Terrible Swift Sword (36 page)

4.
Threat to New Orleans

When General Beauregard pulled his men
away from Shiloh Church and took them stumbling back toward Corinth, on the
afternoon of April 7, a door which the Confederacy for its life's sake had to
keep open began to swing shut. The hinge was Pittsburg Landing, where more than
20,000 Americans had been shot, where Albert Sidney Johnston looked at the sky
and died; and the final, echoing slam of the door's closing sounded just a few
hours later, 110 miles to the northwest, when other Confederates surrendered
their stronghold at Island Number Ten and gave the Federal invader, once and for
all, the means to control the middle Mississippi River.

Island
Number Ten no longer exists. Long ago the Mississippi rolled over it, washed
part of it away, joined what was left to the Missouri shore and cut a new
channel elsewhere; as if when the guns were stilled the place was no longer
worth preserving. In 1862 the island was a two-and-one-half-mile-long mud patch
lying in a great loop of the river, rimmed with strong ramparts and heavy guns,
so menacing that even Flag Officer Andrew Foote was afraid of it. It blocked
the river. The island and the army together kept the Confederate west alive.
But the army was beaten and the strong point was taken, and on the day these
things happened the Confederate west began to die. The fall of Island Number
Ten was the essential postscript to Shiloh.

Running
south from Columbus, Kentucky, where
a
Confederate
Gibraltar had been abandoned because of the loss of the forts on the Tennessee
and the Cumberland, the Mississippi in 1862 crossed the Tennessee-Kentucky
line, turned sharply to the west, and then doubled back in the beginning of
a
huge S-curve, flowing due north for five or
six miles, going west once more, and then flowing south toward Memphis and the
Gulf. Island Number Ten lay at the bottom of the first loop; at the top of the
next loop, Madrid Bend, on the Missouri shore, was the town of New Madrid, and
fifteen miles downstream, on the Tennessee side, was the unremarkable town of
Tiptonville. The country all about was low and marshy, half-drowned in the
spring of 1862 by high water in the big river. To support Island Number Ten the
Confederates had two routes: they could go up the river by steamer, or they
could go by land along the river bank from Tiptonville. No other approach was
feasible. The long peninsula that ran north from Tiptonville to Madrid Bend,
with the bristling island as an anchor on its eastern side, was almost
completely isolated by a chain of swamps and ponds at its base. To hold the
river route the Confederates had to hold New Madrid and the Missouri shore to
the south of it; to keep the land route open they had to hold Tiptonville; and
to do all of this they had upwards of 7000 soldiers, a large number of heavy
guns, and
a
little
flotilla of wooden gunboats which were not very formidable. Shortly after the
fall of Fort Donelson, Halleck sent an amphibious expedition down to take the
river away from them.

The expedition consisted of 20,000 men
led by John Pope and was supported by Flag Officer Foote, who had seven
iron-plated gunboats and a fleet of barges mounting big mortars. Pope put his
men ashore at Commerce, Missouri, forty miles above New Madrid, marched down
the river without opposition, and began to lay siege to New Madrid on March 3.
It developed that this place was neither strongly fortified nor well manned,
and Pope captured it in ten days, after which he moved some of his infantry and
artillery ten miles downstream to Point Pleasant to keep the Confederates from
sending men and supplies up the river by steamboat. He had finished the first
half of his assignment. Now he had to get across the river, occupy Tiptonville,
isolate Island Number Ten and compel it to surrender.

The second half of the job was not going
to be easy. To get over to the Tennessee shore Pope had to have transports, and
to protect the transports he had to have gunboats, and to reach him these
vessels would have to steam past Island Number Ten, which was obviously
impossible. Foote, stumping about on crutches—the wound he had taken at Fort
Donelson was refusing to heal—held his flotilla just upstream from the island,
moored his mortar boats along the bank, opened a long-range bombardment, and
studied his problem with rising pessimism. He was as tough as any man in the
Navy, but he refused to run in close and hammer these fortifications the way he
had hammered the forts on the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Island Number Ten
was far too strong; furthermore, the river ran in the wrong direction. At Fort
Henry and Fort Donelson, Foote's fleet had fought facing upstream, and a
disabled boat would drift back to safety. Here the fleet would be facing
downstream, and a disabled boat would drift down to certain capture—a thing
which seemed all the more likely because the gunboats were sadly under-engined,
so that even moderate battle damage could make it impossible for them to steam
against the strong current of the Mississippi. Foote devoted himself to the
bombardment; it went on for three weeks and was most spectacular to see and
hear, but
it'
did the Confederates
little real damage. Meanwhile, General Pope kept on calling for gunboats and
transports.
¹

At this point Pope's engineer officers
had a bright idea. The place where Foote's fleet was lying was twelve or
fifteen miles from New Madrid by water, but it was not half that distance in an
air line, and the long peninsula that lay between the fleet and the army was
half a marsh, covered with second-growth timber and cut by innumerable sluggish
bayous. It ought to be possible (said the engineers) to make some sort of
waterway across this peninsula, so that shallow-draft steamers could leave the
river and go cross-lots to New Madrid. Since there appeared to be no other way
to get transports, Pope accepted the proposal, sent back to Cairo for
tugboats, barges, and incidental equipment, and put six hundred men to work to
create a canal. While Foote went on with his bombardment, Pope's engineer
troops went off into the bayous and got to work.

They dug a ditch across a cornfield,
came up to a submerged forest, and began felling trees. Here they had to work
afloat, devising ingenious ways to cut through the tree trunks four and one
half feet below the surface of the water, rooting out stumps, hoisting
submerged logs and snags out of the way, pulling and chopping and digging and
sawing all at the same time. While they labored, other details worked to convert
empty coal barges into floating batteries, hoping that if the gunboats could
not get downstream Pope could be given something that would float and carry
guns. Day after day the work on the waterway continued: a non-military job done
by energetic Westerners who knew how to improvise and who were exercising the
national aptitude for changing the face of the landscape. In a little less than
three weeks the work was done, and there was a waterway six miles long, fifty
feet wide and a little more than four feet deep. Now Pope could have his
transports.
²

He still could not have his gunboats, as they
drew too much water for this canal, and without the gunboats the transports
would be of no use. (The business of making floating batteries out of coal
barges was a forlorn hope, at best.) The Confederates had planted batteries
along the Tennessee shore of the river above Tiptonville, covering every
feasible landing place, and the river here was a mile wide. Federal guns on the
Missouri shore could not hope to silence these batteries, and unless one or two
sturdy fighting ships could come in and pound them the transports would have to
stay at New Madrid. Desperately, Pope wired Halleck asking that Foote be
required to give two of his gunboats, minus crews, to the Army; Pope would man
them with soldiers and try to run them past Island Number Ten in spite of the
odds.
⁸

Perhaps
if Andrew Foote had been well he would have been bolder, but his health was
atrocious and much of his old drive was gone. He was impatient with his
enforced inaction, however, and the idea of turning his ships over to the Army
and letting soldiers try to do what sailors could not do was altogether too
much; and so when Commander Henry Walke, skipper of the gunboat
Carondelet,
insisted that he could take his boat down the
river Foote told him to go ahead. Walke had felt all along that it ought to be
possible to run past Island Number Ten. He wanted just two things: a barge
loaded high with bales of hay, to lash to the portside for protection against
gunfire, and a night dark enough to give him a fair chance to go down the river
unseen. He got both, presently, and on the night of April 4
Carondelet
left her moorings and
drifted downstream to run the gantlet.

She
was moving slowly, just fast enough for steerageway. The high-pressure engines
of river steamboats normally fed their exhaust into the smokestacks, making a
noisy, locomotive-like
puff-puff
which could be heard
miles away; to muffle the sound Walke had his engineers rearrange things so
that the exhaust went into the paddle box, and he would not try to make any
speed until the Confederates discovered him. Slipping down with the current,
ungainly with the clumsy barge fastened to her port side,
Carondelet
went on toward Island
Number Ten.

Carondelet
had been afloat for
less than four months, but she was a veteran; had fought at Fort Henry, had
opened the bombardment at Fort Donelson, and had been hit so hard there that
she had to go back to Cairo and go into dry-dock for repairs; all in all she
had seen about as much close action as any vessel afloat. Walke was ready for
anything. If the boat should run aground or become disabled he would resist
boarders: cutlasses and muskets were served out, and hoses were attached to the
boilers so that scalding water could be directed at hostile parties, and if
worse came to worst he was prepared to scuttle his vessel rather than let the
Confederates have her. The night was dark as the inside of his pocket, with a
thunderstorm building up, and
Carondelet
reached
the upstream end of Island Number Ten without being seen.

Then the storm came, and the midnight
blackness suddenly dissolved into vivid moments of daylight as enormous flashes
of lightning broke out of the clouds, throwing river and gunboat into
startling relief: black boat on a glistening river, spectral green trees for a
background, blue-white lightning winking on and off like an erratic spotlight
in some prodigious theater. The Southern lookouts saw it, and, on
Carondelet,
Walke
could hear the Confederate drums beating the long roll, calling the gunners to
their stations, and rockets arched up into the sky as Island Number Ten
notified batteries on the Tennessee shore that there was a Yankee gunboat on
the water. Walke cracked on steam, and
Carondelet
surged ahead,
dragging the heavy barge, running heavily like a man in a nightmare. The dry
soot in the gunboat's stacks, ordinarily kept damp by the exhaust steam, took
fire and sent tall jets of revealing flame high out of each pipe: and with
these flares as beacons, while great sheets of lightning lit the river and the
rockets shot up toward the dripping clouds,
Carondelet
kept on coming.

The Confederates
manned their guns and opened fire, the crash of the guns mingling with the
crash of thunder, deafening noise and the constant off-and-on of the lightning
flashes bewildering everybody. Walke had his pilot steer close to the shore of
the island, hoping that the Confederate gunners would overshoot their target;
Carondelet
almost ran aground as a result but sheered
away just in time, the heavy shells passed overhead, flash of the guns and
flash of bursting shell punctuating the thunderstorm—and at last, in spite of
everything,
Carondelet
passed
the island unhurt and went pounding down the reverse stretch of the big bend in
the river. A couple of solid shot hit the hay barge, minie balls spattered here
and there without harm, and then the firing ended and
Carondelet
came steaming down to New Madrid at midnight,
the thunderstorm tapering off, Pope's troops lining the waterfront to cheer.
The gunboat drew up to a mooring, Army officers came aboard to offer
congratulations, and Walke as an Old Navy man issued the traditional order:
Splice the main brace. Nobody on his boat had been hurt, the thing that he
thought could be done had been done, and from this moment on, Island Number Ten
was helpless.
⁴

Nothing
remained now but to pick up the pieces. On the morning of April 5—the beautiful
spring day when the soldiers around Shiloh were firing their guns to see how
rain had affected loaded muskets—Pope had transports and one gunboat on the
river below New Madrid and he could get on with the job, which he promptly did.
Troops went aboard the stern-wheelers that had come down through the cutoff,
Walke discarded his hay barge and his hot-water hoses, and the Federals went
down to cross the river.
Carondelefs
guns knocked the Confederate river batteries
to bits, and before long John Pope had soldiers over on the Tennessee shore
around Tiptonville and Island Number Ten had been cut off. The Confederates
along the river took to the brush to escape capture, Foote sent U.S.S.
Pittsburgh
down to join
Carondelet
—once Walke had done it, everybody could see
how simple it was—and late on the evening of April 7 Island Number Ten
surrendered and the victory that had just been won at

Shiloh was made complete. To all intents
and purposes, the Confederacy had lost the middle Mississippi.

Which is to say that they had lost the
one stretch they had a chance to hold. They still possessed a strong point
called Fort Pillow, on a Tennessee bluff forty-five miles above Memphis, and
ever since the fall of New Madrid they had been strengthening the place; and
Pope and Foote made plans for an Army-Navy assault. But Fort Pillow could be
allowed to die on the vine. Once Beauregard was driven out of Corinth, Fort
Pillow would be cut off and would fall of its own weight, just as the great
fort at Columbus had fallen after the conquest of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.
Halleck correctly judged that there was no point in fighting for Fort Pillow,
and he ordered Pope to put his army on transports, steam back to Cairo, and
come up the Tennessee to join Grant and Buell at Pittsburg Landing. The major
effort would be the advance on Corinth, and Halleck would have more than
100,000 men; the Navy could be left to clean up the fragments along the
Mississippi. Shortly after Pope left, Andrew Foote was compelled to go on sick
leave,
⁵
which would be followed by undemanding shore-side
assignments in the east. He had fought his last fight, contributing mightily to
Union victory in the west, burning himself out in the process, and he had just
over a year to live. Welles sent in another good man, Captain Charles Henry
Davis, to replace him, and the fleet and the mortar boats dropped downstream
and began a desultory bombardment of Fort Pillow. In effect they were marking
time until the advance of Halleck's army one hundred miles to the southeast
made its effect felt.