“Fire raft! Dear God, they are sending fire rafts!” Pope shouted. They were sending fire rafts and he was broadside to the current, out of control, with barely the steam pressure to turn the screws. And suddenly, where there had been optimism, there was now the vision of his squadron engulfed in flames.
Robley Paine stood in the wheelhouse of the Yazoo River, watched the fireworks on the water. The ship trembled underfoot as the twin paddle wheels turned slowly astern, holding the riverboat in place against the current.
First to attack, per the plan, had been the ram, the Manassas. Formerly the towboat Enoch Train, she was now an ironclad, her topsides a rounded hump of half-submerged narrow iron plate, about 150 feet long, thirty feet wide. On her bow was mounted a pointed iron ram, and from her rounded foredeck a sixty-four-pound Dahlgren peered forward.
She was an amazing engine of war, and the more Robley looked on her, the more he wanted such a thing for himself. The Union navy would not be beaten by ships of equal size. The Confederacy was unable to build ships of equal size. The Yankees must be defeated by technological advances, such as the Manassas, the first ironclad built in the Western Hemisphere.
Spread out over the river, upstream of the Yankees, was the Confederate fleet. The flagship was the 830-ton steam sloop McRae, armed with a sixty-four-pounder mounted on a pivot, four eight-inch Columbiads, and a rifled twenty-four-pounder. With her navy crew and complement of Confederate States Marines, she was run with an efficiency that made Robley despair for the sloppy, disinterested civilian mercenaries he was forced to ship.
The rest of the fleet: the five-hundred-ton side-wheel steamer Calhoun, with one twenty-four-pounder and two eighteen-pounder Dahlgren guns; the steamer Ivy, just a bit smaller than Calhoun, with one eight-inch rifle; the steamers Jackson and Tuscarora; and the cutter Pickens, with an eight-inch Columbiad and four twenty-four-pound carronades. An odd hodgepodge of former merchant ships and assorted guns, but it was the waterborne defense of the southern Mississippi. Between the five of them they did not carry the firepower of even the Richmond alone. But they had surprise, and they had the ram, and those seemed to be working well.
One of the Yankee ships was blazing away, and Paine guessed it was the Richmond and that the ram had done her business.
Then another ship, closer to the Confederate fleet, began to fire the guns of her broadside. The two ships were lashing out. There was a desperate, panicked quality to their firing. Robley nodded his head as he watched the fusillade. Good, good… At last, something was being done. The filthy invaders who had murdered his sons were paying for it now.
Mr. Kinney, the pilot, was showing no sign of approval. He had in fact been muttering curses under his breath for some time. But now, as the second ship opened fire, he became more vocal.
“I signed on here to pilot a boat, I did not sign on to get my damn ass blown off. Didn’t say nothing about no goddamned battle with no Yankee fleet.”
“You signed aboard a river defense ship, I made no secret about it,” Paine said, never taking his eyes from the action downriver. It was the most cathartic thing he had experienced since the death of his boys. He could not wait to fling himself into the fight, to fly at the head of the serpent, guns blazing.
They called the serpent “Scott’s Anaconda.” The overarching plan of Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott—wrap a blockade of ships around the coastline of the Confederate States, drive down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, from the United States to the Gulf, until the coils of the thing completely encircled the new Southern nation, and then squeeze.
They laughed at this “Anaconda Plan,” North and South. But Robley Paine was not so sure, and he was not laughing.
“River defense ain’t the same as attacking no damned men-of-war,” Kinney pointed out, though what he thought river defense was Robley could not guess.
Paine turned at last from the window, regarded the pilot in the dim light of the binnacle. Kinney’s jaw was working furiously at a plug of tobacco. The light glinted on a line of spittle on his beard. He met Paine’s eyes with defiance.
“Are you a coward, sir?” Paine asked. “Or merely a Union sympathizer?”
“I ain’t none of them, you son of a bitch, and don’t say it again. But I’m a civilian, hear? I ain’t no navy man, and neither are you.”
“I can’t disagree. You certainly are not ‘no navy man.’ But tonight you had best play the part. You have been well paid to do so.”
Paine turned back to watch the fight on the river, but Kinney troubled him. They all did, all the white trash he had collected aboard the Yazoo River. His initial concern was right, he was sure of it now. Any able-bodied Southern man worth a damn was already in the army or navy, or working at some job vital to the war effort. And everyone else was a shirker, a coward, a craven dog.
The serpent haunted him. It haunted his days, kept him thrashing in a cold sweat at night. He thought of little else. The money he doled out every day for food and coal and wages and maintenance made no impression on him. The letter from his attorney in Yazoo City, telling him in the gentlest terms of the death of his wife, Katherine, failed to move him beyond a certain sadness, and even a bit of envy, at the way her agony was over, while his continued on.
It would be his turn soon. The promise of eternity with his Katherine and his boys was the only point of hope left to him. He would die battling the serpent.
A rocket shot up into the sky, a long streak of red coming right up from the midst of the Union ships.
“There’s Manassas ’s signal!” Robley said, with an excitement unmatched in the Yazoo River ’s wheelhouse. Thirty yards away, right ahead of the Yazoo River ’s bow, the nearest fire raft sputtered and flickered as the combustible material heaped on board was lit off. The flames took hold at last, creeping along the edge of the oil-soaked logs and bales of cotton, then climbed up the heap, engulfed the raft—a fifty-foot-long derelict river barge—throwing brilliant light out one hundred feet in every direction. Robley could see the light of the flames dancing on the Yazoo River ’s bow and the bales of cotton stacked around her deck as armor.
There were three rafts, strung out across the river and attached to one another by a long chain. Controlling the string of rafts at one end was the towboat Tuscarora and at the other end the Watson.
“Them tugs ain’t never gonna keep them rafts under control,” Kinney said with a subtle, gloating tone. Paine did not reply.
“Slow ahead, Mr. Kinney. We’ll keep just behind the string of rafts.”
Kinney hesitated, just long enough to show he followed orders under duress, then reached up and rang the bell. A moment later the big paddle wheels stopped, then slowly started up again, forward this time, barely pushing the Yazoo River ahead, while Kinney let the current do the rest.
Paine could see the few lights onshore slipping by, could see the out-of-control Yankee ships lit up in the light of the fire raft, and he felt satisfied. It had all gone exactly to plan, and his only disappointment—and it was a small one—was that the Richmond was not now heeling over and sinking fast from the injury doled out by the ram.