To convict the man, it is only necessary to read his original dispatch to the Confederate government, which fortunately is still preserved as a double evidence of his brutality and his illiteracy. It reads: “We busted the fort at ninerclock and scatered the niggers. The men is still a cillenem [killing them] in the woods. Them as was cotch with spoons and brestpins and sich was cilled and the rest was payrolled and told to git.”
Not long after this event, Commodore Pennock sent for me, one day, and handed me my orders to the command of the ironclad Benton, then at anchor off Natchez, and suggested that I had better take the first steamer from Cairo down to my new ship.
In a way this was a piece of good fortune. The Benton had been at different times the flagship of both Admirals C. W. Davis and David D. Porter, and she was the largest vessel on the river and carried the heaviest armament. The trouble was that she was a very slow ship, and against the strong Mississippi current, going up stream she could scarcely make four knots an hour.
However, she had spacious quarters for her commanding officer, albeit they were directly over the boilers; and she was the division flagship, which carried a certain distinction; while if she ever should get into a fight again she had the weight of metal to make her a very formidable opponent. So I packed my traps and was soon steaming down the river on the fine passenger steamer Olive for my new command.
The torrid heat of a waning July day was being tempered by the delicious evening breeze that was blowing up the Mississippi River as I sat aft on the berth deck of my ship smoking a post-prandial cigar in one of the ports and trying to make up my mind to get into my evening togs and go on shore to make a long-postponed call. I had now been several months in command of the Benton, and on the whole they had not been unpleasant nor altogether unprofitable months.
The navy was just then very busily engaged in keeping up a close patrol of the river to prevent the Confederate trans-Mississippi army in Arkansas, under the command of General Dick Taylor and Prince Polignac, from crossing over the river and effecting a junction with General Joe Johnston, which they were very desirous of accomplishing.
Cooped up where they were, these twenty-five thousand Confederates, with an abundance of military stores obtained from English ships at the mouth of the Rio Grande, did no particular harm; but let them get on the other side of the river and they would make a very material difference in the comfort of Sherman, who was then starting on his famous march through Georgia.
The navy was expected to prevent this passage of the river by keeping up an incessant patrol day and night, and thus a crossing of the army in force was an impossibility. We were constantly capturing rebel deserters, or stray couriers with letters from the Confederate leaders to Johnston; and occasionally, no doubt, some escaped us, but not many of them, I imagine.
I wish to emphasize the vital importance to us of keeping this patrol effective, and the great value it would be to the rebels to break it, as this has an important bearing upon the incident I am about to relate.