Early in March, 1862, while the Richmond was at Ship Island, where ten thousand troops had been brought together, Captain David Glasgow Farragut came out from New York in the United States steamship Hartford and took command of the West Gulf Squadron.
On the 20th of the month Major-General Benjamin F. Butler and his staff arrived at Ship Island, in the transport steamer Mississippi, and on the 25th the fourteen hundred troops on board of her were landed, and General Butler established his headquarters on shore.
Meanwhile from day to day, the vessels comprising Captain David D. Porter’s fleet of twenty-one bomb schooners were dropping in and anchoring in our vicinity, adding to the formidable appearance of the preparations now being actively made for the coming attack upon New Orleans by the army and navy.
There was at last no doubt that we were going at our work in good earnest, and although in the New Orleans papers, of which we occasionally obtained copies, the most exaggerated accounts were given of all that they were doing “to welcome the invaders to hospitable graves,” we of the navy were anxious to bring the matter to the test of battle as quickly as possible.
Of certain facts we were assured. We well knew that Forts Jackson and St. Philip mounted one hundred and twenty-eight heavy guns; that they were admirably situated in a bend of the river where it is but half a mile wide, and were calculated with their cross fire to repel a foe ascending the Mississippi against the current, which in the spring runs with great rapidity. We also knew that one, if not two heavy chains had lately been stretched across the river at this point; and we of the Richmond knew, from our own experience, that the rebels had at least one iron-plated ram capable of knocking a hole through any of the wooden vessels of our fleet.
Such of us as had read the history of the war of 1812 were also aware that the British fleet in 1815 ineffectually threw over one thousand 13-inch bombs—exactly such as we were now preparing to use—into Fort Jackson during a nine days’ siege of that work, which was then vastly inferior in strength to the present fort, and was the only defense of the river, where there were now two forts.
These facts we knew, but we were also informed by such deserters as came in to us, and also by the New Orleans papers, that a line of fortifications had been constructed all the way from the Forts to English Turn, just below the city, and also that two very large and very formidable iron-clad floating batteries were just being completed, to aid in making New Orleans impregnable against any force we could bring to bear upon it.
Against all this known and unknown force we had, under command of General Butler, fifteen thousand troops, most of them as yet untried in battle, and forty-seven vessels of war,—all wooden ships,—of which the Hartford, Richmond, Brooklyn, and Pensacola were the largest and heaviest armed ships, while seventeen of them were small gunboats of the Kennebec and Katahdin class, three were old-fashioned sailing vessels, of no particular value for the desired service, and twenty-one were mortar schooners, carrying one 13-inch mortar each, which threw shells weighing two hundred and fifteen pounds.
With this force Flag Officer Farragut was expected to accomplish a feat which up to that time had never yet been performed successfully,—to reduce two forts situated in swamps on the banks of a rapid stream, where there was no possibility of coöperation by the land forces, and then to pass seventy-five miles up a river guarded, as we believed, by earthworks bristling with guns, to the conquest of a city garrisoned by fifty thousand troops and defended by formidable iron-clad batteries!
Decidedly this was not to be child’s play, and although, as I have said, we of the fleet were eager for the coming fight, we were by no manner of means over-confident of success.