This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [79]
Still another asset the Federals brought to the scene: a youthfully jovial flag officer in his early sixties named David Glasgow Farragut.
Farragut had been in the navy for more than half a century — had served as a very juvenile powder monkey on the famous frigate Essex when she cruised the Pacific in the War of 1812, and was still spry enough for a midshipman. He had a habit of turning a handspring on every birthday and told an amazed junior that he would not think he was growing old until he found himself unable to do it. He had been living in Norfolk, Virginia, when the war started; had warned his secessionist fellow townsmen, “You fellows will catch the Devil before you get through with this business,” and then had closed his house and gone north to stick with the old flag. Now he was in command of the fleet that had been appointed to attack New Orleans, and he was getting heavy sloops and gunboats up into the river. It was hard work — the mouths of the river were silting up, and his heaviest warships had to be left out in the Gulf — but at last he got the most of his fleet anchored three miles below the forts. There he made ready, perfectly confident that he could rush the forts and take New Orleans, and eleven days after the battle of Shiloh he signaled Porter to cast his mortars loose and commence firing.4
By now the Confederate command was awake to the peril, but by now it was too late. The huge new ironclads were not quite finished; troops had been sent north to fight at Shiloh and defend the upper river — if New Orleans was in danger, men had felt, the danger would be coming downstream, not up from the Gulf — and General Lovell was complaining bitterly that his defenses were manned entirely by “the heterogeneous militia of the city, armed mostly with shotguns, against 9 and 11-inch Dahlgrens.”5 His river fleet suffered from divided command and from bitter rivalry among leaders. New Orleans was suddenly looking very naked and undefended — and then Porter began tossing his thousands of heavy shells into the forts, dismounting guns and smashing emplacements and letting floodwaters into the parade grounds, while Farragut stripped his warships for action, weaving anchor chains along the sides for armor, smearing paintwork with Mississippi mud to reduce visibility at night, waiting for the moment when the bombardment would soften the defenses enough to make a bold dash possible.
The moment came soon after midnight on April 24. Red lanterns were hauled to the masthead of Farragut’s flagship, the wooden steam sloop-of-war Hartford, and with a great creaking of windlasses and clanking of anchor chains the ponderous fleet got under way and started upstream.
It was an eerie business; pitch-dark night all around, broken by a wild red glare as the Confederate fire rafts were pushed out into the current. Fort Jackson lay on the western shore of the river, with Fort St. Philip lying opposite and a little farther north; Farragut’s ships had to run straight between the two, fire rafts floating down on them, Confederate gunboats lying off to deliver a raking fire. Porter’s mortars had hammered the forts mercilessly, but there were plenty of guns still in position, and men to fire them, and as the smoky light of the burning rafts lit the night the forts opened fire with everything they had. A cigar-shaped Confederate ram, almost invisible on the black water, had come down to help discomfit the Yankees; great clouds of smoke went billowing out from forts and ships, to lie on the water and create blinding pockets in the firelight; a tugboat was out in the night, trying to shove one or another of the burning rafts up against some Union warship. Farragut’s navigators had to feel their way along, the ships jarring and shaking with the shock of heavy broadsides, guns going off everywhere, great