FARRAGUT AT NEW ORLEANS
There was still another man of splendid genius and capacity who about
this time came to the front as a winner of victories for the Federal
arms, and above all, as a man like Grant, who knew how to do things
when officialism permitted him to act. Like Grant on the one side, and
Lee on the other, Farragut was at first treated as a negligible factor
in the war.
David Glasgow Farragut was a man of Southern birth who had been twice
married in Virginia, and all of whose kindred and connections and
instinctive sympathies were Southern. He so far sympathized with
the South indeed that he openly declared his purpose to go with the
Confederacy if by any means the division of the country could be
peacefully arranged and accomplished. But, living as he did at the
outbreak of the war in a strongly secessionist Virginia town, he
frankly declared his lack of faith in the peaceful accomplishment of
secession, and his fixed purpose in the event of war to cast in his
lot with the cause of the nation, which, all his long life--for he was
sixty years old--he had served, and from which all his honors had come.
This declaration quickly made Norfolk, in which city he was living,
"too hot" for him in its popular sentiment, and accordingly he removed
to the North to await events.
At that time Farragut was a captain in the navy. He was by all odds the
officer in that service most distinguished for brilliant, daring and
competently effective performance. He had entered the navy "through a
port hole," as he said, at nine years of age. He had served with such
distinction under Commodore Porter, that at twelve years of age he had
been intrusted by the great seaman with the command of a richly laden
prize ship, navigating her for fifteen hundred miles into the harbor of
Valparaiso, and there arranging for her condemnation. He had, while yet
a mere boy, distinguished himself for courage in a severely-contested
sea fight.
In brief, this Captain Farragut was obviously, and unquestionably, the
very fittest man to undertake any difficult naval expedition that the
Washington government might plan or contemplate.
But he had the taint of Southern birth and connections, and it was
nearly a year after he offered himself unreservedly for any service
that might be required of him when the politicians who controlled the
Navy Department at Washington ventured to make use of his abilities.
And when at last these people in the Navy Department reconciled
themselves to the thought of giving an important command to this
brilliantly distinguished naval officer, who shared with Winfield Scott
and George H. Thomas the suspicious disadvantage of Southern birth and
connections, they did it in a way insultingly suggestive of their doubt
as to his loyalty or courage or something else essential.
New Orleans was in every way--in population, exports, imports, and
everything else--the chief city of the Southern Confederacy. Moreover
its strategic position was one which commanded a vast system of inland
waterways constituting the only effective link between the Confederate
country west of the Mississippi and that part of the Confederacy that
lay east of the great river.
The city lies about a hundred miles, to use round figures, above the
multitudinous mouths of the Mississippi. It lies less than half a dozen
miles west of the so-called Lake Pontchartrain, which is an inlet from
the gulf, with two other bodies of water, Mississippi Sound and Lake
Borgne, lying between.
But the passes into Lake Borgne and from that body of water into Lake
Pontchartrain, are shallow and difficult, as the British discovered in
1814 in their attempt to approach New Orleans by the "back door," as it
were.
On the other hand, the Mississippi has five principal mouths, with some
others that carry less water. Thus it was, or seemed to be, impossible
for any Federal fleet to blockade the entrances to that stream and cut
off commerce between New Orleans and the outer world.
But above and beyond all these considerations, was the desire of the
Federal authorities to conquer control of the Mississippi itself
throughout its entire length. That would be not only to split the
Confederacy into halves, cutting off a large part of its food
resources, but also to make of the great river a convenient highway for
the transportation of Federal food supplies, troops, ammunition and all
else that is needful in war, to such points as might have need of them.
Thus the reduction of the defenses of New Orleans, and the conquest
of that city became a matter of supreme strategic importance. To this
task Farragut was assigned with a fleet that, in our time, could
not possibly force its way past a single well-defended fort, or
successfully meet an adversary afloat. He had in his fleet, first of
all--in Navy Department estimation--twenty-one schooners, each carrying
a mortar intended to throw shells high in air and drop them into the
Confederate defensive works. These proved to be utterly useless, as
Farragut had from the beginning believed that they would be. He had
besides, six sloops of war, sixteen gunboats, and eight other ships.
His flagship, the _Hartford_, was a wooden vessel, carrying twenty-two
Dahlgren nine-inch guns besides howitzers in the tops. The others were
similarly armed. All were under-powered, and could make only eight
knots an hour where there was no current. In such a stream as the
Mississippi four knots constituted the limit of their performance.
There were transports also, carrying an army of about 15,000 men
under command of General Benjamin F. Butler. This force was intended
to occupy the city after Farragut should have captured it, but until
he should do so it was only an incumbrance to his expedition. He got
rid of it for a time by landing the troops on one of the islands that
separate Mississippi Sound from the gulf, and leaving them there until
such time as he should have need of them.
The civilians in control of the Navy Department had not in any
adequate way consulted Farragut as to the composition or the armament
of the fleet with which he was required to accomplish a task that
was next to impossible. In making up the fleet they had accepted
the suggestions of his subordinate, Commander David D. Porter, and
in obedience to them had created the flotilla largely out of mortar
schooners which Farragut regarded as practically useless, and which
in the event proved to be altogether so. That is to say, after the
manner of that time they had consulted with the less experienced
inferior instead of asking the advice of the thoroughly experienced
superior. They had been guided by an officer who was not to command the
expedition, instead of asking the advice of the officer who was to lead
it. But Farragut was so anxious to proceed upon the country's business
and in some way to serve it that he promptly accepted the command
offered to him and expressed himself as "satisfied" with the ship force
provided for him to command.
Expert as he was in all that pertained to Mexican Gulf geography and
hydrography, he perfectly knew that one of the principal ships assigned
to him could in no wise be dragged into the Mississippi because of her
excessive draught of water. Expert as he was in all that pertained to
naval warfare, he foresaw that the mortar fleet assigned to him could
accomplish nothing, and that its presence in his squadron could be
nothing other than an embarrassment. In the same way he saw clearly
that General Butler's land force, carried upon transports, could not
fail to be a weak spot in his armor. Yet he uncomplainingly accepted
the conditions and set about the duty assigned him.
It was with this utterly inadequate and motley crew of serviceable
and unserviceable and positively detrimental ships that Farragut was
ordered to reduce the defenses of New Orleans, overthrow its naval
resistance and conquer the city.
Farragut was fully aware of the utter inadequacy of the means given to
him. He perfectly knew that the effective vessels at his disposal were
far fewer and far less formidable than the task set him required. But
it was his habit to undertake desperate enterprises with inadequate
means, and he had waited a long time for any opportunity, however
meager, to serve his country. So, in the great generosity of his mind,
he expressed to the Navy Department his willingness to undertake the
desperate enterprise with the obviously insufficient, and in part the
absurdly worthless, force assigned to him to command.
Then came his orders from the civilians, who, without experience or
knowledge, or skill, or any other recognizable qualification for
command, controlled the Navy Department. These orders were insulting
in their tone and manner. It was quite a matter of course that so old,
so tried, so skilful an officer as David Glasgow Farragut would do the
very best that was possible with the means placed at his command. Yet
the Navy Department people suggested doubt of this by the very terms of
the orders they gave him.
These orders instructed him to reduce the defenses of the Mississippi
and take possession of New Orleans. They took no account of
difficulties. They reckoned not upon things in the way. They merely
ordered a thing done as one might order a carpet cleaned or a load of
wood sawed into stove lengths. Then those orders went on to say: "As
you have expressed yourself perfectly satisfied with the force given
to you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can
commence operations, _the department and the country require of you
success_."
Could there have been anything more impertinent than this, from a
purely civilian department to an officer who for half a century had
been accustomed to make success the keynote of all his reports of
action? Could there have been anything more insolent or more insulting
than the suggestion that David Glasgow Farragut might do less than lay
within his power to do toward the accomplishment of any purpose to
which he might be commissioned? Could anything be more insolent than
the reminder that in consenting to undertake the expedition he had
declined to criticise the composition of the fleet concerning which
he had not been consulted and had expressed himself as "satisfied" to
undertake the expedition with the means provided to his hand?
Now let us consider the terms and conditions of Farragut's problem,
the nature of the work he had to do, the tools he had to do it with,
and the difficulties he must overcome in order to achieve the success
"required" of him.
The Mississippi river is the greatest waterway in the world. It is the
middle thread of a system embracing more than sixteen thousand miles of
practically navigable rivers, bayous and creeks. In its ramifications
it drains no less than twenty-eight states of the Union. In its course
it flows from the Rocky Mountains on the one side, the Alleghenies on
the other, and the Cumberland, the Ozark, and the Missouri ranges, into
a single great stream.
New Orleans lies in a bend of that tortuous stream within about one
hundred miles from its mouths.
But this greatest of rivers, dividing the eastern from the western
United States, and, in its great tributaries dividing the north from
the south, instead of broadening in its course toward the sea after the
usual manner of rivers, narrows itself below New Orleans to a width of
half a mile or less.
Here the Confederates had established their defenses, or more properly
speaking, here they had made themselves masters of defenses created by
the National Government before a thought of civil war had arisen in any
mind.
So far as the "back door" approach was concerned--the approach by way
of Lake Borgne and the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain--New Orleans was
adequately defended by the shallowness of the water at critical points.
Unless a special fleet of shallow-draught gunboats should be built
at Ship Island or elsewhere there was no possibility of reaching the
chief city of the Confederacy by that route. Farragut's only hope lay,
therefore, in ascending the Mississippi river.
His first obstacle was encountered in the mouth of the Mississippi
itself. The great river carries with it to the sea a limitless quantity
of mud which it deposits in whatever spot there may be ready to
receive it. It is credited by the geologists with having created in
this way all the low-lying lands from Cairo to the gulf, a distance
of nearly twelve hundred miles by the river's course. At the several
mouths of the stream it is still depositing mud and still pushing the
land out into the gulf. Very naturally its mud deposits create bars at
the several mouths. Long after the war was over, Captain Eads with his
jetties undertook to compel the current to wash out channels in the
principal mouths and thus to render easy the approach of ships to New
Orleans. But nothing of that kind had been done in the early sixties,
and the Federal fleet that was charged with the duty of reducing the
forts and capturing the city must first force its way through shifting
mud banks in order to get into the river. The useless mortar schooners
entered easily by the Pass á l'Outre, but the vessels that were to do
the effective fighting had far greater difficulty. It required three
weeks of strenuous night and day exertion to force them through the
Southwest Pass--the principal mouth of the river--and even then one of
them, the _Colorado_, had to be left outside.
Having thus passed the first and purely natural defense of New
Orleans, Farragut had next to encounter the artificial defenses of
the river itself. These consisted of two forts at the narrowest part
of the stream, together with some adjunctive defenses presently to be
mentioned.
These forts were two very imperfectly armed works--Fort St. Philip on
the eastern bank, and Fort Jackson on the western. They mounted about
109 effective guns, some of them of obsolete pattern, only a few of
which--estimated at fourteen--were protected by casemates. Captain
Mahan, in his "Life of Farragut," tells us that these forts had been
largely stripped of their armament, and were very imperfectly equipped
for the defensive work required of them.
In the river above the forts lay a Confederate war fleet of fifteen
vessels, including an iron-clad ram and an iron-clad floating battery,
both carrying heavy guns. This fleet had been stupidly weakened by the
withdrawal of Hollins's gunboats for inconsequent service at Memphis.
Below the forts was a great chain barrier stretched across the river
and supported by hulks anchored in the stream for that purpose. For
the protection of this barrier the shores were lined with Confederate
sharpshooters--riflemen accustomed to hit whatever they might shoot at.
Having got his fleet into the river after weeks of toil--leaving one
very important vessel behind--it was Farragut's task to assail and
overcome these defenses and force his way through a strong fleet, up
the narrow river to the city he was ordered to capture.
Farragut, as has been said already and as he had bluntly told the Navy
Department, had no confidence whatever in the effectiveness of the
mortar fleet, which was in charge of its originator, David D. Porter.
He would have preferred to leave that part of his squadron behind as
an entirely useless and embarrassing incumbrance; but he was a man of
generous mind and never arrogantly opinionated. So he gave Porter the
fullest possible opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his
mortar fleet.
There were twenty-one of the mortar schooners, each carrying a mortar
of thirteen inches caliber, which threw shells weighing two hundred and
eighty-five pounds each. These shells were filled with such charges
of gunpowder as made them, in theory at least, terrible engines of
destruction when they exploded. It was Porter's firm conviction that
by their fire alone he could compel the Confederates to abandon their
forts and leave the way clear for the fleet to sail on up the river
with only the Confederate war vessels to contest their passage.
Farragut did not expect any such result, but he gave Porter every
opportunity.
Securely anchored in a position of Porter's own selection, the mortar
schooners opened fire on the eighteenth of April. For six consecutive
days and nights they threw their fearful missiles, each in itself a
mine, into the forts. They threw in all six thousand of these shells,
weighing in the aggregate no less than eight hundred and fifty-five
tons. They killed or wounded only fifty men--a picket guard in
numbers--or, as Dr. Rossiter Johnson has curiously calculated, they
killed or wounded about one man to every sixteen tons of iron hurled
into the forts.
This was at the rate of only eight casualties a day, a bagatelle in war
and very naturally a bombardment so slightly effective utterly failed
to render the forts untenable or to drive out the brave men who were
set to defend them. On the contrary the Confederate fire in response
to the mortars sank one of the schooners and disabled one of the
steamers.
Thus was again taught the familiar lesson of war, that the terrific is
not necessarily the effective fire in battle.
So far from abandoning their forts under this fearful rain of metal
and explosives the Confederates were busying themselves night and day
in determined and intelligently directed efforts to destroy their
adversary's fleet. They sent down the river a multitude of blazing
fire-rafts, and it required not only all of Farragut's wonderful
foresight and ingenuity but constant and very earnest exertions on the
part of his crews to ward off this danger.
At last the mortar experiment was done. It had utterly failed to
accomplish its intended purpose of reducing the forts or compelling
their evacuation. Farragut was dealing with an enemy of his own
determined kind, an enemy as resolute, as daring, and as patiently
enduring as he himself was.
He decided at last to push his fleet past the forts at all hazards,
and, leaving those works as an enemy in his rear, to try conclusions
in a decisive battle with the Confederate fleet that lay in wait for
him in the river above. It was a dangerous and a daring thing to do.
Indeed, it was almost desperately daring. But Farragut's habit of
mind was daring. Moreover his orders on this occasion offensively and
insultingly "required" success at his hands. It was his fixed purpose
either to achieve that success or to sink beneath the muddy waters of
the Mississippi in a determined effort to achieve it.
His first care was to sever the chain barrier across the river. To that
end he sent a force up the stream which gallantly boarded one of the
hulks, cut the chain, and rendered that defense useless.
On the morning of April 24, at 3.30 o'clock, the fighting part of the
fleet advanced in full force, engaging the enemy to the right and left,
but meanwhile pushing its way up the river without waiting for results
at the point of obstruction.
The forts were quickly passed and then ensued one of the most
picturesque water battles ever fought. The Confederates knew their
business and they did it with a skill and determination which excited
Farragut's admiration, as he was afterwards accustomed to testify in
glowing words of recognition.
Captain Theodorus Bailey, with eight vessels, was the first to pass the
forts. He immediately became involved in a desperate encounter with
the Confederate fleet. His flagship, the _Cayuga_, was engaged at once
by three Confederate vessels, each determinedly trying to board and
capture her; for this was a battle of giants in which every officer
and every man on either side was ready for any conceivable deed of
"derring-do," and in which personal courage of the most dauntless sort
was the one military equipment which both sides possessed in absolutely
limitless supply.
Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has
the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell
penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In
every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively
earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks
everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel
it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and
renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the
destruction.
That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey.
Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its
purpose the _Oneida_ and the _Varuna_ came to the rescue. The _Oneida_
rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The _Varuna_
had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and
running ashore, sank helplessly.
The _Pensacola_ sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the
forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in
those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their
precincts.
The _Mississippi_, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by
the Confederate iron-clad _Manassas_. But, by way of revenge, the
_Mississippi's_ guns riddled the ram and destroyed it.
In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in
great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these
Farragut's flagship, the _Hartford_, ran aground upon a mud bank and
for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position.
If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight"
he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi
is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream
must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of
quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that
fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The
men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other,
are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or
sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century
than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side
and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that
soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and
right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody
work they were set to do.
The net result of the contest was the destruction of the Confederate
fleet. With that out of the way Farragut pushed on to New Orleans and
with guns out for action, demanded the city's surrender.
Only one issue was possible, of course. The city was at Farragut's
mercy. He could easily destroy it should it resist. It only remained
for him to hoist the National flag over it and to send for General
Butler's land force to occupy and possess the chief city of the South,
which he did on the first of May.
Butler's rule in the city, where the white population at that time
consisted chiefly of women and children, was harsh and even brutal--so
harsh and so brutal in its attitude toward women as to offend sentiment
both North and South, and in Europe.
He issued one order which could not have come from the headquarters
of any man of soldierly instincts or gentle associations. By way of
resenting the attitude and conduct of women toward a conquering
soldiery, he put forth a decree in these words:
General Orders No. 28
Headquarters, Dept. of the Gulf,
New Orleans, May 15, 1862.
As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject
to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of
New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and
courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female
shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for
any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded
and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her
avocation.
By order of Major-General Butler.
GEORGE C. STRONG,
Assistant Adjutant General and
Chief of Staff.
It needs no argument and no exposition to show that in issuing this
order Benjamin F. Butler deliberately gave license and authority
to the most brutal impulses of the most degraded men under his
command,--authorizing them to judge for themselves when they should
choose to think themselves insulted "by word, gesture, or movement,"
and upon every such occasion, without further inquiry, and upon their
own initiative, to treat every woman who had occasion to venture into
the streets as "a woman of the town plying her avocation."
With the cynicism that had equipped him for practice in the criminal
courts of Boston, Butler afterwards explained his order by saying that
the only right way to treat "a woman of the town plying her avocation,"
is to pass her by unnoticed. But he perfectly knew that that was not
what his order meant to his soldiery or what he meant it to mean.
The rigor of Butler's rule in New Orleans was in some other respects
salutary. He wantonly imprisoned many citizens--men and women
indifferently--without warrant or just cause, but apart from that he
ruled the city to its advantage. In mortal dread of yellow fever, he
cleaned New Orleans as it had never been cleaned before, and throughout
a hot summer he kept the city healthier than it had ever been in all
its history.
Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians
of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious
to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character
against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried
on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade
could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for
its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy
could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every
Confederate port.
To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his
purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve
the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult,
and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all
outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute
the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly
inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at
once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile.
The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay.
They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered
Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time
and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the
batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson.
Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey.
But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly
water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under
compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the
Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing
in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness,
quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the
maintenance of their armies in the field.
Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped
to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the
country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how
should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did,
the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute
to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control
of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of
its official head.
Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the
Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and
human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg,
where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that
the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and
Sherman were ready to do it well.
This judgment does not rest upon the opinion of the author of this
history. It is supported in every detail by the skilled criticism of no
less a naval authority than Captain Mahan. In his "Farragut," page 116
_et seq._, that highest authority in naval criticism has written:
"The principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration
was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to
afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above
New Orleans. Nor was this the worst. The time thus consumed in marching
up the hill in order at once to march down again threw away the
opportunity for reducing Mobile before its defenses were strengthened.
Had the navy been large enough, both tasks might have been attempted;
but it will appear in the sequel that its scanty numbers were the
reason which postponed the attack on Mobile from month to month until
it became the most formidable danger Farragut ever had to encounter."
In other words, the policy of setting a Gideon Welles to direct the
naval operations of a Farragut, resulted in making a difficult task
out of a very easy one. The fall of New Orleans served to warn the
Confederates of the danger in which Mobile lay, and while Welles was
keeping Farragut uselessly and against his will in the Mississippi,
skilled Confederate engineers were strengthening the Mobile defenses
and planting the harbor of that port with destructive mines and
torpedoes, so that Farragut's task of closing that port, when months
later he was reluctantly permitted to undertake it, was difficult and
perilous in the extreme, where it had been simple, easy, and scarcely
at all dangerous to ships or seamen at the time when he had asked
permission to proceed to its accomplishment.
But the Pinafore practice of setting an untrained, inexperienced and
ignorant politician to direct the scientific and strictly professional
work of highly trained naval officers, is too firmly imbedded in our
system of administration to be disturbed by considerations of mere
common-sense. When war is on, the country pays the penalty of this
folly.