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Chapter 5 Disgust
- Texas A&M University Press
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Chapter 5 Disgust federal gunboats on patrol outside confederate river mouths and port cities numbered approximately three hundred vessels by midsummer 1862. They had tightened the Union’s economic grip on southern ports to the choking point. The Union blockade of Galveston had been underway ten months when Southern forces surrendered New Orleans on April 28 to forty-three enemy gunboats and mortar barges commanded by Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut. The cantankerous Farragut, of the memorable order bellowed later at the August 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” directed the Union’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron and was the first officer to rise to permanent flag rank in the American navy. Spaight, Duncan, and the rest of the Texas Volunteers were fighting Farragut on the Gulf of Mexico coast in the Civil War. In late September 1862, Farragut’s fleet made the Union gulf coast blockade complete when the Henry James and Rachel Seaman destroyed Fort Griffin at Sabine Pass. When Virginia native and West Point graduate Maj. Gen. John Magruder assumed command of Confederate forces in Texas on November 29, 1862, his first goal was to break Farragut’s blockade of the upper Texas gulf coast. John Magruder was a career army officer who became a favorite of Gen. Winfield Scott as an artilleryman in the Mexican-American War. He resigned his U.S. Army commission and joined the Confederacy in 1861. Gen. Robert E. Lee exiled Magruder to the Trans-Mississippi Texas command after he earned a reputation as “Prince John” for dramatic theater techniques he occasionally employed as battlefield tactics. Magruder was arrogant and ostentatious with a lisp made worse by frequent drafts of whiskey. South Carolina–born diarist Mary Chestnut, a confidante of Mrs. Varina [Jefferson] Davis, remembers how an acquaintance ridiculed Magruder’s manner and speech impediment in a comical picture of the general exhorting an army on the battlefield: “Chawge,” A4950.indb 36 A4950.indb 36 10/17/08 8:54:16 AM 10/17/08 8:54:16 AM Disgust 37 said the mimic, “and chawge fuwiously.” Magruder’s flamboyance dressed in a general’s uniform made him a clown in the eyes of many Texas Volunteers. They were ordinary frontier citizen soldiers like Ashley Spaight and William Duncan who probably sneered at the self-absorbed regular army general from Virginia. Wrapped in his bedroll inside a tent at Grigsby’s Bluff southeast of Beaumont , Capt. William Duncan opened his eyes shortly after 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1863. His sleep was interrupted by the low rumble of artillery fire erupting 112 miles away at the south end of Galveston Bay. Duncan’s wife Celima and her neighbors heard the cannon much more clearly from their homes less than thirty miles north of the bay along the Trinity River in Liberty County. Two Texas Confederate cottonclads, the Bayou City and the Neptune under command of Capt. Leon Smith, had crept under cover of darkness down the bay to attack six Federal gunboats at anchor near Galveston’s docks as well as 264 men in three companies of the 42nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment bivouacked at Kuhn’s Wharf at the end of 18th Street. General Magruder chose the predawn hours of New Year’s Day for the attack, hoping to catch the Federals semiconscious after their late night New Year’s Eve celebrations. Texas Confederate artillery, cavalry, and infantry units followed their bargeborne brethren in an extension of the surprise attack that captured or killed all the Union soldiers and seized their substantial store of supplies. The Confederates also commandeered four Union vessels, including the USS Harriet Lane. Federal sailors scuttled their commander’s flagship, the USS Westfield, before Confederate boarders could take it. The offshore Union blockade would throttle the Oleander City’s trade for the rest of the Civil War, but after New Year’s Day, 1863, Galveston was back in Texas Confederate hands. Before the victors were certain the battle was a clear-cut Confederate victory , Colonel Spaight sent Duncan an order by courier to load men and horses onto the steamer Sunflower and head for Houston “with all dispatch.” It took Duncan and sixty men until 1:30 the next morning to load themselves, gear, and horses on board the Sunflower. As they watched another of Spaight’s companies cram themselves onto the boat, a rider brought...