Page images
PDF
EPUB

594

CAPTURE OF GALVESTON.

blow in return, which sent her to the bottom of the harbor. The only cannon on the Bayou City (a 68-pounder) had bursted, and it seemed as if she, too, must speedily succumb, when, by a quick maneuver, she ran her bow into the wheel of the Harriet Lane, held her fast, careened her so that she could not bring her guns to bear, and allowed Sibley's soldiers to swarm over on her deck. A brief resistance by an inferior force followed, and when Captain Wainwright was killed, and Lieutenant-commanding Lee was mortally wounded, she was captured. The Owasco, coming up to her assistance, was kept at bay by the sharp-shooters and the fear of the Lane's captured cannon, now in the custody of the Confederates, and she withdrew to a safe distance.

Meanwhile the Westfield, Renshaw's flag-ship, which went out to meet the Confederate steamers in Bolivar Channel, had run hard aground at high tide, and signaled for assistance, when the Clifton hastened to her relief. During the absence of the latter the attack began. Observing this, Renshaw ordered her back. She opened upon Fort Point batteries, and drove the Confederates up the beach; and at about sunrise a flag of truce came to her commander, Lieutenant Law, with a demand for a surrender of the fleet. Law refused, and time was given to communicate with Renshaw, on the Westfield. He, too, rejected the proposal, ordered the National vessels and troops to escape, and, as he could not get his own ship off, he resolved to blow it up, and with officers and crew escape to two of the transports. The firing of the magazine was done prematurely by a drunkard, it was said, and Commodore Renshaw, Lieutenant Zimmerman, Engineer Green, and about a dozen of the crew, perished by the explosion. Nearly as many officers and men were killed in the Commodore's gig, lying by the side of the Westfield.

In the mean time, while flags of truce were flying on the vessels and on shore, the Massachusetts troops, with artillery (which they had not) bearing upon them, were treacherously summoned to surrender by General R. Scurry. Resistance would have been vain, and they complied, satisfied that when the Harriet Lane should be relieved from contact with the Bayou City, she would be too much for the Clifton or the Owasco. Law fled in the latter, with the remains of the fleet, to New Orleans. Before the Harriet Lane could be repaired and got out to sea as a Confederate pirate ship, Farragut sent a competent force to re-establish the blockade of Galveston, and Magruder's victory was made almost a barren one. Just as that blockade was re-established under Commodore Bell, with the Brooklyn as

1 Richardson Scurry was a native of Tennessee, and was a representative in Congress from Texas from 1851 to 1853.

2 Report of Captains James S. Palmer and Melanethon Smith, and Lieutenant-commanding L. A. Kimberly (who composed a court of inquiry appointed by Admiral Farragut), dated January 12, 1863. The Confederates acknowledged the bad faith on their part. An eye-witness, in a communication in the Houston Telegraph, January 6, 1863, declared that the flag of truce was only a trick of the Confederates to gain time. It was evident, he said, that if the Ilarriet Lane could not be speedily disengaged, the Nationals would escape, and the flag was to make a delay. "A truce of three hours was agreed upon," said the writer. "During the truce with the vessels, the unconditional surrender of the Massachusetts troops was demanded and complied with." Magruder, in his official report, declared that Renshaw had agreed to surrender." If that be true, the conviction is forced upon us that Renshaw was a traitor, and was acting in concert with Magruder.

3 Magruder's spoils were only the Harriet Lane and her property, the 260 officers and men of the Fortysecond Massachusetts, and about 120 on board of the Harriet Lane, made prisoners. His loss he reported at 26 killed and 117 wounded, and the steamer Neptune.

!

INTERIOR OF LOUISIANA.

595

a Jan. 11, 1863.

his flag-ship, a strange sail appeared in the distance, when the gun-boat Hatteras was sent to make her acquaintance. At first the stranger moved off slowly, and Lieutenant Blake, commanding the Hatteras, gave chase and prepared for action. He overtook the tardy and even waiting fugitive, and on hailing her was informed that she was the British ship Vixen. Blake was about to send a boat aboard, when the craft was revealed as the pirate ship Alabama. A hot fight ensued, which ended in the destruction of the Hatteras. Her heaviest guns were 32's, while the Alabama had a 150-pounder on a pivot, and a 68-pounder. There was a vast disparity in their power. The Hatteras was sunk, but her crew were saved, and the Alabama went into the friendly British port of Kingston, Jamaica, for repairs.

Ten days later two National gun-boats (Morning Light and Velocity), blockading the Sabine Pass, were attacked by two Confederate steamers (John Bell and Uncle Ben) that came down the Sabine. They were driven out to sea and captured, with guns, prisoners, and a large amount of stores. And so when Grant was beginning the siege of Vicksburg in earnest, not a rood of Texas soil was "repossessed" by the National authority.

General Banks began offensive operations immediately after his arrival. On the 18th of December he sent General Cuvier Grover with ten thousand men to reoccupy Baton Rouge, preparatory to an advance on Port Hudson. This was done without serious opposition, but the advance was delayed, because the Confederate force there was stronger than any Banks could then march against it. So he turned his attention to the rich sugar and cotton districts of Louisiana west of the Mississippi, for the purpose of weakening or destroying the Confederate forces there, for they might give him much trouble on his flank and rear, and seriously menace New Orleans. Already National troops had overrun a portion of the territory between the railway from New Orleans to Brashear City, and the Gulf, but between that road and the Red River National troops had not penetrated, excepting in La Fourche district,' nd the inhabitants were mostly disloyal.

[ocr errors]

The country in which Banks proposed to operate is a remarkable one. It is composed of large and fertile plantations, extensive forests, sluggish lagoons and bayous, passable and impassable swamps, made dark with umbrageous cypress-trees draped with Spanish moss and festooned with. interlacing vines, the earth matted and miry, and the waters abounding in alligators. At that season the country was almost half submerged by the superabundant waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries, and the great bayous. A single railway (New Orleans, Opelousas, and Great Western railroad) then penetrated that region, extending from New Orleans to Brashear City, on the Atchafalaya, a distance of eighty miles, at which point the waters of the great Bayou Tèche meet those of the Atchafalaya, and others that flow through the region between there and the Red River. The latter gather in Chestimachee or Grand Lake, and find a common outlet into the Gulf of Mexico at Atchafalaya Bay.

These waters formed a curious mixture of lake, bayou, canal, and river at Brashear City, and presented many difficulties for an invading army.

See page 530.

596

EXPEDITION TO THE TECHE REGION.

These difficulties were enhanced by obstructions placed in the streams, and fortifications at important points. Near Pattersonville, on the Tèche, was an earthwork called Fort Bisland, with revetments; and well up the Atchafalaya, at Butte à la Rose, was another. There was also an armed steamer called the J. A. Cotton on the Bayou Tèche.

a 1863.

A LOUISIANA SWAMP.

These were intended to dispute the passage of those important waters by National gun-boats from Red River, or forces by land from New Orleans.

Some operations by National forces had already been made on the Tèche, and it was now determined to drive the Confederates from their strong places in the vicinity of Brashear City, and to destroy their gun-boat. An expedition for that purpose was led by General Weitzel, accompa nied by a squadron of gunboats under Commodore McKean Buchanan, who fought his traitor brother so bravely on the Congress in Hampton Roads.' Weitzel left Thibodeaux on the 11th

[graphic]

of January, and placing his infantry on the gun-boats at Brashear City, he sent his cavalry and artillery by land. All moved slowly up the Bayou to Pattersonville, and at Carney's Bridge, just above, they encountered the first formidable obstacles. These consisted of the piles of the demolished bridge, against which lay a sunken old steamboat laden with brick, and in the bayou below, some torpedoes. Just above these was the very formidable steamer Cotton, ready for battle, and batteries (one of them Fort Bisland) were planted on each side of the bayou, and defended by the Twenty-eighth Louisiana and artillerymen, in all about eleven hundred men. Buchanan proceeded to attack the obstructions and the batteries on the morning of the 15th," when, after a short engagement, the stern ს Jan. of the Kinsman was lifted fearfully but not fatally by a torpedo that exploded under it. Just then a negro, who had escaped from the Cotton for the purpose, warned them of another torpedo just ahead. Without

1 See note 2, page 362. His squadron consisted of the gun-boats Calhoun (flag-ship), Kinsman, Estrella, and Diana.

2 Weitzel's force consisted of the Eighth Vermont, Seventy-fifth and One Hundred and Sixtieth New York, Twelfth Connecticut, Twenty-first Indiana. Sixth Michigan, a company of the First Louisiana Union cavalry. and artillery under Lieutenants Bradley, Carruth, and Briggs. A portion of the Seventy-fifth New York, under Captain Fitch, volunteered as sharp-shooters

A correspondent of the New York Times, with the expedition, wrote that one of the torpedoes fished up bore the name of a New York firm who manufactured them, and remarked, concerning the good offices of the

BATTLE ON THE BAYOU TECHE.

597

heeding the warning, Buchanan passed on in the Calhoun, standing on her bow with his spy-glass in his hand, in the face of a fierce cannonade from the vessel and the batteries, and prominently exposed to the sharp-shooters of the foe. Presently his acting chief-engineer, standing near him, was wounded in the thigh by a spent ball from a rifle-pit, and the Commodore said, "Ah, you've got it!" The next moment a ball passed through the brave and beloved commander's head, and he fell dead.

The Eighth Vermont was now in the rear of the Confederates, and clearing the rifle-pits, while the batteries of the Fourth Maine and Sixth Massachusetts (Lieutenants Bradley's and Carruth's), supported by Fitch's sharp-shooters and the One Hundred and Sixtieth New York, had flanked the defenses on the south side of the bayou, and were raking the Cotton with a terrible enfilading fire. She and the Confederate land forces soon retreated, the latter leaving forty of their number prisoners. Two or three times the Cotton returned to the fight and retired, and finally, at two o'clock on the morning of the 16th, she was seen unmanned, and floating sullenly on the bayou, as the nucleus of a vast sheet of flame. Having destroyed this monster and driven the Confederates from their works, the expedition went no farther, but returned to Brashear City, with a loss of seven killed and twenty-seven wounded. The latter were

[graphic]

placed upon a raft, and towed down the bayou by a steamer in the night of the 15th, after the battle had ceased. The air was very mild and soft, and in the pale light of the moon, which rose at a little past midnight, the sufferers had a more comfortable voyage than they could have had in the close air of a steamer.

RAFT WITH WOUNDED SOLDIERS ON BAYOU TÈCHE.

Ineffectual efforts to open the Bayou Plaquemine so as to capture Butte à la Rose followed the expedition to the Tèche, when the enterprise was abandoned, and General Banks concentrated his forces (about twelve thousand strong) at Baton Rouge, for operations in conjunction with Admiral Farragut, then on the Lower Mississippi. The latter, on hearing of the loss of the Queen of the West and the De Soto,' determined to run by the batteries at Port Hudson with his fleet, and recover the control of the river from that point to Vicksburg. For this purpose he gathered his fleet at Prophet's Island, a few miles below Port Hudson, on the 13th of March, and on the same day Banks sent forward about twelve thousand men to divert the attention of the foe while the fleet should perform the proposed perilous act. These drove in the pickets before them, while the

a 1863.

fugitive slave who warned them of their danger." While people in the North are enriching themselves by manufacturing these hellish things to blow our brave men to atoms, a poor black animal' down here has friendship and humanity enough to coine and warn them off from their terrible doom."

1 See page 589.

2 His fleet consisted of the frigates Hartford (flag-ship). Mississippi. Richardson, and Monongahela; the gun-boats Essex, Albatross, Kineo, Genesee, and Sachem, and six mortar-boats.

598

ATTEMPT TO PASS PORT HUDSON BATTERIES.

gun-boats Essex and Sabine, and the mortars, bombarded the Confederate works.

Farragut intended to pass the batteries the next morning, under cover of a vigorous attack by the troops; but the night being very dark, he concluded not to wait until morning, but as silently as possible glide up the river in the gloom. The fleet moved accordingly, at a little past nine in the evening. The Hartford, Captain Palmer, led, with the Admiral on board, and the gun-boat Albatross lashed to her side. The other frigates followed, each with a gun-boat attached. But the darkness was not sufficiently profound for the quick vision of the vigilant sentinels, who had equally quick ears. The approach of the fleet was discovered, and soon rockets and other signal-lights were streaming in the air. Then an immense bonfire suddenly blazed out in front of one of the heaviest batteries, lighting up the scene for several miles around, and fully revealing the approaching fleet. Still the vessels moved on, when a heavy gun from the west side of the river fired on

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

the Hartford. She replied, and instantly the batteries along the Port Hudson bluff opened their thunders. The mortar-boats responded; and as the frigates and their gun-boats severally came within range of the batteries, as they moved slowly up the stream, gave them broadside after broadside, while the howitzers on their tops and their heavy pivot bow-guns were very active. Several of the batteries were so high and well managed that the fleet could not harm them, and the advantage was all on the side of the Confederates.

1 This is a view of the river-front of the high bluff whereon the little village of Port Hudson stood, and the Confederate works were constructed. No place on the river, excepting Vicksburg, was better adapted for defense than this. The landing-place (known as Hickey's) at the foot of the bluff is a very difficult one, owing to the strong eddies, and the high banks extend a long distance from this point.

2 The guns in the works on the edge of the high bluff would be pointed downward at the proper angle to strike the vessels, run out, discharged, and instantly run back out of the way of harm from shot from below

« PreviousContinue »