Part 9 (2/2)
”MY DEAREST WIFE: I write and leave this letter for you. I am going into Mobile in the morning, if G.o.d is my leader, as I hope he is, and in him I place my trust. If he thinks it is the proper place for me to die, I am ready to submit to his will in that as in all other things. My great mortification is that my vessels, the ironclads, were not ready to have gone in yesterday. The army landed last night, and are in full view of us this morning, and the Tec.u.mseh has not yet arrived from Pensacola.
”G.o.d bless and preserve you, my darling, and my dear boy, if anything should happen to me; and may his blessings also rest upon your dear mother, and all your sisters and their children.
”Your devoted and affectionate husband, who never for one moment forgot his love, duty, or fidelity to you, his devoted and best of wives,
”D. G. FARRAGUT.”
A more touching and gratifying testimony of unwavering attachment, after more than twenty years of marriage, no wife could desire. It was an attachment also not merely professed in words, but evidenced by the whole course of his life and conduct. Infidelity or neglect of a wife was, in truth, in the estimation of Admiral Farragut, one of the most serious of blots upon a man's character, drawing out always his bitterest condemnation.
A pleasing glimpse is at this same period afforded of his relations to the surviving members of his father's family, who still remained in or near New Orleans, and from whom by the conditions of his profession he had been separated since his childhood. ”My dear sister,” he writes, ”has sent me a Holy Virgin like the one Rose gave me. She said it was blessed by the archbishop, who said I was good to the priests. I only tell you this,” adds the admiral dryly, ”to show you that they did not succeed in impressing the bishop with the idea that I had robbed the church at Point Coupee.” This is not the only mention of his sister during this time, and it is evident that two years' occupation of New Orleans by the Union forces had done much to mollify public sentiment; for immediately after the surrender he had written home, ”It is a strange thought that I am here among my relatives, and yet not one has dared to say 'I am happy to see you.'”
On the 8th of July General Canby, accompanied by General Granger, who was to have immediate charge of the land operations against the Mobile forts, had called upon the admiral to make the preliminary arrangements.
Somewhat later Canby sent word that he could not spare men enough to invest both Gaines and Morgan at the same time; and at Farragut's suggestion it was then decided to land first upon Dauphin Island, he undertaking to send a gunboat to cover the movement. Granger visited him again on the 1st of August, and as the admiral then had reason to expect the last of his monitors by the 4th, that day was fixed for the attack and landing. Granger was up to time, and his troops were put ash.o.r.e on the evening of the 3d; but the Tec.u.mseh had not arrived from Pensacola.
The other three had been on hand since the 1st, anch.o.r.ed under the shelter of Sand Island, three miles from Fort Morgan.
To Farragut's great mortification he was unable to carry out his part of the programme; but on the evening of the 4th the Tec.u.mseh arrived, together with the Richmond, which had been for a few days at Pensacola preparing for the fight. ”I regret to have detained you, admiral,” said Craven, the commander of the monitor, ”but had it not been for Captain Jenkins (of the Richmond), G.o.d knows when I should have been here. When your order came I had not received an ounce of coal.” In his report of the battle, Farragut warmly acknowledged the zeal and energy of Jenkins, to which he owed the seasonable arrival of this important re-enforcement. ”He takes,” he said, ”as much interest in the fleet now as formerly when he was my chief-of-staff. He is also commanding officer of the second division of my squadron, and as such has shown ability and the most untiring zeal.... I feel I should not be doing my duty did I not call the attention of the Department to an officer who has performed all his various duties with so much zeal and fidelity.” Farragut has been charged with failure to notice adequately the services of those under him; but the foregoing words, which are not by any means unparalleled in his dispatches, show that he could praise cordially when he saw fitting occasion.
The night of August 4th was quiet, the sea smooth, with a light air just rippling the surface of the water. At sundown it had been raining hard, but toward midnight cleared off, the weather becoming hot and calm.
Later on a light air again sprang up from the southwest. The admiral was not well, and slept restlessly. About three in the morning he called his servant and sent him to find out how the wind was. Learning that it was from the quarter he wished, he said, ”Then we will go in in the morning.” Between four and five the lighter vessels got under way and went alongside those to which they were to be lashed. When daybreak was reported Farragut was already at breakfast with the captain of the Hartford, Percival Drayton, and the fleet-surgeon, Dr. James C. Palmer, who had left his usual post at the hospital in Pensacola to superintend the care of those wounded in the approaching battle. It was then about half-past five; the couples were all formed, and the admiral, still sipping his tea, said quietly, ”Well, Drayton, we might as well get under way.” The signal was made and at once acknowledged by the vessels, which had all been awaiting it, and the seamen began to heave round on the cables. The taking their a.s.signed positions in the column by the different pairs consumed some time, during which the flag-s.h.i.+p crossed the bar, at ten minutes past six. At half-past six the column of wooden vessels was formed, and the monitors were standing down from Sand Island into their stations, in gaining which some little further delay was caused. At this time all the s.h.i.+ps hoisted the United States flag, not only at the peak where it commonly flies, but at every mast-head as well.
It had been the intention of the admiral to lead the column of wooden vessels with his own s.h.i.+p; but at the earnest request of many officers, who thought the fleet should not incur the greater risk consequent upon having its commander in so exposed a position, he reluctantly consented to waive his purpose, and the Brooklyn was appointed to this post of honor. To this selection contributed also the fact that the Brooklyn had more than the usual number of chase guns, the advantage of which has been explained, and also an arrangement for picking up torpedoes.
Bitterly afterward did Farragut regret his yielding on this occasion. ”I believe this to be an error,” he wrote in his official report of the battle; ”for, apart from the fact that exposure is one of the penalties of rank in the navy, it will _always_ be the aim of the enemy to destroy the flag-s.h.i.+p, and, as will appear in the sequel, such attempt was very persistently made.” ”The fact is,” he said in one of his letters home, ”had I been the obstinate man you sometimes think me, I would have led in the fleet and saved the Tec.u.mseh”--meaning, doubtless, that, by interposing between that important vessel and the buoy which marked the torpedo line, he would have prevented the error which caused her loss.
Some notes upon the action found afterward among his papers contain the same opinion, more fully and deliberately expressed. ”Allowing the Brooklyn to go ahead was a great error. It lost not only the Tec.u.mseh, but many valuable lives, by keeping us under the fire of the forts for thirty minutes; whereas, had I led, as I intended to do, I would have gone inside the buoys, and all would have followed me.” The Hartford took the second place in the column, having secured on her port or off side the side-wheel gunboat Metacomet, Lieutenant-Commander James E.
Jouett.
While the monitors were taking their stations, the Tec.u.mseh, which led their column, fired two shots at the fort. At five minutes before seven, the order of battle now being fully formed, the fleet went ahead. Ten minutes later Fort Morgan opened fire upon the Brooklyn, which at once replied with her bow guns, followed very soon by those of the fighting column of wooden s.h.i.+ps; a brisk cannonade ensuing between them, the monitors, and the fort. In order to see more clearly, and at the same time to have immediately by him the persons upon whom he most depended for governing the motions of the s.h.i.+p, Farragut had taken his position in the port main-rigging. Here he had near him Captain Jouett, standing on the wheel-house of the Metacomet, and also the pilot, who, as at Port Hudson, had been stationed aloft, on this occasion in the maintop, so as to see well over the smoke. As this increased and rose higher, Farragut went up step by step until he was close under the maintop.
Here, without losing touch with Jouett, he was very near the pilot, had the whole scene of battle spread out under his eyes, and at the same time, by bracing himself against the futtock shrouds, was able to use his spy-gla.s.s more freely. Captain Drayton, however, being alarmed lest he might be thrown to the deck, directed a seaman to carry a las.h.i.+ng aloft and secure him to the rigging, which the admiral, after a moment's remonstrance, permitted. By such a simple and natural train of causes was Farragut brought to and secured in a position which he, like any other commander-in-chief, had sought merely in order better to see the operations he had to direct; but popular fancy was caught by the circ.u.mstance, and to his amus.e.m.e.nt he found that an admiral lashed to the rigging was invested with a significance equivalent to that of colors nailed to the mast. ”The ill.u.s.trated papers are very amusing,” he wrote home. ”Leslie has me lashed up to the mast like a culprit, and says, 'It is the way officers will hereafter go into battle, etc.' You understand, I was only standing in the rigging with a rope, that dear boy Watson had brought me up,” (this was later in the action, when the admiral had s.h.i.+fted his position), ”saying that if I would stand there I had better secure myself against falling; and I thanked him for his consideration, and took a turn around and over the shrouds and around my body for fear of being wounded, as shots were flying rather thickly.”
Shortly after the monitors and the bow guns of the fleet began firing, the enemy's gunboats and the Tennessee moved out from behind Morgan and took their position enfilading the channel. Twenty minutes later, through the advance of the column, the broadsides of the leading s.h.i.+ps began to bear upon the fort; and as these heavy batteries vomited their iron rain the fire of the defense visibly slackened. Amid the scene of uproar and slaughter, in which the petty Confederate flotilla, thanks to its position of vantage, was playing a deadly part quite out of proportion to its actual strength, the Tec.u.mseh alone was silent. After the first two shots fired by her, which were rather the signal of warning than the opening of the battle, she had loaded her two guns with steel shot, backed by the heaviest charge of powder allowed, and, thus prepared, reserved her fire for the Tennessee alone. ”I believe,” wrote Farragut in a private letter, ”that the Tec.u.mseh would have gone up and grappled with and captured the Tennessee. Craven's heart was bent upon it.”
The two columns, of ironclads and of wooden vessels lashed together in pairs, were now approaching the line of torpedoes and the narrow entrance through which lay the path of safety; and the broadsides of the heavy sloops which led--the Brooklyn, the Hartford, the Richmond--supported by the less numerous but still powerful batteries following, and by the guns of the turreted ironclads, overbore the fire of the works. All promised fairly, provided the leaders of the two columns pushed rapidly and unhesitatingly in the direction a.s.signed them. But almost at the same moment doubt seized them both, and led to a double disaster. As Craven, leading the monitor column, and then about three hundred yards in advance of the Brooklyn, drew up to the buoy, to the eastward of which he had been directed to go, he saw it so nearly in line with the point beyond that he could not believe it possible to pa.s.s. ”It is impossible that the admiral means us to go inside that buoy,” he said to the pilot; ”I can not turn my s.h.i.+p.” Just then the Tennessee moved a little ahead, to the westward; and Craven, under the double impulse of his doubt and of his fear lest the hostile ironclad should escape him, changed his course to the left and pushed straight for her, the Tec.u.mseh heading to pa.s.s the buoy on the wrong side.
The movement thus indicated, if followed by the succeeding monitors, would throw that column across the path of the wooden s.h.i.+ps if the latter endeavored to obey their orders to pa.s.s east of the buoy. At the same moment there were seen from the Brooklyn, in the water ahead, certain objects which were taken to be buoys for torpedoes. The s.h.i.+p was at once stopped and backed, coming down upon the Hartford, her next astern, which also stopped, but did not reverse her engines. The Richmond followed the Hartford's movements, and the two s.h.i.+ps drifted up with the young flood tide, but with their heads still pointed in the right direction, toward the Brooklyn; the stern of the latter vessel, as she backed, coming up into the wind so that her bows turned toward the fort. Fortunately, the rear s.h.i.+ps were some little distance off; but Farragut, ignorant of the cause of the Brooklyn's action, saw his line of battle doubling up and threatened with an almost inextricable confusion, in the most difficult and exposed part of the pa.s.sage, under a cross-fire from the fort and the enemy's vessels. Immediately upon this frightful perplexity succeeded the great disaster of the day.
Craven, pursuing his course across the suspected line of danger, had reached within two hundred yards of the Tennessee, and the crews of both vessels were waiting with tense nerves for the expected collision, when a torpedo exploded under the Tec.u.mseh, then distant a little over five hundred yards from the Hartford. From his elevated post of observation Farragut saw her reel violently from side to side, lurch heavily over, and then go down head foremost, her screw revolving wildly in the air as she disappeared.
It was the supreme moment of his life, in which the scales of his fortunes wavered in the balance. All the long years of preparation, of faithful devotion to obscure duty awaiting the opportunity that might never come--all the success attending the two brief years in which his flag had flown--all the glories of the river fights--on the one side; and on the other, threatening to overbear and wreck all, a danger he could not measure, but whose dire reality had been testified by the catastrophe just befallen under his own eyes. Added to this was the complication in the order of battle ahead of him, produced by the double movements of the Brooklyn and Tec.u.mseh, which no longer allowed him to seize the one open path, follow his own first brave thought, and lead his fleet in person through the narrow way where, if at all, safety lay.
The Brooklyn, when she began to back, was on the starboard bow of the flag-s.h.i.+p, distant one or two hundred yards, and falling off to starboard lay directly in the way athwart the channel. The second monitor, Manhattan, of the same cla.s.s as the Tec.u.mseh, had pa.s.sed ahead; but the two light-draughts, the Winnebago and Chickasaw, were drawing up abreast of the three s.h.i.+ps thus ma.s.sed together. As they pa.s.sed, the admiration of the officers of the flag-s.h.i.+p was stirred to see Captain Stevens, of the Winnebago, pacing calmly from turret to turret of his unwieldy vessel, under the full fire of the fort; while of Perkins, in the Chickasaw, the youngest commander in the fleet, and then about twenty-seven years of age, an officer of high position in the flag-s.h.i.+p says, ”As he pa.s.sed the Hartford he was on top of the turret, waving his hat and dancing about with delight and excitement.”
But as they went thus gallantly by, the position of these vessels, combined with that of the Brooklyn relatively to the flag-s.h.i.+p, forbade the latter's turning in that direction unless at the risk of adding to a confusion already sufficiently perilous. A signal was made and repeated to the Brooklyn to go ahead; but that vessel gave no sign of moving, her commander being probably perplexed between his orders to pa.s.s east of the buoy and the difficulty of doing so, owing to the position into which his s.h.i.+p had now fallen and the situation of the monitors. But to remain thus motionless and undecided, under the fire of the fort with the other s.h.i.+ps coming up to swell the size of the target offered to its gunners and to increase the confusion, was out of the question. To advance or to recede seemed alike dangerous. Ahead lay the dreaded line of torpedoes; behind was the possibility of retreat, but beaten, baffled, and disastrous. All depended upon the prompt decision of the admiral. If he failed himself, or if fortune failed him now, his brilliant career of success ended in the gloom of a defeat the degree of which could not be foreseen. In later days, Farragut told that in the confusion of these moments, feeling that all his plans had been thwarted, he was at a loss whether to advance or retreat. In this extremity the devout spirit that ruled his life, and so constantly appears in his correspondence, impelled him to appeal to Heaven for guidance, and he offered up this prayer: ”O G.o.d, who created man and gave him reason, direct me what to do. Shall I go on?” ”And it seemed,”
said the admiral, ”as if in answer a voice commanded, 'Go on!'”
To such a prompting his gallant temper and clear intuitions in all matters relating to war were quick to respond. Personal danger could not deter him; and if it was necessary that some one s.h.i.+p should set the example and force a way through the torpedo line by the sacrifice of herself, he was prepared by all his habits of thought to accept that duty for the vessel bearing his flag. Describing the spirit in which he began an arduous enterprise, after once deciding that it should be undertaken, he said: ”I calculate thus: The chances are that I shall lose some of my vessels by torpedoes or the guns of the enemy, but with some of my fleet afloat I shall eventually be successful. I can not lose all. I will attack, regardless of consequences, and never turn back.” To a mind thus disciplined and prepared, the unforeseen dilemma presented before the barriers of Mobile Bay caused but a pa.s.sing perplexity. Like the Puritan soldier who trusted in G.o.d and kept his powder dry, Farragut met the overthrow of his carefully arranged plans and the sudden decision thrust upon him with the calm resolution of a man who has counted the cost and is strengthened by a profound dependence upon the will of the Almighty. He resolved to go forward.
The Hartford was now too near the Brooklyn to go clear by a simple movement of her helm. Backing hard, therefore, the wheels of the Metacomet, while turning her own screw ahead, her bows were twisted short round, as in a like strait they had been pointed fair under the batteries of Port Hudson; then, going ahead fast, the two s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sed close under the stern of the Brooklyn and dashed straight at the line of the buoys. As they thus went by the vessel which till then had led, a warning cry came from her that there were torpedoes ahead. ”d.a.m.n the torpedoes!” shouted the admiral, in the exaltation of his high purpose.
”Four bells![X] Captain Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed!” The Hartford and her consort crossed the line about five hundred yards from Mobile Point, well to the westward of the buoy and of the spot where the Tec.u.mseh had gone down. As they pa.s.sed between the buoys, the cases of the torpedoes were heard by many on board knocking against the copper of the bottom, and many of the primers snapped audibly, but no torpedo exploded. The Hartford went safely through, the gates of Mobile Bay were forced, and as Farragut's flag cleared the obstructions his last and hardest battle was virtually won. The Brooklyn got her head round, the Richmond supporting her by a sustained fire from her heavy broadside; and, after a delay which allowed the flag-s.h.i.+p to gain nearly a mile upon them, the other s.h.i.+ps in order followed the Hartford, ”believing,”
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