Sea Wolf of the Confederacy: The Daring Civil War Raids of Naval Lt. Charles W. Read - Hardcover

David S. Shaw

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786267003 ISBN 13: 9780786267002

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2004

Synopsis

In June 1863, just days before the epic clash at Gettysburg ended the last rebel land invasion of the North, a small party of the Confederate Navy mounted a devastating series of raids on the New England coast, culminating in a battle off Portland, Maine. Combining a flair for powerful storytelling with extensive research, Shaw brings to light this fascinating yet little known episode of the war.

About this title

About the Author:

David Shaw is the author of America's Victory and a number of other books. He lives in Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Daring Combat

Western Mississippi, Yazoo River,
2:00 A.M., July 15, 1862

Acrid smoke drifted lazily skyward from the tall funnel of the Confederate ironclad Arkansas, signifying the activity below in the fire room as the coal heavers set to their work with a will at the open doors of the furnaces beneath the boilers. The dull light of a lantern flickered in the pilothouse, but little of it was visible from outside. Only a swath of yellow penetrated the shadows from the port cut into the iron to give the commander and the two river pilots a view ahead without being exposed to enemy fire.

Arkansas was a cumbersome vessel, ugly to the seaman accustomed to the sharp lines of a full-rigged sailing ship. Her main deck hardly cleared the water's surface, and the oak-and-iron-reinforced walls protecting the guns resembled a boxlike fort. In the darkness on the water below the diminutive heights of Haynes Bluff, her form loomed above the landing -- indistinct, like a small island merged with the shore.

The spring rains had come and gone, and with the onset of summer the water level of the river began to drop. Drawing fourteen feet, Arkansas was deep for work on a tributary of the Mississippi River. On each bank of the Yazoo rose a dense forest choked with briars and vines, and blowdown was piled high from the endless cycle of passing thunderstorms and annual inundation that temporarily spread an inland sea across the Mississippi flood plain. Overhanging branches might easily snag the smokestack, or one of the many shoals might easily trap the ironclad, making her a prize of any patrols sent from the two Union fleets anchored several hours away just above Vicksburg beyond DeSoto Point on the Mississippi River.

The nearly two hundred men down below, deep inside the ironclad, prepared for the battle to come as the ship's deckhands cast off the lines and the pilots muttered commands to the helmsman, who turned the wheel as directed. Orders were relayed via a tin speaking tube to the engineers on duty at the ship's two low-pressure steam engines. The 165-foot warship maneuvered away from the shore into midchannel, and started slowly downriver keeping just enough way on to maintain steerage in the current. Men moved about on the gundeck filling the tubs between the guns with fresh water for the sponges needed to swab the barrels after each shot, lest a lingering spark prematurely explode the next charge rammed home.

Other crewmen poured sand around the guns to soak up blood and help prevent the gunners and powder boys from slipping. They piled bandages and tourniquets at various locations while the surgeons below on the berth deck readied the surgery. The instruments -- scalpels, forceps, and saws -- shone brightly in the dim light. Down below, the churn of the ship's twin propellers was a dull roar.

In the aft section of the gundeck, Second Lieutenant Charles W. Read supervised the loading of the two six-inch stern rifles capable of firing exploding shells deadly to any wooden ship they might hit. The two gun crews under his command rammed home cartridge bags filled with powder, and followed them with wads and shells. When this was done, the gun captains plunged sharp metal picks down the vent holes at the breeches of the cannons to break open the powder bags. Primers and lanyards were made ready, and the guns were run out. The still air smelled of the river, dank and primal, of mud and ooze, and the heavy odor of the closely packed men, their sweat in the humid night darkening their uniforms and dampening their brows.

Standing near one of his guns, Read satisfied himself that his battery was ready for action, then leaned on the cannon and gazed out the gunport. He well understood what would come with the dawn -- the thrill and rush of war, the cries of the wounded, and the possibility that he might not live to see another day. He was already battle-hardened from bloody engagements on the upper and lower Mississippi River, and had learned under fire what he failed to at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. By all accounts of those who knew him, he was unafraid to fight. Rather than fearing war, he liked the excitement.

Read was a short man of slight build with a sharp, angular face adorned with a slender brown mustache and a goatee. A native of Satartia, Mississippi, a small town about twenty miles downriver from Yazoo City, he was soft-spoken and often taciturn, even when on liberty in the company of his fellow lieutenants, though he was fiercely loyal to his few friends. Like so many officers in the Confederate Navy, he resigned his commission in the Union Navy during the spring of 1861. His brief stint in the U.S. Navy, most of which he spent as a midshipman aboard the steam cruiser Powhatan, stationed in the Gulf of Mexico, provided him with few opportunities to better himself as an officer or to acquire important skills and knowledge of naval warfare.

Read's lackluster record at the Naval Academy in Annapolis likewise revealed nothing to indicate bright prospects as an officer in charge of ships and men in peacetime or in combat. He had taken his final examinations at Annapolis in June 1860, graduating at the age of twenty, and finishing last in his class of twenty-five cadets. During his liberal arts and military studies at the academy he racked up a prodigious number of demerits for fighting, profanity, failure to pass room inspection, and other infractions. His lack of discipline and his single-minded self-assurance came close to ending his naval career before it began. A classmate of his, Roswell H. Lamson, a lieutenant serving in the Union Navy, wrote that Read "was not considered very brilliant, but was one of those wiry, energetic fellows who would attempt anything but study."

Read's worst subject was French. No matter how hard he tried, he failed to master the language. The only word he could pronounce correctly was savez, a form of the verb "to know." He evidently took to saying it so often his classmates nicknamed him Savez. In fact, his close friends called him Savez throughout his life.

While Read may not have been a prime candidate as a French interpreter, he showed somewhat more promise in gunnery. He finished fourth from the bottom of his class in the theory of naval gunnery, a complex course of study involving voluminous charts, tables, and calculations required to figure accurate range, trajectory, and bearing for a target, the influence of windage, and, of course, a comprehensive overview of the various types of guns and projectiles found on typical warships of the day. However, when it came to actually firing cannons he exhibited a natural flair for the job. Big guns he could understand, and his instructors noticed and encouraged his affinity for them.

Of all the men aboard, Read was the only one with firsthand knowledge of what lay ahead of Arkansas. Several days past, under orders from his commander, Read had ridden hard across fifty miles of rugged terrain through the night to reach the stronghold of Vicksburg. Once there, he presented himself to Major General Earl Van Dorn. Read passed on his captain's concerns about the general's insistence that Arkansas should leave her easily defended position on the Yazoo to carry out the risky mission of attacking two Union fleets, then steam down the Mississippi and make for Mobile, destroying enemy gunboats along the way. Van Dorn listened to Read, but he did not change his mind. Arkansas would attack without delay and sink the enemy vessels gathered above Vicksburg or be blown up in the process. Infantry and cavalry charges against impossible odds were common in the land war, and thus far the Confederates had proven victorious in most such engagements. Van Dorn saw no reason not to apply similar tactics when it came to the ironclad.

In the company of another officer, Read rode up the east bank of the Mississippi above Vicksburg until he came within sight of the Union fleets. The undergrowth of the forest became so thick that he could ride no further. He crept to the river's edge on foot, and with a field glass surveyed the armada he and his shipmates aboard Arkansas would soon confront. The seagoing vessels of Admiral David G. Farragut were anchored in a line along Read's side of the river.

Read had fought Farragut's fleet during the battle of New Orleans the previous April, and he nursed a special grudge against one of the vessels, Gunboat Number Six. It was this ship that had fired a broadside into the CSS McRea, on which he had served as the executive officer. It was this ship that had killed his commander, Lieutenant Thomas B. Huger, a fair and brave man to whom he was devoted. Read later wrote that Huger was "an agreeable gentleman," adding that he was the sort of leader he wanted to serve under. Read watched patiently for a time, trying to see the telltale signs of smoke rising from the stacks of the wooden sloops of war.

Convinced that Farragut's ships did not have steam up, Read turned his attention to the ironclads and rams of Admiral Charles H. Davis anchored across the river from Farragut's fleet. Plumes of gray-and-black smoke rose from the stacks of most of Davis's ships. The smoke meant these ships had steam up and could get underway as soon as Arkansas hove into view. Of the two fleets, the ironclads and rams ranked as the most dangerous. They had fought their way down the Mississippi to destroy Confederate fortifications and capture cities, squeezing the Confederates from the north while Farragut did the same from the South in the Union's concerted effort to control all of the Mississippi and effectively cut the Confederacy in two. Vicksburg represented the last major Confederate fortress, a city with gun emplacements mounted on the heights above the river, and a series of defenses to protect its landward flanks. Read counted more than thirty large warships and support craft. Some of the mortar boats that had shelled forts Jackson and St. Philip, guarding the lower Mississippi before the fall of New Orleans, were also in the area. Arkansas's mission appeared doomed from the start.

The hours passed in tense silence for the dozens of men crowded into the small confines of Arkansas's gundeck, and for the others lined up below ready to pass cartridge bags, shot, and shells from the magazines along the passageways to the upper deck. The pilots worked the ship skillfully downriver, negotiating each twist and turn with care to stay in midchannel and avoid the shallows that made out from the points on the inside of bends. The first faint tinges of daylight cast the open gunports in dark blue. Soon, the men could make out the features along the shoreline as the sun rose and the warship approached the lower Yazoo.

"Daylight found us seven or eight miles above the mouth of the river," Read later wrote in his Reminiscences of the Confederate States Navy. "The morning was warm and perfectly calm; the dense volume of black smoke which issued from our funnel, rose high above the trees, and we knew that the enemy would soon be on the lookout for us. Pretty soon we discovered smoke above the trees below, winding along the course of the crooked Yazoo."

Three Union warships steamed fast upriver on a reconnaissance mission. The USS Carondelet, an ironclad mounting thirteen guns, was the most powerful. Tyler, a side-wheeler with eight guns, and the ram Queen of the West supported her. The rebel vessel came into view. The lookouts noted that she looked chocolate, rather than black, due to the patina of rust on her iron plating. The armor reinforcing her timber casemate was nothing more than railroad iron hastily fitted in place, along with boiler plate. She looked like a great brown monster pushing up a bow wave of murky river water.

The distance between the opposing vessels closed. Tyler, the leading ship, fired her bow guns. Carondelet followed. The deafening impacts of the shells smashing against Arkansas's forward casemate shook the ship and sent shards of iron from her shield whizzing aft. More shot and shells hit, and the iron began to warp and bend. When her guns came to bear, Arkansas returned fire. A shell ripped through Tyler and exploded in the engine room, spraying the compartment in blood and gore from the dead and wounded. The Union ships turned back toward the Mississippi. They chose a running fight that would bring the rebel ironclad between the massed guns of the two Union fleets, where it was supposed she would be quickly destroyed.

The roar of cannons, the shriek of shells, and the tremendous explosions from each direct hit rumbled through the countryside. The noise of the cannonading could be heard more than ten miles away. Smoke drifted across the water, and created an unnatural fog that seemed to hang in the still air and spread slowly to each bank of the Yazoo. Both Union and Confederate crews took casualties, the men of Carondelet receiving the worst of it with approximately thirty killed, wounded, or missing at the close of the engagement. Queen of the West, after ineffectual attempts to ram Arkansas, steamed away with all speed, though damaged from several well-aimed projectiles.

Read described in vivid detail the destruction of Carondelet:

We had decreased our distance from the iron-clad rapidly, and were only a hundred yards astern, our shot still raking him, when he ceased firing and sheered into the bank; our engines were stopped, and ranging up alongside, with the muzzles of our guns touching him, we poured in a broadside of solid shot, when his colors came down....on we pushed, driving the two fleeing boats ahead of us, our speed decreasing all the time, owing to shot holes in the smoke stack; but in a few minutes the "Arkansas" glided out into the broad Mississippi, right into the midst of the hostile fleet.

In addition to casualties among the crew, Arkansas had sustained serious damage. Holes riddled the smokestack, reducing the flow of air available to efficiently fire the boilers. The connection between the funnel and the furnaces had been shot to pieces, and flames from the furnaces heated the gundeck. The temperature inside the ship rose to above 120 degrees, steam pressure decreased, and the ironclad's propellers turned more slowly every minute.

As Arkansas emerged from the Yazoo, the engines could hardly keep her moving fast enough to maintain steerage in the swift river current. Her captain, who had been wounded, nevertheless kept to his post. He ordered her turned downriver toward the safety of Vicksburg. In the brief interlude before the next battle, he observed the "forest of masts and smokestacks" and the "panoramic effect...intensified by the city of men spread out with innumerable tents opposite on the right bank." The Union fleets were not ready to get underway and the men aboard the ships rushed to bring their guns to bear. One of the first to slip her cable and close in was Gunboat Number Six.

Manning his station at the bow guns, Lieutenant George W. Gift recognized the ship. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0786267003
• ISBN 13: 9780786267002
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408