Captains of the Civil War Part 13

Pickett advanced at three o'clock, to the breathless admiration of both friend and foe. He had a mile of open ground to cover. But his three lines marched forward as steadily and blithely as if the occasion was a gala one and they were on parade. The Confederate bombardment ceased. The Federal guns and rifles held their fire. Fate hung in silence on those gallant lines of gray. Then the Federal skirmishers down in the valley began fitfully firing; and the waiting ma.s.ses on the Federal slopes began to watch more intently still.

"Here they come! Here comes the infantry!" The blue ranks stirred a little as the men felt their cartridge boxes and the sockets of their bayonets. The calm warnings of the officers could be heard all down the line of Gibbon's magnificent division, which stood straight in Pickett's path. "Steady, men, steady! Don't fire yet!"

For a very few, tense minutes Pickett's division disappeared in an undulation of the ground. Then, at less than point-blank range, it seemed to spring out of the very earth, no longer in three lines but one solid ma.s.s of rus.h.i.+ng gray, cresting, like a tidal wave, to break in fury on the sh.o.r.e. Instantly, as if in answer to a single word, Hunt's guns and Gibbon's rifles crashed out together, and shot, sh.e.l.l, canister, and bullet cut gaping wounds deep into the dense gray ranks. Still, the wave broke; and, from its storm-blown top, one furious tongue surged over the breastwork and through the hedge of bayonets. It came from Armistead's brigade of stark Virginians. He led it on; and, with a few score men, reached the highwater mark of that last spring tide.

When he fell the tide of battle turned; turned everywhere upon that stricken field; turned throughout the whole campaign; turned even in the war itself.

As Pickett's men fell back they were swept by scythe-like fire from every gun and rifle that could mow them down. Not a single mounted officer remained; and of all the brave array that Pickett led three-fourths fell killed or wounded. The other fourth returned undaunted still, but only as the wreckage of a storm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CIVIL WAR CAMPAIGNS OF 1863]

Lee's loss exceeded forty per cent of his command. Meade's loss fell short of thirty. But Meade was quite unable to pursue at once when Lee retired on the evening of the fourth. The opposing cavalry, under Pleasonton and Stuart respectively, had fought a flanking battle of their own, but without decisive result. So Lee could screen his retreat to the Potomac, where, however, his whole supply train might have been cut off if its escort under the steadfast Imboden had not been reinforced by every teamster who could pull a trigger.

Gettysburg and Vicksburg, coming together, of course raised the wildest expectations among the general public, expectations which found an unworthy welcome at Government headquarters, where Halleck wrote to Meade on the fourteenth: "The escape of Lee's army has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President." Meade at once replied: "The censure is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I most respectfully ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army." Wiser counsels thereupon prevailed.

Lee and Meade maneuvered over the old Virginian scenes of action, each trying to outflank the other, and each being hampered by having to send reinforcements to their friends in Tennessee, where, as we have seen already, Bragg and Rosecrans were now maneuvering in front of Chattanooga. In October (after the Confederate victory of Chickamauga) Meade foiled Lee's attempt to bring on a Third Mana.s.sas.

The campaign closed at Mine Run, where Lee repulsed Meade's attempted surprise in a three-day action, which began on the twenty-sixth of November, the morrow of Grant's three days at Chattanooga.

From this time forward the South was like a beleaguered city, certain to fall if not relieved, unless, indeed, the hearts of those who swayed the Northern vote should fail them at the next election.

CHAPTER IX

FARRAGUT AND THE NAVY: 1863-4

The Navy's task in '63 was complicated by the many foreign vessels that ran only between two neutral ports but broke bulk into blockade-runners at their own port of destination. For instance, a neutral vessel, with neutral crew and cargo, would leave a port in Europe for a neutral port in America, say, Na.s.sau in the Bahamas or Matamoras on the Rio Grande. She could not be touched of course at either port or anywhere inside the three-mile limit. But international law accepted the doctrine of continuous voyage, by which contraband could be taken anywhere on the high seas, provided, of course, that the blockader could prove his case. If, for example, there were ten times as many goods going into Matamoras as could possibly be used through that port by Mexico, then the presumption was that nine-tenths were contraband. Presumption becoming proof by further evidence, the doctrine of continuous voyage could be used in favor of the blockaders who stopped the contraband at sea between the neutral ports. The blockade therefore required a double line of operation: one, the old line along the Southern coast, the other, the new line out at sea, and preferably just beyond the three-mile limit outside the original port of departure, so as to kill the evil at its source. Na.s.sau and Matamoras gave the coast blockade plenty of hara.s.sing work; Na.s.sau because it was "handy to" the Atlantic ports, Matamoras because it was at the mouth of the Rio Grande, over the shoals of which the Union wars.h.i.+ps could not go to prevent contraband crossing into Texas, thence up to the Red River, down to the Mississippi (between the Confederate strongholds of Vicksburg and Port Hudson) and on to any other part of the South. But what may be called the high-seas blockade was no less hara.s.sing, complicated as it was by the work of Confederate raiders.

The coast blockade of '63 was marked by two notable s.h.i.+p duels and three fights round Charleston, then, as always, a great storm center of the war. At the end of January two Confederate gunboats under Commodore Ingraham attacked the blockading flotilla of Charleston, forced the _Mercedita_ to surrender, badly mauled the _Keystone State_, and damaged the _Quaker City_. But, though some foreign consuls and all Charleston thought the blockade had been raised for the time being, it was only bent, not broken.

At the end of February the Union monitor _Montauk_ destroyed the Confederate privateer _Nashville_ near Fort McAllister on the Ogeechee River in Georgia. In April nine Union monitors steamed in to test the strength of Charleston; but, as they got back more than they could give, Admiral Du Pont wisely decided not to try the fight-to-a-finish he had meant to make next morning. Wa.s.saw Sound in Georgia was the scene of a desperate duel on the seventeenth of June, when the Union monitor _Weehawken_ captured the old blockade-runner _Fingal_, which had been converted into the new Confederate ram _Atlanta_. The third week in August witnessed another bombardment of Charleston, this time on a larger scale, for a longer time, and by military as well as naval means. But Charleston remained defiant and unconquered both this year and the next.

Confederate raiders were at work along the trade routes of the world in '63, doing much harm by capture and destruction, and even more by shaking the security of the American mercantile marine.

American crews were hard to get when so many hands were wanted for other war work; and American vessels were increasingly apt to seek the safety of a neutral flag.

Slowly, and with much perverse interference to overcome in the course of its hara.s.sing duties, the Union navy was getting the strangle-hold that killed the sea-girt South. By '64 the North had secured this strangle-hold; and nothing but foreign intervention or the political death of the Northern War Party could possibly shake it off. The South was feeling its practical enislement as never before. The strong right arm of the Union navy held it fast at every point but three--Wilmington, Charleston, and Mobile; and round these three the stern blockaders grew stronger every day.

The Sabine Pa.s.s and Galveston also remained in Southern hands; and the border town of Matamoras still imported contraband. But these other three points were closely watched; and the greatly lessened contraband that did get through them now only served the western South, which had been completely severed from the eastern South by the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. The left arm of the Union navy now held the whole line of the Mississippi, while the gripping hand held all the tributary streams--Ohio, c.u.mberland, and Tennessee--from which the Union armies were to invade, divide, and devastate the eastern South this year.

Several Southern raiders were still at large in '64. But the most famous or notorious three have each their own year of glory. The _Florida_ belongs to '63, the _Shenandoah_ to '65. So the one great raiding story we have now to tell is that of the _Alabama_, the greatest of them all.

The _Alabama_ was a beautiful thousand-ton wooden barkentine, built by the Lairds at Birkenhead in '62, with standing rigging of wire, a single screw driven by two horizontal three-hundred horse power engines, coal room for three hundred and fifty tons, eight good guns, the heaviest a hundred-pound rifle, and a maximum crew of one hundred and forty-nine--all ranks and ratings--under Captain Raphael Semmes, late U. S. N. Semmes was not only a very able officer but an accomplished lawyer, well posted on belligerent and neutral rights at sea.

For nearly two years the _Alabama_ roved the oceans of the Old World and the New, taking sixty-six Union vessels valued at seven million dollars, spreading the terror of her name among all the merchantmen that flew the Stars and Stripes, and infuriating the Navy by the wonderful way in which she contrived to escape every trap it set for her. She was designed for speed rather than for fighting, and, with her great spread of canvas, could sometimes work large areas under sail. But, even so, her runs, captures, and escapes formed a series of adventures that no mere luck could have possibly performed with a fluctuating foreign crew commanded by ex-officers of the Navy. Her wanderings took her through nearly a hundred degrees of lat.i.tude, from the coast of Scotland to St.

Paul Island, south of the Indian Ocean, also through more than two hundred degrees of longitude, from the Gulf of Mexico to the China Sea. She captured "Yankees" within one day's steaming of the New York Navy Yard as well as in the Straits of Sunda. West of the Azores and off the coast of Brazil her captures came so thick and fast that they might have almost been a flock of sheep run down there by a wolf. Finally, to fill the cup of wrath against her, she had sunk a blockader off the coast of Texas, given the slip to a Union man-of-war at the Cape of Good Hope, and kept the Navy guessing her unanswered riddles for two whole years.

Imagine, then, the keen elation with which all hands aboard the U. S. S. _Kearsarge_ heard at their berth off Flus.h.i.+ng that the _Alabama_ was in port at Cherbourg on the Channel coast of France, only one day's sail southwest! And there she was when the _Kearsarge_ came to anchor; and every Northern eye was turned to see the s.h.i.+p of which the world had heard so much. The Kearsarges hardly dared to hope that there would be a fight; for they had the stronger vessel, and now the faster one as well. The _Alabama_ had been built for speed; but she had knocked about so much without a proper overhaul that her copper sheathing was in rags, while she was more or less strained in nearly every other part. The _Kearsarge_, on the other hand, was in good order, with mantlets of chain cable protecting her vitals, with one-third greater horse power, with fourteen more men in her crew, and with two big pivot guns throwing eleven inch sh.e.l.ls with great force at short ranges. Moreover, the _Kearsarge_, with her superior speed and stronger hull, could choose the range and risk close quarters. The Alabamas were also keen to estimate respective strengths. But the French authorities naturally kept the two s.h.i.+ps pretty far apart; so the Alabamas never saw the chain mantlets which the Kearsarges had cleverly hidden under a covering of wood that appeared to be flush with the hull.

The Kearsarges had a second and still more elating surprise when they heard the _Alabama_ was coming out to fight. Semmes was apparently anxious to show that his raider could be as gallant in fighting a man-of-war as she was effective in sinking merchant vessels; so he wrote his challenge to the Confederate Consul at Cherbourg, who pa.s.sed it on to the U. S. Consul, who handed it to Captain Winslow, commanding the _Kearsarge_. Still, four days pa.s.sed without the _Alabama_; and the Kearsarges were giving up hope, when, suddenly, on Sunday morning, the nineteenth of June, just as they had rigged church and fallen in for prayers, out came the _Alabama_. The _Kearsarge_ thereupon drew off, so that the _Alabama_ could not easily escape to neutral waters if the duel went against her. Cherbourg, of course, was all agog to see the fight; and many thousands of people, some from as far as Paris, watched every move. An English yacht, the _Deerhound_, kept an offing of about a mile, ready to rescue survivors from a watery grave. Its owner, with his wife and family, had intended to stay ash.o.r.e and go to church. But, when they heard the _Alabama_ was really going out, he put the question to the vote around the breakfast-table, whereupon it was carried unanimously that the _Deerhound_ should go too.

When the deck-officer of the _Kearsarge_ sang out, "_Alabama!_"

Captain Winslow put down his prayer-book, seized his speaking-trumpet, and turned to gain a proper offing, while the drum beat to general quarters and the s.h.i.+p was cleared for action, with pivot-guns to starboard. The weather was fine, with a slight haze, little sea, and a light west breeze. Having drawn the _Alabama_ far enough to sea, the _Kearsarge_ turned toward her again, showing the starboard bow. When at a mile the _Alabama_ fired her hundred-pounder. For nearly the whole hour this famous duel lasted the s.h.i.+ps continued fighting in the same way--starboard to starboard, round and round a circle from half to a quarter mile across. Each captain stood on the horse-block abreast the mizzen-mast to direct the fight.

Semmes presently called to his executive officer: "Mr. Kell, use solid shot! Our sh.e.l.l strike the enemy's side and fall into the water" (after bounding off the iron mantlets Winslow had so cleverly concealed). The _Kearsarge's_ gunnery was magnificent, especially from the after-pivot, which Quartermaster William Smith fired with deadly aim, even when three of his gun's crew had been wounded by a sh.e.l.l. These three, strange to say, were the only casualties that occurred aboard the _Kearsarge_. But at sea the stronger side usually suffers much less and the weaker much more than on land.

The _Alabama_ lost forty: killed, drowned, and wounded.

The Kearsarges soon saw how the fight was going and began to cheer each first-rate shot. "That's a good one! Now we have her! Give her another like the last!" The big eleven-inchers got home repeatedly as the range decreased; so much so that Semmes ordered Kell to keep the _Alabama_ headed for the coast the next time the circling brought her bow that way. This would bring her port side into action, which was just what Semmes wanted now, because she had a dangerous list to starboard, where the water was pouring through the shot-holes.

Kell changed her course with perfect skill, righting the helm, hoisting the head-sails, hauling the fore-try-sail-sheet well aft, and pivoting to port for a broadside delivered almost as quickly as if there had not been a change at all. But at this moment the engineer came up to say the water had put his fires out and that the s.h.i.+p was sinking. At the same time a strange thing happened.

An early shot from the _Kearsarge_ had carried away the _Alabama's_ colors; and now the _Alabama's_ own last broadside actually announced her own defeat by "breaking out" the special Stars and Stripes that Winslow had run up his mizzenmast on purpose to break out in case of victory. A cannon ball had twitched the cord that held the flag rolled up "in stops."

Semmes sent his one remaining boat to announce his surrender; threw his sword into the sea; and jumped in with the survivors. The _Deerhound_, on authority from Winslow, had already closed in to the rescue, followed by two French pilot boats and two from the _Kearsarge_; when suddenly the _Alabama_, rearing like a stricken horse, plunged to her doom.

Long before the _Alabama's_ end the Navy had been preparing for the finis.h.i.+ng blows against the Southern ports. Farragut had returned to New Orleans in January, '64, hoping for immediate action. But vexatious delays at Was.h.i.+ngton postponed his great attack till August, when he crowned his whole career by his master-stroke against Mobile. Grant was equally annoyed by this absurd delay, which was caused by the eccentric, and therefore entirely wasteful, Red River Expedition of '64, an expedition we shall ignore otherwise than by pointing out, in this and the succeeding chapters, that it not only postponed the overdue attack on Mobile but spoilt Sherman's grand strategy as well as Farragut's and Grant's. Banks commanded it. But by this time even he had learnt enough of war to know that it was a totally false move. So he boldly protested against it.

But Halleck's orders, dictated by the Government, were positive.

So there was nothing for it but to suffer a well-deserved defeat while trying to kill the dead and withering branches of Confederate power beyond the Mississippi, in order to "show the flag in Texas"

and say "hands off!" to Mexico and France in the least effective way of all.

During this delay the Confederate ram _Albemarle_ came down the Roanoke River, hoping to break through the local blockade in Albemarle Sound and so give North Carolina an outlet to the sea. Two attempts against Newbern, which closed the way out to Pamlico Sound, had failed; but now (the fifth of May) great hopes were set upon the _Albemarle_. At first she seemed impregnable; and the Federal shot and sh.e.l.l glanced harmlessly off her iron sides. But presently Commander Roe of the _Sa.s.sacus_ (a light-draft, pair-paddle, double-ender gunboat) getting at right angles to her, ordered his engineer to stuff the fires with oiled waste and keep the throttle open. "All hands, lie down!" shouted Roe, as the throbbing engines drove his vessel to the charge. Then came an earthquake shock: the _Sa.s.sacus_ crashed her bronze beak into the _Albemarle's_ side.

Both vessels were disabled; a sh.e.l.l from the _Albemarle_ burst the boilers of the _Sa.s.sacus_, scalding the engineers. But the rest fought off the attempt made by the Albemarles to board. Presently the furious opponents drifted apart; and the _Albemarle_, unable to face her other enemies, took refuge upstream. There, on the twenty-seventh of October, she was heroically attacked and sunk by Lieutenant W. B. Cus.h.i.+ng, U. S. N., with a spar torpedo projecting from a little steam launch. Cus.h.i.+ng himself swam off through a hail of bullets, worked his way through the woods, seized a skiff belonging to one of the enemy's outposts, and reached the flags.h.i.+p half dead but wholly triumphant.

Between the _Albemarle's_ two fights Farragut took Mobile after a magnificent action on the fifth of August. There were batteries ash.o.r.e, torpedoes across the channel, the _Tennessee_ ram and other Confederate vessels waiting on the flank: three kinds of danger to the Union fleet if one false movement had been made. But Farragut's touch was sure. He sent his ironclads through next to the batteries, which were only really dangerous on one side. This protected the wooden s.h.i.+ps against the batteries and the ironclads against the torpedoes; for the Confederates had to leave part of the fairway clear in order to use it themselves. Through this narrow channel the four strongly armored monitors led the desperate way, a little ahead and to starboard of the wooden vessels, which followed in pairs, each pair lashed together, with the stronger on the starboard side, next to Fort Morgan.

The Confederates in Fort Morgan, and in the small and distant Fort Powell on the other side, hardly reached a thousand men. Their force afloat was also comparatively small: the ironclad ram _Tennessee_ and three side-wheeler gunboats. But the great strength of their position and the many dangers to a hostile fleet combined to make Farragut's attack a very serious operation, even with his four monitors, eight screw sloops, and four smaller vessels. The Union army, which took no part in this great attack, was over five thousand strong, and lost only seven men in the land bombardment later on.

Farragut crossed the bar in the _Hartford_ at ten past six in the morning with the young flood tide and a westerly breeze to blow the smoke against Fort Morgan. All his s.h.i.+ps ran up the Stars and Stripes not only at the peak, as usual, but at each mast-head as well. Farragut himself at first took post in the port main rigging.

But as the smoke of battle rose around him he climbed higher and higher till he got close under the maintop, where a seaman, sent up by Captain Drayton, lashed him on securely.

All went well amid the furious cannonade till the monitor _Tec.u.mseh_, taking the wrong side of the channel buoy in her anxiety to ram the _Tennessee_, ran over the torpedoes, was horribly holed by the explosion, and plunged headforemost to the bottom, her screw madly whirling in the air. Nor was this the worst; for the _Tec.u.mseh's_ mistake had thrown the other monitors out of their proper line-ahead, athwart the wooden s.h.i.+ps, which began to slow and swing about in some confusion. The Confederates redoubled their fire. Ahead lay the fatal torpedoes. For a moment Farragut could not decide whether to risk an advance at all costs or to turn back beaten. He was a very devout as well as a most determined man; and his simple prayer, "O G.o.d, shall I go on?" seemed answered by the echo of his soul, "Go on!" So on he went, not in unreflecting exaltation, but in exaltation based on knowledge and on skill. Like Cromwell, he might well have said, "Trust in the Lord and keep your powder dry!" For he had done all that naval foresight could have done to ensure success. And now, in one lightning flash of genius, he reviewed the situation. He knew the torpedoes of his day were often unreliable, that they exploded only on a special kind of shock, that those which did explode could not be replaced in action, that they were all fixed to their own spots, and that if one s.h.i.+p was blown up her next-astern would get through safely.

The _Brooklyn_, his next-ahead, was in his way. So he ordered the flags.h.i.+p _Hartford_ and her lashed-together consort, the double-ender _Metacomet_, to use, the one her screw, the other her paddles, in opposite directions, till he had cleared the _Brooklyn's_ stern.

As he drew clear and headed for the danger-channel a shout went up from the _Brooklyn's_ deck--"'ware torpedoes!" But Farragut, his mind made up, instantly roared back--"d.a.m.n the torpedoes!" Then, turning to the _Hartford's_ and _Metacomet's_ decks, he called his orders down: "Four bells! Captain Drayton, go ahead! Captain Jouett, full speed!" In answer to the order of "four bells" the engines worked their very utmost and the two vessels dashed ahead.

Torpedoes knocked against the bottom and some of the primers actually snapped. But nothing exploded; and Farragut won through.

Inside the harbor the _Tennessee_ fought hard against the overwhelming Union fleet. But her low-powered engines gave her no chance at quick maneuvers. Three vessels rammed her in succession; and she was forced to surrender.

After this purely naval victory on the fifth of August, General Granger's troops invested Fort Morgan, which, becoming the target of an irresistible converging fire from both land and sea on the twenty-second, surrendered on the twenty-third.

The next objective of a joint expedition was Fort Fisher, which stood at the end of a long, low tongue of land between the sea and Cape Fear River. Fort Fisher guarded the entrance to Wilmington in North Carolina, the port, above all others, from which the Confederate armies drew their oversea supplies. Lee wrote to Colonel Lamb, its commandant, saying that he could not subsist if it was taken. Lamb had less than two thousand men in the fort; but there were six thousand more forming an army of support outside. The Confederates, however, had no naval force to speak of, while the Union fleet, commanded by Admiral Porter, was the largest that had ever yet a.s.sembled under the Stars and Stripes. There were nearly sixty fighting vessels of all kinds, including five new ironclads and the three finest new frigates. The guns that were carried exceeded six hundred.

There was also a mine s.h.i.+p, the old _Louisiana_, stuffed chock-a-block with powder to blow in the side of the fort. The Was.h.i.+ngton wiseacres set great store on this new mine of theirs. It was, of course, to end the war. But naval and military experts on the spot were more than doubtful. On the night of the twenty-third of December the _Louisiana_ was safely worked in near the fort by brave Commander Rhind, who fired the slow match and escaped unhurt with his devoted crew of volunteers. A tremendous explosion followed. But, as there was nothing to drive the force of it against the walls, it simply resulted in an enormous flurry of water, mud, sand, earth, and bits of flaming wreckage.

Next morning the fleet bombarded with such success as to silence many of the guns opposed to them. But on Christmas Day General Weitzel reported that an a.s.sault would fail; whereupon General Butler concurred and retreated, much to the rage of the fleet, which thought quite otherwise.

In a few days General Terry arrived with the same white troops reinforced by two small colored brigades, making a total of eight thousand men. To these Porter, strongly reinforced, added a naval brigade, two thousand strong, that volunteered to storm the sea face of Fort Fisher. These gallant men had only cutla.s.ses and pistols--except the four hundred marines, who carried bayonets and rifles. They were a scratch lot, from the soldier's point of view, never having been landed together as a single unit till called upon to a.s.sault the most dangerous features of the fort. Yet, though they were repulsed with considerable loss, they greatly helped to win the day by obliging the defenders to divide their forces.

As Terry's army was, by itself, four or five times stronger than Lamb's entire command the military stormers succeeded in fighting their way through every line of defense and compelling a surrender.