DAVID GLASCOE FARRAGUT.
The Lesson of the Rebellion to Monarchs--The Strength of the United
States--The U. S. Naval Service--The Last War--State of the
Navy in 1861--Admiral Farragut Represents the Old Navy and the
New--Charlemagne's Physician, Farraguth--The Admiral's Letter
about his Family--His Birth--His Cruise with Porter when a Boy
of Nine--The Destruction of the Essex--Farragut in Peace Times
--Expected to go with the South--Refuses, is Threatened, and
goes North--The Opening of the Mississippi--The Bay Fight at
Mobile--The Admiral's Health--Farragut and the Tobacco Bishop.
The course and character and result of the Rebellion taught many a
great new lesson; in political morals and in political economy; in
international law; in the theory of governing; in the significance of
just principles on this earth. Perhaps all those lessons, taught so
tremendously to the civilized world, might be summed in one expression;
the Astounding Strength of a Christian Republic. For, whichever phase
of the Rebellion we examine in considering it as a chapter of novelties
in the world's history, we still come back to that one splendid,
heart-filling remembrance;--How unexpected, how unbelieved, how
inexhaustible, how magnificent beyond all history, the strength of the
United States!
"There goes your Model Republic," sneered all the Upper Classes of
Europe, "knocked into splinters in the course of one man's life! A good
riddance!" And reactionary Europe set instantly to work to league
itself with our own traitors, now that the United States was dead,
to bury it effectively. But the Imperial Republic, even more utterly
unconscious than its enemies, of what it could suffer and could do,
stunned at first and reeling under a blow the most tremendous ever
aimed at any government, clung close to Right and Justice, and rising
in its own blood, went down wounded as it was, into the thunder and
the mingled blinding lightning and darkness of the great conflict,
unknowing and unfearing whether life or death was close before. As
its day, so was its strength. As the nation's need grew deeper and
more desperate, in like measure the nation's courage, the conscious
calmness, the unmoved resolution, the knowledge of strength and wealth
and power, grew more high and strong, and whereas the world knew that
no nation had ever survived such an assault, and knew, it said, that
ours would not, lo and behold, the United States achieved things
beyond all comparison more unheard of, more wonderful, than even the
treasonable explosion for whose deadly catastrophe all the monarchists
stood joyfully waiting. They were disappointed. And ever since, they
know that if the Rebellion was not the death-toll of Republics, it was
the death-toll of many other things, and ever since, all the kings are
setting their houses in order.
There were three great national material instrumentalities which the
Free Christian People of the United States created in their peril,
being the sole means which could have won in the war, and being
moreover exactly the means which England and Europe asserted that we
were peculiarly unable to create or to use; they were: the Supply of
Money; the Army on the land, and the Fleet on the sea.
Of these three, the story of the fleet has a peculiar interest of
its own. The United States Navy was always a popular service in the
country, for the adventurous genius and inventive faculties of our
people, developed and stimulated by its successful prosecution of
commerce, had easily dealt with the naval problems of fifty years ago.
In the war of 1812, the superior skill of our shipbuilders and sailors
launched and navigated a small but swift and powerful and well managed
navy, and the single common-sense application of sights for aiming,
to our ship-guns, in like manner as to muskets, gave our sailors a
murderous superiority in sea fights which won us many a victory.
But in times of peace, a free nation almost necessarily falls behind
a standing army nation in respect of military and naval mechanism
and stored material and readiness of organization; and accordingly,
after forty years of little but disuse, our navy, as the muscles of
an arm shrink away if it is left unmoved, showed little of the latest
improvements in construction and armament, and indeed there was very
little navy to show at all. At Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, the whole
navy of the United States consisted of seventy-six vessels, carrying
1,783 guns; and of these, only twelve were within reach, so effectively
had Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of the Navy, Toucey, dispersed them in
readiness for the secession schemes of his fellows in the cabinet.
And even of those twelve, but a few were in Northern ports. The navy
conspirators had no mind to have a southern blockade brought down on
them, and so took good care to send our best ships on long fancy
voyages to Japan or otherwhere--and to clap on board of them certain
officers whose loyalty and ability they wished to put out of the way.
Thus General Ripley found himself, to his indignation, over in Asia
when the explosion took place.
It was from this beginning--practically nothing--that the energy and
skill of American inventors and seamen created a navy beyond comparison
the strongest on the face of the earth, reaching a strength of 600
ships, and 51,000 men; which effectively maintained the most immense
and difficult blockade of history; which performed with brilliant and
glorious success, enterprises whose importance and danger are equal
to any chronicled in the wonderful annals of the sea; which fully
completed its own indispensable share in the work of subduing the
rebellion; and which revolutionized the theory and practice of naval
warfare.
In this chapter of the history of the navy the most famous name is that
of Admiral Farragut, not so much in consequence of any identification
with the mechanical inventions of the day, as because his past
professional career and his recent brilliant and daring victories,
have linked together the elder with the younger fame of our navy, and
have done it by the exercise of professional and personal courage and
skill, rather than by the ingenious use of newly discovered scientific
auxiliaries. The hardy courage of unmailed breasts always appeals
more strongly to admiration and sympathy, than that more thoughtful
and doubtless wiser proceeding which would win fights from behind
invulnerable protections.
A friend of the writer was, during the Rebellion, investigating some
subject connected with the history of medicine. In one of the books
he examined he found mention made of Charlemagne's physician, a
wonderfully skilful and learned man, named _Farraguth_. Our famous
Admiral was then in the Gulf of Mexico, engaged in the preparations
for the attack on Mobile which took place during August of that year.
So odd was this coincidence, that its discoverer wrote to the Admiral
to ask whether he knew any thing of this mediæval doctor, and received
in reply a very friendly and agreeably written letter, from which some
extracts may here be given without any violation of confidence, as
giving the most authentic information about his ancestry.
"My own name is probably Castilian. My grandfather came from Ciudadela,
in the island of Minorca. I know nothing of the history of my family
before they came to this country and settled in Florida. You may
remember that in the 17th century, a colony settled there, and among
them, I believe, was my grandfather. My father served through the war
of Independence, and was at the battle of the Cowpens. Judge Anderson,
formerly Comptroller of the Treasurer, has frequently told me that my
father received his majority from George Washington on the same day
with himself; and his children have always supposed that this promotion
was for his good conduct in that fight. Notwithstanding this statement
* * * * I have never been able to find my father's name in any list of
the officers of the Revolution.
"With two men, Ogden and McKee, he was afterwards one of the early
settlers of Tennessee. Mr. McKee was a member of Congress from Alabama,
and once stopped in Norfolk, where I was then residing, on purpose,
as he said, to see me, as the son of his early friend. He said he had
heard that I was "a chip of the old block"--what sort of a block it was
I know not. This was thirty years ago. My father settled twelve miles
from Knoxville, at a place called Campbell's Station, on the river,
where Burnside had his fight. Thence we moved to the South, about the
time of the Wilkinson and Blennerhassett trouble. My father was then
appointed a master in the Navy, and sent to New Orleans in command of
one of the gunboats. Hence the impression that I am a native of New
Orleans. But all my father's children were born in Tennessee, and as I
have said in answer to enquiries on this subject, we only moved South
to crush out a couple of rebellions.
"My mother died of yellow fever the first summer in New Orleans, and
my father settled at Pascagoula, in Mississippi. He continued to serve
throughout the 'last war,' and was at the battle of New Orleans, under
Commodore Paterson, though very infirm at that time. He died the
following year, and my brothers and sisters married in and about New
Orleans, where their descendants still remain. * * * *
"As to the name, Gen. Goicouria, a Spanish hidalgo from Cuba, tells
me it is Castilian, and is spelled in the same way as the old
physician's--Farraguth."
Admiral David Glascoe Farragut was born at Campbell's Station, in
East Tennessee, in 1801. While only a little boy, at nine years of
age, his father, who had been a friend and shipmate of the hardy
sea-king, Commodore Porter, procured him a midshipman's berth under
that commander, and the boy, accompanying Porter in the romantic cruise
of the Essex, served a right desperate apprenticeship to his hazardous
profession. His first sea-fight was the short fierce combat of Porter
in the Essex, on April 13th, 1812, with the English sloop-of-war,
Alert. No sooner did the Alert spy the Essex, than she ran confidently
close upon her weather quarter, and with three cheers opened her
broadside. Porter, not a whit abashed, replied with such swift fury
that the Englishman, smashed into drowning helplessness, and with seven
feet of water in his hold, struck his colors in eight minutes, escaping
out of the fight by surrender even more hastily than he had gone into
it.
In that desperate and bloody fight in Valparaiso harbor, when the
British captain Hillyar, with double the force of the Essex, and by
means of a most discreditable breach of the law of neutrality, made
an end of the Essex, Midshipman Farragut, twelve years of age, stood
by his commander to the very last. When those who could swim ashore
had been ordered overboard, Porter himself, having helped work the
few remaining guns that could be fired, hauled down his flag, and
surrendered the bloody wreck that was all he had left under him, for
the sake of the helpless wounded men who must have sunk along with
him. Farragut was wounded, and was sent home with the other officers
of the ship, on parole; and Porter, in his report to the Secretary of
the Navy, made special and honorable mention of the lad, and mentioned
with the appropriate regret of a just and brave man, that the boy was
"too young for promotion." Probably not another living man on the face
of the earth had so early and so thorough a baptism of blood and fire,
and bore himself through it so manlike.
Commodore Porter had been so much interested in the youth that he
gave him the means of pursuing an education in general studies and
military tactics. But Farragut's vocation was the sea, and as soon as
the war was over he got another ship. Peace is the winter of soldiers
and sailors; when they sit still and wait for the deadly harvest that
brings them prosperity. The times were as dull for Farragut as for
the rest, and for forty-five years he was sailing about the world or
quietly commanding at one or another station, and at long intervals
rising by seniority from one grade to another. In 1825 he became
lieutenant, in 1841 commander, in 1851 captain. When the rebellion came
he was sixty years old, had been in the service forty-eight years, and
to the country at large was utterly unknown. This is not strange; for
throughout all his youth and manhood he had had no opportunity to show
the heroic qualities which when a boy of twelve he had proved himself
to possess even then in such manly measure.
He was living at Norfolk; was a native of the South; and his second
wife, with whom he was now living, was from a Norfolk family. It was
therefore taken for granted that Farragut would go with the South, and
when he frankly avowed his patriotism, he was met with astonishment and
then with threats. They told him it would probably be unsafe for him
to remain in the South, with such sentiments. "Very well," he replied,
"I will go where I can live with such sentiments." Accordingly, he left
Norfolk for the North on the night of April 18, 1861, the very night
before the rebels there fired the navy-yard. He established himself
for a time near Tarrytown, on the Hudson river. The very air was full
of suspicion in those days, and Captain Farragut being unknown to the
people in the vicinity, and walking about in the fields alone a good
deal, a report got out at one time among the neighbors that he was one
of a gang that had arranged to cut the Croton Aqueduct and burn down
New York.
Farragut's very first appointment was that to the command of the naval
part of the New Orleans expedition, for which his orders reached
him January 20, 1862, and on Feb. 3d, in his famous flag-ship, the
Hartford, he sailed from Hampton Roads for Ship Island.
The opening of the Mississippi river has passed into history. Of
all the series of strange and novel and desperate combats which
accomplished the task, the passage of the forts and the capture of New
Orleans was beyond comparison the most dangerous and difficult, and
its success was the most brilliant. The services which succeeded this
were less showy, but included much that was excessively laborious, and
that was dangerous enough for any ordinary ambition; and from beginning
to end the whole task required not only high courage, indefatigable
activity, incessant labor, and the ordinary professional knowledge of
a sailor, but an invention always ready to contrive new means for new
ends, prompt judgment to adopt them if suggested by others, wisdom and
tact in dealing with the rebel authorities, and patience in waiting
for the co-operation of the military forces or the development of
the plans of the government. In carrying his fleet past Port Hudson
and Vicksburg, in helping Grant to cross the river and take the
latter place, in all his operations, whether alone or with the land
commanders, Admiral Farragut gave proof of the possession of all these
qualities.
The "Bay Fight" at Mobile, and the resulting capture of Forts Powell
and Gaines, was another scene as terrible as New Orleans, and still
more splendidly illuminated by the perfect personal courage of the
Admiral, who has already gone into history, song and painting, as he
stood lashed in the rigging of the old Hartford, clear above the smoke
of the battle, and, even when he saw the monitor Tecumseh sunk--the
very ship he had been waiting for for months--yet ordered his wooden
fleet straight forward despite forts, gunboats, ram and torpedoes,
and won a second victory of that most glorious sort only possible to
the high, clear and intelligent courage of a leader who is both truly
heroic and truly wise.
The fame which the Admiral earned in the war has been in some measure
paid him, in the testimonials of admiration and respect which he has
received both at home and abroad. It would require a book to give
account of the greetings and the thanks he has received from his own
countrymen; and on the official voyage which he has made since the war
to the principal ports of Europe, as the representative of the naval
power of the United States. The civilities and attentions conferred
upon himself and his officers, were not solely that formal politeness
which one nation observes to another, but were in large measure the
more enthusiastic acknowledgment which men pay to lofty personal
qualities.
Admiral Farragut is a man of remarkably pure and vigorous health, and
though no longer young, is more elastic, vigorous and enduring than
most young men. His health and strength are the just recompense for
a cleanly and temperate life. He seems to have that sort of innate
or constitutional abhorrence for every unclean thing, which has
characterized some great reformers. There is a pleasant story of a
rebuke once administered by him in a most neat and decorous, but very
effective manner, to a tobacco-smoking bishop, which conveys a good
lesson. At dinner with Farragut, and after the meal was over, the
Bishop, about to select a cigar, offered the bunch to the sailor. "Have
a cigar, Admiral?" said he. "No, Bishop," said the Admiral, with a
quizzical glance, "I don't smoke--_I swear a little, sometimes_."
We regret that the limits of our sketches do not allow us to do justice
to those wonderful, inspiring, romantic scenes by which our navy
gained possession of New Orleans and Mobile. But if one wants to read
them in poetry, terse and vivid, with all the fire of poetry and all
the explicitness of prose, we beg them to read the "River Fight," and
"Bay Fight," of Henry Brownell, who was in both scenes as a volunteer
officer. There he will find Homeric military ardor baptized by
Christian sentiment.
Full red the furnace fires must glow,
That melts the ore of mortal kind;
The mills of God are grinding slow,
But ah, how close they grind!
To-day the Dahlgren and the drum
Are dread Apostles of his name,
His kingdom here can only come
In chrism of blood and flame.
[Illustration: _John A. Andrew_]