Thieves Of Mercy

TEN

U.S. Flag-steamer Benton Off Fort Pillow, May 11, 1862 SIR: I have the honor to inform the Department that yesterday morning, a little after 7 o’clock, the rebel squadron, consisting of eight ironclad steamers, four of them, I believe, fitted as rams, came around the point at the bend above Fort Pillow and steamed gallantly up the river, fully prepared for a regular engagement.

CAPTAIN C.H.DAVIS, COMMANDING MISSISSIPPI FLOTILLA, TO GIDEON WELLES

Second Master Thomas B. Gregory, United States Navy, in command of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, was not entirely at ease. The early morning was lovely, the air cool and just a little damp, the sky clear blue. The birds had resumed, in a tentative way, their chirping in the trees, protesting the intrusion of the second master and his ilk. Perfect, the stretch of the Mississippi River at Plum Point Bend, idyllic, like a bit of Eden. It seemed, somehow, disloyal to Second Master Gregory that he should find such beauty and tranquillity in Tennessee. Coming from Amesbury, Massachusetts, he had expected to find the depravity of Southern rural poverty, squalid slave quarters stuck behind grand plantation houses, barefoot people sharing dilapidated cabins with their pigs in the Mississippi mud. He had not expected to find the South as lovely as it was, as peaceful. He had to remind himself of why, and how much, he hated the Rebs.

He was standing on a wooden crate marked FUSES and looking over the casemate wall of Mortar Boat Number Sixteen, tied by a half-dozen lines to trees on the shore. Number Sixteen, like all its brethren, was an odd-looking thing. Its hull was no more than a barge, twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. On top of the barge was built an iron casemate, the sides angled slightly inward to deflect shot, so that the whole affair looked mostly like a small ironclad without a roof or any means of self-propulsion.

The area within the walls of the casemate was mostly empty, save for the short, thick mortar mounted in the center of the deck. With its muzzle tilted straight up, it looked like a stew pot with fifteen-inch-thick sides. It sat on a low, heavy carriage. No wheels, there was no need of them. The gun was moved by boat, and when it fired, the water absorbed the recoil.

Aft of the mortar, a tent was set up, the kind of tent used by soldiers in the field, but here it was used to keep the powder for the mortar dry. Mounted on the sides of the casemate were the various implements for loading and servicing the gun. Arranged on racks along the edge of the deck sat the round shells, thirty-nine inches in circumference, that the mortar would lob a mile or so into the air, and that would, through the judicious application of science, experience, trial, and luck, land amid the Confederate troops holed up at Fort Pillow, out of sight on the other side of Plum Point.

The gun was the center of the mortar boat, literally and spiritually, and the men were there to service its needs. They did so that morning, slowly, lethargically, but Second Master Gregory did not mind. It was early morning, a morning that seemed to resist any effort to move quickly, and the men were moving fast enough that he could not call them beats.

The gun captain clipped the lanyard to the friction primer and stretched it out. Gregory automatically clapped a hand over the ear nearest the gun. The captain jerked the lanyard. The birds, the river, the sky, everything was obliterated by the gut-pounding roar of the mortar going off. The deck shuddered, the mortar boat was pushed down into the water, the air was filled with smoke and a noise that was like a physical presence, that seemed to go on and on long after the gun had fired.

Gregory’s eyes traced the upward flight of the shell, a black dot against the blue sky. Up, up, up it went, hanging at the zenith of its flight, and then down, to drop beyond Plum Point. He listened for the detonation, though he knew there was no chance of hearing it. The first and second shell of the day he could hear explode, sometimes the third. But that was number five for the morning, and by then his hearing was so numb that even the men’s voices a dozen yards away were muted and dull-sounding.

The gun crew set about swabbing the gun and preparing for the next shell, a slow, steady rhythm they would keep up all the daylight hours. The morning breeze carried the smoke away, and soon, one by one, the birds would set in again until the next blast silenced them. It seemed like a lazy, lethargic sort of warfare to Second Master Gregory, not at all the kind of dashing naval action he had envisioned when he volunteered.

He looked away from the mortar-there was no need for him to oversee the loading, the men knew the drill as well as he did- and looked off downstream, down the nearly mile-wide, brown, lazy water of the Mississippi, to where it was lost from sight around Plum Point. Mortar Boat Number Sixteen represented the southernmost point of Union control of the northern part of the Mississippi. Everything downriver from them was Confederate country, clear down to Vicksburg.

As he stared south, Gregory saw plumes of black smoke rise up over the wooded point like a line of campfires and his first thought was that the mortar had managed to set Fort Pillow on fire. But the smoke did not look like smoke from a fire, more like smoke from a smokestack, or a number of smokestacks. The dark columns were not stationary, but moving steadily toward them. One, two, three, four, Gregory counted. Hallo, now what in the world could this be?

Fifty yards upriver, also made fast to the trees on shore, lay the United States gunboat Cincinnati. She was one of the seven City Class gunboats, also known as “Pook Turtles”: “Pook” for their constructor, Samuel Pook, and “Turtle” for their undeniable resemblance to that creature. A thin trail of smoke rose from her twin funnels, the output of fires that were banked and nearly out. Most of her crew were on hands and knees, holystoning the wooden deck that formed the roof of her iron casement. A lazy morning, playing nursemaid to the mortar boat downstream as it lobbed its shells at the invisible Confederates beyond the point.

In his cabin below, in his shirtsleeves, sitting behind his desk, Commander Roger Stembel fretted over his paperwork and dreamed of commanding a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, going toe-to-toe with two French first-rates at Trafalgar. Hand-to-hand combat across the massive decks of line-of-battle ships, a beautiful thing, lost to history, killed, like so many things, by the steam engine and rifled ordnance.

He sighed, perfectly aware of how juvenile his daydreams were, on a par with dime novels read by boys who dreamed of the romance of war. Stembel was at least beyond that. There was nothing romantic in the ugly war in which he was now engaged. The romance of naval combat belonged to an earlier age.

Downriver the mortar boat fired, and Stembel felt the concussion of the blast and the recoil against the sides of his ship, like sitting inside a drum while someone beats it. Then quiet, and above his head the steady scrape, scrape, scrape of holystones on decks. It was the same sound that Nelson would have heard above his great cabin, the morning of Trafalgar. Some things had not changed, but it was mostly the mundane things. Paperwork. Holystones.

Then the sound of footsteps, and Stembel sat upright. He could hear the urgency in the steps as if they were speaking in some familiar, rhythmic code. He heard the steps on the ladder and he felt his heart race, heard the steps outside his cabin door stop, the fist banging the door, the voice of a midshipman calling, “Captain Stembel, sir!” and all he could think was, Oh, dear God, why do I not have steam up?

The River Defense Fleet came on in line ahead, just as they had planned the night before. The General Bragg, long and lean, her walking beam engine driving her with a bone in her teeth, the General Sumter next in line, a side-wheeler like Bragg but smaller. Next came the General Sterling Price, big and boxy, awkward-looking compared with the ships in the van. In the Price’s wake came the General Joseph Page and the General Earl Van Dorn, almost side by side, as if in a race, and behind them, more or less in line, the rest of the fleet, the flagship Little Rebel and the others.

To Samuel Bowater, standing beside the wheelhouse, it seemed clear that one of them, the Page or the Van Dorn, was getting out of line, trying to charge ahead of her assigned position. Since he was not privy to the battle instructions, Bowater did not know which of the ships was breaking formation. But he could guess.

“Yeeeeehaaa!” Mississippi Mike screamed with the sheer thrill of the thing. Plum Point seemed to fall back and the river opened up in front of them, and there, tied to the bank, with no steam up that Bowater could see, one of the despised Union gunboats; just below it, one of the floating mortars, which, with virtual impunity, inflicted such misery on troops huddled in the river forts. They were alone. The rest of the fleet was farther up the river, tied to the bank, pants around their ankles.

“Yeeeehaaaa! Son of a bitch!” Mike grabbed the engine room bell and rang it again, though to Bowater’s certain knowledge he had already rung up full speed five minutes before. Bowater could all but hear Guthrie cursing from three decks down.

The black smoke poured from the Page’s twin stacks, the walking beam worked itself up and down as if it was possessed. Bowater grinned. It was infectious.

In the past year Bowater had felt the touch of this wild recklessness more than once, blasting away at the Union fleet in Hampton Roads, defending Elizabeth City against the Yankee invaders until the ammunition was gone, then ramming and boarding. Incredible, but it was only a little more than two weeks before that he had driven the ironclad Yazoo River into the night battle below New Orleans.

There was a wild abandon to such a brawl, a release unlike any other, an extreme of emotion that could not be had by imitation, and Bowater could see how a man could become addicted.

Samuel Bowater and his men had no business being where they were. Their orders were to report to Shirley’s yard, to assist in getting the Tennessee ready to launch. But Samuel had found the sight of the half-built hull greatly discouraging. And when Sullivan had learned of the coming fight on the river, and asked Bowater to come along to augment the Page’s crew with his own, Bowater found he could not resist. The thought of fiddling around in a shipyard while a real fight was going on upriver was intolerable.

So here he was. And he felt guilty, exhilarated, wary, and ready to fight, all at once.

“You’re right, Captain, devil take me, you are right!” Sullivan shouted over the cumulative noise of the racing side-wheelers.

“About what?”

“Mississippi Mike’s mother! You know, Mississippi Mike in the book? She marries Mike’s uncle-damn me to hell, that’s gonna get ’em talkin! Just hope the boys in New York ’ll go for it!”

“They might not be so shocked in New York. They see a lot of that sort of thing.”

“Reckon you’re right! Oh, look, that old peckerwood ironclad’s getting under way! Ha ha ha! Too late for you, boys!”

The ironclad was drifting away from the bank. Thick black smoke was rolling from her twin funnels. They had caught the Yankee with no steam up, and now her engineers were throwing whatever they had on the fires-pitch pine, turpentine, oil-soaked rags-to get head up steam.

That was a mistake, Bowater thought. Should have stayed tied to the bank. A ship captain’s first instinct was always to get under way, to get sea room to fight. But in this case the iron ship was better off with one side pressed against the shore, protected, while they fought the enemy off with their broadside. Now they were drifting and helpless.

Well, not helpless, entirely. As the Bragg raced for the Yankee ship, water creaming around the riverboat’s submerged ram, the ironclad fired. From ten feet away she blasted the Rebel with her starboard broadside guns, four thirty-two-pounders, from what Bowater could see. The impact was lost from sight behind the deckhouse, but Bowater saw the shot come out the other side, blowing sections out of the superstructure, sending planks and splinters and heaps of cotton into the air in a cloud of flying debris.

But the gunfire did not slow the Bragg in the least. She slammed bow-first into the Yankee ironclad, which, fortunately for the Yankees, had slewed around at the last moment, leaving the Bragg with only a glancing blow.

“Did she hole the bastard, ya reckon?” Sullivan shouted the question. He was in a frenzy, dancing in place, leaning forward on the rail, like a dog straining at the leash. Bowater half expected Mike’s tongue to come lolling out of his mouth.

“I think so. See, they’re locked together.”

The Bragg and the ironclad seemed to embrace one another as they spun in the stream, and it was clear that the Bragg’s ram was stuck in the ironclad’s side. If the ironclad went down, she could take the Confederate ship with her.

The ironclad fired again, with the Bragg pressed against her so close that she could not even run her guns out. The heavy balls ripped through the riverboat’s fragile upper works, but the blast seemed to shake the Bragg loose. She backed away, turning sideways in the stream, seemingly out of control, as the Price charged past, putting every ounce of steam she had behind her wild run at the listing Yankee.

“Come left, come left!” Sullivan shouted into the wheelhouse, then charged in and grabbed the wheel himself, helped Baxter spin it over. The Bragg was drifting down on them, not under command, for what reason they could not see.

“Did her boiler blow?” Sullivan asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bowater said. There was no evidence of that. It might have been a rudder gone, or tiller ropes.

The General Page did a wild turn clear of the drifting riverboat, and as she did the Van Dorn came charging past, making for the ironclad.

“Oh, you son of a bitch!” Sullivan roared, hurling more abuse on the River Defense boat than Bowater had ever heard him shout at the enemy. “Son of a bitch is goin for our meat!”

But Bowater’s eyes were on the General Sterling Price, racing to take the place of the Bragg, steaming into the storm of iron the Yankee was firing at her. She slammed into the ironclad aft, twisting her around in the river. The Price shuddered her full length, as if she had struck a reef. The ironclad rolled away under the impact, firing her guns into the Price as the riverboat hit and kept on going. The sound of rending wood, the screech of structural members ripped clean away were audible even over the gunfire, the shouting, the huffing of engines, and the slap of paddle wheels.

The fight was building, the ironclads from upstream having dropped down, their iron-encased central paddle wheels turning enough now to give them steerage. They were firing bow guns and broadside guns at the Confederates, crushing the flimsy upper works of riverboats never designed for that kind of abuse. But still the River Defense Fleet came on.

The once blue sky was hazy, the belching clouds of smoke hanging like fog over the river, giving everything a soft and milky look, the air choking, the water and the shoreline gray-looking through the haze. The mortar boat was firing fast, lobbing shells above the river that came screaming down from overhead and burst at water level, throwing their whistling fragments of iron in every direction, and Bowater had to wonder if there wasn’t just as good a chance of hitting friend as foe.

It was a battle now, a genuine naval battle, a fleet action, played out on the twisting Mississippi River.

The Van Dorn charged past the General Page, past the Price and the ironclad, firing away at the mortar boat tied to the bank. Her eight-inch bow gun ripped a shell through the thin side of the mortar boat’s casemate, left a neat hole as it passed on, and the Van Dorn fired again.

Bowater pulled his eyes from the sight, concentrated on what his ship was doing. The ironclad, the one that had been tied to the shore, was still in front of them. But it was listing, dragging itself toward shallow water, looking for a place to die. The Price had left it astern and was charging upriver toward the rest of the Yankee fleet.

“Baxter!” Bowater shouted in to the helmsman. “Come right! Shave the stern of that ironclad and make for the big one coming down on the right side of the river!”

Baxter turned and looked at Bowater, the cheroot hanging from his lips, his expression somewhere between amused and aghast. Bowater felt his face flush red. He had entirely forgotten himself.

Then from the edge of the hurricane deck, the booming laugh of Mississippi Mike Sullivan. Bowater caught a movement from the corner of his eye, and before he could brace for it the arm came around in a great arc, the good-natured slap on the back like being hit with a club, and he staggered forward.

“You listen to him, Baxter!” Sullivan shouted. “Do just like he said. Remember, Captain Bowater here went to the Navy School !”

Baxter grinned around his cheroot, spun the wheel. Down below, on the Page’s bow, behind the bulwark of pine boards and compressed cotton that earned the ship the designation of cotton clad, the gunners opened up on the crippled Yankee. The Page’s rifle gun roared, smoke and flame shooting out ahead of the riverboat. Bowater felt the recoil in his feet, the entire boat shuddering under the weight of the gun slamming back on her breeching.

Then it was the ironclad’s turn. From the stern guns poking out of her sloped casement and the aftermost broadside guns that would bear, the Yankees lashed out at the passing riverboat. The crash of gun, the crush of wood, the shudder underfoot as the round shot and rifled shells hit, it was all familiar to Bowater, a part of the whole, along with the smoke and the noise and the controlled chaos.

They were up with the ironclad, not more than ten yards off her stern, and Samuel had his first real look at the despised Yankee gunboats, and what he saw was a nearly perfect weapon for the war they were fighting. Around one hundred and eighty feet long, about fifty on the beam, there was no effort made here to create a sleek craft, and there was no need for one.

Underfoot, the deck shuddered from the impact of iron that struck the General Page’s deckhouse and went right on through. All along the boiler deck below, the Page’s sharpshooters fired away with their rifles at the ironclad as they passed, the sound of the small arms puny under the roar of the big guns. Sparks like fireflies flashed on the Yankee’s iron casemate as minie balls ricocheted off, the gunmen searching out the Yankees through the gun ports.

Bowater watched in awe as the ironclad slipped past. The Yankee gunboats drew around six feet, three feet less than the Price and nine feet less than the General Bragg. A centerline paddle wheel encased in iron, heavy guns bristling from every quarter, she was one of the most frightening things Bowater had seen, representative of the kind of industrial superiority the Yankees could bring to bear.

And yet she was sinking. Brought down by the most ancient of naval weapons, the ram.

“Yeeehaaa!” Mississippi Mike shouted. “There, that one!” He pointed upriver to another of the ironclads dropping down, guns lashing out in every direction, black smoke rolling from her funnels. “That’s our meat! Right into her!”

The crippled ironclad fired again, her stern guns blowing holes clean through the deckhouse. Bowater doubted that the guns, at that short range, could be depressed enough to hit the engines or boilers, or elevated enough to hit the wheelhouse. As long as they missed the walking beam’s A-frame and the steering gear, there wasn’t much they could do.

Bowater pulled his eyes from the ironclad and looked upriver.

No time for reflection. No time for philosophizing. That was the beauty of a fight such as this. It focused the mind wonderfully.

In the Cincinnati’s conical pilothouse, Commander Stembel was trying to focus, but it was not working

very well. The smoke from the gun deck rolled up the companionway and was sucked out of the square viewing ports, choking and blinding. The noise was tremendous, the sounds of the great guns firing again and again, the shudder of the vessel from the recoil of her own guns and the impact of the enemy’s guns on her iron-plated sides.

He had given up ringing the engine room. There was not steam enough to maneuver, and ringing for more would not make it appear. He stared out the view port. The first ship to ram them, and hole them, was drifting downstream, out of the fight. He hoped his gunners had blown out her boilers, killed every one of them, but he doubted it.

Another one was coming at them now, a big, boxy Confederate ram, charging like a bull, seemingly oblivious to the furious gunfire the Cincinnati was hurling at her. Stembel shouted a warning, grabbed a stanchion, and braced for the impact. There was nothing more he could do.

The Rebel struck aft with a terrible wrenching sound, rolling the Cincinnati away to starboard. The helmsman made a grunting sound and nearly fell as the wheel spun out of control and then stopped, a dead thing. Stembel met the man’s eyes, wide with surprise. “Rudder must be gone, sir. Done for!”

Stembel turned away, craned his neck to see out the view port. The Rebel was steaming on, forging upstream into the teeth of the rest of the Union fleet. Leaving the Cincinnati for dead.

We are not dead, goddamn it! Stembel clenched his teeth. Footsteps on the iron ladder. Lt. William Hoel was there. His cap was gone, his face smudged black, his hair matted down with perspiration.

“Sir? We’re taking on water, sir, pretty bad. That last ram knocked a good hole aft!”

“Yes.” Stembel looked through the view port. “It seems to have done for our steering gear as well.” He turned back. “Lieutenant, take over here. Keep her headed for the shallow water. I have to see for myself.”

Hoel’s “Aye, aye, sir” came as Stembel was already dropping down the ladder, into the gloom and smoke of the gun deck. At each of the big guns, men stripped to the waist and gleaming with sweat hauled, swabbed, loaded, ran out, cursed. The officers behind them, in blue frock coats, with caps on heads, shouted orders and encouragement, and Stembel was proud of what he saw. The men were drilled, disciplined; they did not think, they just acted- loaded and fired as if nothing existed beyond their guns, as if they were not in a deadly fight on board a sinking ironclad.

Stembel made his way aft, called out encouragement, accepted the cheers of the men. He gagged on the smoke, relished the odd swirl of fresh air from a gun port. The casemate shuddered and rang from the crash of enemy shot against it, and in counterpoint the sharp pinging of the small-arms fire bouncing harmlessly away.

He reached the ladder to the engine room and climbed down, into the nearly unbearable heat and noise of the clanging pipes and hiss of steam and the working of the two big engines. He paused on the ladder, looked down into the half-light, the lanterns illuminating the space in parts here and there, and he tried to make sense of what he saw. There was something not right about the deck. The deck did not seem to be where it was supposed to be, did not seem to be the solid thing he recalled.

And then he realized that the deck was underwater, and as he did he saw Chief Engineer McFarland come hurrying over-wading over-the water up to his knees. He moved with the exaggerated swing of the arms and push of the legs that people do when their movement is impeded in that way.

“Captain, the pumps can’t keep up, sir!” the chief yelled and Stembel nodded. “Water’ll be up to the boilers soon, just when we’re getting head up steam! Son of a bitch!”

“Yes, Chief,” Stembel shouted over the noise, the unrelenting noise. “We’ll beach her!”

The chief nodded, turned back to his work. Stembel climbed back to the gun deck, and suddenly he could not stand to be there, down below, blind. He could not go back to the pilothouse with its little view ports. He had to see, had to be able to look around and understand the way things lay. Like Nelson on his quarterdeck.

He climbed another ladder onto the hurricane deck and stepped out into the morning, blinking and squinting. The smoke from the battle was swirling around the river, blinding and choking, but still it was considerably more bright and cool on the hurricane deck than it was below.

The Cincinnati was sinking, his ship was going down. He could feel the list in her as he crossed the hurricane deck to the pilothouse. Time to get her on the mud. But here was another Rebel, coming up fast, her bow gun firing, steaming up on the port quarter where only one of the Cincinnati ’s guns could reach her.

Fifty yards away, and someone from the Rebel boat shouted, “Haul down your flag and we will save you!”

The words were like a slap. Stembel did not know what to say. Haul down our flag? But then from somewhere aboard the Cincinnati, someone shouted back, “Our flag will go down when we do!”

Yes, yes, Stembel thought. He turned and hurried forward. He would direct the ship from outside the pilothouse, to the extent that he could direct a sinking ship that had no steering gear. Minie balls thudded into the wooden deck below his feet.

Then the Confederate ram struck, right on the port quarter. Stembel stumbled and fell forward as the Cincinnati ’s bow was driven under by the force of the impact. The Rebel went full astern, drawing its ram from the hole it had punched, and none of the ironclad’s guns would bear.

Stembel pulled himself to his feet and drew his side arm. He pulled the hammer back with his thumb, found a Rebel sharpshooter over the barrel, pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in his hand. He thumbed the trigger back again. He could feel his ship settling under him, wondered how much water they were in. He fired, thought of Nelson, so recklessly exposing himself. He wondered how different this moment was from Nelson’s. The smoke, the gunfire, the despair at the thought of defeat.

He fired again. He wondered if perhaps Nelson also felt that the romance of war belonged to an earlier age.

He felt a punch in his shoulder, a straight line of burning pain running right through his shoulder, right through his neck, right through his throat. He gasped, staggered, dropped the pistol, grabbed at his neck. It was hot and wet with blood. He could feel the ragged skin under his hand where the ball had exited, passed clean through him. The pistol clattered on the deck. Stembel fell to his knees. Everything seemed hazy, indistinct, but it might have been the smoke. He fell prone, laid out on the warm deck planks, and did not move.