The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

  Clearing Eagle Pass by the last week in June, Shelby paused to weight his tattered battle flag with stones and sink it in the Rio Grande before crossing into Mexico. At Monterrey the column lost most of its distinguished civilian hangers-on, who scattered variously for Cuba, Brazil, and other regions where ex-Confederates were reported to be welcome. But Shelby and his body of troopers, grown by now to the size of a small brigade, kept on for Mexico City, having decided — such was their proclivity for lost causes — to throw in with Maximilian, rather than Juárez. The Emperor, whose subjects already were showing how much they resented his foreign support, knew better than to enlist the help of gringo mercenaries. Still, he was friendly enough to offer them a plot of land near Vera Cruz for colonization. Most declined and went their several ways, being far from ready to settle down to the farming life they had left four years ago, but Shelby and a few others accepted and even sent for their families to join them; which they did, though not for long. The settlement — dubbed Carlota, in honor of the Empress — scarcely outlasted Maximilian, who fell in front of a firing squad two Junes later, after the troops supporting Juárez rushed into the vacuum left by the departing French. Grant had been right about Napoleon’s reaction, once Sheridan reached the Texas border and bristled along it, much as he had done in the old days up and down the Shenandoah Valley.

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  Afloat, whether on salt water or fresh, the wind-down of the rebellion seemed likely to prove a good deal more erratic and explosive than on land, depending as it would on the attitude and nature of the individual skipper operating on his own, as so many did in the Confederate navy, up lonely rivers or far out to sea. “Don’t give up the ship” — a proud tradition sometimes taken to irrational extremes: as in duels to the death, with eight-inch guns at ranges of eight feet — might apply no less at the finish than at the start. A case in point was Lieutenant Charles W. Read, whose handling of the steam ram William H. Webb in a late-April dash for freedom down the Red and the Mississippi provided a possible forecast of instances to come.

  A twenty-four-year-old Mississippian, Read had finished at Annapolis in 1860, one year ahead of his Union counterpart William Cushing, and like him had had a colorful war career. He fought with distinction against Farragut below New Orleans, then again at Vicksburg as a gunnery officer on the Arkansas, and next aboard the Florida in her great days, when Maffitt gave him a captured brig, along with a crew of twenty and one boat howitzer, and set him up as an independent raider. In twenty-one days, cruising the Atlantic coast from Norfolk to New England, he took twenty-one prizes before he himself was taken, off Portland, Maine, in June of 1863, and confined at Fort Warren. Exchanged in October of the following year, he was assigned to duty with the James River squadron below Richmond until March of 1865, when Mallory chose him to command the Webb, languishing in far-off Louisiana for the past two years. Reported to be “the fastest thing afloat,” she had seen no substantial action since her sinking of the monster ironclad Indianola, back in the early spring of ’63, and it was Mallory’s belief that she could be put to highly effective use against Yankee merchantmen and blockaders, if Read could only get her out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Arriving by the end of the month he found the 206-foot sidewheel steamer tied up eighty miles below Shreveport, “without a single gun on board, little or no crew, no fuel, and no small arms save a few cutlasses.” Undaunted, he took her up to department headquarters and secured from the army a 30-pounder Parrott rifle, which he mounted on her bow, and two 12-pounder smoothbores, one for each broadside, as well as fifty-one soldier volunteers and sixteen officers. Back at Alexandria, while training his new green crew, he put carpenters to work constructing a rough bulwark around the Webb’s forecastle and loaded close to two hundred bales of cotton for use as a shield for her machinery until he reached Cuba and could exchange them for a longer-burning fuel than the pine knots he now had stacked about her decks. By that time, news had come of Lee’s surrender and the government’s flight south. He knew he would have to hurry, and on April 22, as he prepared to’ cast off down the Red, he learned of Lincoln’s assassination, which might or might not add to the confusion he hoped to encounter during his run past Baton Rouge and New Orleans and the warships on patrol above and below them both. “As I will have to stake everything upon speed and time,” he wrote Mallory that day, “I will not attack any vessel in the passage unless I perceive a possibility of her arresting my progress. In this event I am prepared with five torpedoes … one of which I hold shipped on its pole on the bows.”

  He left that evening and reached the mouth of the river about 8.30 the following night, the first Sunday after Easter. Displaying the lights of a Federal transport and running slow to reduce the engine noise, he hoped to sneak past the blue flotilla on patrol there, which ineluded two ironclads and a monitor. For a time it seemed the Webb was going to steam by undetected, but then a rocket swooshed up from the deck of one of the blockaders, giving the signal: “Strange vessel in sight, positively an enemy.” Read shouted, “Let her go!” and the engineer opened the throttle all the way. As the ram shot forward, whistles screamed and drums rolled beat-to-quarters along the line of warships dead ahead. “Keep for the biggest opening between them,” Read told the pilot. Out in the moonless night, the monitor Manhattan swung her big guns in their turret and hurled two 11-inch shells at the rebel churning past. Both missed, and the Webb was soon out of range, driving hard as she began her intended 300-mile run down the Mississippi to the Gulf. Unpursued by anything that had even an outside chance of overtaking him, Read tied up to the east bank and sent a detail ashore to cut the telegraph wires, then set out again, gliding past Baton Rouge in the darkness, unseen or unrecognized, and on to Donaldsonville by daylight, still carrying the signals of a Union transport. Here too the ram passed unchallenged, though some who saw her booming along with the midstream current later testified that she was making a good 25 knots as she went by. That may well have been; for by 1 o’clock that afternoon, April 24, the church spires of low-lying New Orleans came in view.

  Read hoisted the U.S. flag at half mast, brought his boiler pressure up to maximum, and began his run past the Crescent City. No warning message had got through, thanks to the cutting of the wires the night before; lookouts here, like those at Donaldsonville that morning, took the Webb to be a friendly transport, mourning with her lowered colors the death of Abraham Lincoln. They did, that is, until about midway through the run, when a bluejacket who had fought against her, a couple of years ago upriver, recognized her and gave the alarm, setting off a din of bells and drums and whistles, soon punctuated by the roar of guns. Most of the shots went wild, but three struck the ram before she cleared the fleet, one through her chimney, one into a bale of cotton, and one just above the waterline at her bow, damaging the torpedo mechanism so badly that the explosive had to be jettisoned. Stopping to accomplish this, Read took down the half-staffed Union emblem, ran up to the peak his true Confederate colors, and continued downriver at full speed, bound for the open waters of the Gulf.

  Behind him New Orleans was abuzz with rumors that Jeff Davis and John Wilkes Booth were aboard the ram, headed for South America with millions in gold bullion. Read knew nothing of this, of course, but he did know that the two fastest gunboats in the enemy flotilla, Hollyhock and Florida, were churning downstream after him. Confident that he could outrun them, the young Mississippian was alarmed only so far as their pursuit might interfere with his plan for not reaching Forts Jackson and St Philip, sixty winding miles away, before night came down to help screen him from the plunging crossfire of guns on both sides of the river. He considered stopping to dispose of them, despite their superior armament, but up ahead just then, twenty-five miles below the city, he saw something that commanded all his attention. It was the veteran screw sloop Richmond, mounting twenty-one guns, anchored for engine repairs and now being cleared for action. He studied her briefly, regretting the loss of his spar torpedo
, then told the pilot: “Make straight for the Richmond’s bow, and ram.” “I can’t reach her bow because of a shoal,” the pilot replied, “but I can come in under her broadside.” Read shook his head at that suggestion. “I’ve been under the Richmond’s broadside before, and don’t wish to try it again,” he said. He assembled all hands on the foredeck and informed them of what he knew he had to do. “It’s no use. The Richmond will drown us all — and if she doesn’t, the forts below will, as they have a range of three miles each way up and down the river, and they know by this time that we are coming.” He turned to the helmsman. “Head for shore,” he told him.

  Fifty yards from bank the Webb struck bottom, and while most of the crew began climbing down ropes thrown over the bow, others went about dousing the deck and cabins with turpentine before they too abandoned ship. Read started fires with a lighted match, then went over the side, the last to leave the flaming ram. He and his men lay in waiting in the brush till they heard her magazine explode, after which they broke into groups and scattered. By daybreak, half of them had been rounded up, including Read, who suffered the indignity of being placed on public display in New Orleans; but not for long. Presently he and the rest were paroled and allowed to return to their homes. At a cost of one man wounded, and of course the Webb herself, he had given the victors notice of what they might expect in the way of naval daring between now and the time the final curtain fell.

  Whatever might come of such fears as this aroused, a river mishap of far bloodier proportions occurred six hundred miles upstream in the early morning hours of April 27, the day Read was put on display in New Orleans. En route for Cairo with an outsized cargo of surplus army mules and discharged soldiers who had crowded aboard at Vicksburg and Helena after their release from Deep South prison camps, the sidewheel steamer Sultana, one of the largest on the Mississippi, blew her boilers near Paddy’s Hen and Chickens, north of Memphis two hours before dawn. Although her authorized capacity was less than 400 passengers, she had about six times that number packed about her decks and in her hold — mostly Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana veterans, men who had fought perhaps the hardest war of all, sweating out its finish in stockades beyond reach of the various columns of invasion. So sudden was the blast and the fire that followed, those who managed to make it over the side had to dive through flames into muddy water running swift and cold as any millstream. A body count put the official death toll at 1238, but there was really no way of telling how many troops had been aboard or were consumed by shrimp and gars before all those hundreds of other blue-clad corpses bobbed up downstream in the course of the next month. Estimates ran as high as 1800 dead and presumed dead, with 1585 as the figure most generally agreed on. That was more than the number killed on both sides at First Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek combined, and even by the lowest count the loss of the Sultana went into the books as the greatest marine disaster of all time. Just under one month later, as if to emphasize the shock that came with sudden peace, on May 25 — the day after the Grand Review up Pennsylvania Avenue ended, and the day before Simon Buckner surrendered to Canby in New Orleans for his chief — a warehouse on the Mobile waterfront, stocked with some twenty tons of surrendered ammunition, blew up and “shook the foundations” of the city. An estimated 300 people were killed outright, and the property loss was reckoned at $5,000,000.

  By way of consolation for these subtractions — unexpected and all the more tragic because they were self-inflicted, so to speak — fears regarding those other losses, anticipated because of the example set by Read in his abortive downstream dash, turned out to be quite groundless. Joe Johnston’s capitulation, followed within two weeks by Richard Taylor’s — the former on the day before the Sultana blew her boilers above Memphis — brought about the surrender of the few surviving rebel warships east of the Mississippi, bloodlessly and practically without fanfare. On May 10, four that had taken refuge up the Tombigbee almost a month ago, after the evacuation of Mobile, struck their colors in accordance with a commitment by the flotilla captain to hand over to the Federals “all public property yet afloat under his command.” On May 27, down in West Florida, the gunboat Spray was the last to go. Stationed up the St Marks River to cover the water approaches to Tallahassee, her skipper agreed to surrender when he learned that the troops defending the capital in his rear had laid down their arms the week before. Then came Kirby Smith’s formal capitulation at Galveston, and next day, June 3, the Webb’s one-time consorts up the Red hauled down their flags. One among them was the ironclad Missouri, completed at Shreveport in late March and taken down to Alexandria, not in time to fight, but at any rate in time to be handed over with the rest. “A most formidable vessel,” one Union officer pronounced her, though after a closer look he added an assessment that might have served as an epitaph for all the improvised warships knocked together by backwoods carpenters and blacksmiths, here and elsewhere throughout the South: “She is badly built of green lumber, caulked with cotton, leaks badly, and is very slow.”

  By that time, too, the gravest of all the Union navy’s current fears had been allayed. These concerned still another ironclad, a seagoing armored ram described by those who had seen her as the most powerful thing afloat. Built not by amateur shipwrights in the rebel hinterland, but rather by French craftsmen at Bordeaux, she was commissioned the C.S.S. Stonewall — “an appellation not inconsistent with her character,” the purchasing agent proudly declared — and in mid-January set out down the European coast on the first leg of a voyage across the Atlantic, under instructions to lift the blockade at Wilmington and elsewhere by sinking the blockaders: an assignment considered by no means beyond her capability, since in addition to her defensive attributes, which reportedly made her unsinkable, she featured such dread offensive devices as a protruding underwater beak, heavy enough to drive through the flank and bottom of any rival, wood or metal, and a 300-pounder Armstrong rifle mounted on her bow. Damaged by rough weather, she put into Ferrol, Spain, for repairs. By the time these were made, two multigunned U.S. frigates were on station outside the harbor, apparently waiting to take her on when she emerged. When she did so, however, on March 24, both refrained and stood aside to let her go, one blue skipper afterwards explaining that “the odds in her favor were too great and too certain, in my humble judgment, to admit of the slightest hope of being able to inflict upon her even the most trifling injury.”

  As it turned out, that one negative triumph, achieved by a bluff for whose success the Federal commander was court-martialed, was the Stonewall’s only contribution to the struggle whose tide of victory her purchasers had hoped she would reverse. After filling with coal at Lisbon, down the coast, she set out across the ocean on March 28, still unchallenged. Obliged to make another refueling stop in the Canaries, she did not reach Nassau until May 6. Not only had she made poor time; her bunkers were nearly empty again, and her skipper, Captain T. J. Page, a Virginian in his middle fifties, was shaking his head at her lumbering performance and the sharpness of French salesmen. “You must not expect too much of me,” he wrote his superiors; “I fear the power and effect of this vessel have been much exaggerated.” On May 11 he dropped anchor at Havana. News had not yet arrived of the capture of Jefferson Davis the day before, but he soon learned that both Lee and Johnston had surrendered their armies. While he pondered what to do, word came that Taylor had followed suit, ending all possibility of resistance east of the Mississippi. By now, moreover, Union warships of all types were assembling outside the harbor from all directions, including the monitors Canonicus and Monadnock, veterans of Fort Fisher and the first of their type to leave home waters. “Canonicus would have crushed her, and the Monadnock could have taken her beyond a doubt,” the admiral in command of the blue flotilla later said of the holed-up Stonewall. No one would ever know for sure, however. On May 19, having reached his decision, Page turned over to the Captain General of Cuba, for a decision by Spain as to her eventual disposition, the only ironclad ever to fly the Confederate flag
on the high seas.

  That flag still flew on the high seas, but only at one ever-moving point, the peak of the cruiser Shenandoah. “An erratic ship, without country or destination,” Gideon Welles quite accurately described her, urging his otherwise unemployed frigate captains to locate and run down this last Confederate raider, which lately had been reported raising havoc in the South Pacific. By now, though, she was elsewhere; Welles was warm, yet far from hot, in the game of hide-and-seek the rebel privateer was playing with his men-of-war. James Waddell had sailed her north from Melbourne in mid-February, intent on “visiting,” as his instructions put it, “the enemy’s distant whaling grounds.” He had no luck in that regard until April 1, when he approached Ascension Island in the eastern Carolines and found a quartet of the blubber-laden vessels anchored in Lea Harbor like so many sitting ducks. After putting the crews ashore he set all four afire and continued northward, past Japan, into the northwest reaches of the Sea of Okhotsk, where he took one more prize during the final week in May. So far, the pickings had been rather slim, but now he had accurate, up-to-date whaling charts, as well as a number of volunteers from the captured ships, to show him where to go: south, then north, around the Kamchatka Peninsula, into the Bering Sea. There the forty-year-old North Carolinian found what he had been seeking all along.

  Off Cape Navarin on June 22 he came upon two whalers, one of which — a fast bark out of New Bedford, aptly named the Jerah Swift — tried to make a run for it. Shenandoah gave chase, dodging ice floes as she went, and after a hard three-hour pursuit, drew close enough to put a round from a 32-pounder Whitworth rifle across her bow; whereupon her captain “saw the folly of exposing the crew to a destructive fire and yielded to his misfortunes with a manly and becoming dignity.” So Waddell later wrote, unaware at the time — as, indeed, he would remain for weeks to come — that he had just fired the last shot of the American Civil War. He burned the two ships, then started after more. Next day he took a trading vessel, only two months out of San Francisco, and found aboard her a newspaper dated April 17, containing the latest dispatches from the eastern theater. Lee had surrendered: Richmond had fallen: the Government had fled. Shaken though he was by this spate of disasters, he also read that Johnston had won a victory over Sherman in North Carolina, back in March, and that the President, resettled with his cabinet in Danville, had issued a proclamation announcing “a new phase of the struggle,” which he urged all Confederates to wage with “fresh defiance” and “unconquered and unconquerable hearts.” Waddell took his cue from that, and was rewarded three days later when he steamed into a cluster of six whalers lying becalmed off St Lawrence Island. Five he burned; the sixth he ransomed to take on board the crews of all the rest. Two days later, on June 28, he made his largest haul near the narrows of Bering Strait, where he fell in with a rendezvous of eleven whalers. He put all the crews aboard two of these, bonded as before, and set the other nine ablaze in a single leaping conflagration, rivaling with its glow of burning oak and sperm oil, reflected for miles on the ice that glittered roundabout, the brilliance of the Aurora Borealis. In nine months of sailing close to 40,000 miles, the Shenandoah now had taken an even two dozen whalers, along with 1053 prisoners and another 14 merchant vessels, destroying all but six of the 38, whose total value Waddell placed at $1,361,983. Wanting still more, he steamed next day into the Arctic Ocean.