THE following spring the commodore ordered the Anderson to New Orleans to refit, and while there an official letter came to me from the Navy Department detaching me from the West Gulf Squadron and granting me two months’ leave of absence, with orders to report at the expiration of that time to the officer commanding at Cairo, Illinois, for service in the Mississippi Squadron, which was then under the command of Rear Admiral David D. Porter.
On inquiry I found that I was one of the half dozen officers selected as a contingent from the West Gulf Squadron to be placed in command of Porter’s fleet of river steamers, which had been transformed into vessels of war.
As the fighting was all over in our department since the capture of Mobile, and as there was a decided novelty in the river fleet, I did not object to this transfer, more particularly as a furlough was the agreeable accompaniment of the change.
So I went home, and of course thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the first leave of absence I had obtained for more than three years. I found my only little baby, whom I had never seen, grown into quite a child of two and a half years, who would scarcely come to the stranger in uniform she had never seen, who called her daughter. And there were other family changes, some of them very sad ones, but in those busy war-days we had little time for sentiment.
Like everything else in this world, my two months’ furlough soon passed, and I bade everyone good-by, and took the train for Cairo. And a vile hole it was in the early spring of 1864, the streets flooded and almost impassable and the wretched hotels filled with soldiers, gamblers, and the ruck that always hang about the skirts of an army.
When I reported to Commodore Pennock, he was kind enough to say that he wanted me with him at the Naval Station at Mound City, a few miles above Cairo, and so I moved out there and was acting as executive officer of the Navy Yard, as we called it, when the rebel General N. B. Forrest, in April, made his famous—or infamous—assault on Fort Pillow, a few miles below us, carrying it by storm and massacring a large number of the colored troops who were defending the work.
The mangled survivors of this affair were brought at once up to our naval hospital at Mound City, and we improvised beds as best we could for their accommodation. General Forrest is still living, I believe, and I understand that he denies that any extraordinary cruelty was manifested by his conquering troops. But I speak from my own observation; and although it is now thirty years ago, the recollection of the horrors we saw among those poor mangled negroes is still fresh in my mind, as are the stories of the dying that were poured into our ears.
It was a brutal, cowardly massacre, pure and simple, and no amount of attempted explanation can make it anything else. It was only one sad episode of a cruel war, but it was an episode worthy of Alva, “the Spanish Butcher.”
To convict the man, it is only necessary to read his original dispatch to the Confederate government, which fortunately is still preserved as a double evidence of his brutality and his illiteracy. It reads: “We busted the fort at ninerclock and scatered the niggers. The men is still a cillenem [killing them] in the woods. Them as was cotch with spoons and brestpins and sich was cilled and the rest was payrolled and told to git.”
Not long after this event, Commodore Pennock sent for me, one day, and handed me my orders to the command of the ironclad Benton, then at anchor off Natchez, and suggested that I had better take the first steamer from Cairo down to my new ship.
In a way this was a piece of good fortune. The Benton had been at different times the flagship of both Admirals C. W. Davis and David D. Porter, and she was the largest vessel on the river and carried the heaviest armament. The trouble was that she was a very slow ship, and against the strong Mississippi current, going up stream she could scarcely make four knots an hour.
However, she had spacious quarters for her commanding officer, albeit they were directly over the boilers; and she was the division flagship, which carried a certain distinction; while if she ever should get into a fight again she had the weight of metal to make her a very formidable opponent. So I packed my traps and was soon steaming down the river on the fine passenger steamer Olive for my new command.
The torrid heat of a waning July day was being tempered by the delicious evening breeze that was blowing up the Mississippi River as I sat aft on the berth deck of my ship smoking a post-prandial cigar in one of the ports and trying to make up my mind to get into my evening togs and go on shore to make a long-postponed call. I had now been several months in command of the Benton, and on the whole they had not been unpleasant nor altogether unprofitable months.
The navy was just then very busily engaged in keeping up a close patrol of the river to prevent the Confederate trans-Mississippi army in Arkansas, under the command of General Dick Taylor and Prince Polignac, from crossing over the river and effecting a junction with General Joe Johnston, which they were very desirous of accomplishing.
Cooped up where they were, these twenty-five thousand Confederates, with an abundance of military stores obtained from English ships at the mouth of the Rio Grande, did no particular harm; but let them get on the other side of the river and they would make a very material difference in the comfort of Sherman, who was then starting on his famous march through Georgia.
The navy was expected to prevent this passage of the river by keeping up an incessant patrol day and night, and thus a crossing of the army in force was an impossibility. We were constantly capturing rebel deserters, or stray couriers with letters from the Confederate leaders to Johnston; and occasionally, no doubt, some escaped us, but not many of them, I imagine.
I wish to emphasize the vital importance to us of keeping this patrol effective, and the great value it would be to the rebels to break it, as this has an important bearing upon the incident I am about to relate.
The ship stationed next above me had been the light-armored (we called them tin-clad) steamer—Brilliant I will call her, although that was not her name. She was commanded by Acting Master Daniel Glenny, a native of Connecticut, a bright, active young officer, an excellent seaman, and a man who had always impressed me favorably.
As I was his senior officer and for the time commanding the division, Glenny always came on board the Benton to report when our ships met, which was almost daily, and I had often had him at dinner with me, and had come to know him intimately. A few weeks before this evening he had been ordered to a beat thirty miles farther up the river, not far from Skipwith’s Landing, and consequently I had not seen him for perhaps a month.
As I sat in the port smoking and dreaming of home, my orderly came up and said the officer of the deck reported that a tug was steaming up the river, and that she had signaled, “I wish to communicate.”
I at once went on deck, and by that time the tug was within hail.
“Tug ahoy!”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“What tug is that? Don’t come any nearer at present!”
“This is the Rover, sir. I have special orders for you from Commodore Morris from New Orleans.”
“Very well; steam up under my quarter and come on board!”
The tug came near, and as she touched our overhang we lowered a side ladder, and an officer in uniform came on board and handed me an official document.
I went down to my cabin, opened the letter, and read:—
A. V. LIEUT. ROBERT KELSON, Commanding U. S. S. Benton:
Sir,—Upon the receipt of this order you will at once detach your executive officer and order him to proceed immediately, without any delay, in the tug Rover up the river to the U. S. S. Brilliant, where he will take command of that vessel, putting her commanding officer, Acting Master Daniel Glenny, in close confinement.
When this duty is accomplished send the Rover back to me here.
Very Respt’y,
Yr. Obt. Servant,
(SIGNED) HENRY W. MORRIS,
Commodore Commanding West Gulf Squadron.
Here was a pretty kettle of fish! And what did it all mean? I touched my bell. “Orderly, send the captain of the Rover down here to me.”
The ensign in command of the tug came down to my cabin. “Captain,” said I, “do you know what duty you are on?”
“No, sir; except that I was to give you a letter and then follow your instructions.”
“You have no idea of the contents of this letter?”
“I haven’t the least idea, sir.”
“Very well, I shall send an officer up the river with you to-night to the Brilliant. You will find her not far below Skipwith’s, I fancy. Go on board your tug, sir, and be all ready to proceed up the river within an hour.”
The officer bowed and retired. Then I sent for my executive, Mr. Willetts, feeling as though I were in a dream. He was a plain, straightforward man with no more imagination in his composition than a boarding pike. When I read the commodore’s orders to him, he merely said, “Shall I put Captain Glenny in irons, sir?”
I had never thought of that unpleasant detail in the affair, and could have beaten Willetts for the suggestion.
“The commodore says ‘close confinement,’ sir,” he added.
“Yes, Mr. Willetts; but I think confinement to his stateroom, with possibly a sentry on the guards and another at the door of his room, will be near enough to close confinement until we get further orders. I can see nothing in this dispatch to warrant me in subjecting an officer to the indignity of irons.”
So I packed Willetts off within the hour and turned in for a sleepless night in my berth, with the problem running through my brain, “What on earth has Glenny been doing to get him into this scrape?”
Three evenings after that eventful night a vessel was seen steaming down the river showing the Brilliant’s night signal. She passed us, rounded to astern of the Benton, and then steamed up within hailing distance.
“Benton ahoy!” came the hail in Willetts’ familiar voice. “I wish to communicate, sir. Can I come alongside?”
“Very well; come on board yourself.”
I heard the captain’s gig called away, and in a few minutes Willetts, looking as pale as a ghost, stood in my cabin.
“Captain Kelson,”—he stammered.
“What has happened to you, sir?” I queried, for the man’s manner warned me that something was wrong.
“Captain Glenny escaped last night, sir!” he said, as he sank into a chair.
“Escaped!”
And then he told me as much of the story as he knew, which was later supplemented, bit by bit, from different sources.
Three months before, Glenny had made the acquaintance of a Miss ——, a very bright, dashing girl, devoted to the cause of the Confederacy and willing, as she often boasted, to sacrifice anything but her honor for her country. She lived near the river, within Glenny’s beat, and she soon discovered that he was attracted by her beauty, which was very striking, and it was not long until she had made him her willing and abject slave, body and soul.
Of the details of the affair we could learn little except that she came on board the Brilliant almost daily and Glenny visited her very frequently on shore. But this we did discover: that for love of this girl the young officer at last became a traitor and actually entered into a compact with the rebel officer commanding on shore to deliver up his ship to the Confederates.
The consideration for this treachery was to be a major’s commission in their army, a hundred bales of cotton, and one hundred thousand dollars in gold, while, as it was understood, the girl promised to marry Glenny when the deed was accomplished.
A plan was arranged by which a body of the Brilliant’s crew was to be given liberty on shore to go to a negro ball on a certain night, when the Confederates were to come off in boats in large numbers and take possession of the steamer, Glenny making a mere nominal resistance.
The sailors were duly sent on shore to the dance; but through a suspicion on the part of a vigilant junior officer of the Brilliant, the consummation of the plot was thwarted and the attempted surprise failed.
Meanwhile, news of the proposed plan was carried down to New Orleans by a deserter from Dick Taylor’s corps, and it came to Commodore Morris, who took prompt action by sending to me to place Glenny under arrest.
Mr. Willetts told me that he obeyed my orders by placing Captain Glenny under close arrest, and had stationed a sentry at the door of his stateroom and another at the window, which opened on the guards. The first night, however, at midnight, Glenny quietly got up, dressed himself, and, looking out of the window, said in a calm voice to the sentry, “Take this pitcher to the scuttle butt and bring me some cool water!”
With the instinctive impulse of obedience to a commanding officer, the man at once obeyed and went for the water, without a second thought.
During his absence Glenny crawled out of the window to the guards and lowered himself down by a rope into a small fishing-canoe they had towing alongside. He then cut the painter, and in a moment he had dropped astern in the swift current and vanished in the darkness!
We never saw Glenny again, but I heard of him a couple of years later from a Texan who had met him, under another name, in the Confederacy at about the time of Lee’s surrender.
One thing is very sure: had the rebels succeeded in getting possession of the Brilliant, as they planned, and had obtained her signal book from Glenny, they could have filled her with armed men, steamed down to the Benton, made their night number and ran alongside of us without exciting suspicion, and, pouring a large body of men on my decks, could have captured my ship almost without a struggle.
Then, under cover of the Benton, the trans-Mississippi army could readily have crossed the river; and with such a body of fresh, well-armed men in his rear, Sherman might never have reached the seaboard. Slighter chances than this have changed the course of mighty campaigns, as all know who have read history.
In conclusion, I wish to say that this incident is veritable truth, entirely uncolored, and a bit of unwritten history of the only naval traitor of the great Civil War.