General Phelps had already got himself into trouble because he declined to return these fugitives to their masters, and it seemed at first as though these poor fellows would have to be put on shore, where their fate, if captured after having run away to us, might easily be imagined.
But Captain Alden of the Richmond was a very kind-hearted man, and he intimated unofficially that if the presence of these men was not brought to his notice he should know nothing about them. While their fate was thus hanging in the balance, the poor fellows were in a terrible state of anxiety; but when they learned that they might go to work as wardroom servants, without pay, their gratitude seemed to know no bounds.
To close this episode here, Jacob, the elder of the men, became my special servant on board of the Richmond; and when I later obtained a command, he went with me, rated as captain’s steward, and for two years he was my devoted servitor, and never have I had a more faithful, humble friend than this runaway slave.
It was a relief to both army and navy when Butler’s common-sense classification of the negroes as “contraband of war,” cut the Gordian knot and enabled us to grapple successfully with one of the most difficult problems of the war, although why we should have been so long in thus solving it always passed my comprehension.
Finding that Vicksburg would not surrender to the naval forces, we ran down the river to New Orleans, and after several months of preparation returned to Vicksburg, convoying a detachment of three thousand troops in river-boats. But as the rebels had been improving the shining hours by establishing a series of heavy batteries on the heights overlooking the river, and had a garrison of ten thousand men, we were no better able to cope with Vicksburg than we had been earlier in the summer.
We gallantly ran the batteries with our fleet, but we were no nearer to capturing the stronghold from above than from below. So in July we ran the batteries again, down river and at night this time, giving up the capture of Vicksburg to the army; and we all know the history of that long and tedious siege.
Preparations now commenced in good earnest for the naval attack upon Mobile, and we learned that for that service several of the new monitors were to be sent out to our fleet. But Farragut, now admiral, was a very old-fashioned sailor, with a strong prejudice in favor of wooden ships: he had gained all his victories in such ships, and he said he was too old a dog to learn new tricks.
So, as will be remembered, when he finally went into the Mobile fight, his flagship was still the wooden ship Hartford; and singular enough, the only vessel he lost in that memorable battle was the new iron-clad, Tecumseh. She was sunk by a torpedo, and went down with Captain Craven and one hundred and thirteen of her crew!
Had Farragut taken that vessel as his flagship, as he was urged to do, he would undoubtedly have lost his life with the others.
I was myself a witness of an exhibition of his aversion to iron-clads. On the 4th of July, 1862, our fleet and the squadron of Admiral Charles H. Davis were lying above Vicksburg where the two fleets had met a few days before. Davis’s flagship was the Benton, an iron-clad of which you will hear more later on in this narrative, and he was quite proud of her.