Pursuit:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ rank in two different services, plus the fact that he was the president’s nephew, gave Wood a level of trust between him, politicians, and officers in the two services. It was in 1864 that Wood found his true calling as a formidable sea raider. While commanding the CSS Tallahassee, he took more than thirty-three Union vessels.

      Not on the same train, but soon to follow the cabinet to Danville was the most famous of sailors for both the North and the South, Admiral Raphael Semmes. Semmes was a 55-year-old native of Maryland who practiced looking flamboyant by keeping a waxed mustache whose ends sprang several inches from each side of his face. He had gone to sea with the United States Navy when he was 14 and had spent more than 35 years in the service of his country, including winning commendations for trying to save his ship during a violent storm off Mexico in 1846. Early in 1861 he resigned his commission as a commander and cast his lot with the Confederacy.

      Semmes was famous in the South and infamous in the North for his command of first the CSS Sumter and later the CSS Alabama, two fast raider ships designed to run down Northern commercial vessels such as cargo and whaling ships. In the course of two years, Semmes’ two commands accounted for the capture of eighty-seven Union vessels. No Union ship captain left port without fearing that he would one day see Semmes’ sails rushing over the horizon toward him. Semmes was also a formidable foe when he had to do battle. He sank the warship USS Hatteras off Texas in a battle that lasted just thirteen minutes.

      Semmes made the mistake of fighting the USS Kearsage off the coast of France on June 19, 1864, when the CSS Alabama was badly in need of an overhaul and fresh gunpowder. The Alabama had been at sea so long that she leaked at several points in her hull, and her powder was so damp that her cannons were not firing as hot as they should have been. When the Alabama’s stern was shot away, Semmes jumped into the sea, but he was quickly pulled from the water by a British ship. Eventually he returned to Richmond and continued to command the ships and ironclads making up the last remnants of the James River Squadron.

      Not only were two of the South’s most famous sea captains planning to escape south with Davis, there were at least a dozen skilled ship captains and sailors, refugees from the James River Squadron, who were also retreating toward Danville. If Davis needed an experienced crew of sailors to go wherever he wanted in the world reachable by the seven seas, all he had to do was walk through the train cars and recruit from the flower of the Confederate navy.

      As for his long-range plans after escaping from Richmond, Davis seemed determined to head for the vastness of the Trans-Mississippi Theater (Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Indian Territory, and parishes of Louisiana west of the river) where he hoped to find troops still in the field who had not lost the will to fight. He intended to meet up with General Edmund Kirby Smith around Galveston, Texas, an island just a few miles from the coast from which blockade-runners still successfully slipped in and out of port. Ideally, Davis wanted to stop along the way to Texas and link up with another nephew, General Richard Taylor, who was leading a small army quartered near the coastal (but captured) city of Mobile, Alabama.

      While Davis would never have admitted it, trying to reach Taylor and Kirby Smith by taking a land route would be virtually impossible because much of the territory between Virginia and Texas was already occupied by Union troops. The best way for the cabinet to reach both of these armies quickly would be by sea. But finding a fast ship large enough to accommodate the cabinet was no longer as easy as it had been just a few months earlier. The big blockade running ports of Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, had been captured. Owners of many of the most successful blockade-runners that had routinely run back and forth to Bermuda and to Nassau, Bahamas, were now holding them in foreign ports, finally convinced that their profitable ventures of trading cotton for war material were over.

      It was still possible but not promising to make for the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas. If a small party could slip between Grant’s army around Petersburg, Virginia, and Sherman’s army around Smithfield, North Carolina, they could make for the coastal network of numerous small rivers and streams. Once on the coast, they might find loyal citizens willing to give them a boat seaworthy enough to run to the Bahamas or Bermuda. A small craft, disguised as a fishing boat operating along the Carolina coast, might escape the attention of the Union blockaders who would be concentrating on watching for larger blockade-runners still trying to make a profit.

      If the cabinet could survive Atlantic storms in a small boat and reach a neutral country like Bermuda or the Bahamas, they could then board safer, foreign-flagged ships bound for Europe. Or if they still felt loyalty to Davis and the Confederacy, they could risk their freedom by following him and boarding a blockade-runner that would make for Alabama and Texas. One possibility that could have crossed Davis’s mind was reaching and boarding the CSS Stonewall, a French-built, iron-hulled raider that was supposed to be on its way across the Atlantic to Havana, Cuba. No Union wooden blockading ship would have been able to stand against the Stonewall, a ship designed to break the Union blockade. All Davis would have known on April 2 was that the Stonewall should be at sea on its way to Cuba.

      But Davis did not try for the shorter escape route toward the Carolina coast. The option Davis apparently chose without conferring with his cabinet was a combination land and sea escape. He chose a longer route that would take them even further from the coast, first into upstate South Carolina and then into Georgia with coastal Florida assumed as the final destination.

      The longer route seemed plausible. Florida was still mostly unmolested by Union forces. The third state to secede from the Union had been a blockade-runner’s haven early in the war. But since it was also the smallest of the Confederate states in population, fewer than 45,000 people, there had been little buildup of prewar infrastructure such as railroads or even large towns or ports, so large quantities of supplies could not be brought into Florida and then easily shipped north. The blockade-runners based in Florida were mostly small boats and schooners that could carry a few bales of cotton to Cuba or the Bahamas while carrying loads of lead and arms back to the peninsula that local forces would use.

      However, while Florida did not have large blockade-runners, it did have the longest coastline of any state in the Union or the Confederacy at nearly 2,300 miles. Hidden along both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico coast were scores of inlets and rivers that were too numerous for the United States Navy to patrol continuously. With prior word sent ahead by courier, loyal Confederates could have prepared large boats and small ships for the Confederate cabinet’s use.

      But, the escape plan would take weeks to effect, even if nothing went wrong. If the cabinet could successfully avoid Union capture by taking trains south through North Carolina, switching to wagons and horses through unoccupied upstate South Carolina, and then going through unoccupied upstate Georgia, there was a chance they could stay ahead of any pursuing Union troops and disappear into Florida’s still unoccupied panhandle. From north Florida, they would make their way through the upper center of the state before splitting off into one of two directions, either to the southeast below Union-occupied St. Augustine on the east coast or to the southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast.

      Heading southeast to Florida’s Atlantic coast was the less desirable direction. While the Union blockade on that side of the state was light because there were few coastal towns below St. Augustine that could have engaged in blockade-running, there would also be fewer people living near the coast who could be called on to help with the escape. Leaving for Alabama from Florida’s Atlantic coast would also have added hundreds of miles and days of risky ocean sailing before Davis could reach Mobile.

      Leaving from Florida’s west coast had its own problems, principally that those waters were more heavily guarded because Union ships blanketed the Gulf to capture blockade-runners trying to use Mobile and Galveston. Still there was opportunity there. While Florida’s small, blockade-running port of Cedar Key had been captured in 1862, the coastline north of Cedar Key was still in Confederate hands and actively used for making salt that was shipped to Confederate armies. This part of the coast bending upward and westward was just too long СКАЧАТЬ