The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  No such feeling was experienced by the crews of the monitors, the officer added; “for in their turrets the nuts that secured the laminated plates flew wildly, to the injury and discomfiture of the men at the guns.” Up closer, they were harder hit. “The shots literally rained around them,” a correspondent wrote, “splashing the water up thirty feet in the air, and striking and booming from their decks and turrets.” The flagship was a mile from Sumter, the nearest monitors about half that far, but the captain of the twin-turreted Nahant quickly found what it would cost to close the range. “Mr Clarke, you haven’t hit anything yet,” he protested to the ensign in charge of the 15-inch gun, which was throwing its 420-pound shells at seven-minute intervals. When the young man replied, “We aint near enough, Captain,” the skipper went into a rage. “Not near enough? God damn it,” he cried, “I’ll put you near enough! Starboard your helm, Quartermaster!” As the ship came about, a rebel projectile slammed against the sight-slit, killing the helmsman and mangling the pilot. “Retire! Retire!” the captain shouted. Others caught it as hard or harder, with similar results: smokestacks perforated, turrets jammed, decks ripped up, guns knocked out of action. The only effect on the enemy a journalist could see, examining the brick northeast face of Sumter through his glasses, was that of “increasing pock marks and discolorations on the walls, as if there had been a sudden breaking out of cutaneous disease.” But there was no corresponding slackening of fire from within the fort, whose cannoneers were jubilant over the many hits they scored. Frenzied at being kept from a share in the fun of pummeling the ironclads, Confederates locked in the Moultrie guardhouse screamed above the roar of the bombardment: “For God’s sake, let us come out and go to the guns!”

  After peering through the drifting smoke for about two hours, Du Pont was told that it was nearly 5 o’clock. “Make signal to the ships to drop out of fire,” he said quietly. “It is too late to fight this battle tonight. We will renew it early in the morning.” Below decks, when the gun captains received word of this decision, they sent up an urgent request that they be allowed to fire at least one broadside before retiring. It was granted, and as the Ironsides turned to steam down the channel an eight-gun salvo was hurled at Moultrie, the only shots she fired in the course of the engagement. This brought the total to an even 150 rounds expended by the flotilla, and of these 55 were scored as hits. The Confederates, on the other hand, had fired 2209, of which no less than 441 had found their mark, despite the fact that the targets had not only been comparatively small, and moving, but had also been mostly submerged. That this was remarkably effective shooting Du Pont himself began to appreciate when the retiring monitors came within hailing distance of the flagship and he got a close-up look at their condition. The first to approach was the Keokuk, limping badly. Last in and first out, she had ventured nearest to Sumter’s 44 guns, and she had the scars of 90 point-blank hits to prove it. She was “riddled like a colander,” one witness remarked, “the most severely mauled ship one ever saw.” That night, in fact, she keeled over and sank at her anchorage off Morris Island. Others also had been roughly handled; Weehawken had taken 53 hits, Nantucket 51, Patapsco 47, Nahant 36, Passaic 35, Catskill 20, and Montauk 14. In general, the damage suffered was in inverse ratio to the individual distance between them and the rebel guns, and none had been closer than 600 yards.

  The admiral’s intention to “renew [the battle] early in the morning” was modified by the sight of his crippled monitors. Five of the eight were too badly damaged to be able to engage if ordered, and of these five, one would sink before the scheduled time for action. Equally conclusive were the reports and recommendations of the several captains when they came aboard the flagship that evening. “With your present means,” John Rodgers advised, “I could not, if I were asked, recommend a renewal of the attack.” The redoubtable Worden was no less emphatic. “After testing the weight of the enemy’s fire, and observing the obstructions,” he reported, “I am led to believe that Charleston cannot be taken by the naval force now present, and that had the attack been continued [today] it could not have failed to result in disaster.” This gave Du Pont pause, and pausing he reflected on the risks. Here was no New Orleans, where the problem had been to run the fleet through a brief, furious gauntlet of fire in order to gain a safe haven above the forts and place a defenseless city under the muzzles of its guns; this was Charleston, whose harbor, in the words of a staff officer, “was a cul-de-sac, a circle of fire not to be passed.” The deeper you penetrated the circle, the more you were exposed to destruction from its rim. Moreover, as the admiral saw the outcome, even if he pressed the attack “in the end we shall retire, leaving some of our ironclads in the hands of the enemy, to be refitted and turned against our blockade with deplorable effect.” This last was unthinkable—though he thought about it in his cabin all night long. By daybreak he had made up his mind. “I have decided not to renew the attack,” he told his chief of staff. “We have met with a sad repulse; I shall not turn it into a great disaster.”

  Next afternoon he recrossed the bar. “I attempted to take the bull by the horns, but he was too much for us,” he admitted to the army commander whose troops had been standing by to pick up the pieces. By the end of the week the flotilla again was riding at anchor inside Port Royal, swarmed over by armorers hammering the vessels back into shape. The admiral knew the reaction in Washington would be severe, coming as it did on the heels of such great expectations, but he also knew that he had the support of his monitor captains, who stood, as one of them said, “like a wall of iron” around his reputation, agreeing with his chief of staff’s opinion that “Admiral Du Pont never showed greater courage or patriotism than when he saved his ships and men, and sacrificed himself to the clamor and disappointment evoked by his defeat.” In point of fact, however, part of the expressed disappointment, if not the outright clamor, occurred within the fleet itself. A chief engineer was clapped in arrest for complaining in his ship’s mess that the attack had not been pressed to the victory point, and at least one junior officer remarked wryly that “the grim sort of soul like Farragut was lacking.” Welles and Fox, though hot enough at the outcome and in no doubt at all as to where the blame lay, were considerably hampered in their criticisms by the political necessity for delay in bringing the matter out into the open with the publication of the adverse battle reports. After all, it was they—especially Fox—who had announced that the monitors were irresistible, and contracts already had been signed for the delivery of eighteen more of the expensive naval monsters. Two weeks after the repulse, Welles was attempting to shrug it off by telling his diary: “I am by no means confident that we are acting wisely in expending so much strength and effort on Charleston, a place of no strategic importance.”

  The grapes had soured for him; but not for Beauregard. The Louisiana general’s only regrets were that the boiler-torpedo had not gone off beneath the Ironsides and that the Yankees had slunk away without attempting a renewal of the assault, which he felt certain would have been even more decisively repulsed. In a congratulatory address to his troops, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. He spoke of “the stranded, riddled wreck” of the Keokuk, whose big guns now were part of the harbor defenses, and of the ignominious flight of “her baffled coadjutors,” whose defeat had reinspired world-wide confidence in the ultimate and glorious triumph of the Confederate cause. In his official report to Richmond, though—for he had recently confided to a friend that, from now on, he was adopting a more restrained style in his dispatches, in order to counteract a rumor that he was prone to exaggerate his accomplishments—the little Creole, with his bloodhound eyes, his swarthy face, and his hair brushed forward in lovelocks at the temples, contented himself for the most part with factual observations. “It may be accepted, as shown,” he wrote, “that these vaunted monitor batteries, though formidable engines of war, after all are not invulnerable or invincible, and may be destroyed or defeated by heavy ordnance, properly placed and skillfully handled.” However,
in the glow and warmth of congratulations being pressed upon him, including one that he had made Sumter “a household word, like Salamis and Thermopylae,” he could not resist the temptation to add a closing flourish to the report: “My expectations were fully realized, and the country, as well as the State of South Carolina, may well be proud of the men who first met and vanquished the iron-mailed, terribly armed armada, so confidently prepared and sent forth by the enemy to certain and easy victory.”

  2

  Though he grew snappish at the first report that the fleet had been repulsed—“Hold your position inside the bar near Charleston,” he instructed Du Pont in a message sent posthaste down the coast; “or, if you shall have left it, return to it, and hold it till further orders”—Lincoln was in a better frame of mind for the reception of bad news than he had been for months. The reason for this was that he had just returned from a five-day Easter vacation combined with a highly satisfactory inspection of the Army of the Potomac, whose tents were pitched along the Rappahannock in the vicinity of Falmouth. The visit was a heartening experience, not only because it showed him that the condition of the troops was excellent, but also because it abolished his main previous doubt as to the fitness of the man he had appointed as their commander. After saying, “Now there is Joe Hooker. He can fight. I think that is pretty well established,” Lincoln had added: “But whether he can ‘keep tavern’ for a large army is not so sure.” If the trip down the bay had done nothing else, it had reassured the President on that score. Fighting Joe had taken hold with a vengeance, and the results were plain to see on the faces and in the attitude of the men. Fredericksburg and the Mud March, though the letters of the former were embroidered on the rippling blue of their regimental colors, were no longer even a part of their vocabulary.

  Hooker could indeed keep tavern. Within a week of his assumption of command he jolted the commissary department by ordering the issue of rations expanded to include fresh vegetables and soft bread; he supervised a thorough cleanup of the unsanitary camps, shrinking the overlong sick lists in the process, and he instituted a liberal system of furloughs which, combined with a tightening of security regulations, did much to reduce desertion. “Ah! the furloughs and vegetables he gave!” one infantryman still marveled years later, “How he did understand the road to the soldier’s heart!” In the midst of all this welcome reform, army paymasters came down from Washington with bulging satchels and surprised the troops with six months’ back pay. It was no wonder another veteran recalled that “cheerfulness, good order, and military discipline at once took the place of grumbling, depression, and want of confidence.” Idleness, that breeder of discontent, was abolished by a revival of the old-time grand reviews, with regiment after regiment swinging past the reviewing stand so that when the men executed the command “eyes right” they saw their chieftain’s clean-shaven face light up with pleasure at seeing their appearance improved by their diurnal spit-and-polish preparations. Unit pride, being thus encouraged, increased even more when Hooker, expanding the use of the so-called Kearny patch—a device improvised by the late Phil Kearny, about this time last year, to identify the men of his division in the course of their march up the York-James peninsula—ordered the adoption of corps insignia of various shapes, cut from red, white, or blue cloth, thus indicating the first, second, or third division, and stitched to the crown of the caps of the troops, so that he and they could tell at a glance what corps and division a man was gracing or disgracing, on duty or off. Moreover, after the gruff and dish-faced Pope and the flustered and fantastically whiskered Burnside, Hooker himself, by the force of his personality and the handsomeness of his presence, infused some of the old McClellan magnetism into the reviving army’s ranks. “Apollo-like,” a Wisconsin major called the forty-eight-year-old Massachusetts-born commander, and a visiting editor wrote of him as “a man of unusually handsome face and elegant proportions, with a complexion as delicate and silken as a woman’s.” Another remarked, along this same line, that the general looked “as rosy as the most healthy woman alive.”

  Some claimed that this glow, this rosiness, had its origin in the bottle (the men themselves apparently took pride in the assertion;

  “Joe Hooker is our leader—

  He takes his whiskey strong!”

  they sang as they set off on practice marches) while other dissenters from the prevalent chorus of praise, although admitting that the general was “handsome and picturesque in the extreme,” directed attention to what one of them called his “fatally weak chin.” Still others believed they detected inner flaws, below the rosy surface. “He could play the best game of poker I ever saw,” a former West Coast intimate recollected, “until it came to the point when he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk.” But the harshest judgment of all came from a cavalry officer, Charles F. Adams, Jr. According to this son of the ambassador to England, the new commander was “a noisy, low-toned intriguer” under whose influence army headquarters became “a place to which no self-respecting man liked to go, and no decent woman could go. It was a combination of barroom and brothel.” Young Adams’ own “tone” was exceptionally high, which made him something less than tolerant of the weakness of others—particularly the weaknesses of the flesh, from which he himself apparently was exempt—but in support of at least a part of the accusation was the fact that, from this time on, the general’s surname entered the language as one of the many lowercase slang words for prostitute. As for the rest, however, a friend who was with him almost daily insisted that Hooker had gone on the wagon the day he took command. Headquarters might have some of the aspects of a barroom, as Adams said, but according to this observer the general himself did not imbibe.

  The fact was, it did indeed appear that he as well as the army had experienced a basic change of character. Much of his former bluster was gone; he had even acquired a dislike for his nom-de-guerre, though perhaps this was largely because the story was beginning to get around that he had come by it as the result of an error made in a New York composing room during the Peninsula Campaign, when a last-minute dispatch arrived from the front with additional news involving his division. “Fighting—Joe Hooker,” the follow-up was tagged, indicating that it was to be added to what had gone before, but the typesetter dropped the dash and it was printed as a separate story, under the resultant heading. The nickname stuck despite the general’s objections. “Don’t call me Fighting Joe,” he said. “[It] makes the public think that I am a hotheaded, furious young fellow, accustomed to making furious and needless dashes at the enemy.” Nor was this the only change in Hooker. All his military life, at West Point, in Mexico, and in the peacetime army—from which he had resigned in 1853, after sixteen years of service, in order to take up California farming and civil engineering, only to fail at both so utterly that when news came that the war had begun his friends had to pass the hat to get up money for his fare back East—he had been quick to resent the authority and criticize the conduct of his superiors. Just recently, he had sneered at the President and the Cabinet as a flock of bunglers and had asserted that what the country needed was a dictator, making it more or less clear that the man he had in mind for the job was himself. Now, though, all that had gone by the board. He had not even resented Lincoln’s “beware of rashness. Beware of rashness” letter, calling him to account for his derogations while appointing him to command the army. Soon afterwards, in the privacy of his tent, Hooker read the letter to a journalist, only taking exception to the charge that he had “thwarted” Burnside. “The President is mistaken. I never thwarted Burnside in any way, shape, or manner,” he broke off reading to say—though even now he could not resist adding: “Burnside was pre-eminently a man of deportment. He fought the battle of Fredericksburg on his deportment; he was defeated on his deportment; and he took his deportment with him out of the Army of the Potomac, thank God.” He returned to the letter, and when he had finished reading it he folded it and put it back into his breast pocket, as if to empha
size the claim that he had taken it to heart. “That is just such a letter as a father might write to his son,” he mused aloud, and the reporter thought he saw tears beginning to mist the general’s pale blue-gray eyes. “It is a beautiful letter,” Hooker went on, “and although I think he was harder on me than I deserved, I will say that I love the man who wrote it.” Again he paused. Then he said, “After I have got to Richmond I shall give that letter to you to have published.”

  This last, variously phrased as “When I get to Richmond” or “After we have taken Richmond,” cropped up more frequently in his talk as the spirit and strength of his army grew, and it was one of the few things that struck Lincoln unfavorably when he arrived for his Easter visit. “If you get to Richmond, General—” he remarked at their first conference, only to have Hooker break in with “Excuse me, Mr President, but there is no ‘if’ in this case. I am going straight to Richmond if I live.” Lincoln let it pass, though afterwards he said privately to a friend: “That is the most depressing thing about Hooker. It seems to me that he is over-confident.” Presently, however, as the inspection tour progressed, he began to see for himself that the general’s ready assurance was solidly based on facts and figures. Even after the detachment of Burnside’s old corps—which took with it, down the coast to Newport News, whatever resentment its members might be feeling as a result of the supersession of their former chief—Hooker still had seven others, plus a newly consolidated corps of cavalry, including in all no less than twenty divisions of infantry and three of horsemen, here on the Rappahannock, with a present-for-duty total of 133,450 effectives, supported by seventy batteries of artillery with a total of 412 guns. Across the way, the Confederates had less than half as many men and a good deal less than half as many guns, and Hooker not only knew the approximate odds, he was also preparing to take advantage of them. On the eve of Lincoln’s arrival he had put his corps commanders on the alert by ordering all surplus baggage sent to the rear, and he had warned the War Department to have siege equipment ready for shipment to him in front of the rebel capital. In addition to 10,000 shovels, 5000 picks, 5000 axes, and 30,000 sandbags, he wanted authentic maps of the Richmond defenses, to be used in laying out saps and parallels, and he requested that a flotilla of supply boats be kept standing by at all times, ready to deliver 1,500,000 rations up the Pamunkey River as soon as the army got that far. He did not say “if,” he said “as soon as,” and when this was repeated at Falmouth on Easter Sunday Lincoln shook his head in some perplexity. He admired determination and self-reliance, especially in a military man, but he also knew there was such a thing as whistling in the dark. He had known men—John Pope, for one—who assumed those qualities to hide their doubts, not only from their associates but also from themselves. In fact, the louder a man insisted that there was no room for doubt in his make-up, the more likely he was to belong to the whistler category, and Lincoln feared that Hooker’s brashness might be assumed for some such purpose. “It is about the worst thing I have seen since I have been down here,” he remarked.