JAMES NELSON: Thieves Of Mercy

Bowater heard the limping gate of Hieronymus Taylor as the chief engineer stepped up beside him. “Well, goddamn me, Cap’n,” Taylor said around his cigar, his accent thick New Orleans. “There goes your third ship.” He pulled out a flask of whiskey, took a drink, handed it to Bowater. Bowater took it, put it to his lips, and took a big mouthful, a thing he would have considered unthinkable a year before. Captains did not drink with the crew. Samuel Bowater did not drink whiskey from a flask. He did not drink with the likes of Hieronymus Taylor.

It had been a long year.

“Seems the life span of your ships just gets shorter and shorter all the damn time,” Taylor observed, taking the flask back.

“Don’t see how it could get much shorter than this, Chief.” They had been there for less than a month, working like madmen to get the ship in the water. Finishing her was not even a consideration, they hoped only to get her floating, so that like her sister ship Arkansas she might be towed away.

It was June fifth, and the Tennessee was still on the stocks and the Yankees were just up the river. The following day there would be a battle, a river battle that would determine whether Memphis would be in Union or Confederate hands.

If the Confederates won, and if they could hold the Yankees at bay, then there was still a chance that they could get the Tennessee in the water and downriver to safety.

But if the Union won, then Yankee shipwrights would complete the Tennessee with an efficiency that the South could not match, and the trim little ironclad would be used against her own people.

It was a gamble over who would win the river fight, and everyone knew which side was the odds-on favorite, so before the battle even started they burned the ship on the ways.

Latitude, elevation and rainfall all combine to render the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe .

HARPER’S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863

It was a month before the burning of the Tennessee, and ten hours after he met the man, that Samuel Bowater first saw someone smash a chair over Mississippi Mike Sullivan’s head. The one doing the smashing was Ruffin Tanner, a blue-water sailor of nearly twenty years’ experience, who had been with Bowater since Bowater had commanded the CapeFear in Norfolk.

Tanner was a powerful man, certainly as strong as Sullivan, though not nearly as big. The chair, however, was a meager affair, with thin turned legs and a cane seat, and it shattered over Mike’s thick head and wide shoulders like a china figurine and did little more than slew his slouch hat around, leaving Tanner red-faced and gripping the two smashed back rails.

It was two days before that chair-smashing, all-hands-in brawl that Bowater finally heard from the Navy Department in Richmond.

After the Battle of New Orleans, after the Yazoo River had been battered to death by Farragut’s big ships, Bowater and his remaining men had returned to Yazoo City. They had no other place to go, and the Yankees were still far from that Yazoo, so it seemed like a good choice. Bowater began to send telegraphs off to Richmond, looking for instructions.

On the third of May, word arrived.

Lt. Samuel Bowater, CSN Yazoo City, Mississippi

Sir: You and those men still under your command will proceed with all possible dispatch to Memphis, Tennessee, where you will assume command of the ironclad Tennessee currently building there. You will exert all possible effort in the completion and fitting out of that vessel. Recent events along the Mississippi have made it imperative that this ironclad sloop of war be readied to meet the enemy.

Respectfully, Stephen Mallory Secretary of the Navy

Bowater read the words with some skepticism. Sometimes it seemed as if Mallory believed that calling a ship an ironclad would make it so. The last time Mallory had ordered him to command an “ironclad” it had turned out to be a broken-down side-wheeler with pine board and cotton bale bulwarks, a “cottonclad.” It was a near miracle that they had managed to turn her battered topsides into an iron casement, and Bowater reckoned that his supply of miracles was pretty well played out.

And so he stood in the telegraph office and looked for a long time at the words, until he heard the telegraph operator start to clear his throat in a nervous sort of way.

Ironclad… recent events…

Bowater could not fault Mallory for his understanding of the tactical situation, even if the Secretary had been mistaken in thinking the chief threat to New Orleans was from the north, and not the Gulf. It was true that Farragut’s big men-of-war, built for fighting the British on the high seas, were utterly unsuited for river work. But the Union admiral had managed to drag his heavy squadron bodily over the shallow bar at the mouth of the river and blast his way past the forts and the smattering of Confederate ships defending the river below the city.

Now Farragut was probing upriver, but the farther north he came, and the more the water level continued to fall, the more unwieldy his fleet became.

Flat-bottomed, paddle-wheel-driven, ironclad gunboats. Those were the ships for this river fight. A new vessel for an unprecedented type of warfare.

Mallory knew it, was trying his level best to make it a reality. The Yankees knew it as well, and behind their effort was an almost unlimited industrial capacity. So, for the first year of the war, while the Confederacy struggled to get even one operational ironclad on the Father of Waters, the Union built seven. Those ships, the “City Class” gunboats, were fighting their way south, accompanying the Union Army sweeping along the shore.

Bowater left the telegraph office, wandered along the streets of Yazoo City, still considering the “ironclad Tennessee.” What, he wondered, would greet him on his arrival in Memphis. How would he get there?

“Reckon we best get to Vicksburg.” That was Hieronymus Taylor’s pronouncement, upon learning about the orders. Taylor was a riverboat man, an engineer out of New Orleans who had joined the navy to avoid a possible draft, and for the possibility of killing Yankees, which he found very appealing. He was a part of the world of the Mississippi River, as alien to Bowater as the moon.

“ Vicksburg,” Bowater repeated.

“Best place to find a boat goin north. Ain’t a damn thing movin on this here backwater. We best get to Vicksburg before goddamn Farragut does.”

The next day they found a tug that would take them to Vicksburg, and Bowater herded aboard it the thirty-six men still under his command.

He felt like a schoolteacher at times, or the head of an orphanage, with his charges to care for. He had men but no ship to house them, no galley to feed them. It was like having a company of infantry, but infantry were prepared for such living, they had tents and knew how to cook rations. Sailors without a ship were lost men. They looked to Bowater for guidance, but Bowater did not know much more about such things than they did. He had never been in that situation before.

They steamed down the Yazoo River, crowded on the deck of the tug, turned south where the Yazoo met with the Mississippi River. Just above the city, the river took a sharp turn so that for a time they were actually steaming northeast before turning one hundred and eighty degrees. Around the low, marshy point was the city of Vicksburg.

The hills of the town rose up from the water’s edge, steep and terraced, a formidable defensive position. The “ Gibraltar of the West,” as it was popularly called, a name that carried no small amount of hope for the city’s ability to withstand invasion.