Glory In The Name

lookout called, “Boat approaching! Steaming from the south! Looks like one of our dispatch boats, sir!”

Wainwright turned and looked south, but Farragut did not. With his eyes, he had no hope of seeing the boat until it was almost up with them. Nor was he that curious. He had seen enough dispatch boats in the past month to satisfy him for life.

With creaks and groans and billowing black smoke and the occasional jerk, the Hartford drove over the mud. Forty minutes after the Calhoun took up the strain, the ship gave a little lurch as she broke free from the last desperate grasp of the river bottom and surged ahead into deep water. Forward, Farragut could see the Calhoun sheer off as the towline was dropped.

“All stop!” Wainwright said. “Stand by the anchor!” he shouted down the length of the deck.

The Hartford was just settling on her hook when the dispatch boat pulled up alongside.

“Admiral, sir!” the lieutenant in command called up.

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Farragut called down. What news it was that could not wait for the lieutenant to come aboard he did not know, but he could guess.

“Admiral, sir, Commander Porter’s compliments, sir, and he reports his arrival at Ship Island with his mortar fleet.”

“Excellent!” Farragut replied. He looked upriver. Brooklyn was lying to her anchor, head to stream, three hundred yards away. “Lieutenant, steam up to Brooklyn and tell Captain Craven, with my compliments, to give his people their dinner and then I will signal to get underway. We’ll anchor at Head of the Passes.”

The lieutenant repeated the orders, saluted, spoke to someone in his wheelhouse that Farragut could not see, and the little steamer chugged on its way.

The Head of the Passes… He would plant the Union flag on Louisiana soil, and pray God it would remain.

Let the festivities commence…

On May 10, the newspapers in Yazoo City ran banner headlines, and those headlines proclaimed the death of the wooden walls.

Theodore Wilson arrived on his black horse, reined to a stop in a shower of small stones and dirt, leaped off, paper in hand.

“Captain Bowater! Captain Bowater, sir, did you see this?”

He handed Bowater the paper, shifted from foot to foot as Samuel read the article. CSS Virginia had sailed two days before. She rammed and sank the USS Cumberland, burned the Congress, which had run aground. Sent the Yankees into a panic, gave new hope to an emotionally battered Confederacy. It had been a hell of a maiden voyage.

Bowater read the account with the kind of interest only a professional navy man could have. He read the breathless claims of the obsolescence of all wooden vessels and smiled. The Virginia was too unseaworthy for the open ocean and of too deep a draft to get up any of the big rivers that emptied into the Chesapeake.

CSS Virginia was not the future. She was only a glimpse of it.

But one would not know that looking at the gleam in Theodore Wilson’s eyes. “What do you say to that, Captain?”

“Very impressive.”

Hieronymus Taylor ambled over. He had returned from Vicksburg, bleary-eyed, with a tear in his frock coat he did not recall getting. Had behaved a bit cagy at first, as if he was feeling Bowater out, but that did not last long.

“What’s so impressive, Cap’n?” Taylor asked, took the paper, read the first few paragraphs. “Well, damn. Looks like your ironclad done some good, Cap’n.”

“‘Your’ ironclad?” Wilson asked.

“Hell, yes,” Taylor said, looking up at Wilson. “Whole damn thing was Cap’n Bowater’s idea. What the hell you think we was doin in Norfolk so long? Cap’n here suggested it to Mallory, drew up the first plans. Weren’t no one thought it would work, but then, sure enough, once them others smell success, hell, they all come around like dogs to a…somethin. Anyhow, that’s why they sent Cap’n Bowater out here, figured he could do the same to the ol Yazoo River.”

Taylor folded the paper, handed it to Bowater. “Congratulations, Cap’n,” he said, then ambled off.

Bowater turned to Wilson. There was a light in the man’s eyes he had not seen before. “None of that is true,” Bowater said, but he could see Wilson would not be disabused of his fantasy.

Nor was Wilson a man to fantasize alone. The enthusiasm which he had displayed in organizing the wagons seemed to double up on itself. More wagons arrived, and carpenters, blacksmiths, machinists, laborers, black and white, from plantations all over Yazoo County. They set up their makeshift foundries on the shore, in a semicircle around the now cut-down riverboat. Wilson brought his screw steamer Abigail Wilson down and tied her astern of the Yazoo River. Her hoisting engine was made to drive several steam drills on shore, and her cabins became housing for the officers of the Yazoo River.

Newspaper reports two days later of the battle between Virginia and the Yankee ironclad Monitor did nothing to cool the ardor. Southern papers shaded the story in such a way as to make it sound like a Confederate victory, but any experienced navy man, reading the bare facts of the thing, could see it was a stalemate.

It was also the first time in the history of naval warfare that two ironclad vessels had battled it out. The future seemed to be arriving at an alarming rate.

Not only did the plantations send help, but the men of the town began to arrive as well, to lend their brawn and in some cases valuable skills to the work. Women came at noon with lunch in baskets. Children gathered up scraps of wood, swept sawdust into piles, scurried for tools.

The train of wagons arrived every third or fourth day, and eager hands pulled the plates of iron off the beds, stacked them carefully on the landing, and soon the once sorry pile was transformed into an impressive mountain of iron. And still it came.

Ironclad fever swept like the plague through Yazoo City. The people had read of the future in the papers, and they wanted a part of it. Suddenly the vision of a madman had become the most effective means of keeping the Yankee at bay. They were like Noah’s neighbors, who began to see the wisdom of the thing as the water crept up around their ankles.

All of the Yazoo River’s superstructure was gone, and in its place rose a casement, a low deckhouse with angled sides, and a small wheelhouse, no more than a four-foot-high hump on the roof through which captain, pilot, and helmsmen could see. The side wheels, delicate spider structures, were encased in oak two feet thick, a housing with flat, angled sides intended to protect that most vulnerable part of the ship from enemy fire. Paddle wheels were ideal for riverboats. They were not ideal for men-of-war.

The sides and bulkheads of the casement, foot-thick live oak, were pierced for ten guns-two pointing forward, two aft, and three on each broadside. It was optimistic, since they still had only the guns that Robley Paine had purchased for the ship, but Bowater was firing off a continual barrage of letters and he hoped one of them might have an effect.

Hieronymus Taylor tore the engines apart. He checked the cylinder bores and replaced piston rings with new ones he had had turned in Vicksburg. He checked the piston-rod packing and rebuilt and realigned the engines so that they would not tear themselves apart driving the big side wheels.

With block and tackle and crowbars they lifted the paddle wheels off their bearings and checked for wear and pitting and cracks. They checked crosshead bearings and mapped them with lead wire to see where they were worn and scraped them to get the proper clearance. They ground the steam valves and scraped the flues in the boilers.

Two days before they began bolting iron to the casement, the crew arrived. Fifty men, twenty-three of whom