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ADMIRAL FARRAGUT
Great Commanders
_EDITED BY JAMES GRANT WILSON_
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The Great Commanders Series.
EDITED BY GENERAL JAMES GRANT WILSON.
Admiral Farragut. By Captain A. T. Mahan, U. S. N.
General Taylor. By General O. O. Howard, U. S. A.
General Jackson. By James Parton.
General Greene. By Captain Francis V. Greene, U. S. A.
General J. E. Johnston. By Robert M. Hughes, of Virginia.
General Thomas. By Henry Coppee, LL. D.
General Scott. By General Marcus J. Wright.
General Washington. By General Bradley T. Johnson.
General Lee. By General Fitzhugh Lee.
General Hancock. By General Francis J. Walker.
General Sheridan. By General Henry E. Davies.
General Grant. By General James Grant Wilson.
_IN PREPARATION._
General Sherman. By General Manning F. Force.
Admiral Porter. By James R. Soley, late Assist. Sec. of Navy.
General McClellan. By General Peter S. Michie.
Commodore Paul Jones. By Admiral Richard W. Meade.
New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.
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[Illustration: D. G. Farragut]
D. Appleton & Co.
* * * * *
GREAT COMMANDERS
ADMIRAL FARRAGUT
BY CAPTAIN A. T. MAHAN, U. S. NAVY
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES NAVAL WAR COLLEGE
AUTHOR OF THE GULF AND INLAND WATERS, AND OF
THE INFLUENCE OF SEA POWER UPON HISTORY, 1660-1783
_WITH PORTRAIT AND MAPS_
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1897
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Copyright, 1892,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved._
Electrotyped and Printed
at the Appleton Press, U.S.A.
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PREFACE.
In preparing this brief sketch of the most celebrated of our naval
heroes, the author has been aided by the very full and valuable
biography published in 1878 by his son, Mr. Loyall Farragut, who has
also kindly supplied for this work many additional details of interest
from the Admiral's journals and correspondence, and from other
memoranda. For the public events connected with Farragut's career,
either directly or indirectly, recourse has been had to the official
papers, as well as to the general biographical and historical literature
bearing upon the war, which each succeeding year brings forth in books
or magazines. The author has also to express his thanks to Rear-Admiral
Thornton A. Jenkins, formerly chief-of-staff to Admiral Farragut; to
Captain John Crittenden Watson, formerly his flag-lieutenant; and to his
friend General James Grant Wilson, for interesting anecdotes and
reminiscences.
A. T. M.
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--Family and Early Life, 1801-1811 1
II.--Cruise of the Essex, 1811-1814 10
III.--Midshipman to Lieutenant, 1814-1825 51
IV.--Lieutenant, 1825-1841 69
V.--Commander and Captain, 1841-1860 89
VI.--The Question of Allegiance, 1860-1861 106
VII.--The New Orleans Expedition, 1862 115
VIII.--The First Advance on Vicksburg, 1862 177
IX.--The Blockade, and the Passage of Port Hudson, 1862-1863 196
X.--Mobile Bay Fight, 1864 237
XI.--Later Years and Death, 1864-1870 294
XII.--The Character of Admiral Farragut 308
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
FACING
PAGE
Portrait of Admiral Farragut _Frontispiece_
General Map of the scene of Farragut's operations 115
Passage of Mississippi Forts 127
Passage of Vicksburg Batteries 187
Passage of Port Hudson 213
Battle of Mobile Bay 247
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ADMIRAL FARRAGUT.
CHAPTER I.
FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE.
1801-1811.
The father of Admiral Farragut, George Farragut, was of unmixed Spanish
descent, having been born on the 29th of September, 1755, in the island
of Minorca, one of the Balearic group, where the family had been
prominent for centuries. One of his ancestors, Don Pedro Ferragut,
served with great distinction under James I, King of Aragon, in the wars
against the Moors, which resulted in their expulsion from Majorca in
1229, and from the kingdom of Valencia, in the Spanish Peninsula, in
1238. As Minorca in 1755 was a possession of the British Crown, to which
it had been ceded in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht, George Farragut was
born under the British flag; but in the following year a French
expedition, fitted out in Toulon, succeeding in wresting from the hands
of Great Britain both the island and its excellent fortified harbor,
Port Mahon, one of the most advantageous naval stations in the
Mediterranean. It was in the course of the operations which resulted in
this conquest of Minorca by the French that the British fleet, under
the command of Admiral Byng, met with the check for which the admiral
paid the penalty of his life a few months later. At the close of the
Seven Years' War, in 1763, the island was restored to Great Britain, in
whose hands it remained until 1782, when it was again retaken by the
French and Spaniards.
George Farragut, however, had long before severed his connection with
his native country. In March, 1776, he emigrated to North America, which
was then in the early throes of the Revolutionary struggle. Having grown
to manhood a subject to Great Britain, but alien in race and feeling, he
naturally espoused the cause of the colonists, and served gallantly in
the war. At its end he found himself, like the greater part of his
adopted countrymen, called to the task of building up his own fortunes,
neglected during its continuance; and, by so doing, to help in restoring
prosperity to the new nation. A temper naturally adventurous led him to
the border lines of civilization; and it was there, in the region where
North Carolina and eastern Tennessee meet, that the years succeeding the
Revolution appear mainly to have been passed. It was there also that he
met and married his wife, Elizabeth Shine, a native of Dobbs County,
North Carolina, where she was born on the 7th of June, 1765. At the time
of their marriage the country where they lived was little more than a
wilderness, still infested by Indians; and one of the earliest
recollections of the future admiral was being sent into the loft, on the
approach of a party of these, while his mother with an axe guarded the
door, which she had barricaded. This unsettled and dangerous condition
necessitated a constant state of preparedness, with some organization
of the local militia, among whom George Farragut held the rank of a
major of cavalry, in which capacity he served actively for some time.
While resident in Tennessee, George Farragut became known to Mr. W. C.
C. Claiborne, at that time the member for Tennessee in the National
House of Representatives. Mr. Claiborne in 1801 became governor of
Mississippi Territory; and in 1803, when the United States purchased
from France the great region west of the Mississippi River, to which the
name Louisiana was then applied, he received the cession of the newly
acquired possession. This was soon after divided into two parts by a
line following the thirty-third parallel of north latitude, and
Claiborne became governor of the southern division, which was called the
Territory of Orleans. To this may probably be attributed the removal of
the Farraguts to Louisiana from eastern Tennessee. The region in which
the latter is situated, remote both from tide-water and from the great
river by which the Western States found their way to the Gulf of Mexico,
was singularly unfitted to progress under the conditions of
communication in that day; and it long remained among the most backward
and primitive portions of the United States. The admiral's father, after
his long experience there, must have seen that there was little hope of
bettering his fortunes. Whatever the cause, he moved to Louisiana in the
early years of the century, and settled his family in New Orleans. He
himself received the appointment of sailing-master in the navy, and was
ordered to command a gun-boat employed in the river and on the adjacent
sounds. A dispute had arisen between the United States and the Spanish
Government, to whom the Floridas then belonged, as to the line of
demarcation between the two territories; and George Farragut was at
times employed with his vessel in composing disturbances and forwarding
the views of his own government.
David Glasgow, the second son of George Farragut, and the future Admiral
of the United States Navy, was born before the removal to Louisiana, on
the 5th of July, 1801, at Campbell's Station, near Knoxville, in eastern
Tennessee. In 1808, while living in his father's house on the banks of
Lake Pontchartrain, an incident occurred which led directly to his
entrance into the navy, and at the same time brought into curious
coincidence two families, not before closely associated, whose names are
now among the most conspicuous of those in the annals of the navy. While
George Farragut was fishing one day on Lake Pontchartrain he fell in
with a boat, also engaged in fishing, in which was an old gentleman
prostrated by the heat of the sun. He took him to his own house, where
he was cared for and nursed until he died, never having recovered
strength sufficient to be removed. The sufferer was David Porter, the
father of the Captain David Porter who afterward commanded the frigate
Essex in her adventurous and celebrated cruise in the Pacific during the
years 1813 and 1814, and grandfather of the still more distinguished
Admiral David D. Porter, who, over half a century later, served with
David Farragut on the Mississippi in the civil war, and in the end
succeeded him as second admiral of the navy. Captain, or rather, as he
then was, Commander Porter being in charge of the naval station at New
Orleans, his father, who had served actively afloat during the
Revolution and had afterward been appointed by Washington a
sailing-master in the navy, had obtained orders to the same station, in
order to be with, though nominally under, his son. The latter deeply
felt the kindness shown to his father by the Farraguts. Mrs. Farragut
herself died of yellow fever, toward the end of Mr. Porter's illness,
the funeral of the two taking place on the same day; and Commander
Porter soon after visited the family at their home and offered to adopt
one of the children. Young David Farragut then knew little of the
element upon which his future life was to be passed; but, dazzled by the
commander's uniform and by that of his own elder brother William, who
had received a midshipman's warrant a short time before, he promptly
decided to accept an offer which held forth to him the same brilliant
prospects. The arrangement was soon concluded. Porter promised to be to
him always a friend and guardian; and the admiral wrote in after life,
"I am happy to have it in my power to say, with feelings of the warmest
gratitude, that he ever was to me all that he promised." The boy
returned to New Orleans with his new protector, in whose house he
thenceforth resided, making occasional trips across Lake Pontchartrain
to a plantation which his father had purchased on the Pascagoula River.
A few months later Commander Porter appears to have made a visit to
Washington on business connected with the New Orleans station, and to
have taken Farragut with him to be placed at school, for which there
were few advantages at that time in Louisiana. The boy then took what
proved to be a last farewell of his father. George Farragut continued to
live in Pascagoula, and there he died on the 4th of June, 1817, in his
sixty-second year.
The trip north was made by Porter and his ward in the bomb-ketch
Vesuvius, a stop being made at Havana; where the commander had business
growing out of the seizure by him in the Mississippi River of some
French privateers, for which both Spain and the United States had
offered a reward. At Havana the lad heard of an incident, only too
common in those days, which set his heart, as those of his countrymen
were fast being set, against Great Britain. Presuming confidently upon
the naval weakness of the United States, and arguing from their long
forbearance that insults to the flag would be indefinitely borne for the
sake of the profitable commerce which neutrality insured, Great Britain,
in order to support the deadly struggle in which she was engaged with
France, had endeavored to shut off the intercourse of her enemy with the
rest of the world, by imposing upon neutral trade restrictions before
unheard of and without justification in accepted international law. Both
the justice and policy of these restrictions were contested by a large
party of distinguished Englishmen; but upon another principle men of all
parties in the old country were practically agreed, and that was the
right of the British Government to compel the services of British seamen
wherever found. From this grew the claim, which few Englishmen then
dared to disavow, that their ships of war could rightfully take from any
neutral merchant ship any seaman of British birth who was found on
board. In estimating this monstrous pretention, Americans have shown
little willingness to allow for the desperate struggle in which Great
Britain was involved, and the injury which she suffered from the number
of her seamen who, to escape impressment in their home ports and the
confinement of ships of war, sought service in neutral merchant ships.
Her salvation depended upon her navy; and seamen were so scarce as
seriously to injure its efficiency and threaten paralysis. This was
naturally no concern of the United States, which set up its simple,
undeniable right to the protection the neutral flag should give to all
persons and goods under it, which were not involved in any infraction of
belligerent rights. The straits of Great Britain, however, were too dire
to allow the voice of justice to override that of expediency. Had the
United States Navy been a force as respectable in numbers as it was in
efficiency, the same dictates of expediency might have materially
controlled the action of her opponent; might have prevented outrage and
averted war. As it was, right was set up against right--the right of the
neutral flag on the one hand against the right of a country to the
service of all her citizens on the other. The United States protested
and wrote with all the conviction of a state upon whose side justice
was. She resorted to measure after measure of peaceable coercion; but
she had no military force to show upon the sea, and her utterances were
consequently too uncertain to command respect. Great Britain continued
to take seamen from American merchant ships upon the plea of her right
to impress British seamen in any place; and, though the claim to detain
or search ships of war had been explicitly disavowed after the
Chesapeake affair of 1807, scant deference was shown to the vessels of a
power so little able to stand up for itself. In a day when most vessels
carried some guns for self-defense, it was a simple matter to ignore the
national character of an armed ship and to stop it unceremoniously. Of
such an insult Farragut heard during this stay in Havana. The brig
Vixen, of the United States Navy, had been fired into by a British ship
of war. "This," wrote Farragut in his journal, "was the first thing that
caused in me bad feeling toward the English nation. I was too young to
know anything about the Revolution; but I looked upon this as an insult
to be paid in kind, and was anxious to discharge the debt with
interest." It is scarcely necessary to say how keenly this feeling was
shared by his seniors in the service, to whom the Vixen incident was but
one among many bitter wrongs which the policy of their Government had
forced them humbly to swallow.
After their arrival in Washington Farragut was put to school, where he
remained until Porter was relieved from the New Orleans station. During
his stay at the capital he was presented by his guardian to the
Secretary of the Navy, Paul Hamilton, of South Carolina; who, after
ascertaining his wish to enter the service, promised him a midshipman's
warrant when he should be ten years old. The promise was more than kept,
for the warrant, when issued, was dated December 17, 1810; the future
admiral thus finding himself at least a titular officer, in the service
which he was afterward to adorn, when not quite nine and a half years of
age. Although at that time, and in earlier generations, boys, no older
than Farragut then was, were not infrequently turned aboard ship to
fight their own way in life, Porter did not so construe his duties to
his charge. In the latter part of 1810 he finally left New Orleans and
went North again, this time by the Mississippi River and in a gun-boat.
The voyage to Pittsburg against the swift current took three months; and
it was not till toward the close of the year that he and his family were
again settled in their home at Chester, in Pennsylvania, the birthplace
of Mrs. Porter. Farragut was then removed from Washington and put to
school in Chester, there to remain until his guardian should be able to
take him to sea under his own eyes, in a vessel commanded by himself.
This opportunity was not long in arriving.