CHAPTER IX
THE NAVAL TRAITOR
The following spring the commodore ordered the Anderson to New Orleans to refit, and while there an official letter came to me from the Navy Department detaching me from the West Gulf Squadron and granting me two months’ leave of absence, with orders to report at the expiration of that time to the officer commanding at Cairo, Illinois, for service in the Mississippi Squadron, which was then under the command of Rear Admiral David D. Porter.
On inquiry I found that I was one of the half dozen officers selected as a contingent from the West Gulf Squadron to be placed in command of Porter’s fleet of river steamers, which had been transformed into vessels of war.
As the fighting was all over in our department since the capture of Mobile, and as there was a decided novelty in the river fleet, I did not object to this transfer, more particularly as a furlough was the agreeable accompaniment of the change.
So I went home, and of course thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the first leave of absence I had obtained for more than three years. I found my only little baby, whom I had never seen, grown into quite a child of two and a half years, who would scarcely come to the stranger in uniform she had never seen, who called her daughter. And there were other family changes, some of them very sad ones, but in those busy war-days we had little time for sentiment.
Like everything else in this world, my two months’ furlough soon passed, and I bade everyone good-by, and took the train for Cairo. And a vile hole it was in the early spring of 1864, the streets flooded and almost impassable and the wretched hotels filled with soldiers, gamblers, and the ruck that always hang about the skirts of an army.
When I reported to Commodore Pennock, he was kind enough to say that he wanted me with him at the Naval Station at Mound City, a few miles above Cairo, and so I moved out there and was acting as executive officer of the Navy Yard, as we called it, when the rebel General N. B. Forrest, in April, made his famous—or infamous—assault on Fort Pillow, a few miles below us, carrying it by storm and massacring a large number of the colored troops who were defending the work.
The mangled survivors of this affair were brought at once up to our naval hospital at Mound City, and we improvised beds as best we could for their accommodation. General Forrest is still living, I believe, and I understand that he denies that any extraordinary cruelty was manifested by his conquering troops. But I speak from my own observation; and although it is now thirty years ago, the recollection of the horrors we saw among those poor mangled negroes is still fresh in my mind, as are the stories of the dying that were poured into our ears.
It was a brutal, cowardly massacre, pure and simple, and no amount of attempted explanation can make it anything else. It was only one sad episode of a cruel war, but it was an episode worthy of Alva, “the Spanish Butcher.”