We all know the story of the passage of the forts by the fleet (numbering seventeen ships, with 179 guns) with the rising of the moon, early in the morning of April 24, 1862; of the fire rafts (one of which set the Hartford afire); of the fight with the eleven Confederate steamers (one an ironclad ram) above the forts; the arrival off New Orleans. Says George W. Cable: “I went to the riverside; there far into the night I saw hundreds of drays carrying cotton out of the presses and yards to the wharves, where it was fired. The glare of these sinuous miles of flame set men and women weeping and wailing thirty miles away on the farther shore of Lake Pontchartrain. But the next day was a day of terrors.... The firemen were out, but they cast fire upon the waters, putting the torch to the empty ships and cutting them loose to float down the river. Whoever could go was going.... My employer left the city. I closed the doors and ran to the river to see the sights.... ‘Are the Yankee ships in sight?’ I asked an idler. He pointed to the tops of their naked masts as they showed up across the huge bend of the river. They were engaging the batteries at Camp Chalmette—the old field of Jackson’s renown. Presently that was over. Ah me! I see them now as they came slowly round Slaughter House Point into full view, silent, so grim and terrible, black with men, heavy with deadly portent, the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky. Oh, for the Mississippi, the Mississippi! Just then she came down upon them. But now drifting helplessly—a mass of flames.
“The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the Hartford, standing with a lanyard in his hand beside a great pivot gun, so plain in view you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech and blandly grinned.”[52]
The ships anchored, and now came as bold an act as any of these stirring hours. Captain Theodorus Bailey, Farragut’s flag captain, and Lieutenant George Perkins, of beloved memory in the navy, landed and calmly walked through a howling mob crying “Hang them! hang them!” to the city hall and demanded the hauling down of the state flag and surrender of the city.
It was not until the 28th that everything was settled by the surrender of the forts to Commander Porter, who had remained below with his mortar flotilla, which had done such good service. Mention should be made of the very improper action of the British ship Mersey, which, following Farragut’s fleet up the river, anchored near the Hartford, where the men aboard sang Confederate songs and acted otherwise in a way so offensive that Farragut was obliged to call the English captain’s attention to their conduct. Farragut should, in fact, have ordered the ship out of the river.
The first step only had been taken. There were yet to come great and ever-memorable battles before Port Hudson and Vicksburg; fights with ironclads, and expeditions up the rivers by squadrons of improvised men-of-war under Flag Officers Davis and Foote, both of gallant memory. Finally the command of the navy, extending over the whole of the vast river system of which the Mississippi was the main artery, fell gradually to Porter, who on the fall of Vicksburg, in which his fleet played so great a part, was made a rear-admiral. His command was now extended down to New Orleans. He had over 150 vessels under his flag, and on August 7, 1863, he was able to write from New Orleans that the “river is entirely free from guerrillas, and merchant vessels can travel it without danger.” But there was plenty of fighting yet for the navy in the affluents of the Mississippi, and the Red River expedition of March 12 to May 16, 1864, in aid of General Banks’s ill-advised campaign, came near to causing the destruction of the most important part of Porter’s fleet through the falling of the water. The building of the famous dam by Colonel Bailey of the volunteers, and the successful passage thereby of the fleet into deeper water, is one of the great dramatic events of the war.
While such things were happening on the western rivers, scores of actions were taking place in Atlantic waters. The siege of Charleston was a continuous operation and was to remain such to the end of the war; the ironclad had come into extended use; the Confederate ironclad Atlanta had been captured in Wassaw Sound in Georgia by the monitor Weehawken, under Captain John Rodgers. There were in all, during the year 1863, 145 engagements by the navy, great and small.
The year 1864 was to bring the Civil War well toward a close. The blockade had become one of extreme rigor; the region west of the Mississippi had been entirely cut off, and the whole South was now reduced to a poverty of arms, equipment, food, clothing, and medical supplies, the want of all of which was gradually reducing its armies to a state of inanition. Before the end of the war every port had been closed, Wilmington, in North Carolina, being the last. Between November, 1861, and March, 1864, eighty-four different steamers were running between Nassau and Confederate ports, of which thirty-seven were captured and twenty-four wrecked or otherwise destroyed.[53] These vessels were built in Great Britain especially for the service, were laden with British cargoes, and used the British Bahamas and Bermudas as ports of call and supply. Nassau bloomed into one of the greatest and most active ports of the world.
In addition to the remarkable episode of Red River already mentioned, which resulted in saving Porter’s fleet, the last year of the war was to include some of its most important and striking events: the appearance in April of the powerful ironclad Albemarle; her career, and her final destruction by a torpedo through the heroic bravery of Lieutenant Cushing on the night of October 27-28; the fight of the Kearsarge and Alabama on June 19th; the battle of Mobile Bay on August 5th; the appearance of the ironclad Stonewall and the bombardments of Fort Fisher at the end of December and in the beginning of the new year.
The destruction of the Alabama on a Sunday morning off Cherbourg brought to an end the career of a ship built in England and manned by an English crew, which for more than two years had sunk or burned our merchantmen. Her captain escaped being taken, as the English yacht Deerhound, which had accompanied the Alabama out of the harbor to the point seven miles out where the Kearsarge awaited her, took him aboard before he could be reached by the boats from the Kearsarge. That this aid, if it should be necessary, was prearranged, is shown by the statement of Winslow of the Kearsarge, that the Deerhound had received aboard Captain Semmes’s valuables the night before. It was a notable victory and went far to set aright the British mind, so susceptible to “success.”