag Officer McKean was there waiting for him, and the two made quick work of transferring several ships from McKean’s to Farragut’s command. A short time later, McKean left for his new base at Key West.

  Dividing the Gulf Blockading Squadron into two separate commands, East and West, served two purposes. The first and most obvious, was that each squadron commander could focus his attention on a smaller portion of the Confederate coast with better results expected from each command. The second was that it enabled Welles to send Farragut to the Gulf for the purpose of attacking New Orleans, without giving the enemy a hint of the intended goal. The suberfuge was only partially successful, since veteran sailors knew Farragut was not the
kind of man to spend too many months sitting off the enemy’s shores without taking some kind of real action against the Confederacy.

  Ship Island was a natural jumping-off point for vessels heading up the Mississippi River. Named for its ship-like formation, the barren stretch of land, 100 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River and thirty miles south of Biloxi, Mississippi, had been used as a base by the Royal Navy during the War of 1812. It now served as the United States Navy’s sole base along the Confederate-controlled Gulf Coast. With the same high-energy style he had used years earlier at Mare Island, Farragut immediately went to work preparing Ship Island for its role as the base for his invasion of Louisiana. Lieutenant George Dewey described the atmosphere on Ship Island after Farragut’s arrival as being “surcharged with his energy.” Dewey considered Farragut his ideal of a naval officer, “urbane, decisive, indomitable.”

  For the next few weeks, Farragut worked on his detailed plans for the coming campaign. During this same period, the other ships assigned to his squadron gradually began arriving at the island marshaling point. On March 18, Farragut sent a small party into Biloxi to raid the post office and obtain copies of local newspapers. These provided encouraging news about Union victories at Nashville, and at Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River. He continued gathering intelligence concerning the Mississippi River and its tidelands from the efforts of men assigned to his squadron from the Coast Survey, whom he sent out to locate and mark channels through which his larger ships could pass. Unlike most rivers, the Mississippi does not open to the sea at a wide mouth, but instead divides itself into a series of five outlets into the Gulf. These passes, as they are called, tend to become clogged with mud washing down the long river, and become so shallow that during peacetime dredging operations were under way almost continuously. Since the outbreak of the war, not much dredging had been done, so the passes were in unusually bad condition for the passage of large ships. The situation was exacerbated by the constantly shifting riverbed, which made identifying a permanent channel through the mud nearly impossible.

  Farragut’s instructions from Washington were based on the Navy Department’s incorrect assessment that the water flowing through at least several of the passes was nineteen feet deep. This would allow for easy passage of all his ships, with the exception of the forty-gun frigate Colorado. A plan had been developed to lighten the Colorado by removing her guns and supplies, including water casks. When these measures failed to reduce the great warship’s draft enough to get her into the river, her guns were distributed to other ships, and she was left at Ship Island.

  On March 7, the first day of the two-day Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, a pivotal fight for control of the Trans-Mississippi region, Farragut decided that the Hartford and the Brooklyn should enter the river and steam to the planned assembly point, a group of bleak little buildings squatting atop pilings driven into the mud, called Pilot Town. From there the infamous river forts were only thirty miles upriver. Using the information the government had supplied him, he selected the pass closest to Ship Island for his entry, Pass à l’Outre. Both ships drew approximately sixteen feet of water and should have made the river entry without incident if the Navy Department’s information had been correct. Unfortunately, the pass hadn’t been used by large vessels for several months, and the endless flow of sediment down the mighty river had caused the mud barrier to reach a height that prevented the sister ships from entering. For three days, the two warships struggled to penetrate the pass, each in turn finding herself stuck in the mud for several hours at a time.

  Finally, with the Brooklyn grounded and unable to move under her own power for seventeen hours, a frustrated Farragut gave up the effort. With lines passed between the two ships, the Hartford strained her engines to pull the Brooklyn loose. After several hours of exertion, the Brooklyn was finally freed, and both sloops steamed west. Despite a brief grounding of the Brooklyn, they succeeded in entering the river through the Southwest Pass. One by one the ships of Farragut’s squadron arrived and made their way through the passes to the assembly point. Farragut sent several companies of sailors and marines from his gunboats ashore to occupy the dozen or so buildings at Pilot Town. Having accomplished this without incident, they immediately began converting the ramshackle buildings into hospitals and warehouses.

  On March 18, Commander David Porter arrived at Pilot Town with his fleet of twenty mortar boats towed by seven steamers and dropped anchor. Several of the steamers were sent downriver to help the larger Union warships cross the mud-obstructed Southwest Pass. Using one of his own gunboats, the Winona, Farragut returned to Southwest Pass and personally supervised the lightening and dragging of the seventeen-gun side-wheel steamer Mississippi and the twenty-three-gun sloop Pensacola over the mud bar.

  With both ships stripped of every item that could be removed, including all coal not required for the passage, the steamers tugged and pulled for four days before getting the Mississippi across the mud. The Pensacola was another story. Her commander, Captain Henry W. Morris, attempted to ram his way through the pass, but accomplished little except to lock his ship securely in several feet of mud. Angered at Morris’s refusal of help from his steamers, Porter swore he would offer no further help, relenting only after Morris humbled himself by personally requesting assistance in freeing his ship. It took nearly two weeks to free the Pensacola, then drag her inch by inch through the pass.

  Porter, who was apparently having second thoughts about not having sought command of the squadron for himself, began writing to Fox, complaining about the “old fogies” who were in charge of the larger ships. His envy of both Farragut’s position as flag officer and his accomplishments revealed themselves in Porter’s private communications and would forever shadow his own deeds during the war. More letters were to follow, with Porter becoming increasingly critical of both Farragut and the other older captains of the fleet. In one letter, he told Fox that Farragut’s “administrative abilities are not of the first order.” Later, when Farragut had proven himself and gained wide public recognition through his great victories, Porter might regret his comments, but until then he was using his direct line to Washington in an attempt to undermine the confidence of both Fox and Welles in the flag officer. Despite his letters of complaint, long after the war, when both of these men were dead, Porter brazenly claimed full responsibility for Farragut’s selection as commander of the expedition. Twenty years after the fighting had ceased, Porter wrote two books about the war in which he described his role in the coming battles in glowing, self-aggrandizing terms.

  Meanwhile, Farragut concentrated on the task ahead. He prepared detailed instructions for the captains of his ships, and spent much of his time visiting the ships themselves, giving heart to those who saw the job of reducing the river forts as insurmountable. The sixty-one-year-old flag officer’s physical stamina impressed all who saw him, especially those who witnessed his morning ritual of turning a handspring on deck.

  By the middle of April 1862, the fleet was fully assembled, including 18,000 army troops under the command of General Benjamin F. Butler. Butler’s orders were to be prepared with troops sufficient to occupy whatever Confederate facilities or towns were taken in naval victories, including the city of New Orleans itself.

  Aside from Porter’s mortar schooner flotilla, Farragut’s invasion fleet consisted of seventeen warships. The largest and most heavily armed were the four sloops-of-war, the twenty-four-gun Hartford, Commander Richard Wainwright (with Flag Officer Farragut and Fleet Captain Henry H. Bell aboard); the twenty-two-gun Brooklyn, Captain Thomas T. Craven; the twenty-four-gun Richmond, Commander James Alden; and the twenty-three-gun Pensacola, Captain Henry W. Morris. Next in size was the side-wheeler Mississippi, with seventeen guns, Commander Melancton Smith. Known as a steam frigate, the side-wheeler had a long, illustrious career, having served as Commodore Matthew Perry’s flagship when he forced Japan to open her doors to foreign trade in 1853. She was followed by three screw corvettes,
the Oneida, Veruna, and Iroquois. Each was slightly over 1,000 tons and carried nine, ten, and seven guns respectively. Finally, at around 500 tons, and carrying two guns each, were the gunboats Cayuga, Itasca, Katahdin, Kennebec, Kineo, Pinola, Scotia, Winona, and Wissahickon. Counting the guns removed from the Colorado and distributed among the other vessels, the squadron mounted 181 guns.

  Porter’s flotilla consisted of twenty mortar boats, mostly converted sailing schooners. Each was mounted with a thirteen-inch mortar, although most carried a second gun, either a thirty-two-pounder or a twelve-pound howitzer. Six of his seven gunboats were side-wheel ferryboats, the seventh a more traditional gunboat similar to those in the main fleet. Together, the seven steamers carried twenty-seven guns.

  Farragut’s fleet captain was, like the flag officer, a southerner by birth, and married to a woman from a leading Virginia family. Also like Farragut, Bell never hesitated for a moment in his loyalty to the Union. When his native state of South Carolina seceded, Bell wrote to the Navy Department and requested that the registry be changed to show him as coming from New York rather than from that secessionist state. Bell had distinguished himself in the mid-1850s in China, when a boat from his ship, the frigate San Jacinto, came under fire by Chinese troops manning forts controlling the Canton River. In retaliation, Captain Bell and Captain Andrew H. Foote of the nearby Portsmouth, a man who would also rise to prominence during the Civil War, led a force of marines and sailors in an attack on the forts, driving the defenders out in terror. They then blew the forts apart, reducing them to rubble.