Glory In The Name

S. R. Mallory

Secretary of the Navy

Lt. Samuel Bowater, CSN

Yazoo City

New Orleans, Bowater thought, as he read the terse order. So it is to be New Orleans … There did not seem to be much consensus as to the direction from which the chief threat was coming, north or south. Hollins and his fleet had been sent upriver from New Orleans to meet the Yankee ironclad gunboats, leaving New Orleans with little in the way of naval protection.

Now there seemed to be a shift in policy.

The Yazoo River was, happily, a far way toward completion when the telegraph arrived. Hieronymus Taylor had pronounced her engines as fit as they were going to get, and nothing short of running them under load could reveal any further defects. The gunboat iron was bolted in place, so it looked as if the entire upper works were covered with wide wood strips painted dull brown.

The guns and ordnance had arrived the day before Mallory’s telegram; three nine-inch shell guns and six thirty- two-pounder smoothbores. That left one gunport empty, and into that went the ten-inch Dahlgren of Yazoo River ’s original battery. The old six-pounder was left on the landing.

They hoisted the guns aboard, set them at their gunports. They finished off the last of the armor, the iron over the wheelboxes. The officers’ quarters were no more than a few roughed-in bulkheads, the crew quarters were hammocks slung along the gundeck, but that was how it had to be. Bowater did not think they would have to endure that inconvenience for long.

On the 18th of April they were underway. The crew numbered 153. They included the original Cape Fears, the new men sent by Mallory, and eager volunteers from Yazoo City, men who were not sailors, but who were perfectly capable of hauling on a gun tackle or carrying shot and charge to guns, or heaving coal in the engine room. Artemus Polkey signed on as ship’s carpenter. A pilot by the name of William Risley, thickset, heavily bearded, volunteered to take the ship south and to fight her if need be.

There was no place for Robley Paine. He was not a pilot, not even a sailor. His leg had become so lame that he could hardly walk at times, and his health was not good.

Still, when he came to Bowater, and admitted to all of those imperfections, and begged to nonetheless accompany his ship on what they all understood might be her death run, Samuel was much moved. The Yazoo River was there because of Robley Paine, and him alone. Bowater knew he could not leave Robley Paine on the beach, force him to watch his ship sail off without him.

They got off the dock under their own power and steamed down the Yazoo River. Four miles above the Mississippi, one of the main bearings on the starboard engine cracked in two, bringing the engine to a halt with a sound that made every man aboard wince. They limped into Vicksburg on the port engine. Taylor and Burgess worked for seven hours straight, right through the night, and the next morning they were underway again.

From Vicksburg it was 250 miles to the Crescent City. They steamed all day, all night, with both engines wide open, slowing only when they had to shut down the port engine to replace a throttle valve that jammed half- open.

Samuel Bowater looked out the narrow window at the forward end of the wheelhouse. It was not really a window, more a long rectangular opening in the armor plating, but then it was not really a wheelhouse either, but more of a low pilothouse, a four-foot-high ironclad box with sloped sides sitting on top of the casement.

Six feet below the roof of the box, mounted on the gundeck, was a platform that formed the deck of this truncated pilothouse. On that deck was mounted the wheel and the two telegraphs to the engine room. Crowded onto the platform, the lower part of their bodies in the casement, upper half, from the chest up, in the short wheelhouse, stood Bowater, the pilot, Risley, the helmsman, and a midshipman to relay the captain’s orders. It was the oddest lash-up Bowater had ever witnessed, but he reckoned it would do.

He moved his head from the port beam forward beyond the bow, to the starboard beam. The great, wide, brown Mississippi lay before them, over a mile wide, and crowded with shipping as they closed with New Orleans. Amazing. He had very little experience with the river, had never been stationed in New Orleans. It took no imagination to see why this was where the lifeblood of the Confederacy flowed.

“How far to New Orleans, Pilot?”

“Fifteen miles. Be another sixty-five downriver to Fort St. Philip, which I reckon is where the fleet is. Ain’t no use in stationing at New Orleans. Time the damn Yankees get to New Orleans, it’s too damn late to stop them.”

Bowater nodded. “Carry on,” he said, and stepped the four steps down from their little pilothouse deck to the gundeck below. Four steps, and the heat rose by twenty degrees, from what Bowater guessed to be around eighty to around one hundred. Sweating and shirtless men struggled with the big guns, loading and running out in dumb show, those experienced in naval gunnery instructing those who had never been this close to a cannon.

Bowater walked slowly through the odd twilight of the ironclad. In sixteen years at sea he had been aboard nearly every type of vessel afloat, but he had never seen anything like this. They were in a box, a rectangular box with sloping sides. The rough-cut wood of the deck and the sides and bulkheads was painted white to aid in visibility, and it helped, some, but still the interior of the ironclad was gloomy. A row of lanterns hung along the centerline, despite the brilliant sun that poured in through the open gunports.

Samuel paused and looked along the port battery. If he looked at just that, just that small section of the gundeck, he could almost believe he was on the lower deck of a regular man-of-war. The broadside guns, the gunports, the sloping side like a ship’s tumble home, were all familiar things.

It was when he looked forward, when he saw the forward bulkhead, the forward-facing guns at right angles to the broadside, that the illusion was blown away. He was not on a proper man-of-war. He was on an ironclad ram, a newfound engine of war.

Ironclads at sea, armies moving by rail, communicating by telegraph. Rifled cannons, rifled rifles, exploding ordnance. They were all Americans, Yankees and Confederates, like it or not, all children of that particular genius that was America. How apt then that in less than a year of war, Americans fighting Americans, they should alter forever the very nature of warfare.

Bowater stepped forward and was joined by Lieutenant Asa Quillin, stripped down to shirtsleeves, his shirt clinging to him, as wet with perspiration as if he had been doused by a bucket. Together they strode the length of the deck, gave words of encouragement to the men working the guns. Bowater stopped to talk with Ruffin Tanner, whom he had promoted to acting master’s mate and given command of the starboard battery.

“How do you fancy being an officer, Mr. Tanner?”

Tanner gave a long, slow chew of the tobacco in his mouth. “Ain’t bad.”

“How are your gun crews coming along?”

“Good. Gettin better. I don’t reckon aiming will be much of an issue.”

“No, I think not. Rate of fire, that’s what we’re looking for.”

“That’s what you’ll get, Cap’n.”

The Yazoo River steamed through New Orleans, the crowded docks, the sailing vessels, the paddle wheelers, the screw tugs, crisscrossing the river like water bugs. There was wild activity there, frenetic activity.

Hieronymus Taylor came up the steps from the engine room to the gundeck, joined Bowater in the pilothouse. He stoked up his cigar and the smoke was sucked through the narrow windows and out into the evening.

“Home sweet home,” Taylor said, smiling as he peered out at the waterfront. “This won’t be the first time I got my ass whopped ’round these parts, far from.”

“Is it always this busy, Chief?” Bowater asked.

“Yeah…” Taylor said, and then, a moment later, “Well, maybe not…somethin strange about it, seems like one damned big hurry. What you think, Mr. Pilot?”

“I think everyone with a boat’s tryin to get the hell out of town afore the Yankees gets here.”

Taylor nodded. “And fools we be, we goin’ in the opposite direction.”

They passed the city, made the 180-degree bend in the river ten miles south, and then another ninety-degree turn before the Mississippi straightened out for its final run to the Gulf.