Admiral Farragut

Farragut had undertaken this daring exploit with the expectation that, after passing the forts, he could obtain the co-operation of the army, and that the action of the two services, combined in mutual support, would suffice to force the way to New Orleans. The occupation of the land by the army, and of the water by the navy, interposing by the nature of their operations between the city and the forts, would effectually isolate the latter. In accordance with this plan he at once sent Captain Boggs, of the Varuna, through the Quarantine Bayou with messages to Commander Porter and General Butler. The latter was notified that the way was now clear to land his troops through the bayou, in accordance with the previous arrangements, and that gunboats would be left there to protect them against those of the enemy, of which three or four were seen to be still at the forts. Boggs passed successfully through the country and streams which a day before had been in quiet possession of the enemy, though it took him twenty-six hours to do so; but General Butler, who from a transport below had witnessed the success of the fleet, had waited for no further tidings. Hurrying back to his troops, he collected them at Sable Island, twelve miles in rear of Fort St. Philip, whence they were transported and landed at a point on the river five miles above the work, where the Kineo and Wissahickon awaited them.

During the remainder of the 24th the fleet stayed at anchor off the Quarantine station, to repose the crews after the excessive labor and excitement of the previous night. Early the next morning all got under way except the two gunboats left to support Butler's troops, and moved up stream; but slowly, owing to the indifferent speed of some and to want of knowledge of the river. At half-past ten they reached English Turn, five miles below the city; the point where the British forces had in 1815 been so disastrously repelled in their assault upon the earth-works held by Jackson's riflemen. The Confederates had fortified and armed the same lines on both sides of the Mississippi, as part of the interior system of defenses to New Orleans; the exterior line being constituted by Forts Jackson and St. Philip, together with several smaller works at different points, commanding the numerous subsidiary approaches through the Mississippi delta. The interior lines at English Turn, known as the Chalmette and McGehee batteries, were, however, intended only to check an approach of troops from down the river. Their general direction was perpendicular to the stream; and along its banks there ran only a short work on either side to protect the main entrenchments from an enfilading fire by light vessels, which might, in company with an invading army, have managed to turn the lower forts by passing through the bayous. These river batteries, mounting respectively nine and five guns, were powerless to resist the ships that had successfully passed the main defenses of the city. After a few shots, fired rather for the honor of the flag than in any hope of successful result, the guns were forsaken; and both lines of entrenchments, being turned and taken in the rear, were abandoned.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans a scene of fearful confusion was growing hourly more frenzied. Whatever the fears of the military commanders as to the result of the attack upon the forts, they had very properly concealed them from the inhabitants; and these, swayed by the boastful temper common to mobs, had been readily led to despise the efforts of the enemy and to trust implicitly in the power of their defenses. General Lovell, commanding the department, had gone down to the forts the evening before the attack, and was still there when the United States fleet was breaking its way through; he was, in fact, on board the little steamer, the pursuit of which lured the Varuna into the isolation where she met her fate. The news of the successful forcing of the exterior and principal defenses thus reached the city soon after it was effected; and at the same time Lovell, satisfied from the first that if the forts were passed the town was lost, prepared at once to evacuate it, removing all the Government property. This in itself was a service of great difficulty. New Orleans is almost surrounded by water or marsh; the only exit was to the northward by a narrow strip of dry land, not over three quarters of a mile wide, along the river bank, by which passed the railroad to Jackson, in the State of Mississippi. As has already been said, Lovell had by this road been quietly removing army rations for some time, but had abstained from trying to carry off any noticeable articles by which his apprehensions would be betrayed to the populace. The latter, roused from its slumber of security with such appalling suddenness, gave way to an outburst of panic and fury; which was the less controllable because so very large a proportion of the better and stronger element among the men had gone forth to swell the ranks of the Confederate army. As in a revolution in a South American city, the street doors were closed by the tradesmen upon the property in their stores; but without began a scene of mad destruction, which has since been forcibly portrayed by one, then but a lad of fourteen years, who witnessed the sight.

Far down the stream, and throughout their ascent, the ships were passing through the wreckage thus made. Cotton bales, cotton-laden ships and steamers on fire, and working implements of every kind such as are used in ship-yards, were continually encountered. On the piers of the levees, where were huge piles of hogsheads of sugar and molasses, a mob, composed of the scum of the city, men and women, broke and smashed without restraint. Toward noon of the 25th, as the fleet drew round the bend where the Crescent City first appears in sight, the confusion and destruction were at their height. "The levee of New Orleans," says Farragut in his report, "was one scene of desolation. Ships, steamers, cotton, coal, etc., were all in one common blaze, and our ingenuity was much taxed to avoid the floating conflagration. The destruction of property was awful." Upon this pandemonium, in which the fierce glare of burning property lit up the wild passions and gestures of an infuriated people, the windows of heaven were opened and a drenching rain poured down in torrents. The impression produced by the ships as they came in sight around the bend has been graphically described by the boy before mentioned, who has since become so well-known as an author—Mr. George W. Cable. "I see the ships now, as they come slowly round Slaughter House Point into full view, silent, grim, and terrible; black with men, heavy with deadly portent, the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against the frowning sky. Oh! for the Mississippi! for the Mississippi!" (an iron-clad vessel nearly completed, upon which great hopes had been based by the Confederates). "Just then she came down. But how? Drifting helplessly, a mass of flames.

"The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the Hartford, standing lanyard in hand beside a great pivot gun, so plain to view that you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech and blandly grinned. And now the rain came down in torrents."

That same morning, as though with the purpose of embarrassing the victor whom he could not oppose, the Mayor of New Orleans had ordered the State flag of Louisiana to be hoisted upon the City Hall. His secretary, who was charged with this office, waited to fulfill it until the cannonade at English Turn had ceased, and it was evident the fleet had passed the last flimsy barrier and would within an hour appear before the city. The flag was then run up; and the Mayor had the satisfaction of creating a position of very unnecessary embarrassment for all parties by his useless bravado.

To Captain Bailey, the second in command, who had so gallantly led both in the first assault and in the attack at Chalmette, was assigned the honor of being the first to land in the conquered city and to demand its surrender. It was no barren honor, but a service of very sensible personal danger to which he was thus called. General Lovell having to devote his attention solely to his military duties, the city which had so long been under martial law was escaping out of the hands of the civil authorities and fast lapsing into anarchy. Between one and two in the afternoon Bailey landed, accompanied by Perkins, the first lieutenant of the Cayuga; who, having shared his former perils, was permitted to accompany him in this one also. "We took just a boat and a boat's crew," writes Perkins, "with a flag of truce, and started off. When we reached the wharf there were no officials to be seen; no one received us, although the whole city was watching our movements, and the levee was crowded in spite of a heavy rainstorm. Among the crowd were many women and children, and the women were shaking rebel flags and being rude and noisy. They were all shouting and hooting as we stepped on shore.... As we advanced the mob followed us in a very excited state. They gave three cheers for Jeff Davis and Beauregard and three groans for Lincoln. Then they began to throw things at us, and shout 'Hang them!' 'Hang them!' We both thought we were in a bad fix, but there was nothing for us to do but just to go on." Mr. Cable has given his description of the same scene: "About one or two in the afternoon, I being in the store with but one door ajar, came a roar of shoutings and imprecations and crowding feet down Common Street. 'Hurrah for Jeff Davis!' 'Shoot them!' 'Kill them!' 'Hang them!' I locked the door of the store on the outside and ran to the front of the mob, bawling with the rest, 'Hurrah for Jeff Davis!' About every third man had a weapon out. Two officers of the United States navy were walking abreast, unguarded and alone, not looking to the right or left, never frowning, never flinching, while the mob screamed in their ears, shook cocked pistols in their faces, cursed, crowded, and gnashed upon them. So through those gates of death those two men walked to the City Hall to demand the town's surrender. It was one of the bravest deeds I ever saw done."

Farragut's demand, made through Bailey, was that the flag of Louisiana should be hauled down from the City Hall, and that of the United States hoisted over the buildings which were its property, namely, the Custom House, Post Office, and Mint. This the Mayor refused to do; and, as Farragut had no force with which to occupy the city, it became a somewhat difficult question to carry on an argument with the authorities of a town protected by the presence of so many women and children. The situation was for three days exceedingly critical, from the temper and character of the mob and from the obstinacy and powerlessness of the officials. It was doubtless as much as the life of any citizen of the place was worth to comply with the admiral's demands. On the other hand, while there could be no difficulty in hoisting the United States flag, there would be much in protecting it from insult with the means at the flag-officer's disposal; for to open fire upon a place where there were so many helpless creatures, innocent of any greater offense than behaving like a set of spoiled children, was a course that could not be contemplated unless in the last necessity, and it was undesirable to provoke acts which might lead to any such step. The United States officers who were necessarily sent to communicate with the authorities did so, in the opinion of the authorities themselves, at the peril of their lives from a mob which no one on shore could control. On the 28th of April, however, Forts Jackson and St. Philip surrendered to Commander Porter in consequence of a mutiny in their garrisons, which refused to fight any longer, saying further resistance was useless; and the following day Farragut sent ashore a body of two hundred and fifty marines with two howitzers manned by seamen from the Hartford, the whole under the command of the fleet-captain, Captain Henry H. Bell. The force was formally drawn up before the City Hall, the howitzers pointing up and down the street, which was thronged with people. Fearing still that some rash person in the crowd might dare to fire upon the men who were hauling down the flag, the Mayor took his stand before one of the howitzers; a sufficient intimation to the mob that were murder done he would be the first victim to fall in expiation. The United States flag was then hoisted over the Custom House, and left flying under the protection of a guard of marines.

Thus was timely and satisfactorily completed an act, by which Farragut signalized and sealed the fact that the conquest of New Orleans and of its defenses, from the original conception of the enterprise to its complete fulfillment by the customary tokens of submission and taking possession, was wholly the work of the United States Navy; of which he, by his magnificent successes, became the representative figure. It was a triumph won over formidable difficulties by a mobile force, skillfully directed and gallantly fought. By superior promptitude and a correct appreciation of the true strategic objective had been reduced to powerlessness obstacles not to be overcome by direct assault, except by a loss of time which would have allowed the enemy to complete preparations possibly fatal to the whole undertaking. Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which the fleet could not have reduced by direct attack, fell by the severance of their communications.

It is not to be questioned that the moral effect of the passage of the forts, succeeded, as it was, by the immediate fall of the great city of the Mississippi, was very great; but it was not upon the forts themselves, nor in the unexpected mutiny of the garrison, that that effect was chiefly manifested. Great as was the crime of the men, they showed by their act a correct appreciation of those results to the forts, from the passage of the fleet, which some have sought to ignore—results physical, undeniable, fatal. It was not moral effect, but indisputable reasoning which sapped the further resistance of men—brave till then—to whom were wanting the habit of discipline and the appreciation of the far-reaching effects upon the fortunes of a campaign produced by a prolonged, though hopeless, resistance. They saw that the fate of the forts was sealed, and beyond that they recognized no duties and no advantages. On the scene of his exploit Farragut reaped the material fruits of the celerity in which he believed; and which he had reluctantly for a space postponed, at the bidding of superior authority, in order to try the effect of slower methods. These being exhausted, he owed to the promptness of his decision and action that the Louisiana, on whose repairs men were working night and day, did not take the advantageous position indicated to her by the officers of the forts; and that the Mississippi, the ironclad upon which not only the designers, but naval officers, founded extravagant hopes, was neither completed nor towed away, but burned where she lay. The flaming mass, as it drifted hopelessly by the Hartford, was a striking symbol of resistance crushed—of ascendency established over the mighty river whose name it bore; but it was a symbol not of moral, but of physical victory.

It was elsewhere, far and wide, that were felt the moral effects which echoed the sudden, unexpected crash with which the lower Mississippi fell—through the length and breadth of the South and in the cabinets of foreign statesmen, who had believed too readily, as did their officers on the spot, that the barrier was not to be passed—that the Queen City of the Confederacy was impregnable to attack from the sea. Whatever may have been the actual purposes of that mysterious and undecided personage, Napoleon III, the effect of military events, whether on sea or shore, upon the question of interference by foreign powers is sufficiently evident from the private correspondence which, a few months after New Orleans, passed between Lords Palmerston and Russell, then the leading members of the British Cabinet.¹⁸ Fortunately for the cause of the United States, France and Great Britain were not of a mind to combine their action at the propitious moment; and the moral effect of the victory at New Orleans was like a cold plunge bath to the French emperor, at the time when he was hesitating whether to act alone. It produced upon him even more impression than upon the British Government; because his ambitions for French control and for the extension of the Latin races on the American continent were especially directed toward Louisiana, the former colony of France, and toward its neighbors, Texas and Mexico.

The sympathies, however, of the classes from whom were chiefly drawn the cabinets of the two great naval States were overwhelmingly with the South; and the expressions alike of the emperor and of his principal confidants at this time were designedly allowed to transpire, both to the Southern commissioners and to the British Government. On the very day that Porter's mortar schooners opened on Fort Jackson, Louis Napoleon unbosomed himself to a member of the British Parliament, who visited him as an avowed partisan of the Confederate cause. He said that while he desired to preserve a strict neutrality, he could not consent that his people should continue to suffer from the acts of the Federal Government. He thought the best course would be to make a friendly appeal to it, either alone or concurrently with England, to open the ports; but to accompany the appeal with a proper demonstration of force upon our coasts, and, should the appeal seem likely to be ineffectual, to back it by a declaration of his purpose not to respect the blockade. The taking of New Orleans, which he did not then anticipate, might render it inexpedient to act; that he would not decide at once, but would wait some days for further intelligence.¹⁹ Similar semi-official assurances came from different persons about the emperor; and the members of the Cabinet, with a single exception, showed little reserve in their favorable expressions toward the Confederacy.

A few weeks later Mr. Slidell had a conversation with M. Billault, the minister sans portefeuille, one of the most conservative and cautious men in the Cabinet, who represented the Government in the Chambers upon all subjects connected with foreign affairs. Slidell read a note which he had received from Sir Charles Wood, a leading Southern sympathizer in England, denying that the British Government was unwilling to act in American affairs—a denial to which some color is given by the correspondence of Palmerston and Russell before mentioned. In answer, M. Billault declared that the French Cabinet, with the possible exception of M. Thouvénel, had been unanimously in favor of the South, and added that if New Orleans had not fallen its recognition would not have been much longer delayed; but, even after that disaster, if decided successes were obtained in Virginia and Tennessee, or the enemy were held at bay for a month or two, the same result would follow. After an interview with M. Thouvénel, about the same time, Slidell reported that, though that minister did not directly say so, his manner gave fair reason to infer that if New Orleans had not been taken, and no very serious reverses were suffered in Virginia and Tennessee, recognition would very soon have been declared.²⁰

In its moral effect, therefore, the fall of the river forts and of New Orleans, though not absolutely and finally decisive of the question of foreign intervention, corresponded to one of those telling blows, by which a general threatened by two foes meets and strikes down one before the other comes up. Such a blow may be said to decide a campaign; not because no chance is left the enemy to redeem his misfortune, but because without the first success the weaker party would have been overwhelmed by the junction of his two opponents. The heart-rending disasters to our armies during the following summer does but emphasize the immense value to the Union cause of the moral effect produced by Farragut's victory. Those disasters, as it was, prompted the leaders of the British ministry to exchange confidences in which they agreed on the expediency of mediation. They did not carry all their colleagues with them; but who can estimate the effect, when the scales were thus balancing, if the navy had been driven out of the Mississippi as the army was from Virginia?