Terrible Swift Sword (38 page)

Farragut was on the spot, although it
does not seem to have bothered him. His orders from Secretary Welles said that
he was to reduce the defenses and take New Orleans, and added: "As you
have expressed yourself satisfied with the force given you, and as many more
powerful vessels will be added before you can commence operations, the
Department and the country will require of you success."
⁸
It
was laid on the line, in other words. Farragut had no room for an alibi if
anything went wrong. (The river between the forts was 130 feet deep, after all:
plenty of room there for a flag officer who could not quite make it.)

He
was not just an old man full of dash; he was a good executive and a careful
planner, and his final instructions to his captains were detailed. The captains
were to strike their topgallant masts and land all spars and rigging except
what was needed to operate under topsails, foresail, jib, and spanker; one or
two guns must be mounted on poop and forecastle to fight enemy gunboats,
because the ships would fight head-to the current and broadside guns could not
hit targets more than three points forward of the beam. Grapnels must be handy
to hook on to fires and tow them away if necessary. All ships must be trimmed
slightly by the head so that if they ran aground they would not swing bows-on
down the river; if a ship's machinery should be disabled the captain must drop
anchor and let his vessel drift slowly downsteam: in no case could anyone turn
around and steam back for the Head of the Passes. Spare hawsers must be ready so
that if a captain had to tow another ship he could do it. No matter what
happened, no ship could pull out of action without the flag officer's
permission. And, finally: "Hot and cold shot will no doubt be freely dealt
to us, and there must be stout hearts and quick hands to extinguish the one and
stop the holes of the other. I shall expect the most prompt attention to
signals and verbal orders."
⁹

He had another problem, although he did not
know about it. Commander Porter, who had the mortar flotilla, was persistently
undercutting him in letters to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox,
with whom he was on familiar terms. Porter worked methodically to damn the flag
officer with faint praise: Farragut was probably the best man of his rank, but
after all he was an old man and "men of his age in a seafaring life are
not fit for the command of important enterprises, they lack the vigor of youth"
(which Porter, obviously, had in great measure). Farragut, said Porter, failed
to say what his plans were, and indeed "he talks very much at random at
times, and rather under-rates the difficulties before him, without fairly
comprehending them." It was really hard for a man of Farragut's years,
finding himself in command of a large fleet for the first time in his life;
"he is full of zeal and anxiety, but he has no administrative qualities,
wants stability, and loses too much time in talking."
¹⁰
In the
end this did Farragut no harm, but the ambitious junior was getting plenty of
edged words on the record for ready reference in case the expedition failed.

Although
Porter was not above angling for his superior's job he was an efficient
operator on his own hook, and by the middle of April he had his twenty mortar
schooners moored along the river banks about a mile and a half below Fort Jackson,
with coastal survey experts triangulating the ranges; the fort could not be
seen from the schooners' decks, and everything must be done by indirect fire,
with observers at the mastheads spotting the fall of the shells. For
camouflage, the masts were dressed with leafy branches. A couple of days were
used for sporadic firing to test the ranges and to see whether the return fire
from the forts would be damaging. (Mostly, it was not: Porter lost one
schooner, and his attendant gunboats suffered minor casualties.) On April 18
everything was ready and the flotilla began its bombardment in earnest,
throwing 200-pound shells in high, arching parabolas and dropping a fair
percentage of them inside Fort Jackson, the principal target.

The bombardment was spectacular, and it went
on day and night, at the rate of more than a thousand shells every twenty-four
hours. Porter had boasted that he would reduce the forts in two days, and at
first it looked as if he might have been right: woodwork in Fort Jackson caught
fire and sent up dense clouds of smoke, parapet gunners took refuge in the
protected casemates, and so many shells burst inside the works that optimistic
sailors in the rigging of the Federal ships felt that the end must be near. But
although the bombardment was a sore trial to the nerves of the Confederates in
the forts, it never came close to putting the forts out of action. Their return
fire was inaccurate but it was always spirited. At night they sent flaming fire
rafts downstream, putting an eerie flickering light on the river, causing
Farragut's gunboats
Sciota
and
Kineo
to
collide, with crippling damage, when they tried to evade one of these blazing
drifters. The bombardment went on and on, past Porter's forty-eight hours,
drawing out at last to six full days, the forts still full of fight. Ben Butler
came aboad
Hartford
once
to watch, and wrote of "that superbly useless bombardment," and
Farragut grew more and more impatient. He had never believed that the forts
could be reduced in this way, and he grew tired of waiting. He made up his
mind, at last: enough was enough, the fleet would go up regardless.
¹¹

On
the night of April 20 he sent Commander Henry H. Bell upstream with gunboats
Pinola
and
Itasca
to
blast an opening in the floating barrier. They found the barrier to consist of
six floating hulks, anchored about a hundred yards apart, supporting a huge
chain which blocked passage; but the line of hulks ended some distance short of
the right bank, the gap being filled by a raft which could be drawn aside to
create an opening in case of need. The forts opened fire, shooting wildly in
the darkness; Bell's men went aboard one of the hulks and planted powder
charges, but the charges failed to explode, one of the gunboats ran aground and
had trouble getting off, and in the end all that could be done was to cut loose
the raft. Bell got his two vessels back unharmed, but most of the barrier was
intact. The place where the raft had been was open, but the opening was too
narrow to let the fleet do more than go up in single file close to Fort
Jackson. Furthermore, lookouts in the fleet next morning reported that a new
chain had been strung across the opening, and Farragut sent a boat up late one
night to find out. The boat rowed through the opening, took soundings, found no
chain, came back and reported; and finally, at two in the morning of April 24,
Hartford
hoisted two red lanterns to the mizzen peak
and the big fleet got under way.
¹²

It was a black night, with no wind to
ripple the water, and although the moon was about to rise there would be smoke
to hide it, coal smoke from the ships' funnels, powder smoke from scores upon
scores of great guns, with deadly flashes of light from guns and shells and
fire ships to break the darkness; and there was a four-mile current in the
river so that a crippled ship (or a ship whose captain faltered) would drift
downriver, helpless. Here was the old sailor who did not propose to waste the
chance his flag had given him, a man whose chief underling had warned that he
"lacked the vigor of youth" and whose superior had warned that
success would be expected, and who in his own turn had told his wife that death
coming out of duty well done would make a good end to a life's drama—and ship
after ship brought its anchors up and steamed north against the river, with the
silent forts waiting beyond the chained hulks. The fleet would be sunk if it had
to stand and fight, but it was not going to stop. It had certain advantages;
the barrier had been broken, the ironclads were not quite ready, and on
Hartford's
poop deck it had a lanky flag officer,
stalking up and down on springy legs, knowing exactly what he was going to do
and what he was going to make other people do—and, altogether, this was it.

One
by one the ships went through the gap in the barrier. One or two missed their
bearings and crashed into the chain itself, hung in midstream briefly, then
broke loose and went on; and the Confederate gunners discovered what was happening
and opened fire, long ranks of guns on parapet and in casemate flashing
incessantly on the rim of the night. On
Hartford,
Farragut
had the gun crews lie down until their guns would bear, and the men sweated it
out while shell and solid shot snapped shrouds and backstays and splintered the
bulwarks. The fleet drew abreast of Fort Jackson, and Fort St. Philip was just
upstream on the other side, and the gun crews sprang into action. Then the
whole fleet was firing broadsides to port and to starboard while the forts
slammed back with everything they had, and the heavy smoke rolled and coiled
over the river to blind everybody. Far downstream Porter's mortars opened an
all-out bombardment, and a few men whose duties allowed them to look aloft saw
a terrifying marvel—red glow of the lighted fuses of the great shells soaring
high into the night, blinking on and off as they revolved slowly, hanging
motionless for a moment and then coming down fast to explode in blinding light
and stupefying noise over the forts and the water and the echoing marshes.

Men could see too
much and too little. Gunners could make out their targets only as quick bursts
of fire, and the Confederate cannoneers could do little more than blaze away at
what they supposed was the middle of the river. Ship captains had to steam up a
channel that had no shores and no beacons, nothing visible anywhere except the
stabbing flames from gun muzzles and bursting shell. One of Butler's staff
officers, on the flagship, said later that the business was like "all the
earthquakes in the world and all the thunder and lightning storms together, in
a space of two miles, all going off at once." Captain Thomas T. Craven, on
U.S.S.
Brooklyn,
confessed
that he never expected that he or his ship or the fleet itself would live
through it, and old Farragut wrote that the fight "was one of the most
awful sights and events I ever saw or expect to experience."
¹³

In
mid-passage
Hartford
ran
aground under the guns of Fort St. Philip, a doughty Confederate tug captain
rammed a fire raft hard alongside, a sheet of flame ran up
Hartford's
bulwarks and rigging, the fort's gunners
fired as fast as they could handle their pieces, and for a moment it looked as
if flagship and flag officer had reached the end of the run. But tug and raft
were driven off, the flames were put out, the Confederate gunners fired just a
little too high, and at last
Hartford
wrenched
her hull out of the mud and went on with minor damage. There was a Confederate
ram in the river—
Manassas,
a
converted tugboat with a flimsy turtleback covering of thin iron plating—and
this craft rammed both
Mississippi
and
Brooklyn,
hurting
them but not crippling either one; was driven away and finally was sunk by
gunfire. U.S.S.
Varuna
got
safely above the forts, fought two unarmored rams,
Governor
Moore
and
Stonewall
Jackson,
and was sunk, the
only Federal ship casualty of the night; her two assailants were disposed of as
the rest of the fleet came up. Three gunboats failed to make the passage:
Itasca,
disabled by
a
round
shot through her boilers, and
Kennebec
and
Winona,
which
got entangled in what remained of the floating barrier, were badly shot up, and
had to go back to the original anchorage. But the fleet as a fighting unit
never stopped moving, and
as
daybreak came in over
the swamps Farragut had thirteen warships safely past the forts, a fleet that
was somewhat cut up but perfectly capable of doing everything it was supposed
to do.