v1.1.1 / chapter 42 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* As the winter progressed, the Union attempted to organize new operations against the Confederacy. In the East, Joe Hooker's command of the Army of the Potomac appeared promising, with the Army of the Potomac in much better trim and morale.
On the Mississippi, the Union Navy suffered an embarrassing setback with the loss the powerful river ironclad INDIANOLA, and only managed to prevent it from falling into rebel hands with a clever subterfuge. In the meantime, Grant was pursuing various ideas for dealing with Vicksburg, with little result for the time being.
On the coasts, the Union Navy was having some success with its new second-generation ironclad monitors, and high hopes were placed on these floating monsters. However, on the debit side, the Navy caused an international incident by seizing the British merchantman PETERHOF on the high seas, leading to an international squabble that took some time to die down.
* The misfortunes the Army of the Potomac had endured since the dismissal of McClellan had sent morale to rock bottom. As one item of evidence, by the end of January, the rolls indicated over 85,000 men absent without leave. Not all these men were actually deserters as such. Partly the problem was that men who were injured or ill -- and there were many sick men in the camp at Falmouth -- could be sent back to hospitals in their home state. They rarely returned. Local doctors at such hospitals could grant medical discharges on any pretext they liked, and the army had no control over the matter. Once a soldier was admitted, the army couldn't touch him, and the hospitals had little interest in rounding up soldiers who wandered off.
There were still plenty of actual deserters, driven off by the futile battles and the misery of the camps. The army was too inept to take care of its people, and so not surprisingly also expended little effort to catch runaways. There was a meager reward of $5 for capturing a deserter, and the paperwork involved made it more trouble than it was worth. With misery so widespread, the discouraged soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were not impressed by Joe Hooker at first. To them he was just another humbug general; but Hooker quickly demonstrated an attention to detail that had been beyond the abilities of Ambrose Burnside.
The first problems to attend to were disease and desertion. Hooker dealt with the disease problem by establishing and enforcing sanitation measures in camp, and by ensuring that the men were properly fed, with issues of onions, potatoes, and fresh-baked bread. The fresh bread proved particularly popular. One soldier called Hooker a "veritable Santa Claus", and the sick list fell in half. The men were less happy about the crackdown on liquor in the camps: enlisted men got booze only when their superiors thought they deserved it.
Hooker dealt with the desertion problem by instituting "constant and severe" programs of drill to keep the men occupied and trained, while their officers were schooled at night to improve their skills, and by granting regular furloughs. Congress also helped by finally appropriating the money to give the men the back pay they had been owed for months. Security measures, such as tighter patrols and a pass system, were implemented to catch runaways, and it also became possible to execute deserters without having the President review the sentence in every case. Incoming packages were checked to ensure they did not contain civilian clothing.
Hooker also made changes and improvements in the military organization of the Army of the Potomac, disbanding Burnside's grand division scheme and dividing the army into its seven corps, with the corps commanders reporting directly to him. Following up Burnside's attempts to build a more effective cavalry organization, Hooker set up an independent cavalry corps under Major General George Stoneman, in hopes that Union cavalry would then be able to engage in the long-range raids that had been such a boost to the Confederate cause.
Under Burnside, the military intelligence apparatus of the Army of the Potomac had all but fallen apart. Considering the misleading nature of the information provided by Allen Pinkerton and his men to McClellan, that wasn't entirely a bad thing, but it certainly wasn't a good thing either. As General Dan Butterfield put it: "We were almost as ignorant of the enemy in our immediate front as if they had been in China." Joe Hooker set up a Bureau of Military Intelligence to obtain intelligence and provide reports, basing them on interrogations of deserters and prisoners, cavalry patrols, balloon observations, and a new corps of scouts.
With such prompt and effective reforms, the appreciation of the rank and file for Joe Hooker grew by leaps and bounds. There were still nagging doubts about Hooker among the officer corps, particularly among those of "proper" backgrounds, one of whom called headquarters under Hooker a "combination barroom and brothel". This judgement may have been exaggerated by the prudery common in those times. In fact, a friend of Hooker's said that despite the general's reputation as a hard drinker, he stopped drinking when he was put in the top command. It is still said that use of the term "hooker" for prostitutes is taken from those days.
The men he brought into his inner circle didn't win him any friends among the proper, either. His friend Brigadier General Dan Butterfield was just as fond of the good life as Hooker, and the fact that Butterfield came out of the militia, having been a New York businessman before the war, did not recommend him to regular-army officers -- though Butterfield would make his mark on military history by composing the lights-out bugle call later known as "Taps".
Butterfield was colorless in comparison to Hooker's associate Major General Dan Sickles, a Congressman-turned-general with political origins out of New York City's corrupt Tammany Hall organization. Sickles had his eye on the presidency before the war, but his political career had taken a nosedive when he found out that a friend of his, Philip Barton Key, son of Francis Scott Key, composer of the national anthem, had been having an affair with his wife. Sickles shot and killed Key on the streets of Washington.
His trial was a public spectacle. Edwin Stanton had been one of the attorneys for the defense, and Sickles was acquitted on a plea of temporary insanity, one of the first times that defense was used, though in those days it was unlikely in any case that Sickles would have been convicted of murder in killing a man who had been sleeping with his wife. Killing Key in itself did not lead to Sickles' political problems. What discredited him was that he forgave his wife and took her back. To proper citizens, this was an appalling act of weakness, amounting to approval of her misdeeds, and he was ostracized. When war came along, he saw in it an opportunity to retrieve his fortunes in military glory, and went back to New York to raise militia regiments. Sickles had the look of a melodrama villain and cared little what anyone thought of what he did. Joe Hooker could not have deliberately chosen a friend more calculated to inspire distrust by association.
In any case, there was no doubt about Hooker's inclination towards self-promotion and seeking favor with the powerful, but even that had its ambiguities, for Hooker suggested as his chief of staff Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, the officer who had been carted off to prison on trumped-up treason charges by Secretary Stanton. Stone was now free but lived a ghostlike existence, retaining his rank but entrusted with no responsibilities. Such a selection was not likely to win Hooker any favors with his political backers, and the only plausible reason for making it was out of a sense of justice, something no one thought he had in him. In any case, the suggestion was rejected and Dan Butterfield became Hooker's chief of staff instead. Hooker didn't press the matter and General Stone remained a nonperson.
In the balance, it seemed that something might be made of Joe Hooker. What happened when he met Robert E. Lee remained to be seen.
* David Dixon Porter, now a rear admiral, had enthusiastically cooperated with his friends Grant and Sherman in their various offensive schemes, but Porter was too energetic to be satisfied at merely helping the Army in their plans. He had plans of his own.
As long as the Confederacy held Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the rebels controlled roughly 300 miles (480 kilometers) of the Mississippi, allowing them to maintain commerce between East and West. Porter believed that he could break that link by running warships south down the river past Vicksburg. Once downriver, they could set up bases from which they could sever Confederate traffic on the river. It was a logical extension of the coastal blockade strategy to inland waterways.
In early February, Porter had the fast Ellett ram QUEEN OF THE WEST, under the command of 19-year-old Colonel Charles Ellett and now armed with a few guns to complement her ram, make the run past Vicksburg in broad daylight. While the ram took a dozen hits, none were serious, and Ellett was bold enough to ram the Confederate gunboat CITY OF VICKSBURG while it sat at dock below the city, and then set it on fire using use incendiaries consisting of cotton wads soaked with turpentine.
After a little resupply and refit, the QUEEN OF THE WEST then embarked on an extended and profitable raid down the Mississippi and up the Red River, destroying Confederate cargo vessels and seizing steamships. Unfortunately, while investigating reports of a Confederate battery on the Red River on 14 February 1863, Valentine's Day, the QUEEN OF THE WEST ran aground on a mud bank. Ellett then found out the reports of the battery were perfectly true, since rebel gunners then began to pound the immobilized steamship. Ellett and his crew jumped overboard, leaving the QUEEN to the rebels. Ellett and most of his men managed to make it to one of the steamers they had captured from the rebels, the NEW ERA NUMBER 5, and put on steam to get back north to safety as fast as they could.
The rebels pursued with a fast gunboat named the WEBB. The Federals on board the NEW ERA threw everything they could over the side to stay ahead in the race, for though the WEBB only had one gun, the NEW ERA was unarmed. Two days later, on the morning of 16 February, the NEW ERA was moving upriver north of Natchez when the crew encountered a fearsome-looking vessel that, after a few anxious moments, turned out to be the Union river ironclad INDIANOLA. This was the latest and most impressive addition to the Federal gunboat fleet, with armament of two 11 inch (28-centimeter) guns mounted forward and a pair of 9 inch (22.9 centimeter) rifles mounted amidships, and four steam engines that drove sidewheels and twin screws.
Porter had sent the INDIANOLA, under the command of Lieutenant Commander George Brown, downstream past Vicksburg to reinforce the river blockade. The ironclad carried two barges full of coal, one lashed to each side, to provide fuel for operations. The INDIANOLA and the NEW ERA went downstream to encounter the WEBB moving upstream. The captain of the rebel gunboat took one look at the INDIANOLA and sensibly turned tail, with the INDIANOLA firing a few shots to hurry him on his way. The WEBB managed to make it to the mouth of the Red and escape upriver. Brown, learning from Ellett's mistake, knew better than to follow without an experienced river pilot to keep him from running aground. He decided to stay where he was to keep the rebels bottled up while Ellett took the NEW ERA back upstream to give Porter a report.
A few days later, however, Brown found out that the Confederates had refloated the QUEEN OF THE WEST, repaired it, and were taking it downstream, along with the WEBB and two other vessels, to engage the INDIANOLA. Brown considered standing and fighting, then decided against it, taking the INDIANOLA back upstream on 21 February. Since he hoped that the NEW ERA would send back reinforcements, he held on to the two coal barges, though they slowed the gunboat down considerably.
The INDIANOLA was about a dozen miles downriver of the nearest Union battery on 24 February, when the Confederate fleet caught up with her after sundown. The rebel commander, Major Joseph L. Brent, had held back until dark, calculating that in the darkness the big Union ironclad would not be able to make use of her superior firepower. The fight was confused and short. The INDIANOLA fired wildly into the night but only scored one hit, on the QUEEN OF THE WEST. The ironclad was rammed repeatedly by the QUEEN and the WEBB. The WEBB was damaged severely herself in the process but continued to attack. The INDIANOLA was taking on water and could barely steer, so Brown beached her on the west bank where she could be reached by Union forces. However, when the ironclad touched shore the rebels boarded her, tied ropes to her, and towed her across the river, where she sank in the shallows.
The Confederates immediately set about trying to raise her. A Union sailor who had managed to jump overboard when the INDIANOLA touched the west bank made his way north, to give Porter the bad news on 26 February. Porter was appalled. His plan for river raiding had backfired disastrously, with one of his best wooden ships now fighting for the rebels, and his most powerful ironclad being salvaged to do the same. He had given the Confederates the means to effectively resist any further downstream movements by the Union river navy. Worse, all of the other Federal gunboats were away, assisting Grant in his experiments.
With nothing else available, Porter resorted to deception. He took every man available and set them to work building a false ironclad, using as its basis a old barge that was extended with rafts. Within a day the mock warship had been completed, with a pilot house made of planks and canvas, two empty paddle-wheel boxes, guns made of logs, and twin smokestacks built of stacked barrels, each capped with smoke pots. Two old skiffs were mounted for a convincing touch, and the whole thing was painted with tar. The cost of the project, it was proudly reported, was $8.63.
When the sun fell, the smoke pots were lit and the vessel set adrift to float past Vicksburg. The rebel gunners fired everything they had at her but she moved on steadily as if completely unharmed. The next morning the fake warship grounded herself on the west bank, and Sherman's soldiers pushed her off with a cheer. Moving downstream, she encountered the QUEEN OF THE WEST steaming upstream, which promptly turned about and ran downstream to spread the alarm. The Confederates couldn't hope to take on a big Union ironclad in broad daylight, and besides, they were still nursing injuries from the fight with the INDIANOLA.
The four rebel gunboats fled immediately, leaving the Confederate lieutenant in charge of salvaging the INDIANOLA to destroy her rather than let her fall back into Union hands. The smoking monster steaming downstream halted two miles (3.2 kilometers) upstream of the INDIANOLA. The lieutenant held his ground until nightfall, wondering what the Yankees were up to, when he finally decided to carry out his orders. He had the two 11 inch guns faced muzzle-to-muzzle and fired them into each other using a slow fuze, then burned what was left.
The next day, the threatening Union ironclad was where she had been the night
before. It made no movement nor gave any sign of life. Finally curiosity
got the better of the rebels, and they went out in a rowboat to investigate,
to find out that they'd been had. They also found a sign nailed to the side
of the Quaker warship:
DELUDED
PEOPLE
CAVE IN.
BACK_TO_TOP
* Even while William Tecumseh Sherman and his men labored to cut off Vicksburg by diverting the river away from the city, Grant was considering other options.
On the west bank of the river, just south of the Arkansas border in Louisiana, was a body of water known as Lake Providence. It had once been a bend in the Mississippi, but had been cut off by the river's meanderings. A study of a map of the river systems in the region hinted that Lake Providence might in fact live up to its name: it was drained by a short outlet named Bayou Baxter, which flowed into a longer waterway named Bayou Macon, and so on through a network of rivers that eventually ended up in the Red River and then the Mississippi itself.
Grant wondered if reconnecting Lake Providence to the Mississippi might open a back-door route around Vicksburg to support a combined attack on Port Hudson. Once the southern linchpin of the Confederate-controlled stretch of the river fell, the northern one, Vicksburg, should quickly follow. He estimated that the work required to accomplish the task would be a fraction of the effort Sherman was expending on his futile canal.
Grant ordered Major General James MacPherson to come downriver from Memphis with a division immediately and begin the work. MacPherson was highly qualified for the task. He had been top of the West Point class of 1853, had extensive experience in engineering projects, and had returned to the Academy to teach engineering. MacPherson was youthful, handsome, smart, pleasant, highly competent, and was on a rocketlike rise up through the ranks after starting out as Grant's engineering officer. At the time of the battle of Shiloh, MacPherson had only been a lieutenant colonel.
MacPherson threw himself into his work, having his men drag a steamship over the levee from the Mississippi into Lake Providence to allow him to get a better idea of the lay of the land than could be provided by a map. The practical difficulties turned out to be considerable. The waterways out of Lake Providence proved to be choked with cypress trees, and though McPherson's ingenious men came up with a barge-borne circular saw that they used to cut off stumps below the waterline, such an approach was obviously too laborious to be practical on a large scale.
The attempt to find a waterway through Lake Providence was called off after two months of effort, though Grant had realized it was a dead end well before that. He kept the men at work partly to distract the Confederates, as well as simply to give his soldiers something to do. They seemed to take it in that spirit, the soldiers taking turns sawing out cypress stumps and enjoying the fishing in the meantime. McPherson and his staff took their little steamship out on moonlight excursions, enjoyed the music of the regimental band, and returned to the landing of a plantation house they had commandeered, where they could enjoy its well-stocked wine cellar.
* In the meantime, Grant was pursuing a second back-water approach to the problem. The region north of where the Yazoo flowed into the Mississippi was crisscrossed with streams and small rivers and laced with swamps. The region was known locally as "the Delta", though it was something of the reverse of a conventional river delta, with the waters converging instead of diverging.
Of particular interest was the fact that far north of the confluence of the two major rivers, at a place just south of Helena, Arkansas, the Mississippi had once connected into this network in a way that had allowed steamships to make their way all across to the Yazoo. This connection had so been known as Yazoo Pass, but it had been sealed off by the shifting of the Mississippi in the 1850s.
Grant felt that if he could get his gunboats and transports into the Delta network, he could bypass Confederate defenses protecting the lower reaches of the Yazoo and launch an attack on Vicksburg at Haines' Bluff, upriver of Confederate defenses. At about the same time Grant ordered McPherson to begin work on the Lake Providence route, Grant sent Lieutenant Colonel James H. Wilson, his chief topographical engineer, to scout out the possibilities of the Yazoo Pass route. Wilson was a West Pointer from Illinois, 25 years old, who had served as an aide to McClellan at Antietam. On transferring West, Wilson had been doubtful of the dumpy-looking Grant, who hardly looked half the soldier that McClellan did, but Grant talked less and accomplished more than Little Mac, and gave Wilson plenty of free leash that earned the younger man's trust.
Wilson decided to re-connect the Mississippi with the Yazoo Pass, and on 2 February the Federals blasted the levee separating the two. The result was spectacular, "water pouring through it like nothing else I ever saw except Niagara," as he wrote later. A few days later, after the torrents had ceased, he took a steamboat down Yazoo Pass into Moon Lake, about a mile from the Mississippi, and five miles (eight kilometers) through the pass beyond that. Wilson became extremely excited over the possibilities and wrote Grant, infecting him with enthusiasm. Wilson already had a division at his disposal, and Grant ordered another one to join the first. However, after his initial quick progress, Wilson found that the dozen miles of Yazoo Pass on the far side of Moon Lake were more challenging: the waterway was not only narrow, with great oaks and cypresses hemming in his vessels, but local Confederates had brought in slaves to cut down some of the great trees as barriers to block Yankee movements.
It took Wilson most of the rest of the month of February to clear the way, using parties of hundreds of soldiers to drag the huge trees off on big navy hawsers. However, once past these obstacles, he would then have access to the Coldwater, which was said to be a perfectly navigable river that could handle any vessel available to the Federals in the theater of operations.
* Following the success of the USS MONITOR against the CSS VIRGINIA, the Union Navy had issued orders for dozens of new ironclads. Most of them were improvements or variations on the original MONITOR, and so were known generally as "monitors". The Navy expected great things of them. Such seemingly invulnerable weapons would, it was hoped, make short work of coastal forts, allowing the Federals to seize the most heavily-defended Confederate seaports, with Charleston at the top of the list.
Rear Admiral Samuel Du Pont had his misgivings about such notions, as did even the inventor of the MONITOR, John Ericsson. Du Pont decided to perform a field experiment to see what ironclads could really accomplish. The rebels had constructed an earthwork fort named Fort McAllister, mounting nine guns, near the mouth of the Ogeechee River, just north of the Georgia state line, to help protect Savannah. Du Pont ordered one of his new monitors, the USS MONTAUK, under the command of John L. Worden, hero of the MONITOR, to reduce it.
On 27 January 1863, Worden shelled Fort McAllister for four hours, leaving after he ran out of ammunition. While the MONTAUK had been hit many times, the ship was unharmed. Unfortunately, so was the fort. Worden tried again on 1 February, with exactly the same results. The third attempt, on 27 February, proved much more exciting. The MONTAUK caught the rebel raider NASHVILLE sitting at anchor near Fort McAllister, and hammered the wooden ship with 11 inch (28 centimeter) and 15 inch (38 centimeter) projectiles until her magazine blew up. The ironclad then withdrew, only to strike a torpedo that blasted a hole in her bottom. Worden had to beach the ship to keep her from sinking.
The MONTAUK was swiftly repaired. While repairs were underway, on 3 March three other monitors operating out of Port Royal pounded Fort McAllister for eight hours. The results were as inconclusive as the other bombardments. Du Pont's skepticism of the ability of ironclads to suppress well-prepared defenses ashore solidified. It did him little good. Back in Washington, the enthusiasm for ironclads remained as high as ever.
* While the Union had been able to destroy one would-be rebel commerce raider almost by accident, destroying the much more successful and troublesome rebel raider ALABAMA wasn't quite so easy, though an attempt to do so would have equally unpredicted results.
In response to the embarrassments inflicted on the US Navy by rebel raiders, Navy Secretary Welles relented on the policy held to that time to reserve Union warships for blockade duties. He dispatched the USS VANDERBILT to the Caribbean to hunt down the ALABAMA and sink her. The significant fact in this decision was that the skipper of the VANDERBILT happened to be Captain Charles Wilkes, the anglophobe who had more than a year before triggered threats of war between the US and England by snatching Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell off the TRENT. Old habits die hard, and though Wilkes did not find, much less sink, the ALABAMA, he did seize a British merchantman named the PETERHOF near the Virgin Islands on 25 February 1863.
The British government howled with outrage, and with good reason. The PETERHOF was far away from the nearest blockade zone, and its cargo wasn't even intended for an American port. It was bound for Matamoros, Mexico. This might have seemed like a legalism, since Matamoros was right across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, and goods shipped into Matamoros were pouring into the Confederacy. However, rejecting this legalism then raised another sticky point, since it could be documented that the vast majority of trade into Matamoros actually originated from American vessels, operating out of New York. Southern sneers at Yankee greed were supported by some evidence, provided by Northern manufactured goods flowing into Confederate hands from south of the border.
Secretary of State Seward found himself in an awkward position. The British Ambassador Lord Lyons warned that another such incident would be "little less than a calamity." Fortunately, the US Supreme Court eventually pulled Seward out of the fire by ruling the seizure illegal. As for Captain Wilkes, Navy Secretary Welles reassigned him to other duties where he was less likely to cause trouble. Welles caustically wrote that Wilkes had failed in his mission to catch the ALABAMA because he was too "zealous to catch blockade-runners and get prize money." In any case, war fever between the US and Britain subsided again, at least for the moment.
