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Mrs. and Miss Lee were of this number. Mrs. Lee and her husband keep a hotel, which is known as 'Lee's boarding house.' It is a snug inn. But Mrs. Lee is a tartar. She told Major Strong, that 'Mr. Lee, although he kept a hotel, was of one of the first families of Virginia.'

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"I dare say,' replied the Major; there is nothing incompatible with great qualities in the business he pursues!'

"While this parley was going on, Miss Lee pushed herself through the front door. She pouted as she passed over the portico, pulling as she went an unwilling hood over her handsome face, then somewhat disfigured by a frown.

"After the miniature sea and land fights, the officers met again at Lee's boarding house. Bread and butter, and poor claret, were the substance of the repast; Mrs. Lee and her fire-emitting daughter insisting upon occupying chairs at the table, while Mr. Lee waited upon the guests and drew the corks. The display of appetite was good. I think every man ate the worth of the gold dollar which he gave Mrs. Lee, who carefully folded away the hateful Lincoln coin in the corner of her dirty apron. It struck me as queer to see this 'first lady' in clothes which soap could have improved.” Miss Lee could not be appeased. She continued to pout and frown, and to say rude things to the officers in reply to their polite banter, when silence or witty retort would have been in better accord with the lofty claims of her family.

The squadron returned to Ship Island without farther adventure. General Butler marked his sense of the excellent conduct of the troops in a general order:

"Of their bravery in the field," he said, "he felt assured; but another quality, more trying to the soldier, claims his admiration. After having been for months subjected to the privations necessarily incident to camp life upon this island, these well-disciplined soldiers, although for many hours in full possession of two rebel villages, filled with what to them were most desirable luxuries, abstaining from the least unauthorized interference with private property, and all molestation of peaceable citizens. This behavior is worthy of all praise. It robs war of half its horrors-it teaches our enemies how much they have been misinformed by their designing leaders, as to the character of our soldiers and the intention of our government-it gives them a lesson and an example in humanity

and civilized warfare much needed, however little it may be followed. The general commanding commends the action of the men of this expedition to every soldier in this department. Let it be imitated by all in the towns and cities we occupy, a living witness that the United States soldier fights only for the Union, the constitution, and the enforcement of the laws."

Readers will care to know, that the child, the unconscious cause of these proceedings, was restored to her parents. Her father was seeking her at Fort Pickens, under a flag of truce, while Major Strong was conveying her to Biloxi. Her mother, some weeks later, induced the gentleman to call upon General Butler at New Orleans, and thank him for his goodness to their offspring.

April 15th, the welcome word came from Captain Farragut, that all his fleet were over the bar, and reloaded, and that he hoped, the next day, to move up the river to the vicinity of the forts. He had made all possible haste; but the dense, continuous fogs, and the extraordinary lowness of the water had retarded every movement. On the 17th, General Butler was at the mouths of the river with his six thousand troops ready to co-operate. If the fleet had been delayed a few days longer, General Butler would have taken Pensacola, which he learned had been left almost defenseless. The naval commander vetoed the scheme, not anticipating further delay in operating against the forts.

CHAPTER XIII.

REDUCTION OF THE FORTS.

THE distance from the mouths of the Mississippi to New Orleans is one hundred and five miles. The two forts are situated at a bend in the river, seventy-five miles below the city, and thirty from the place where the river breaks into the passes or mouths. Fort Jackson, on the western bank, is hidden from the view of the ascending voyager by a strip of dense woods, which extends along the bank to a point eight miles below it; but Fort St. Philip, on the eastern shore, lies plainly in sight, because it is placed in the

upper part of the bend, and the ground in front is covered only by a thick growth of reeds. These forts do not look very formidable to the unprofessional eye. They do not stand boldly out of the water, presenting great masses of fine masonry, like those to which we are accustomed in northern seaports. Fort Jackson is but twenty-five feet high, and St. Philip nineteen; and as the ditches and outer works are neatly sodded, the passing traveler sees little more than extensive slopes of green, close-shaven grass, and a low red-brick wall, with many guns mounted on it, and several piercing it.

But these forts, lying low in the bend of a river half a mile wide and running four miles an hour, presented an obstacle to an ascending foe such as, I believe, no fleet had ever been able to overcome. One poor fort at that bend, half finished and half manned, had kept a British fleet at bay, in 1815, for nine days; the English vainly using the same thirteen-inch bombs which were to be employed in 1862. General Jackson's "Tom Overton," who commanded Fort St. Philip on that occasion, was uncle of Thomas Overton Moore, governor of Louisiana under Jefferson Davis. It was not till the eighth day that Overton could get one bomb in position capable of throwing a shell among the enemy, but that one sent them flying down the river-two bomb vessels, one brig, one sloop and one schooner. A thousand heavy shells had fallen about the fort, without impairing its defensive power. But now there were two forts in the bend, constructed by professional engineers, at a cost of a million and a quarter of dollars. Fort Jackson, a five-sided work, of immense strength, mounted seventy-four guns, fourteen of which were under cover; and below it was a supplementary battery mounting six. Fort St. Philip was of inferior strength, mounting forty guns; but it was protected by distance, being a few hundred yards higher up the river, and had a strong battery on each side of it on the river bank. The unmilitary reader does not take the comfort which uncle Toby found in such words as bastion, glacis, scarp, counters carp, fosse, covered-way, curtain, casemate and barbette. We are informed, however, that the forts had all these things and more. I have often looked out those words in the dictionary, and find the sum total of their meaning to be, that the forts, with their outer works, pointed one hundred and

Parton's Life of Jackson, ii., 239.

twenty-eight heavy guns upon the river; that fourteen of those guns could be worked under cover, and that the batteries were protected by ditches wide and deep, by walls of immense strength, by bulwarks of earth and sods, and by enfilading howitzers. All had been done for them which the skill of Beauregard and Weitzel could accomplish, working with leisurely deliberation, and aided by the treasury of the United States. What they had left undone, the zeal of the Confederates had supplied during many months of preparation.

They were garrisoned, as it appears, by fifteen hundred men, commanded by General J. K. Duncan, a recreant Pennsylvanian, educated at West Point. The commander of St. Philip was Colonel Higgins, once an officer of the army of the United States. A large proportion of the garrisons were men of northern birth, who had been consigned to the forts because their devotion to the Confederate cause was considered questionable. But experience shows that it is a matter of little consequence by what process men are got together within the brick walls of a fort or the wooden walls of a ship, provided they are ably, justly, and firmly commanded. "An English seventy-four," says Carlyle, "is one of the impossiblest entities. A press-gang knocks men down in the streets of sea-towns, and drags them on board. If the ship were to be stranded, I have heard they would nearly all run ashore and desert.” Nevertheless, while the ship remains at sea, they usually do all that the various occasions demand. Duncan had a motley, ill-clad, discontented, and rather turbulent garrison, but they stood manfully to the guns as long as standing to the guns could avail.

The weakness of the forts was the kind of guns with which they were armed. "All of them," says Lieutenant Weitzel, "were the old, smooth-bore guns picked up at the different works around the city, with the exception of about six ten-inch columbiads, and two one hundred pound rifled guns of their own manufacture, a formidable kind of gun." He is of the opinion that if the forts had been provided with a full complement of the best modern artillery, they could not have been reduced or passed by wooden ships.

It was not, however, upon the forts that the enemy wholly relied. Across the river, from a point just below Fort Jackson, a cable was stretched, upon which the enemy had expended prodigious labor. They had first supported it by heavy logs thirty feet long

attached to seven large anchors. But this cable caught the floating trees and timber which, in a few weeks, formed a heaped-up, Red-river raft, extending half a mile above the cable. The chain broke at length, and the whole structure, cable, logs, anchor, buoys, and trees, were swept down by the current toward the gulf. A lighter cable was then procured from the stores at Pensacola. Seven or eight schooners, dismasted and filled with logs, were strongly anchored in a row across the river, and the chain was laid across each of them and securely fastened round the capstan. At the end of the cable, on the shore opposite Fort Jackson, a mud battery was built to drive off parties attempting to sever the barrier. Under this cable the floating timber freely passed; and there was an ingenious contrivance near the fort, by which the vessels of the foe were quickly admitted and the aperture quickly closed.

This cable, because of its signal failure as a means of defense, has been too lightly regarded. It might have been a formidable obstacle. Our naval officers think that if it had been placed just above St. Philip, instead of just below Fort Jackson, it could scarcely have been cut; because, in that case, the party attempting it would have had to run the gauntlet of a hundred guns against a rapiḍ current, remain under the fire of most of them during the operation, and then descend two miles under the same fire before reaching the fleet. Placed where it was, however, there was reason to hope that a party could steal silently upon it in the darkness of a foggy night, and work upon it for a considerable time before being discovered; and even if discovered, the night fire of heavy guns might be borne long enough to effect the object; particularly as the supporting hulks would afford cover for the boats. The cable was not ill-planned, but wrongly placed.

Another error appears to have been committed by the enemy, in not cutting away more of the woods below Fort Jackson. They removed enough to enable them to bring their guns to bear upon the channel of the river, but left enough for Captain Porter to string his bomb-schooners behind along the western shore, around the bend, completely out of sight. He had no need to see his object, for his bombs were purposely set to throw the shells high into the air and down upon the forts like falling meteors; but their guns were designed to be sighted and aimed at a visible mark. The forts were stationary, and their exact position was known; the

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