The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (43 page)

Left with time more or less on his hands after the downriver loss of two of his best warships, and being anxious moreover to offset the damage to his reputation with an exploit involving something less flimsy than a dummy ironclad, the admiral pored over his charts and made various exploratory trips up and down the network of creeks and bayous flowing into the Yazoo River below Haines Bluff, whose guns he had learned to respect back in December. Five miles upstream from its junction with the Mississippi, the Yazoo received the sluggish waters of Steele Bayou, and forty miles up Steele Bayou, Black Bayou connected eastward with Deer Creek, which in turn, at about the same upstream distance and by means of another bayou called Rolling Fork, connected eastward with the Sunflower River. That was where the payoff came within easy reach; for the Sunflower flowed into the Yazoo, fifty miles below, offering the chance for an uncontested high-ground landing well above the Haines Bluff fortifications, which then could be assaulted from the rear or bypassed on the way to the back door of Vicksburg. Though the route was crooked and the distance great—especially by contrast; no less than two hundred roundabout miles would have to be traversed by the column of gunboats and transports in order to put the troops ashore no more than twenty air-line miles above their starting point—Porter was so firmly convinced he had found the solution to the knotty Vicksburg problem that he called at Young’s Point and persuaded Grant to come aboard the
Black Hawk
for a demonstration. Steaming up the Yazoo, the admiral watched the tree-fringed
north bank for a while, then suddenly to his companion’s amazement signaled the helm for a hard turn to port, into brush that was apparently impenetrable. So far, high water had been the curse of the campaign, but now it proved an asset. As the boat swung through the leafy barrier, which parted to admit it, the leadsman sang out a sounding of fifteen feet—better than twice the depth the ironclads required. Formerly startled, Grant was now convinced, especially when Porter informed him that they were steaming above an old road once used for hauling cotton to the river. Practically all the lower delta was submerged, in part because of the seasonal rise of the rivers, but mostly because of the cut Wilson had made in the levee, four hundred miles upstream at Yazoo Pass; a tremendous volume of water had come down the various tributaries and had spread itself over the land. It was Porter’s contention, based on limited reconnaissance, that as a result all those creeks and bayous would be navigable from end to end by vessels of almost any size, including the gunboats and transports selected to thread the labyrinth giving down upon the back-door approach to Vicksburg. Infected once more with contagious enthusiasm, Grant returned without delay to Young’s Point, where he issued orders that same night for the army’s share in what was known thereafter as the Steele Bayou expedition.

Sherman drew the assignment, along with one of his two divisions of men who just that week had been flooded out of their pick-and-shovel work on the doomed canal, and went up the Mississippi to a point where a long bend swung eastward to within a mile of Steele Bayou. On the afternoon of March 16, after slogging across this boggy neck of land, he made contact with the naval units, which had come up by way of the Yazoo that morning. As soon as he got his troops aboard the waiting transports the column resumed its progress northward, five ironclads in the lead, followed by four all-purpose tugs and a pair of mortar boats which Porter, not knowing what he might encounter in the labyrinth ahead, had had “built for the occasion.” With his mind’s eye fixed on permanent rank and the ribboned star Fox had promised to try for, the admiral was taking no chances he could avoid. All went well—as he had expected because of his preliminary reconnaissance—until the gunboats approached Black Bayou, where the unreconnoitered portion of the route began. This narrow, four-mile, time-forgotten stretch of stagnant water was not only extremely crooked, it was also filled with trees. Porter used his heavy boats to butt them down, bulldozer style, and hoisted them aside with snatch blocks. This was heavy labor, necessarily slow, and as it progressed the column changed considerably in appearance. Overhead branches swept the upper decks of the warships, leaving a mess of wreckage in the place of boats and woodwork. Occasionally, too, as Porter said, “a rude tree would throw Briarean arms” around the stacks of the slowly passing vessels, “and knock their bonnets
sideways.” After about a mile of this, Sherman’s men were put to work with ropes and axes, clearing a broader passage for the transports, while the sturdier ironclads forged ahead, thumping and bumping their way into Deer Creek, where they resumed a northward course next morning.

But this was worse in several ways, one of them being that the creek was even narrower than the bayou. If the trees were fewer, they were also closer together, and vermin of all kinds had taken refuge in them from the flood; so that when one of the gunboats struck a tree the quivering limbs let fall a plague of rats, mice, cockroaches, snakes, and lizards. Men were stationed about the decks with brooms to rid the vessels of such unwelcome boarders, but sometimes the sweepers had larger game to contend with, including coons and wildcats. These last, however, “were prejudiced against us, and refused to be comforted on board,” the admiral subsequently wrote, “though I am sorry to say we found more Union feeling among the bugs.” To add to the nightmare, Deer Creek was the crookedest stream he had ever encountered: “One minute an ironclad would apparently be leading ahead, and the next minute would as apparently be steering the other way.” Along one brief stretch, less than half a mile in length, the five warships were steaming in five quite different directions. Moreover, this was a region of plantations, which meant that there were man-made obstacles such as bridges, and though these gave the heavy boats no real trouble—they could plow through them as if they were built of matchsticks—other impediments were more disturbing. For example, hearing of the approach of the Yankees, the planters had had their baled cotton stacked along both creekbanks and set afire in order to keep it out of the hands of the invaders: with the result that, from time to time, the gunboats had to run a fiery gauntlet. The thick white smoke sent the crews into spasms of coughing, while the heat singed their hair, scorched their faces, and blistered the paint from the vessels’ iron flanks.

So far, despite the crowds of field hands who lined the banks to marvel at the appearance of ironclads where not even flat-bottomed packets had ventured before, Porter had not seen a single white man. He found this odd, and indeed somewhat foreboding. Presently, however, spotting one sitting in front of a cabin and smoking a pipe as if nothing unusual were going on around him, the admiral had the flagship stopped just short of another bridge and summoned the man to come down to the landing; which he did—a burly, rough-faced individual, in shirt sleeves and bareheaded; “half bulldog, half bloodhound,” Porter called him. When the admiral began to question him he identified himself as the plantation overseer. “I suppose you are Union, of course?” Porter said. “You all are so when it suits you.” “No, by God, I’m not, and never will be,” the man replied. “As to the others, I know nothing about
them. Find out for yourself. I’m for Jeff Davis first, last, and all the time. Do you want any more of me?” he added; “for I am not a loquacious man at any time.” “No, I want nothing more with you,” Porter said. “But I am going to steam into that bridge of yours across the stream and knock it down. Is it strongly built?” “You may knock it down and be damned,” the overseer told him. “It don’t belong to me.” Catching something in his accent, Porter remarked: “You’re a Yankee by birth, are you not?” “Yes, damn it, I am,” the man admitted. “But that’s no reason I should like the institution. I cut it long ago.” And with this he turned on his heel and walked away. Porter had the skipper ring “Go ahead fast,” and the ironclad smashed through the bridge about as easily as if it had not been there. When he looked back, however, to see what impression this had made on the overseer, he saw him seated once more in front of the cabin, smoking his pipe, not having bothered even to turn his head and watch. Deciding that the fellow “was but one remove from a brute,” Porter was disturbed by the thought that “there were hundreds more like him” lurking somewhere in the brush. At any rate, he fervently hoped that Sherman’s men—particularly one regiment, which had the reputation of being able to “catch, scrape, and skin a hog without a soldier leaving the ranks”—would “pay the apostate Yankee a visit, if only to teach him good manners.”

Under the circumstances, even aside from the necessary halts, half a mile an hour was the best speed the ironclads could make on this St Patrick’s Day. Nightfall overtook them a scant eight miles from the morning’s starting point. Twelve miles they made next day, but the increased speed increased the damage to the boats, including the loss of all the skylights to falling debris, and when they stopped engines for the night, Porter heard from up ahead the least welcome of all sounds: the steady chuck of axes, informing him that the rebels were warned of his coming. He wished fervently for Sherman, whose men were still at work in Black Bayou, widening a pathway for their transports, and consoled himself with the thought that the red-haired general would be along eventually; “there was only one road, so he couldn’t have taken the wrong one.” For the present, however, he did what he could with what he had, sending the mortar boats forward in the darkness; and when their firing stopped, so had the axes. Next morning, March 19, he pushed on. Despite the delay involved in hoisting the felled trees aside, he made such good progress that by nightfall he was within half a mile of the entrance to Rolling Fork. At daybreak he steamed north again, but the flagship had gone barely two hundred yards when, just ahead and extending all the way across the creek, the admiral saw “a large green patch … like the green scum on ponds.” He shouted down from the bridge to one of the admiring field hands on the bank: “What is that?” “It’s nuffin but willers, sah,” the Negro replied, explaining
that in the off season the plantation workers often went out in skiffs and canoes to cut the willow wands for weaving baskets. “You kin go through dat lak a eel.”

That this last was an overstatement—based on a failure to realize that, unlike skiffs and canoes, the gunboats moved
through
rather than
over
the water, and what was more had paddle wheels and overlapping plates of armor—Porter discovered within a couple of minutes of giving the order to go ahead. Starting with a full head of steam, the ironclad made about thirty yards before coming to a dead stop, gripped tightly by the willow withes, not unlike Gulliver when he woke to find himself in Lilliputian bonds. The admiral called for hard astern; but that was no good either; the vessel would not budge. Here was a ticklish situation. The high creekbanks rendered the warships practically helpless, for their guns would not clear them even at extreme elevation. Not knowing what he would do if the Confederates made a determined boarding attack, Porter fortified a nearby Indian mound with four smoothbore howitzers and put the flagship’s crew over the side with knives and hooks and orders to cut her loose, twig by twig. It was slow work; “I wished ironclads were in Jericho,” he later declared. Just then his wish seemed about to be fulfilled. The shrill shrieks of two rifle shots, which he recognized as high-velocity Whitworths, were followed at once by a pair of bursts, abrupt as blue-sky thunder and directly over the mound. Suddenly, in the wake of these two ranging shots—within six hundred yards of Rolling Fork and less than ten miles from clear sailing down the broad and unobstructed Sunflower River—two six-gun rebel batteries were firing on the outranged smoothbores from opposite directions, and the naval commander was shocked to see his cannoneers come tumbling down the rearward slope of the mound, seeking cover from the rain of shells. Continuing to hack at the clinging willows, he got his mortars into counterbattery action and, with the help of half a dollar, persuaded a “truthful contraband” (so Porter termed him later, but just then he called him Sambo; which drew the reply, “My name aint Sambo, sah. My name’s Tub”) to attempt to get a message through to Sherman and his soldiers, wherever downstream they might be by now. “Dear Sherman,” the note began: “Hurry up, for Heaven’s sake.”

Tub reached Sherman on Black Bayou late that night, having taken various short cuts, and Sherman started northward before daylight, accompanied by all the troops on hand. Retracing the messenger’s route through darkness, they carried lighted candles in their hands as they slogged waist-deep through swamps and canebrakes. “The smaller drummer boys had to carry their drums on their heads,” the general afterwards recalled, “and most of the men slung their cartridge boxes around their necks.” All the following day they pushed on, frequently
losing their way, and into darkness again. At dawn Sunday, March 22, they heard from surprisingly close at hand the boom of Porter’s mortars, punctuated by the sharper crack of the Whitworths. Presently they encountered rebels who had got below the ironclads and were felling trees to block their escape downstream. Sherman chased them from their work and pushed on. Soon he came within sight of the beleaguered flotilla, but found it woefully changed in appearance. After finally managing to extricate the willow-bound flagship with winches, Porter had unshipped the rudders of all five gunboats and was steaming backward down the narrow creek, fighting as he went. He had not only heard the sound of axes in his rear; what was worse, he had suddenly realized that the Confederates might dam the creek upstream with cotton bales and leave him stranded in the mud. The arriving bluecoats ran the snipers off—they were not actually so numerous as they seemed; just industrious—and came up to find the admiral on the deck of the flagship, directing the retreat from behind a shield improvised from a section of smokestack. “I doubt if he was ever more glad to meet a friend than he was to see me,” Sherman later declared. For the present, though, he asked if Porter wanted him to go ahead and “clean those fellows out” so the navy could resume its former course. “Thank you, no,” the admiral said. He had had enough, and so had Sherman, who complained hotly that this was “the most infernal expedition I was ever on.” As Porter subsequently put it, “The game was up, and we bumped on homeward.”