The Crescent Spy (28 page)

“And ridiculous, on the face of it. Though at least half the city was against secession in the first place, the half that was in favor of it would have tarred and feathered anyone who defended the Union. That said, both sides remain in the city to this day.”

“I don’t follow. Where are you going with this?”

“My point is, there’s a large seditious population in New Orleans. If the Union ever captures the city, these people will trip over themselves collaborating with the enemy.”

“Who are these traitors?” Josephine huffed. “I’ve never met any.”

“You wouldn’t have, would you? Not with war fever raging. But it’s a safe bet that the blockade-runners and smugglers like the man who took you downstream would be the first to cross over.”

Fein apparently didn’t know that the runner was a Confederate soldier. That man wouldn’t do any crossing over. Unless he proved completely craven and deserted, he would end up fighting for the cause, whether he wanted to or not.

“That’s one man,” she said. “Who else?”

“I’m not looking, mind you, but if I were, I’d turn my attention to Irish, Italians. Other foreigners. Men born in the North who came to New Orleans to make their fortune. Free blacks, runaway slaves. Old white creole families who still speak French at home and keep no slaves. Few of these people have any great affinity for Richmond.”

“How about a German-born Jew from New York?” she asked.

“I’m a patriot,” he said quickly. “But I’m also a realist.”

She took a small risk and let out some of her true thoughts on the subject. “They say it’s not about slavery, but over rights, but sometimes I wonder if it’s either of those things. People are proud. Maybe that’s the only reason men go to war. Pride and honor. The South goes to war because the North marches into their territory.”

“And that’s why you fight?” he asks. “With your pen, I mean? In defense of your native soil against invaders? That’s why you take such risks?”

It was a valid question, although not in the way he supposed.

Since she was a child, Josephine had traveled up and down the river dozens of times, passing from slave state to free and back again. She was under no illusion that Northerners were saints, but neither were the Southerners. One vision of the future would hold, either an empire of land and slaves in the South, with growth and energy and free labor always pressing forward in her northern neighbor, or the North would triumph utterly. In which case, it was evident to one and all that the United States would grow into a vast, continental power of unprecedented strength, while the South became a weak, broken colony of the former.

Neither vision appealed to her, but when she remembered the slaves fleeing across the river by boat, thought about Caleb at Fort Jackson as they led him to the gallows, she could feel no soft place in her heart for Southern honor, for any great and glorious cause that would tear the country in two.

“I don’t mean to bend you to cynicism,” Fein said after she had not answered for several seconds.

“I’m in the news business. I’m already bent.”

“My comment about the cause was not to make you doubt. And it was certainly not to make you question my own commitment. But should the worst come to pass, and the Union gunboats fight their way downriver as you say, don’t be a heroine. There will still be need for our services in New Orleans. To raise spirits during a dark time, to shine a light on the doings of the corrupt and powerful. And I’ll need you. You’re notorious in the North, but I’ll protect you if I can. For your part, you’ll need to be practical.”

“I understand.”

He took the other stories she’d written and skimmed through them while Josephine waited for his assessment.

She was beginning to suspect that Fein was every bit as cynical as the man who’d smuggled Franklin to safety in the Gulf. But then he said something that made her reassess.

“You’ve given me plenty of material,” he said. “I want you to take a few days off. Unless I tell you otherwise, you’re not to do any writing for the paper. Instead, I want you to write a story for the War Department. I want you to write your assessment of our dire military situation for the benefit of the government. Use your most persuasive language. Assure them that what you wrote for the
Crescent
wasn’t mere scaremongering to sell more papers. I’ll send copies to President Davis, the War Department, and to Commodore Hollins, General Lovell, and General Lee.”

“Will they listen to me?” she asked.

“They had better. If not, we’ll lose the whole blasted river. Then our hopes will be very black indeed.”

Josephine eyed Fein with new understanding. Any hope that she had found someone to whom she could confess her true purpose drained away. Solomon Fein may have been preparing for the worst, but this man wanted the South to win the war.

J
osephine’s misinformation reaped great dividends. In the first few weeks of January, only General Lovell seemed to pay attention to threats from the Gulf. Hollins steamed upriver with the mosquito fleet, where there did seem to be movement on the part of the Union. A powerful flotilla, backed by some twenty thousand or more troops under Ulysses Grant, was moving on the Tennessee River. Lovell raised new regiments for the defense of New Orleans, but Richmond ordered them upriver as quickly as they formed.

Then, at the end of the month, curious news filtered into New Orleans. It came first via the Washington papers, who claimed that Flag Officer David Farragut had assembled a “great expedition” composed of
Pensacola
,
Richmond
, and several other massive steam frigates, together with thirty other vessels containing mortars and powerful rifled cannons. They were going to attack the Gulf fortifications of the Confederacy. The story reached the Richmond press first, then was reprinted by the
Picayune
on January 29.

Irritated that Ludd had beat him to the story, Fein ordered Josephine to crow in print about how her captured battle plan was playing out exactly as foretold—these were merely preparations for the Union coastal attack designed to divert Confederate naval attention from the real assault to come from the north, down the river. This she did, while wondering with twisting excitement in her belly if this were the invasion force meant to cross the bar and attack Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip.

Meanwhile, the delays continued on the powerful Confederate ironclads being built in the city.
Mississippi
was supposed to be delivered by mid-December, and
Louisiana
on January 25, but by the end of the month, both boats remained unfinished at their respective yards.

Louisiana
finally skidded down the blocks into the river on February 6, sending water sloshing high up the levee, where Josephine watched with a throng of cheering spectators. She wondered what Franklin would have thought could he see the gunboat in the water. She constructed sly, cynical observations, and imagined whispering them in his ear in an attempt to raise a smile. But it had been more than five weeks since she’d seen him.

As for the crowd, their enthusiasm was explosive as they cheered
Louisiana
floating proud and mighty in the river. No enemy ship could stand against her might. Josephine watched quietly, taking notes, and when she returned to the city reported what she’d seen with credulity, while noting privately that the ship had weeks, if not months ahead of her to be worthy of battle.
Louisiana
needed to be clad with iron, fit with her boiler and other machinery, and mounted with guns.

Her sister ship,
Mississippi
, waited in the lot next door, also partially constructed. She had her boiler installed but was still lacking iron or guns and was missing the massive shaft to propel her through the water. The shaft was reportedly under manufacture at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, being refurbished after it had been salvaged from a shipwreck. When Josephine heard that, she knew without a doubt that any shipbuilding competition with the vast, smoking factories of the North was doomed to failure.

The same day
Louisiana
slipped into the water, word came of a ferocious new struggle on the upper rivers. Supported by Flag Officer Andrew Foote’s gunboats, the so-called Pook’s Turtles, General Grant had transported thousands of troops below Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Union guns pummeled the fort until the Confederates withdrew to Fort Donelson, a dozen miles away on the Cumberland. At first it seemed as though the South would hold the line and possibly push federal troops out of Tennessee and off these two vital tributaries of the Mississippi, but after a series of bloody attacks and counterattacks, superior Union reinforcements carried the day. Fort Donelson surrendered on February 16.

The Richmond newspapers had been preoccupied with the struggle in northern Virginia between McClellan and Lee, but now turned to the reverses in the West with a good deal of alarm that was noted bitterly in New Orleans, who felt that the entire western theater had been neglected. In the city itself, the mood was first somber, then alarmed as the implications trickled in. The remaining Confederates in Tennessee and Kentucky had been divided between Columbus and Nashville, two hundred miles apart, with a powerful and confident Union army between them that controlled both the rivers and the railroads.

If there was any comfort to be had in New Orleans, it was that, while the way seemed open to the Union all the way into Alabama if they continued down the Tennessee, powerful forts continued to hold the Mississippi itself, together with Hollins’s mosquito fleet, which still roamed undefeated. That might buy time to raise more militia and strengthen forts upstream from New Orleans.

Rumors continued to trickle in about Farragut’s ocean fleet, which increased the general anxiety in the city. Confederate currency collapsed, and people hoarded silver coins. Coffee hit a dollar a pound and continued to climb. Flour was twenty-two dollars a barrel. Many household items were only available on the black market, and then for outrageous sums. The warehouses and docks remained silent except for military traffic, but Exchange Alley was booming, as was the usual market in liquor and women.

At the end of February, a runner somehow made his way past the blockade. He came to the office of the
Crescent
and insisted on speaking with Josephine. He then demanded five dollars to give her exclusive information about what he’d seen. She paid it.

A massive Union fleet was gathering off the delta. There were so many support boats and transports that the runner simply ran up the Stars and Stripes and steamed through. The ships were from Farragut’s fleet, and they were evidently looking for a way to get their sloops of war over the bar and into the river.

There was no disguising the information, so she wrote it as favorably as she could. The largest Union sloops, with their deep drafts, would founder getting over the bar, she insisted. Even if they did cross, Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson would easily repel any attack by wooden warships. General Lovell’s masterful defenses rendered these Gibraltars of the Mississippi impenetrable. What’s more, the mosquito fleet and its brave Southern fighting men had proven they could put superior Union forces to flight.

That night she went to the Cabildo and looked at her pocket watch until her contact appeared. She went outside and tucked a message behind the box.

Fleet Spotted Trying to Cross the Bar

Rebels Alarmed But Unprepared

Advise Continue As Planned

It was hubris of the first order, thinking she could affect the course of the battle at all, much less at this late moment. Farragut was either in the Gulf trying to cross the bar, or he was not. He either had sufficient force to reduce the forts and steam past safely, or he did not. The army following on troop transports either had sufficient forces to occupy New Orleans, or they did not. At this point they were fully committed, and would not alter their course one iota based on a stray telegram from their agent in the city. But maybe the confident message from the heart of the rebel city would be enough to encourage men for the hard fighting sure to come.

The battle would bring more bloodshed. She knew this, and it diminished the excitement she felt knowing that her strategy was soon to be tested. Less than a year had passed since the first shots at Fort Sumter, and any hopes that it would be a short, bloodless war had long since vanished, but perhaps the battle for New Orleans would break the back of the rebellion. God willing, the end of 1862 would see the end of the war. But first, many men would die. Some of them would be on the Union ships now trying to cross the bar.

Was Franklin on one of those ships? She thought yes. Two months had passed since the attack on the arsenal, and he would be recovered from his injuries, his ribs and fractured leg mended. Pinkerton would want him back in New Orleans when it fell. The city would be surly, even hostile under occupying forces. The Confederates would be scheming to retake it. There would be more need for spies than ever.

The next day, she went to Mrs. Dubreuil to leave another report
on the military situation. This one, she suspected, might not make it to
Washington and then down to the fleet before the battle commenced.

O
n March 11, Josephine went downriver to Fort Jackson to interview Major Dunbar about the preparations and find out if Union ships had been spotted in the river. The river was at flood stage, and uprooted trees and other debris had piled up behind the chain and its hulks, and part of the barricade had already given way. Hundreds of men were in the river on boats and the barricade itself working to clear the debris.

Dunbar showed her a new shipment of ten-inch columbiads that were beefing up the fort’s defenses, but her attention was on the drama playing out in the river. Some fifty men were at work trying to lever out one of the largest oak trees she’d ever seen, which had punched straight up through the deck of one of the main hulks. The hulk was now half-submerged and sinking. Other hulks had broken loose and were drifting away in the current.

Two side-wheelers came downriver, waved flags at the spotters atop the ramparts of Fort Jackson, and picked their way through the gap in the barrier. Moving with the current and under full steam, they quickly disappeared downstream.

“Where are they going?” she asked.

Dunbar lifted a hand to shield his eyes as he stared downriver. “Hollins sends a pair of boats once a week to make sure the enemy hasn’t reached Head of Passes.”

“Why don’t we have forces there permanently?”

“There’s nothing to fortify. It’s a mosquito-infested swamp. Pilottown is a dozen shacks on poles in the mud. Besides, last time the Yankees came, we drove them off easily enough.”

Yet it was obvious from the frenetic pace of work at the forts that expectations were that a major attack was soon coming.

S
he was still at the fort the next day when the rumble of heavy guns
sent soldiers and civilians scrambling to the parapets. Hollins’s two
side-wheelers came steaming into view from their downriver reconnaissance mission. Just as they reached the protection of Fort Jackson’s guns, three light-draft steamers came into view, stopping to lurk some
two miles downriver. There was a flash of light, then another, followed several seconds later by rocking booms. A jet of water spouted
into the air a few hundred yards short of the lowermost Confederate
boat. The other shell slammed into the mud of the riverbank.

“Twenty-pounders,” Dunbar said. “Good thing our boats pulled back when they did.”

Josephine had no way of telling if his assessment of the guns was accurate, but her heart was pounding. She expected to see the entire Union fleet round the bend, Farragut’s sloops followed by mortar boats. By night, the forts would be aflame, the powder stores exploding, and she would be trapped within.