There were stirring events in and around the Gulf of Mexico during the year 1861—some of them stirring the naval sailors in one way and some in another. The trouble began there very early in the year—on January 12th, in fact, when Colonel Lomax and Major W. H. Chase, with some Florida and Alabama troops, surrounded the navy yard at Pensacola and compelled Commodore James Armstrong to surrender it to the Confederates. It was very well known that an attack impended a long time before it actually happened, but no effort was made by any one in the yard to preserve any of the government property for government use. Armstrong was not, indeed, disloyal, but he was very properly suspended from the navy for five years for his failure at Pensacola. The executive officer under him, Commander Ebenezer Farrand, and Lieut. Francis B. Renshaw had already decided to join the Confederate forces, and it should not be forgotten that they were among the men willing to serve the Confederates while still wearing the uniform of the government. Renshaw himself, while in national uniform, had the old flag hauled down and the Confederate flag sent up in its place. Farrand did still worse. He refused to allow the powder to be removed from the magazine when a loyal officer, Commander Henry Walke, proposed removing it. He kept it in the magazine unguarded in order that the Confederates might get it. When he could do no more for the Confederates by remaining in the pay of the government, he sent in his resignation.

Meantime the soldiers in charge of the three forts that guarded the harbor had been concentrated at Fort Pickens on the 10th by Lieut. Adam J. Slemmer, U. S. A. At that time Commander Henry Walke was in Pensacola, in command of the transport Supply. She was en route to Vera Cruz with stores for the government ships lying there. On January 9th, Walke was ordered by Commodore Armstrong to assist Slemmer in concentrating the troops and army supplies at Fort Pickens. Walke at once started to obey this order; but when about to engage in doing so, another order came under which he was to merely give some food to the men already in Fort Pickens and then return to the navy yard, leaving the army forces scattered among the three forts about the harbor. Walke, in his “Reminiscences,” says Farrand “hood-winked” the commodore into issuing that order. Walke showed it to Slemmer, and Slemmer, in despair, said if that order was obeyed, no further effort to hold the forts should be made. But Walke at once determined to disobey the order in so far as he must in order to concentrate the army forces at Fort Pickens.

Walke’s act was one of the most remarkable of that day. It was almost without precedent that a naval officer should be independent-minded enough to do what was right in the interests of the government without first receiving an unmistakable order to do it. But that a man should save a fort for the government by actually disobeying the order of a superior—that was then unheard of, though an officer of a higher grade saved three fine ships from the Merrimac in like fashion some time later. By concentrating the army forces at Pickens, contrary to Armstrong’s orders, Walke saved the fort. Then, when the yard had been surrendered to the Confederates, he took the paroled officers and men, with their families, from the yard and carried them to New York. This, although done in the interest of the government, and as an act of humanity, was also contrary to his original order which contemplated a passage to Vera Cruz. So Walke was court-martialled, found guilty, and sentenced to be censured! This is perhaps the only case on record where the legal censure of an American naval officer was as a badge of honor.

Meantime the Buchanan administration was in some way moved, after the navy yard was captured, to send the Brooklyn down there with eighty-six artillery men and 115 marines. But before these could be landed the administration repented, and the Brooklyn was ordered to lie off the harbor. And there she lay when Mr. Lincoln came into office. On March 12th an order was sent to Capt. J. Vodges, commanding the artillery company on the Brooklyn, to land. This order was received by Vodges on March 31st, and on April 1st he called on Capt. H. A. Adams, of the Brooklyn, for boats, etc., for the landing. Instead of giving them, Adams declined, and wrote a letter to the Navy Department, saying that the order to Vodges “may have been given without a full knowledge of the condition of affairs here.” He was sure that reinforcing the fort “would be viewed as a hostile act, and would be resisted to the utmost.” The department was warned that “it would be a serious thing to bring on, by precipitation, a collision.” In short, this officer, who was a Union man, had been cajoled into a state of mind where he ignored the fact that the Confederates were working day and night to place their defences in the best possible order and were adding to their forces daily. He had, in truth, been instructed by Buchanan’s Secretary of the Navy “not to land the company unless said fort shall be attacked or preparations be made for its attack.” The italics are not in the original document, of course, but they are inserted to make plain the way in which Adams ignored the Confederate work of preparing to capture Fort Pickens by increasing the effectiveness of Fort McRae and Fort Barrancas. To land a man in Fort Pickens would be “viewed as a hostile act,” and would “bring on, by precipitation, a collision.” To improve the Confederate Fort McRae was not to be considered! Certainly the contempt which the Southern people of that day felt for men of the North was not without some justification.

These facts seem worth giving because they show the difference between the state of mind on the Union side and that on the Confederate. The Confederates knew what they wanted and were reaching after it ceaselessly: The Union forces at this time were not much short of mental demoralization, anywhere, and the quick-witted Confederates took advantage of it.

This letter was carried to Washington by Lieut. Washington Gwathmey, who afterwards joined the Confederates. It took him five days to cover the distance, and the reinforcement of Fort Pickens was delayed by that much.

The department could hardly tell whom to trust, but Lieut. John L. Worden was chosen to carry an order to Adams for the landing of the troops; and no mistake was made in his case, for he was the Worden who afterward commanded the Monitor. He reached Pensacola on April 11th, and on telling Gen. Braxton Bragg, of the Confederate forces, that he had an oral order for the captain of the Brooklyn, was allowed to go off to her on the 12th. He had committed the order to memory and destroyed the document. That night, April 12, 1861, Fort Pickens was reinforced. Bragg had planned an attack on Fort Pickens for the night of the 13th—an attack that must have succeeded, because the Union force had been only eighty-three men, all told; but when the artillerymen and the marines were landed the face of matters was changed and the attack postponed indefinitely. The flag has never ceased to float over Fort Pickens. The Confederates were greatly exasperated, and Worden was arrested in Montgomery and held a prisoner for seven months.

In September the general dulness of affairs about Pensacola was relieved by a brilliant dash which a force from the blockader Colorado made into the harbor. The Confederates had been strengthening their works along shore gradually, and had at last started fitting out a schooner called the Judah at the navy yard for use as a privateer. This schooner was guarded by a ten-inch columbiad (a columbiad being a gun half-way between a carronade and a long gun) and a field-piece, both being placed to sweep her deck. There was also a large force of men camped in the yard—some accounts say 1,000—while the schooner had a full crew on board, with a long pivot gun and two broadside guns in place. It is a remarkable fact that the yard where she was fitted and the schooner herself were within easy range and plain sight of Fort Pickens, and the fact that she intended to sail out after American merchant ships was obvious. But not a shot was fired from the fort to disturb her owners or the workmen.

So Commodore William Marvine, commanding the Gulf squadron, sent 100 men in boats under Lieut. J. H. Russell, on the night of September 13, 1861, to destroy her. In spite of the vigilance of the Confederates, they arrived near the schooner undiscovered, and were entirely successful in firing her, in spite of a determined opposition.

Meantime a wave of trouble had rolled over Galveston, Texas—a wave that stirred the foreign consuls living there into an astonishing state of anger, and through their efforts it was used with some effect to misrepresent and prejudice the case of the government throughout Europe. The affair occurred on August 3, 1861. Galveston was first blockaded by the South Carolina, Capt. James Alden, in the latter part of June. Captain Alden “never had any intention of troubling” the people of the city further than interrupting their ocean trade, and this determination was stated to them in an official communication. Nevertheless, the Confederates erected a number of batteries in a place where any attack on them by the blockading squadron would necessarily result in throwing projectiles into the city. A glance at the map will show that Galveston is built on the northerly point of an island that forms the harbor. The city faces the bay, and there is a wide stretch of sand behind the city—that is, between the city and the sea. It was between the city and the sea that the batteries were placed.

On the morning of August 3d a tender of the blockading ship was returning north from a cruise to the south end of Galveston Island. She passed within range of the batteries, and they opened fire on her. She returned the fire and reported it to Captain Alden, who “waited all day for some explanation or disavowal on the part of the authorities.” He could scarcely realize that people “could be so insane as to initiate hostilities when their town was so completely at our mercy.” At 4 o’clock no disavowal having come, he took the South Carolina within a mile of the works. The Confederates opened fire on her and Alden replied with fifteen shots, after which, finding that he could not prevent the shot going into the city as well as the works, he withdrew.

The next day Mr. Arthur Lynn, the British consul, gathered together the Hanoverian and Oldenburg consul, the Swiss consul, the Mexican consul; the deputy consul for Bremen, Saxony, Belgium, and Holland; the consul pro tem. for Electoral Hesse, and the consul for Nassau, besides representatives of some other countries, and wrote and signed the following:

“The undersigned, consuls and vice-consuls at Galveston, consider it their duty to enter their solemn protest against your bombardment of this city on the evening of the 3d instant, without having given any notice, so that the women and children might have been removed, and also against your firing a shell in the midst of a large crowd of unarmed citizens, amongst whom were many women and children, causing thereby the death of an unoffending Portuguese and wounding boys and peaceably disposed persons, as acts of inhumanity, unrecognized in modern warfare, and meriting the condemnation of Christian and civilized nations.”

A copy of the protest was sent to Alden, another to the reporters, of course, and then each official sent one under seal to his government in such fashion that it would appear in the papers there also.

It was a small affair in itself. The Confederate authorities made no protest about it. So far as the attack on the blockading squadron and the return of the fire were of interest from a historical point of view, the matter was not worth mention. But because this was the first case in which a British consul, acting in his official capacity, undertook the work of misrepresenting the deeds of the government officers, it may not be omitted. For the official attitude of the European governments has a very important part in the naval history of the Civil War.

The next event of interest that occurred in the Gulf region might very well be termed the battle of Bull Run afloat, because a squadron of American naval ships became involved in a panic and fled precipitately before a force so utterly insignificant that the shame of it was felt by every man who wore the uniform.

The mouths of the Mississippi were at first blockaded by the Brooklyn, Captain Poor, and the Powhatan, Capt. D. D. Porter, but when the Powhatan was away, one day, the Brooklyn went chasing a strange sail, and the watchful Semmes carried the Sumter, the first of the noted Confederate cruisers, out to sea. As the Confederates had before this carried fifteen ships, two barks, and three schooners from the Gulf to New Orleans as prizes, the government was moved to place a sufficient force in the river to close it absolutely.

This force included the flagship Richmond, a screw steamer of 2,000 tons, carrying twenty large guns, Capt. John Pope; the sailing sloop-of-war Vincennes, ten guns, Capt. Robert Handy; the sailing sloop-of-war Preble, eleven guns, Capt. H. French, and the little screw steamer Water Witch, of four guns (howitzers). In all, there were forty-five guns in the squadron, of which twenty were nine-inch Dahlgrens.

As the reader will remember, a chart of the mouth of the Mississippi is marvellously like a picture of the roots of a crooked tree. The waters divide into three main channels, with a host of offshoots. To effectually close all the entrances to the river it was necessary only to anchor the squadron in the river itself above the point where it was split up, and this was done. There were no Confederate forts near the anchorage, and the officers and men, so far as is known, possessed their souls in peace until the month of October.

Meantime the Confederates had been working against very great difficulties to prepare a squadron fit to clear the river. They had incidentally striven to get a steamer called the McRae in commission for a cruiser, but had failed in making her machinery work well, and she was relegated to the work of harbor defence.

The work of shipbuilding was done under the eyes of a commission that included Capt. L. Rousseau, Commander E. Farrand, and Lieut. Robert J. Chapman, of the Confederate navy, all of whom had been reared in the government navy. Capt. George N. Hollins, formerly of the American navy, was assigned to command the fleet when built.

By the first of October, four river steamers had been converted into the semblance of gunboats by adding timbers so that they could carry eight or nine guns. They were called the Polk, the Ivy, the Livingston, and the Maurepas. A merchant steamer with a bark rig became the McRae. To this was added a most remarkable vessel—the first of her class, the ironclad ram Manassas.

The Manassas was originally the double-screw tug Enoch Train, of Boston. She was 128 feet long, twenty-six wide, and when loaded she drew thirteen feet of water. She was, in short, a tug of the first class in size. Capt. John A. Stevenson, of New Orleans, undertook the contract of making a ram of this vessel for a company of capitalists who determined to use her, privateer-fashion, against the government blockaders immediately after the Confederate Congress enacted a law on May 21, 1861, binding the Confederate treasury to pay to the destroyers twenty per cent. of the value of any government ships that might be destroyed by volunteers.

The tug was cut down almost to the water, first of all, and then her bow was filled in solid with timbers for a space of twenty feet abaft the stem. A deck in the shape of half of a long, sharp egg was built over her, twelve-inch oak timbers being used for the purpose. Of course, all the woodwork was thoroughly bolted. Then the bow and the rounded deck were everywhere plated with flat bar-iron one and a half inches thick. There was one gun-port forward, where a sixty-eight-pounder was mounted, but for some fault of construction they were not able to use it at first.

For motive power she had one compound engine and two screws, the high-pressure cylinder working one shaft and the low-pressure the other. There was but one hatch, a small one, at that, and through this everything—coal, supplies, men—must pass. A ship like that, no matter what her power, could never be popular in any navy in time of peace, but she was built for an emergency, and there was no trouble in finding a crew. Lieut. Alexander F. Warley, formerly in the government service, took command of her for her owners.

From time to time the government officers on the blockaders down at the head of the passes heard about the work in the New Orleans ship-yards. They learned some of the details of the ram that was building, as well as of the gunboat, but they not only did not make any preparations for meeting or guarding against an attack: they did not even consider what might be done if the Confederates should come.

At 3.30 o’clock on the morning of October 13, 1861, the government fleet lay quietly at anchor, save that the schooner Joseph H. Toone was alongside the Richmond, and the Richmond’s watch on deck were taking coal out of her. The Preble was in advance—that is, was further up the river than any. Below her lay the flagship Richmond, and below her the Vincennes, while the Water Witch lay between the Richmond and the east shore, with a little prize schooner, the Frolic, near by. It was a moonlight night, with some clouds flying, the worst kind of a night, as all seamen know, for seeing anything clearly, but there had been no especial care in posting or warning lookouts. It was with the squadron literally “the careless end of night.” Within ten minutes after the bell struck the hour of 3.30, a lookout on the Preble saw a dark object driving down the river, but without any smoke or steam or other appearance of motive power. At nearly the same moment the lookout on the prize schooner saw it, and as the alarm was raised on the Preble the schooner lookout bawled to Richmond: “A rebel steamer is coming down the river.”

In a minute the whole squadron awoke, and with rattle and shout the crews ran to quarters, but before they could get a gun cast loose, the dark object afloat, the ram Manassas, driving with the aid of the current at about nine miles an hour, glanced across the coal schooner’s bow, crashed through a cutter, and struck the Richmond “abreast of the port forechannels, tearing the schooner from her fasts.” “Three planks on the ship’s side were stove in, about two feet below the water-line, making a hole about five inches in circumference.” These quotations are from Pope’s official report, but the report did not use italics.

Immediately “a red light was shown as a signal of danger,” and then the whole squadron except the Water Witch slipped their cables and fled. “I ordered the Preble and Vincennes to proceed down the Southwest Pass,” says Pope, and “they did.” Meantime, “after the first blow given to this ship by the ram,” it “remained under our port quarter, apparently endeavoring to fix herself in a position to give us a second blow, but the slipping of our chain and the ship ranging ahead under steam frustrated the object.” That was Pope’s idea. The fact was that the ram’s machinery had not been properly stayed to sustain a shock, and the blow had entirely crippled the low-pressure engine, and left her with barely enough power to stem the current. She lay there making repairs, with her crew in a state of alarm lest she be disabled altogether. However, they got the high-pressure engine working independently, and then, to the great relief of her crew, she went creeping and coughing up the river, hugging the shoal water lest the Richmond or Water Witch pursue her after she had passed them. Both the Richmond and the Preble fired broadsides at her; the Richmond fired three, “with what effect it was impossible to discover owing to the darkness,” but “some officers are of opinion they heard shot strike the ram.” As the ram disappeared up the river, the Richmond’s “helm was put up, and the ship rapidly fell off, presenting her broadside up and down the river.” In that position they let her drift with the current to “cover the retreat” of the squadron.

A squadron of four great ships, armed with forty-five first-class guns, had been driven into a shameful panic by one crippled tug carrying a gun that couldn’t be fired.

At about this time a rocket was thrown up from the ram, and at once three lights were seen—“three large fire rafts, stretching across the river, were rapidly nearing us, while several large steamers and a bark-rigged propeller were seen astern of them.” In the minds of the flying officers the peril was frightful. Nevertheless, as the Richmond “drifted near the Passes ineffectual attempts were made to get her head upstream.” The attempts did not include the dropping of an anchor, because that would have stopped her in her flight for the sea. Pope was willing to head upstream provided he could keep travelling away from the fearsome ram and fire-rafts “stretching across the river.” When the “ineffectual attempts” were stopped “I found myself a mile and a half down the Southwest Pass.” “I then put the helm up, and continued down the river, hoping to be able to get her head around off Pilot Town. In doing this she drifted some distance below, grounding broadside on.”

Meantime the Vincennes and the Preble had been “drifting” also, and without making any attempts to get their bows pointed upstream. They were under sail, and the wind was in the north. The Preble outran the Richmond, even. Captain French says that as he passed the Richmond Captain Pope told him to “proceed down the pass.” He obeyed, and after bumping on the bar two or three times, crossed over into water unfretted by rams and fire-rafts. So he “anchored near the coal ships Kuhn and Nightingale to protect them if necessary.”

Meantime the Vincennes, like the Richmond, had grounded in the pass, and a little later along came the Water Witch. She had found, as she steamed down the pass, “that the fire rafts were drifting with the wind steadily over toward the western shore,” so the “Water Witch was now steered to the northward and eastward (upstream) and easily cleared them.” The river at this “time in the vicinity of the passes was entirely clear of the enemy.” Nevertheless, a “general signal, ‘cross the bar,’” was displayed on the Richmond.

The effect of this signal on Captain Handy of the Vincennes is well-nigh past belief. He read it “abandon the ship,” he says, but he was not quite sure about the reading, and so sent a boat to the Water Witch to ask how Captain Winslow read it. Captain Winslow replied “that it was impossible” an order to abandon the ship had been given. Captain Handy was of his original opinion still, and at once ordered the boats away. A slow match was set to the magazine, and then, as the crew started over the side of the ship, Captain Handy wrapped the ship’s flag about him in broad folds and climbed down the ladder to his gig.

Fortunately, a quarter-gunner (whose name has not been preserved, alas!) slipped down below, and cutting off the burning end of the slow match, tossed it overboard. Two of the boats went to the Water Witch, but the others, including the gig, to the Richmond. Here Handy’s theatrical air left him. The utter disgust of his crew became manifest after it was told that the slow match had been cut, and Handy was sent back crestfallen to his ship. But, though crestfallen, he was as nerveless as ever.

Of course daylight had come long before the time the two ships had grounded, and the Confederates, who had followed their fire-rafts with the bark-rigged McRae and the four converted gunboats and a river tug, found, to their astonishment, the whole river clear. They had hoped, at first, to make some disturbance—possibly to sink the Richmond with the ram—and, at any rate, get the McRae to sea. But the McRae’s engines had failed, and so had the ram’s, while the fire-rafts had drifted ashore harmless. And yet there were the government ships out at sea, or aground inside and sorry they couldn’t get away. Very naturally the Confederates came down where their long-range Whitworth rifles would take effect, and opened fire on the grounded ships. The only damage done was when a shell lodged in the locker where Captain Pope kept his linen. Fortunately, the shell did not explode, and the linen was not wholly destroyed. The Richmond replied with a nine-inch gun on her forecastle, and the Confederates, having boats so frail that one shell could have sunk any one of them, were obliged to keep at long range. The Water Witch was sent in great haste to bring the South Carolina from Barrataria, and after she came to the rescue the transport McClellan also arrived with rifles for the Richmond. “My mind was very much relieved, knowing that the armament of four rifled guns on board the McClellan, together with the long gun of the South Carolina, would keep the enemy at bay,” says Pope in his report. Imagine the state of mind of this officer! “Four rifled guns on board the McClellan, together with the long gun of the South Carolina, would keep the enemy at bay!”

But before the relief ships arrived, Captain Handy, of the Vincennes, had once more become so nervous he couldn’t stand the strain without doing something. The Confederates were firing at the Richmond; but they might fire at him and he might get hurt. So he wrote a note to the already overwrought Pope. Because no other case of the kind is known to the annals of the American navy, because the exhibit forms an interesting study in mental phenomena, and because the shame of it, when spread in history, must serve to make a repetition of the story impossible, the note shall be given in full:

He was not allowed to abandon his ship again, but it is a fact, incredible as it may seem, that even after the South Carolina had come—the South Carolina that, single-handed, was of a force to have destroyed, with one watch in their hammocks, the whole Confederate squadron—even after she had come, Handy, in his haste to get clear, threw overboard all of his guns, and it was done by permission of Pope. So the Vincennes got away in tow of the steamers.

On the 14th they were all at anchor outside, but even here, according to Captain Pope’s report, Captain French, of the Preble, did not feel safe. He was ordered to blockade Pass à Loutre, but, after starting, came back and asked permission to go to Ship Island for wood for the galley fire. Pope told him there was wood a-plenty at the Northeast Pass, but he “earnestly requested to go to Ship Island,” and Pope “reluctantly consented.” At Ship Island the Preble would be safe, but there was no telling what might happen if she were caught all alone by a Confederate gunboat off Pass à Loutre.

And then, in his report, written on the 17th, Pope makes this statement: “My retreat down the pass, although painful to me, was to save the ships by preventing them being sunk and falling into the hands of the enemy; and it was evident to me they had us in their power.”

This one other quotation will complete the story: “It having been rumored there was a panic on board this ship at the time she was engaged with the enemy, I state it to be false; both officers and men exhibited the utmost coolness and determination to do their duty.”

This chapter shall conclude with the brief story of brave men at Galveston.

It was in November. The frigate Santee was blockading Galveston, and a Confederate steamer, the General Rusk, was inside, together with a privateer schooner called the Royal Yacht. The Confederates were fitting the Rusk for a cruiser, but she could not be shelled without throwing shot into the city. So Lieut. James E. Jouett volunteered to go in and cut her out.

One has to look at the chart of the harbor to appreciate the danger of the service, for the boats would have to pull around the north end of the island, on which the city stands, and then along the water front of the city itself, to reach the ship. Nevertheless, Jouett, with forty men in two boats, started at 11.40 o’clock on the night of November 7, 1861. Everything went well while passing the sentinels on the point, and those on the Royal Yacht that lay near the point, also. But in keeping well to the off side of the channel when approaching the city the leading boat grounded, and the second crashed into her. The noise of the collision and the efforts to get afloat betrayed them, and fire was opened from the land and the Rusk. There was nothing for it but to retreat. The forty men could do nothing against the forces of the Confederates, now that they were alarmed. But Jouett was not to be balked altogether, and turning about, he dashed at the Royal Yacht. The first boat to reach her had a twelve-pound howitzer in its bow, with Gunner William W. Carter in charge. Aiming at her water-line Carter fired just as the boat’s bow was within jumping distance of the schooner, and as the shell crashed through the schooner’s side he leaped to her deck. Unfortunately, the recoil of the howitzer drove the boat away from the schooner, leaving Carter, with cutlass in hand, alone to face the enemy. But Carter was the man for the place, and at them he went, slash and parry and thrust, while Jouett slewed the boat up once more to the schooner’s rail and leaped on board. But the moment he landed there a Confederate thrust a bayonet through his arm and into his lung. It was a dangerous wound, but Jouett cut the man down and hewed his way to Carter’s side.

Even then the fight was not won. Twice the Confederates rallied and drove the Federals back, but Jouett led on again, gained the victory at last, and destroyed the schooner. The Federals lost three killed and six wounded. They carried off thirteen prisoners, but the Confederate loss in killed and wounded is not recorded. And it is worth adding that Jouett is to be heard from further on.