The Hero of Manila: Dewey on the Mississippi and the Pacific

by Rossiter Johnson

CHAPTER VI.

THE BEGINNING OF WAR.

The United States navy had done little to distinguish itself since its wonderful achievements in the War of 1812 with Great Britain. During the Mexican War it took part in the occupation of California, and performed what service it could in the Gulf, but there was no opportunity for anything remarkable. Wilkes had made his exploring expedition in Pacific and Antarctic waters; Ingraham, in the St. Louis, had demanded and secured the release of Martin Koszta at Smyrna; Tatnall, with his famous "blood is thicker than water," had participated in the bombardment of the Chinese forts at Peiho; Hudson, in the Niagara, had assisted in laying the first Atlantic cable; and several cruisers had pursued pirates in the West Indies. But with the exception of these occurrences the navy had done nothing to attract popular attention for more than forty years. Yet it had quietly accomplished much good work on the Coast Survey; and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, from its establishment in 1845, educated officers who gave character and efficiency to the service, and when the day of battle came showed themselves to be worthy successors of the famous captains who had preceded them.

A great crisis in the nation's history was now approaching, more rapidly than any one suspected. The older statesmen were gone. Adams, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, all had passed away within a period of seven years. Their successors were men of different mold, and the problem that had given them the most serious trouble, while comparatively small in their day, had now grown to monstrous proportions. The difficulty arose from the existence of two exactly opposite systems of labor in the two parts of the country. In the Southern States the laborers were of a different race from the capitalists and ruling class, and were slaves; in the Northern States all (except a very small proportion) were of the white race and all were free. The different ideas and interests that arose from these two different states of society had constantly tended to alienate the people of one section from those of the other, and the frequent clashing of these interests in the halls of legislation had obscured the fact that in a much larger view, and for permanent reasons, the interests and destiny of the whole country were the same. In the summer when young Dewey was graduated at the Naval Academy, Abraham Lincoln, then in the midst of a heated canvass on this question, said in a speech that became famous: "I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other." Most of the Southern statesmen, and a few of those at the North, looked to a division of the country as the best, if not the inevitable, solution of the problem. But against this there was a barrier greater and more permanent than any wording of constitution or laws enacted in the last century by a generation that had passed away. This was the geography of our country. Mr. Lincoln did not distinctly name it as the reason for his faith in the perpetuity of the Union, but he probably felt it. History shows unmistakably that the permanent boundaries of a country are the geographical ones. Conquest or diplomacy occasionally establishes others, but they do not endure. Separate tribes or peoples, if living within the same geographical boundaries, ultimately come together and form one nation. Had our country been crossed from east to west by a great river like the Amazon, or a chain of lakes like those that separate us from Canada, or a high mountain range, the northern and southern sections might never have come together, or would have been easily separated into two distinct peoples. But with no such natural line of division, and with the Mississippi running south through the center of the country, and with railroads, telegraphs, and other rapidly multiplying means of communication tying the sections together, the perpetuity of the Union was a foregone conclusion, whatever might be the arguments of the politician or the passions of the people.

Nevertheless, the struggle had to come, whether this great consideration was realized or not, and come it did. The Southern statesmen were in earnest in their threat of disunion, and when Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency in 1860 they proceeded to carry it out. South Carolina passed an ordinance of secession in December, and most of the other Southern States followed quickly, and the new government, called the Confederate States of America, was organized at Montgomery, Alabama, in February, 1861. They proceeded to take possession of the United States forts, arsenals, and navy yards within their territory, and soon had them all without firing a gun, except those at Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The Confederate forces erected several batteries within reach of Sumter, and on April 12th opened fire on the fort and compelled its surrender. This was the actual beginning of hostilities, and within twenty-four hours the whole country, North and South, was ablaze with the war spirit. The President called for volunteers to suppress the rebellion and restore the national authority, and was offered several times as many as he asked for. The South was already in arms. Many of the military and naval officers who were from the South went with their States, and young men who had been educated together at West Point or Annapolis were now to take part on opposite sides in one of the greatest conflicts the world has ever seen. In some instances brother was against brother, and father against son.

Gideon Welles, of Connecticut, was Secretary of the Navy in President Lincoln's cabinet. Though some of the naval officers resigned their commissions and offered their services to the Confederacy, the vessels of the navy, except a very few that were captured at Norfolk navy yard, remained in the possession of the National Government. There was need of all these and more, for a mighty task was about to be undertaken, and there were large bodies of troops to be transported by sea, cities to be captured, fortifications to be bombarded, and ports to be held under blockade. This last was a most important duty, though little idea of glory was connected with it, and popular reputations could not be made in it; for the Southern States had very few manufactures, and for arms, ammunition, and other necessaries they depended mainly on importation.

At this time the United States navy was undergoing transformation. In the more important vessels steam had been substituted for sail power, but they were still constructed of wood, and the development of the ironclad was just beginning. In the emergency the Government bought a large number of merchant vessels of various kinds, including some ferryboats, turning them into gunboats and transports, and began the construction of ironclads. Many ironclads of light draught for use on the western rivers were built in a hundred days. The Southerners were almost without facilities for building vessels from the keel, but they made two or three formidable rams and floating batteries by covering the wooden hulls of some of the captured ships with railroad iron.

The first naval expedition of the war sailed in August, 1861, commanded by Flag-Officer Silas H. Stringham. It consisted of ten vessels, including two transports, carried about nine hundred soldiers, and was directed against the forts that guarded Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina. The troops, with some difficulty, were landed through the surf, and a combined attack by them and the naval force reduced the defenses and compelled their surrender with about seven hundred prisoners. The garrisons had lost about fifty men, the assailants not one. This was due to the fact that the work was done chiefly by rifled guns on the vessels, which could be fired effectively while out of range of the smooth-bore guns of the forts.

Late in October another expedition, commanded by Flag-Officer Samuel F. Du Pont, sailed from Hampton Roads. It consisted of more than fifty vessels, and carried twenty-two thousand men. A terrific gale was encountered, one transport and one storeship were lost, and one gunboat had to throw its battery overboard. When the storm was over, only one vessel was in sight from the flagship. But the scattered fleet slowly came together again and proceeded to its destination—the entrance to Port Royal harbor, South Carolina. This was guarded by two forts. The attack was made on the morning of November 7th. The main column, of ten vessels, led by the flagship, was formed in line a ship's-length apart, and steamed past the larger fort, delivering its fire at a distance of eight hundred yards, and then turned and sailed past again, somewhat closer. In this manner it steamed three times round a long ellipse, delivering its fire alternately from the two broadsides. Some of the gunboats got positions from which they enfiladed the work, and two of the larger vessels went up closer and poured in a fire that dismounted several guns. This was more than the garrison could endure, and they evacuated the fort and were seen streaming out of it as if in panic. The other column, of four vessels, attacked the smaller fort in the same manner, with the same result.

Meanwhile, a much larger and more important naval expedition than either of these was planned at Washington. New Orleans was the largest and richest city in the Confederacy. It had nearly one hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants—more than Charleston, Mobile, and Richmond together. In the year before the war it had shipped twenty-five million dollars' worth of sugar and ninety-two million dollars' worth of cotton. In these two articles its export trade was larger than that of any other city in the world. And as a strategic point it was of the first importance. The Mississippi has several mouths, or passes, and this fact, with the frequency of violent gales in the Gulf, made it very difficult to blockade commerce there. Moreover, if possession of the Mississippi could be secured by the national forces it would cut the Confederacy in two and render it difficult if not impossible to continue the transportation of supplies from Arkansas and Texas to feed the armies in Virginia and Tennessee. Add to this the fact that any great city is a great prize in war, highly valuable to the belligerent that holds it, and the importance of New Orleans at that time may be readily appreciated.

The defenses of the city consisted of two forts—Jackson and St. Philip—on either bank of the stream, thirty miles above the head of the passes and about twice that distance below New Orleans. They were below a bend which had received the name of English Turn, from the circumstance that in 1814 the British naval vessels attempting to ascend the stream had here been driven back by land batteries. The forts were built by the United States Government, of earth and brick, in the style that was common before the introduction of rifled cannon. They were now garrisoned by fifteen hundred Confederate soldiers, and above them lay a Confederate fleet of fifteen vessels, including an ironclad ram and an incomplete floating battery that was cased in railroad iron. Below the forts a heavy chain was stretched across the river, supported on logs; and when it was broken by a freshet the logs were replaced by hulks anchored at intervals across the stream, with the chain passing over their decks and its ends fastened to trees on the banks. A similar chain was stretched across the Hudson at the time of the Revolutionary War. In addition to all this, two hundred Confederate sharpshooters constantly patrolled the banks between the forts and the head of the passes, to give notice of any approaching foe, and fire at any one that might be seen on the deck of a hostile vessel. The Confederate authorities fully appreciated the value of the Crescent City. The problem before the national authorities was, how to take that city in spite of all these barriers.