The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox
Price rewarded their efforts with a full day’s rest, then resumed the march next morning, hoping to reach and cross the Arkansas River, still more than a hundred miles away, without having to stop for another time- and man-killing fight for survival. His hope was not fulfilled. At Newtonia that afternoon, twenty-odd miles beyond Carthage, the Federals came up in his rear and obliged him to turn and form ranks for a battle no one knew was to be the last ever fought between regular forces west of the Mississippi. Back at Fort Scott two days ago, the Kansas militia and two of the Missouri cavalry brigades had retired from the chase — as had Pleasonton himself, after falling sick — but Curtis, with his regulars and Blunt’s plainsmen still on hand, as well as Pleasonton’s other two brigades, was determined to overtake the still-outnumbered raiders before they escaped. Here at Newtonia he got his chance; along with cause to regret it. Spotting dust clouds south of town, Blunt thought Price was attempting a getaway and galloped hard around his flank to cut him off, only to be cut off himself by Shelby, who handled him roughly until other blue units broke through to cover his withdrawal. The fighting sputtered out at sundown, with little or no advantage on either side, and Price took up his march southward, un-pursued, while Curtis waited for Blunt to lick his wounds. “I must be permitted to say that I consider him the best cavalry officer I ever saw,” Old Pap wrote gratefully of Shelby in his report of the campaign: an opinion echoed and enlarged upon by Pleasonton years later, when he said flatly that the Missourian was “the best cavalry general of the South.”
Curtis rested briefly, then proceeded, no longer in direct pursuit of Price, who veered southwest beyond Newtonia, but rather by a shorter route, due south across the Arkansas line, in hope of intercepting the raiders when they swung back east to recross the Arkansas River between Fort Smith and Little Rock; probably at Dardanelle, he figured, where they had crossed on their way north eight weeks ago. Hurrying from Pea Ridge to the relief of Fayetteville, which was reported under attack by a detachment from the rebel main body at Cane Hill, just under twenty miles southwest, the Kansan supposed that his cut-off tactics had succeeded. When he reached Fayetteville on November 4, however, he not only found the attackers gone, he also learned that his adversary was moving en masse in the opposite direction, away from the trap contrived for his destruction. Reduced by casualties and desertions, badly worn by a thousand miles of marching, and even lower in spirits than he was on food and ammunition — which was low indeed — Price was in no condition to risk another heavy engagement, and to avoid one he had decided not to attempt a march east of Fort Smith, whose garrison would be added to the force that would surely intercept him before he made it across the river in that direction. Instead, he would move on west, toward Tahlequah in the Indian Territory, for an upstream crossing of the Arkansas twenty-odd miles beyond the border. Curtis followed as far as a north-bank settlement called Webber’s Falls, November 8, only to find that the raiders, assisted by friendly Choctaws, had destroyed all the available boats on reaching the south bank the day before. So he pronounced the campaign at an end, fired a 24-gun salute in celebration, the booms reverberating hollowly across the empty plains, and turned back toward Kansas, glad to be done with an opponent who, as he declared in closing his report, had “entered Missouri feasting and furnishing his troops on the rich products and abundant spoils of the Missouri Valley, but crossed the Arkansas destitute, disarmed, disorganized, and avoiding starvation by eating raw corn and slippery-elm bark.”
Worse things were said of Price by his own soldiers in the course of their detour through the wintry territorial wilds. “God damn Old Pap!” was among the milder exclamations on the march, and afterwards there was to be a formal inquiry into charges of “glaring mismanagement and distressing mental and physical military incapacity.” One trooper wrote that his unit subsisted for four days on parched acorns, while another told how he and his comrades butchered and devoured a fat pony along the way. A cold wind cut through their rags, freezing the water in their canteens, and coyotes laughed from the darkness beyond their campfires, a terrifying sound to men too weak from hunger or dysentery to keep up with the column. Even so, hundreds fell out in the course of this last long stage of the raid, south through Indian country, down across the Red into Texas, and finally back east to Laynesport, Arkansas, which they reached on December 2, still a hundred miles west of Camden, which Price had left just over three months ago. Though he put the case as best he could in his report — “I marched 1434 miles; fought 43 battles and skirmishes; captured and paroled over 3000 Federal officers and men … [and] do not think I go beyond the truth when I state that I destroyed in the late expedition to Missouri property to the amount of $10,000,000 in value” — his claim that his own losses totaled fewer than a thousand men, in and out of combat, scarcely tallied with the fact that he returned with only 6000, including recruits, or barely half the number who had ridden northward with him in September.
Whatever the true figures were, in men or money, and however great the disruption had been along the Missouri River and the Kansas border, this last campaign in the Transmississippi had no more effect on the outcome of the national conflict than did a much smaller, briefer effort made at the same time, up near the Canadian border, against St Albans, a Vermont town of about 5000 souls. This too was a raid designed to bring home to voters remote from the cockpit of war — Westport and St Albans were both just under a thousand miles from Charleston — some first-hand notion of the hardships involved in a struggle they were about to decide whether to continue or conclude: with the difference that the New England blow was struck primarily at what was reputed to be a New Englander’s tenderest spot, his wallet.
First Lieutenant Bennett Young, a twenty-one-year-old Kentuckian who had ridden with Morgan, reconnoitered St Albans on a visit from Canada, fifteen miles away, and returned on the evening of October 18 with twenty followers, most of them escaped or exchanged prisoners like himself. Arriving in twos and threes to avoid suspicion, they checked into various hotels and boarding houses, then assembled at 3 o’clock the following afternoon in the town square, where they removed their overcoats to reveal that each wore a gray uniform and a pair of navy sixes. At first, when Young announced that the place was under formal occupation and ordered all inhabitants to gather in the square, the townspeople thought they were being treated to some kind of joke or masquerade, but when the raiders began discharging pistols in the direction of those who were slow to obey the lieutenant’s order, they knew better. Meantime, three-man details proceeded to the three banks and gathered up all the cash on hand, though not before outraged citizens began to shoot at them from second-story windows. In the skirmish that ensued, one townsman was killed, three invaders were wounded, and several buildings around the square were set aflame with four-ounce bottles of Greek fire, brought along to be flung as incendiary grenades.
Back in Canada not long after nightfall, once more in civilian dress, Young and his men counted the take from this farthest north of all Confederate army operations. It came to just over $200,000; none of which ever found its way to Richmond, as originally intended, being used instead to finance other disruptions in other Federal regions that had not felt the hand of war till now.
* * *
Afloat as ashore, throughout this critical span of politics and war, there were desperate acts by desperate men intent on winning a reputation before it was too late. Commander Napoleon Collins, for example, a fifty-year-old Pennsylvanian with thirty years of arduous but undistinguished service, learned while coaling at Santa Cruz de Tenerife in mid-September that the rebel cruiser Florida had been there for the same purpose the month before; reports attending her departure, August 4, were that her next intended port of call was Bahia, just around the eastern hump of South America, some 1500 nautical miles away. His orders, as captain of the U.S.S. Wachusett — a sister ship of the Kearsarge — were to intercept and sink her, much as Winslow had sunk the Alabama three months ago off Cherbourg, and he w
asted no time in clearing the Canaries for Brazil. Arriving in early October he did not find the prize he sought in Bahia harbor; nor, despite her six-week head start and her reputed greater speed, had she been there. Apparently the Santa Cruz report was false, or else she had been terribly busy on the way. Then two days later, shortly after dark, October 4, a trim, low-lying sloop of war put into All Saints Bay, and when Collins dispatched a longboat to look her over he found to his delight that the report had been true after all. The twin-stacked handsome vessel, riding at anchor no more than a long stone’s throw off his starboard flank, was indeed the Florida, one of the first and now the last of the famed Confederate raiders that had practically driven Federal shipping from the Atlantic.
Since her escape from Mobile Bay in January of the previous year, Florida had burned or ransomed 37 prizes, and to these could be added 23 more, taken by merchantmen she had captured and converted into privateers, thereby raising her total to within half a dozen of the Alabama’s record 66. Most of the time she had been in Commander John Maffitt’s charge, but since the beginning of the current year, Maffitt having fallen ill, she had been under her present skipper, Lieutenant Charles M. Morris. Her most recent prize was taken a week ago, and Collins had it very much in mind to see that she took no more. Employing Winslow’s tactics, he sent Morris next day, through the U.S. consul at Bahia, a formal invitation to a duel outside the three-mile limit. But Morris not only declined the challenge, he even declined to receive the message, addressed as it was to “the sloop Florida,” quite as if he and his ship were nationless. He would leave when he saw fit, he said, having been granted an extension of the two-day layover allowed by international law, and would be pleased to engage the Wachusett if he chanced to meet her on the open sea. Collins absorbed the failure of this appeal to “honor,” which had worked so well for Winslow against Semmes, then fell back on a secondary plan, rasher than the first and having nothing whatever to do with honor. Tomorrow night would be the Florida’s third in Bahia harbor, and he was determined, regardless of the security guaranteed by her presence in a neutral port, that it would be her last.
Suspecting nothing, Morris coöperated fully in the execution of the plan now being laid for his undoing. He had had the shot withdrawn from his guns, as required by law before entering the harbor, and assured the port authorities — who seemed disturbed by the thought of what he (not Collins, with whose government their own had long-standing diplomatic relations) might do in the present edgy situation — that he would commit no hostile act, in violation of their neutrality, against the enemy vessel anchored off his flank. This done, he let his steam go down, hauled his fires, and gave the port and starboard watches turnabout shore leave while off duty. On the night of October 6 he went ashore himself, with several of his officers, to attend the opera and get a good night’s sleep in a hotel, leaving his first lieutenant aboard in charge of half the crew. Long before dawn next morning he was awakened by the concierge, who informed him that his ship was under attack by the Wachusett in the harbor down below.
Collins had planned carefully and with all the boldness his given name implied. Slipping his cables in the deadest hour of night, he backed quietly to give himself space in which to pick up speed for a ram that would send the raider to the bottom, then paused to build up a full head of steam before starting his run on the stroke of 3 o’clock. His intention was to bear straight down on the sitting vessel and thus inflict a wound that would leave her smashed beyond repair; but Wachusett went a bit off course and struck instead a glancing blow that crushed the bulwarks along the rebel’s starboard quarter and carried away her mizzenmast and main yard. Convinced that he had inflicted mortal damage, Collins was backing out to let his adversary sink, when there was a spatter of small arms fire from the wreckage on her deck. He replied in kind and added the boom of two big Dahlgrens for emphasis, later saying: “The Florida fired first.” As he withdrew, however, he saw that the raider was by no means as badly hurt as he had thought. Accordingly, he changed his plan in mid-career and decided to take her alive. Guns reloaded, he stopped engines at a range of one hundred yards and called out a demand for the sloop’s immediate surrender before he blew her out of the water.
Aboard the crippled Florida, with no steam in her boilers, no shot in her guns, and only a leave-blown skeleton crew on hand, the lieutenant left in charge had little choice except to yield, though he did so under protest at this hostile action in a neutral port. Collins promptly attached a hawser to the captive vessel and proceeded to tow her out to sea, fired on ineffectively by the guns of a harbor fort and pursued by a Brazilian corvette which he soon outdistanced. Morris arrived from the hotel in time to see the two sloops leave the bay in this tandem fashion, Wachusett in front and his own battered Florida in ignominious tow, and though he too protested this “barbarous and piratical act,” they were by then beyond recall on the high seas, bound for Norfolk.
After a stopover in the West Indies, Napoleon Collins brought the two warships into Hampton Roads on November 12, both under their own power. There he received a welcome as enthusiastic as the one that had greeted his former squadron commander, Captain Charles Wilkes — also at one time skipper of the Wachusett — following his removal, three years ago, of Mason and Slidell from the British steamer Trent. Seward, on learning of what had happened in Bahia harbor, was only too aware that the two cases were uncomfortably similar, except that this was an even more flagrant violation of international law. Like the two Confederate envoys, the Florida was likely to prove an elephant on the State Department’s hands, and he began to regret that Collins had not sunk her outright instead of bringing her in, since there could be little doubt that the courts would order her returned intact to the neutral port where he had seized her. “I wish she was at the bottom of the sea,” the Secretary was afterwards reported to have remarked in discussing the affair with David Porter, recently transferred from duty on the Mississippi to command the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. “Do you mean it?” Porter asked, and Seward replied: “I do, from my soul.” The admiral returned to his headquarters in Hampton Roads and ordered the captive sloop moved to Newport News and anchored, as an act of poetic justice, near the spot where the Merrimac had sunk the Cumberland. In the course of the shift, the raider collided with a transport, losing her jibboom and figurehead and being severely raked along one side. She began leaking rather badly, and though her pumps were put to work, suddenly and mysteriously in the early-morning hours of November 28 she foundered and went to the bottom, nine fathoms down. Or maybe not so mysteriously after all; Porter subsequently confided that he had put an engineer aboard with orders to “open her sea cock before midnight, and do not leave that engine room until the water is up to your chin.”
This might or might not account for her loss (for with Porter as an unsupported witness, no set of facts was ever certain) but in any case Seward’s task in responding to the formal Brazilian protest, which arrived next month, was greatly simplified. “You have justly expected that the President would disavow and regret the proceedings at Bahia,” he replied, adding that the captain of the Wachusett would be suspended from duty and court-martialed. As for the rebel sloop, there could be no question of returning her, due to “an unforeseen accident which casts no responsibility upon the United States.” All the same, a U.S. gunboat was to put into All Saints Bay on the Emperor’s birthday, two years later, and fire a 21-gun salute as the amende honorable for this offense against the peace and dignity of Brazil. Collins himself was tried within six months, as Seward promised, and despite his plea that “the capture of the Florida was for the public good,” was sentenced to be dismissed from the service. Gideon Welles, much pleased with the commander’s response to a situation that had worked out well in the end, promptly set the verdict aside, restored the Pennsylvanian to duty, and afterwards promoted him to captain. Like Charles Wilkes, he would be a rear admiral before he died, a decade later.
Welles’s pleasure was considerably
diminished, however, by reports that followed hard on the heels of Collins’s exploit, indicating that this was by no means the end of rebel depredations against Federal shipping on the sea lanes of the world. By coincidence, on October 8 — the day after the Florida was taken under tow in Bahia harbor — the Clyde-built steamer Sea King, a fast sailer with a lifting screw, an iron frame, and six-inch planking of East India teak, left London bound for Madeira, which she reached ten days later to rendezvous with a Liverpool-based tender bearing guns and ammunition and James I. Waddell, a forty-year-old former U.S. Navy lieutenant who had gone over to the Confederacy, with equal rank in its infant navy, when his native North Carolina left the Union. He took over at once as captain of the Sea King, supervised the transfer and installation of her armament, formally commissioned her as the C.S.S. Shenandoah, and set out two days later, October 20, on a cruise designed to continue the Alabama-Florida tradition. In point of fact, his mission was to extend that tradition into regions where his country’s flag had never flown. Like the raid on St Albans, staged the day before he left Madeira, and the recent 31 -prize sortie by the Tallahassee, to Halifax and back, Shenandoah’s maiden effort was designed as a blow at the pocketbooks of New England, although Waddell had no intention of sailing her anywhere near that rocky shore. “The enemy’s distant whaling grounds have not been visited by us,” Secretary Mallory had noted in an August letter of instructions. “This commerce constitutes one of his reliable sources of national wealth no less than one of his best schools for seamen, and we must strike it, if possible.”