POLITICAL SPEAK

 

I wonder how many of you know, dear readers, that the word “Gobbledgook”, meaning a nonsensical word or phrase designed to imply importance has an actual birthday? The word was born on Sunday, 21 May, 1944,  in the pages of “The New York Times Magazine”. And it is just one of the many new English words born out of American politics. For example...

In 1812 the Massachusetts’s legislature contrived, with the help of Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced "Jerry"), to redraw the lines for the Essex County Congressional District, to insure a Thomas Jefferson Democratic-Republican won the elections there. 

According to legend it was famed painter Gilbert Stuart who first examined the twists and bends and curves of the new district (above) and observed that, to him at least,  it resembled a salamander. But whoever said it first, it was Benjamin Russell, editor of the Boston Sentinel, who renamed the proposed district a Gerrymander, after the Governor. 

So Elbridge Gerry (above), a man who signed the Declaration of Independence,  is remembered not for the good he tried to do but for his most blatant act of gaming the democratic system - cheating to win an election, It was an act so damaging to democracy his name now describes  used as a verb, (Gerrymandering), to the redrawing of congressional district to insure the election of one particular candidate or party. And allowing politicians to control the drawing of districts has Gerrymandered all negotiations out of American politics.

Almost as old is the word “Bunko”, meaning a fraud or a fraudulent spiel used by salesmen to sell bad or fake products.  Police departments around the nation still have squads of officers assigned to uncovering fraud and cheating scams, named “Bunko Squads”.  Originally the word was used to describe a speech by Felix Walker, a congressman from North Carolina.

Walker was born in 1753 in the mountains of western Virginia. He worked as a store clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, and tried homesteading with Daniel Boone in Boonsboro, Kentucky. He fought in the American Revolution, and served in the North Carolina House of Commons, the state legislature. In 1816 he was appointed to Congress, to represent the Blue Ridge ‘hollars’ and the French River valley of Buncombe Country.

The county was named after American Revolutionary War hero Colonel Edward Buncombe (above), who had been wounded and captured at the battle of Germantown, in 1777. Recovering from his wounds in occupied Philadelphia that May, Colonel Buncombe was sleepwalking when he fell and bled to death when his wounds reopened. The new county named in his honor was so large it was locally referred to as “The State of Buncombe.”Expecting a contentious re-election in 1818 and again in 1820, Felix Walker quickly learned the value of a well publicized and well received speech. And on 25 February, 1820, while the House of Representatives debated the crucial issue of the “Missouri Compromise”, deciding whether or not to take the first step that would lead to the Civil War, Congressman Walker arose and began to pontificate about the wonders of his district. 

The leadership were eager to put the matter of the Compromise to a vote, and after listening to Walker’s rambling speech for several minutes, they urged the Congressman to stop wasting time and sit down. But Walker explained that his speech was not intended for the benefit of the congress, but for the "simple folk of Buncombe County back home". And then Walker returned to his endless platitudes.

Almost overnight Walker’s speech was transformed from being about Buncombe to being “pure Buncombe” itself. And, with a little modification in spelling, it changed from "Buncombe", to "bunkum", and then to "bunk", as in a useless, pompous and empty speech, or "bunko" a false promise intended to further a fraud: an entirely new word had been added to the English political language.

Gobbledygook is a 20th century invention, and first appeared in an article about an internal government memo. The author of that memo and that article, and the inventor of the word, was Texas Congressman Maury Maverick (above), who was one of those rare politicians who actually believed that politics was a form of public service. He won a silver star and 2 purple hearts in WWI. And then he ran for Mayor of San  Antonio, Texas

He was limited to one term because during his service a communist rented a meeting room in the Civic Auditorium (above, left) . Legally Mayor Maverick could not refuse to rent the room. But his opponents were able to rabble rouse a little Texas-Hysteria, complete with demonstrations that grew until tear gas shells were lobbed back and forth in front of the auditorium. After that panic, he was defeated for re-election.

Maury Maverick later won election to Congress, where, in 1944,  he was named chairman of the "Small War Plants Committee" -  overseeing and coordinating the work of thousands of small factories all across the United States, seeking to avoid duplication of their efforts, causing shortages of raw materials and general waste.

Being a man interested in results,  Maury (above) quickly grew frustrated with the growing complexity of official language which prolonged the already almost endless committee meetings he had to attend .

He defined his new word as a type of talk which is long, vague and  pompous,  "…when concrete nouns are replaced by abstractions and simple terms by pseudo-technical jargon…".  It all made him think of the wild turkey’s back home, and their conversations which sounded like,  "gobble, gobble, gobble, gook".

In his memorandum (above) Maury ordered, in pure Texas style, "Anyone using the words “activation” or “implementation” will be shot”. The sorry state of affairs is substantiated because those very words have burrowed their way into our language and are now passively accepted. Perhaps this is because, despite Maury's protests, no one was executed. But perhaps because no one was, the continued human attraction to verbosity has since produced such nonsense such as "Pentagoneze", "Journalize", "circumlocution", and other such gobbledygook phrases used to describe Maury’s gobbledygook.

In an interesting (I think) side note, gobbledygook was the Maverick family’s second addition to the American lexicon. The first was their family name. There was a Maverick aboard the Mayflower. And 17-year old apprentice, Samuel Maverick, was shot down by 'lobster backs' at the Boston Massacre (above). But the most famous Maverick of all was another Samuel, born in Pendleton, South Carolina in 1803.

This Maverick, Samuel Augustus Maverick (above), graduated from Yale in 1825 and was admitted to the bar in 1829. A year later, he ran for the South Carolina Legislature, but his anti-secession and pro-union opinions contributed to his defeat.  

In 1835 Samuel Maverick moved to Texas. He was one of two men the rebels in the Alamo elected to the Texas Independence Convention, and he thus missed being butchered when Mexican troops captured the mission.   

He was elected Mayor and then Treasurer of San Antonio, and later served in the seventh and eighth Texas Congresses. He also dabbled in East Texas land speculation, and sometime in 1843 or 1844, as payment for a bad debt, Samuel Augustus took possession of a ranch around Matagorda Bay, Texas, on the Mexican border.

The only problem was that Maverick had no experience in ranching and no interest in learning. When he saw that every other rancher had branded their cattle, Augustus decided there was no need for him to bother.  In 1847, when Samuel moved back to San Antonio, he left his cattle under the care of his ranch hands, who saw no reason to pay more attention to their jobs than their absentee boss

They let the animals wander the open range. Cowboys who found unbranded cattle thus identified them all as the property of "Mr. Maverick", and mavericks thus became any unbranded cow or horse.

Samuel Augustus Maverick favored Texas annexation by the United States. And after it was, he opposed  secession from the union until he realized there was no stopping it.  When he died in 1870 he left holdings of over 300,000 acres and a reputation for independence - not being branded by any special interests. His son, Albert, fought with distinction for the south in the Civil War and was promoted to second lieutenant. After the war Albert Maverick  helped preserve the Alamo, donated "Maverick Park" to the city and lived to swear in his own son, Fontaine Maury Maverick (above), as Mayor of San Antonio - and later inventor of the term gobbledegook.  Albert Maverick died in 1936 at the age of 98. Maury Maverick died in 1954. He was not yet 59 years old.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy-Four

One Vicksburg woman remembered that June began with a “clear and unusually warm day. The men sought shelter from the sun's scorching rays beneath the shade of outstretched blankets and in small excavations and huts in the hill sides...” However she was also  forced to admit that it was not only the sun from which the besieged citizens sought protection. “We have slept scarcely none now for two days and two nights.” What was disturbing the lady's sleep were the 200 Federal artillery cannon arrayed against the city.

For Lida Lord (above), daughter of a minister, the siege meant sharing a large cave complex with up to 65 others, “packed in, black and white, like sardines in a box.” Forced underground by the Yankee guns the civilians suffered an endless lists of indignities. “We were...in hourly dread of snakes,” she wrote. “...A large rattlesnake was found one morning under a mattress on which some of us had slept all night.”

An 18 year old Confederate signal corpsman from Virginia, Edward Sanford Gregory, remembered, “...hardly any part of the city was outside the range of the enemy’s artillery. … Just across the Mississippi … mortars were put in position and trained directly on the homes of the people. … Twenty-four hours of each day....their deadly hail of iron dropped through roofs and tore up the deserted and denuded streets. …How many of them came and burst, nobody can have the least idea …”

In fact the Federal commissary had to account for every shell. On average each Yankee gun fired 14 rounds a day - an average one round every 2 minutes. But the guns moored across the river on rafts were not army weapons, but 6 ugly, brutal U.S. Navy 13 inch Seacoast mortars (above)  forged in Pittsburgh,  Pennsylvania. Their squat barrels alone weighed 17,250 pounds, the carriages another ton. These were not mobile artillery, but they were unusually accurate. And they weren't aimed at people's homes. They arched 200 pound projectiles from the DeSoto peninsula and precisely dropped them, half a mile away, at the corner of Washington and First Streets, along the Vicksburg waterfront.

Their target was the foundry operated by Adam Breach Reading and his brother, C.A.. Antebellum the firm had serviced the steamboat trade, and repaired the occasional locomotive (above). 

Once the war broke out they began producing 6 and 12 pound bronze cannon. Their production was only about 2 a month and perhaps 40 in all were cast before the supply of copper was cut off. But day and night the big mortars kept pounding the site, 7,000 shells in all. Occasionally they overshot, in the process destroying the offices of “The Vicksburg Whig” newspaper, and some private homes. Such insults fell into the category of collateral damage.

And these were not the only Naval guns belching fire upon the city. In the original run passed the Vicksburg batteries on the night of 16 April, 1863, the charge had been led by the ironclad USS Benton (above).  She suffered damage that night, and a more serious injury on 29 April during the ironclad duel with rebel guns at Grand Gulf.  Over the last month the Benton had been tied up along the Mississippi shore while her engines were being repaired. But Admiral Porter was never one to let a gun grow cold.

Two 1 ton 42 pound rifled cannons from the USS Benton were off-loaded at the abandoned port town of Warrenton, 2 miles south of Vicksburg. They were manhandled to within range of the South Fort (above), where they were operated by a detachment from the 34^th Iowa Infantry, and commanded by a Missouri artillery lieutenant named Joseph Atwater,   Battery Benton began to methodically pound the South Fort into silence. 

At the opposite end of the 5 mile long Federal line was Battery Selfridge, whose weapons were navy owned and operated – operated in this case by the very brave and the often sunk, Thomas Oliver Selfridge.

The outbreak of the civil war found the 26 year old naval lieutenant, and son of a Naval Captain, Thomas Selfridge (above),  in command of the 6 gun forward battery aboard the 50 gun frigate the USS Cumberland. 

On Saturday, 8 March, 1862, the Cumberland was rammed and sunk by the Confederate Ironclad CSS Virginia. Thomas did not allow his men to abandon their guns until ordered to do so, despite their shots failing to penetrate the iron skin of the rebel ship. 

As reward for his bravery, Thomas was then given command of the first Yankee submarine, the 47 foot long USS Alligator. She broke down on a test cruise up the Potomac, and had to be towed back to the naval yard by a passing schooner (above). Disgusted with the sub, and having lost his place in the promotion line for the blue water navy, Thomas now begged a transfer to the brown water navy.

In November he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander, and given command of the city class ironclad the USS Cairo, with a crew of 215 men and officers. On Thursday, 11 December, 1862, the USS Cairo was steaming up the rain swollen Yazoo river,  following 2 tin-clad gun boats, the USS Marmora and the Signal. When they suspected trouble and slowed, the impatient Lieutenant Commander Selfridge steamed ahead and ran into two torpedoes (above). The ironclad went down in  only 12 minutes, luckily without any loss of life. The "Oft Sunk" Thomas was then transferred to gun boats in less exposed positions. But he still kept pushing to get in the fight.

On 27 May of 1863, the ironclad USS Cincinnati had been sunk in 18 feet of water just north of the Vicksburg lines. Naval engineers were able to quickly raise three 9,200 pound 8 inch Columbiad cannons from the wreck. The first week in June these were mounted atop Steele's Hill, in “Battery Selfridge” (above), manned by crewmen from the USS Cairo, and commanded by its namesake. At least on land the "oft sunk" Lieutenant could not be sunk so easily.

On Saturday, 6 June, 1863, one of the Navy's mortar shells punctured the roof of the 4 story tall Washington Hotel (above, at the corner of Washington and China Street hill). Luckily the shell exploded on contact, only destroying three adjacent storage rooms. The hotel had been converted into a hospital, and as yet did not have many patients. So the only person injured was a surgeon whose leg was so mangled it had to be amputated. But the round also destroyed most the rebel morphine and quinine supplies.  The siege had not begun well for the rebel forces.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy-Three

 

The first angry crack of muskets were fired by green Yankees – with barely a month of training, and largely armed with shoddily made weapons. But these 285 men of the 8^th Louisiana Infantry of African Descent, had literal “skin in the game”.   And in broad daylight of Saturday, 6 June, 1863, they had surprised the rebel pickets around the Tallulah depot of the Vicksburg, Shreveport, and Texas Railroad. The Confederates did as the Yankees had done a week earlier at the Perkin's plantation. They retreated and reported.

However, the commander of the black Yankees, Swiss emigrant and lawyer Colonel Hermann Lieb (above) , had already achieved what he wanted. He had found the rebels and his men had drawn first blood. Now he quickly marched his under strength regiment back to the relative safety of Milliken's Bend, and set them and their companion regiments to work, building defensive positions along two levees. Lieb also called for assistance. His boss at Young's Point, Brigadier General Elias Smith Dennis, could provide only part of the remains of the battered and bloodied 23^rd Iowa Volunteers.

Three weeks earlier, in a single 3 minute charge at the Big Black River Bridge, these 200 buckeyes had l1 charged the enemy line. Eleven enlisted men and 2 officers – including their Colonel, William Kinsman - killed outright, and 3 officers and 85 enlisted men wounded - half of all Federal casualties in that battle. The shattered unit was sent to safe camps across the river to recover. The 130 survivors were now tapped to send 100 men to support the black recruits at Milliken's Bend.   Admiral Porter also promised one 1,000 pound rifle, three 9 inch smooth bore cannons and two 30 pound rifles carried by the stern wheel ironclad ram, the USS Choctaw. But the ram would not arrived until mid- morning. Colonel Lieb woke his men at 3:00 Sunday morning, and put them at the ready.

It was now obvious to the ranking rebel commander at Richmond, Louisiana, Major General Richard Scott Taylor, that the only Yankees remaining on the western shore were some “...convalescents and some negro troops.” But even if he captured Milliken's Bend and Young's Point and the entire De Soto Peninsula, he still would still not be able to directly aid Vicksburg. Lieutenant General Pemberton would not withdraw from that city. Taylor had no provisions with which to resupply the beleaguered garrison. And crossing Taylor's 4,500 men over to join Pemberton's 20,000, would merely advance the day the Vicksburg's defenders ran out of food. But Taylor had his orders, and he authorized General Walker to proceed with the assault.

Setting off at 6:00 p.m. on 6 June, Major General John George Walker pushed his division forward, re-capturing Tallulah after dark. A participant remembered the dramatic night time approach. “ In breathless silence...through dark and deep defiles marched the dense array of men, moving steadily forward; not a whisper was heard — no sound of clanking saber, or rattle of canteen and cup." 

By 2:00 a.m, on Wednesday, 7 June, the 1,000 plus man brigade of 39 year old Brigadier General James Morrison Hawes was approaching the Martin Van Buren hospital at Young's point, and General Henry McCulloch's 1,000 man brigade was within 2 miles of Milliken's Bend. Walker held Colonel Horace Randal's brigade in reserve at the Oak Grove Plantation.

The Yankee pickets, crouched behind a series of hedges, were methodically pushed back by the 19^th Texas infantry on the right, the 17^th regiment in the center, the 16^th cavalry dismounted on the left, The 16^th Texas infantry regiment followed in reserve.  Explained a Texan, "It was impossible for our troops to keep in line of battle, owing to the many hedges we had to encounter, which it was impossible to pass, except through a few gaps that had been used as gates or passageways."

Once through the last line of hedges, the rebels were facing the first cotton bale barricade. Behind it was the 8th, 9th, 11th, and 13th Louisiana Infantry Regiments (African Descent), 1st Mississippi Infantry (African Descent), and the 23d Iowa Infantry (white European descent), totaling 1,061 men. McCulloch drew his men into a line of battle just under a hundred yards from the Yankee line. As they did the Yankees unleashed a volley.  Ignoring the blast, McCulloch took the time to order his men, “No quarter for the officers! Kill the damned abolitionists!" With fixed bayonets, the Texans then charged.

The veterans of the 23^rd Iowa might have had time for a second volley, but that broken regiment had no more to give,. They scattered and ran for the last barricade on the final levee. The black soldiers could only muster a few scattered shots, either because they lacked the training with their weapons or the weapons failed.  General Lorenzo Thomas noted, "Both sides freely used the bayonet - a rare occurrence in warfare...two men lay side by side, each having the other's bayonet in his body. . . .A teenage cook, who had begged for a gun when the enemy was seen approaching, was badly wounded with one gunshot and two bayonet wounds. In one Negro company there were six broken bayonets." It would be the longest bayonet charge of the war.  Afterwards,  General McCulloch reported that of the wounds received by his men, 'more are severe and fewer slight than I have ever witnessed among the same number in my former military experience....This charge was resisted by the negro portion of the enemy's force with considerable obstinacy...” Some might have chosen another word, such as desperation, or even courage.

As the Confederates came over that barricade with bayonets and swinging their muskets as clubs, Yankee Lieutenant David Cornwell saw one of the Union soldiers, a “very large and strong-willed” Sergeant named “Big” Jack Jackson, charge forward “...like a rocket. With the fury of a tiger he sprang into that gang and crushed everything before him. There was nothing left of Jack's gun except the barrel and he was smashing everything he could reach. On the other side of the levee, they were yelling 'Shoot that big nigger!' Cornwell saw the Jack Jackson, “..daring the whole gang to come up and fight him. Then a bullet reached his head and he fell full on the levee.”

For over an hour the untrained Yankees struggled with the rebels, black and white skinned southerners murdering each other with abandon. Then the Yankees fell back through their own camp and toward the second levee and the second barricade. The Confederates followed , as Joseph Blessington of the 16^th Texas remembered, “bayoneting them by hundreds.”   As the Confederates gathered to storm the second barricade, the USS Choctaw steamed into view, big guns blazing.

General McCulloch ordered his men under cover behind the first levee. They looted the Yankee camp, searching for equipment and food they could not find in their own army, and they began killing any wounded black Yankees they found. It was alleged they also killed 2 white Yankee officers.  The murdering continued until McCulloch saw a second Yankee gun boat sailing up the river toward their position. Realizing he lacked the strength to crush these black men in blue uniforms, he ordered his entire brigade to pull back to the Oak Grove Plantation.

The rebel's limped back. Out of the  1,000 men present the Confederates had suffered 44 killed and 131 wounded and 10 missing. For the three under strength black Yankee regiments, it was a bloody disaster - 100 killed outright, 285 wounded, and 266 captured and murdered or returned to slavery.  Except those numbers deserve a closer look. Black Yankees, with barely a month of training and substandard equipment,  had not run. They had not melted away. They had stood and fought. They had inflicted almost 200 casualties on their foe, 20% of the attackers.  Given the worse of everything, they had given their best.

At Young's Point, the rebel's of Hawes' brigade drove in the Yankee pickets, but then finding themselves facing well armed and organized convalescing patients behind barricades, and three Federal gunboats providing covering fire, the Confederates withdrew without even launching an attack. For all the effort and sacrifice of men and material by Walker's "Greyhounds", General Taylor would later note “As foreseen, our movement resulted, and could result, in nothing.”

But there was a result, and even a victory.  In December of 1863, United States Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, (above) an early advocate of black soldiers, wrote a letter to Lincoln concerning the debate over their fighting ability. "Many persons believed, or pretended to believe..., that freed slaves would not make good soldiers,” he told his President. These faint hearts were worried the ex-slaves “...would lack courage, and could not be subjected to military discipline. Facts have shown how groundless were these apprehensions. The slave has proved his manhood, and his capacity as an infantry soldier, at Milliken's Bend (7 June, 1863), at the assault upon Port Hudson (27 May, 1863), and the storming of Fort Wagner (South Carolina, 18 July, 1863)."

The ground the Confederacy had stood upon had shifted. And although the lies and obfuscation used  to defend the myths about antebellum southern culture, would delay the triumph of the truth for almost another century, the fuse was at least lit.  It was already past due time for that to happen. 

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VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy-Two

 

The Hoosier pickets were not the best the Federal army had to offer, merely average. But after 2 ½ years of war, the level of average had been raised. These members of the 60^th Indiana Volunteer regiment, were veterans of Shiloh and Champion Hill. And in the early morning dark of Sunday, 31 May, 1863, when Texans in overwhelming numbers waded across the Bayou Vidal, Louisiana (above), these Hoosiers did not panic. 

The pickets sent word back to their captain, and then picked their shots. They forced the rebels to take shelter, expend their ammunition and energy. And then the Yankees fell back a hundred yards or so, to repeat the exercise.

The Texans were brave, eager and well trained. But this was their first taste of real combat, and the man who had molded their corporate personality for 8 months was 46 year old Brigadier General Henry Eustace McCulloch. The McCulloch family were distant ancestors of George Washington's.  The revolutionary war had wiped out the McCulloch family fortune, leaving them, like most Americans along the frontier, constantly being herded west by creditors. 

In 1835, when Mexican General Santa Ana ordered slavery finally ended in the state of Tejas, Henry's older brother Ben had followed their Tennessee neighbor, David Crockett, south, to defend slavery.  Only a case of measles prevented Ben from dying romantically at the Alamo with his hero. But in 1837 both Ben and Henry McCulloch sought and found new lives and fortunes in the Lone Star state as supporters of first slavery and then succession.

General Ben McCulloch (above)  would die in March of 1862, at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas. General Henry McCulloch was then given command of green troops dispatched to Arkansas. 

Not until November of 1862 did Henry (above)  relinquished the division to Major General Walker. Henry then resumed command of the division's 3^rd Brigade - 4 regiments of infantry and 1 of dismounted cavalry, supported by a 4 gun battery of light artillery, under Captain William Edgar. After some 700 miles of marching and steaming back and forth across Arkansas and Louisiana, these eager men were seeking to slice the jugular of Grant's army.

About a half mile behind the skirmish line, at a wooden dock called Somerset Landing, was a company detachment of the 60^th Indiana. They had been sent here in the tradition of Roman Legionaries, to listen and look for the enemy where the enemy were not supposed to be. Finding them the Yankees were to report and retreat. By circumstance the Yankees were also protecting some 300 runaway slaves, who had come into their lines seeking refuge. And a refugee was the third reincarnation of Somerset Landing in the last six weeks - since General Grant had made this stretch of Old Man River the fulcrum of the American Civil War.

People still called it Somerset Landing, even after it fell into the hands of Judge John Perkins, who already owned a plantation across the river from Natchez, Mississippi. With the addition of Somerset's 17,500 acres, and its 250 slaves, Perkins became one of the richest and most influential men in the slave states. His eldest son, John Perkins junior, eventually became a United States Congressman, and was the “oldest and best friend” of Jefferson Davis, eventually became the Confederate President, and whose plantation was just across the Mississippi. Then in 1858, Perkins junior was deeded Somerset by his then 68 year old father.

So it was no small sacrifice when John junior burned the mansion and buildings of Somerset, before they were captured by Grant's army.  Grant was then snaking his way down the levees of Tansas County, on his way to Hard Times Landing. He had no interest nor ability to confiscate any cotton. But that did not stop Perkins from burning 2,000 bales to spite the hated Yankees. Perkins also destroyed barns and out houses, denying their use to the abandoned human beings used as slaves who were now left to fend for themselves.

While advancing toward Somerset Landing that morning, one member of the rebel 3^rd Battalion recalled, “...we passed by farm after farm all deserted and the buildings going to decay.” Between the patriotic zeal of owners like John Perkins, and the careless destructiveness of the passing Yankees, by 31 May almost all the great river front plantation homes of Louisiana had been burned to the ground.

The country had been picked clean and would not support human life for at least another year.

Alerted by their pickets, the Yankees quickly abandoned their camp, retreating to the levee along the river. There, with the help of the liberated slaves, they hastily began a breastwork of scattered cotton bales. While the rebel infantry paused to loot the Yankee camp, rebel Captain Edgar brought forward his four 6 pound cannon and began to blast away at the barricade. But before Edgar's guns do do much damage there appeared on the river the USS Carondelet (above)  –a 512 ton twin stern wheel ironclad, 175 feet long, carrying seven 8 and 9 inch smooth bore cannon, crewed by 251 men, and ably commanded by 36 year old acting Naval Lieutenant John McLeod Murphy.

The Carondelet exchanged shots with the rebel cannon, killing McCulloch's staff officer Gallatin Smith, and forcing the rebels to take cover. And under that protective fire civilian ship's Captain C. Dan Conway ran his steamboat “The Forest Queen” up to the dock and evacuated the threatened slaves and soldiers. By 10:00 am, the prey had been snatched right out from under General McCulloch's nose. Within a few minutes, Generals Walker and Taylor arrived, with more troops, only to find their noose empty.

The engagement – such as it was – had cost the Yankees one soldier taken prisoner. Five abandoned slaves were also captured. It was enough to boost the confidence of the still green Texans. Captain Eljiah Petty, of the 17^th infantry wrote, “If this is all the fear, I don’t mind a battle.” But the Generals knew better. As one rebel had noted before the move across Bayou Vidal, “...there was supposed to be...(a) heavy force” -  at Somerset Landing. But there was not.

There were supposed to be long trains of wagons filled with food and ammunition, crawling along the levee - the supply line feeding Grant's 45,000 men in Mississippi. Instead there was only the desolation of burned out plantation houses and cotton fields going to weed. Walker and Taylor must have  realized what the lack of Yankees meant. There was no jugular vein on the Louisiana bank of the Mississippi River to cut. As Taylor had warned theater commander General Kirby Smith a week before, Grant had shifted his supply line. 

There should have been a system of mounted spies, gathering information of Yankee movements on the Louisiana shore. But so desperate was the Trans-Mississippi for men and horses, no such web of spies had ever been established. So General Walker's next move was into the dark - to strike north toward New Carthage. Perhaps in that town Grant would be vulnerable.

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