by Terry Smyth
History records that Custer and all the troopers with him on that fateful hill died that day. There were no survivors. The five companies wiped out included Company E, Morris Farrar’s company, but Farrar was not among the dead. For unclear reasons he was not with the unfortunate Company E that day but with companies D, H and K, under the command of Captain Fred Benteen.
Earlier that day, about 12 miles from the Little Bighorn River, on discovering the position of a large Indian encampment, Custer had divided his force into three. Major Marcus Reno was to attack from the upper end of the village, Custer from further downstream, while Benteen was sent to scout the hills on the left flank. Custer, grossly underestimating the number of warriors in the village – it contained at least 7,000 men – decided to attack at once rather than wait for the main army under General Alfred Terry to arrive. Two hours later, as Benteen’s battalion approached the river, having encountered no resistance, trumpeter John Martin rode up at a gallop with a hastily scribbled message from Custer to Benteen: ‘Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.’7 Controversially, instead of rushing off at once to Custer’s aid, Benteen, who was known to dislike Custer intensely, calmly tucked the note into his pocket and spent 20 minutes watering the horses at a ford. It was only when distant gunfire was heard that he mounted up and led his men into battle – not to assist Custer, however, but Major Reno, who was under heavy fire across the river on a bluff that is now called Reno Hill.
Some idea of what Private Farrar experienced when Benteen arrived at Reno’s position can be gained from an account by George Herendon, one of Reno’s scouts, given shortly after the battle: ‘Captain Benteen saw a large mass of Indians gathered on his front to charge, and ordered his men to charge on foot and scatter them. Benteen led the charge and was upon the Indians before they knew what they were about and killed a great many. They were evidently much surprised at this offensive movement, and I think in desperate fighting Benteen is one of the bravest men I ever saw in a fight. All the time he was going about through the bullets, encouraging the soldiers to stand up to their work and not let the Indians whip them; he went among the horses and pack mules and drove out the men who were skulking there, compelling them to go into the line and do their duty. He never sheltered his own person once during the battle, and I do not see how he escaped being killed.’8
Before General Terry’s cavalry arrived to save the day, 47 men of Reno’s and Benteen’s commands had been killed. Morris Farrar was not one of them.
The army scout George Herendon was clearly as impressed by Captain Benteen’s leadership and courage under fire as the Cheyenne leader was of Crazy Horse’s bravery. But while Crazy Horse would be immortalised as a great warrior and military tactician, both Benteen and Reno would be forever haunted by accusations of cowardice. Why, when the fight at Reno Hill was all but finished, and the sound of heavy gunfire to the north-east told them Custer was in deep trouble just a 15-minute ride away, did they stand idly by and not press on to join forces with him?
At an 1879 court of inquiry, Benteen said he found it impossible to obey Custer’s orders because to do so would have been suicide. We can only guess whether Private Morris Farrar, 7th Cavalry, Coy. E, would agree. He never told his story. The only Australian-born participant in the most famous battle of the American West passed away peacefully in his bed in Philadelphia in 1899. Lucky to the last.
Chapter 5
The very model of a Southern gentleman
By his own admission, the irascible captain of the Shenandoah was an incorrigible child. In his memoirs, he confesses that in his birthplace of Pittsboro, a hamlet in Chatham County, in the southern state of North Carolina, ‘All the deviltry committed in and out of that hamlet the mothers of my playmates laid at my door and would exclaim, “I’ll bet it was James Iredell.”’1
James Iredell Waddell, born in 1824, makes no mention of his parents, Francis and Elizabeth, in his memoirs, revealing only that as a young boy he was adopted by his paternal grandmother. Intriguingly, he was not orphaned. His mother lived until 1869, his father until 1881.
At 13 years old, when his grandmother fell ill, he was sent to live with his maternal grandfather in Orange County, North Carolina. It was this grandfather who had named him James Iredell, after the eminent US Supreme Court Justice of that name.
At 17, for reasons he does not disclose, the teenager who had never seen the sea joined the US Navy as a midshipman. He reported for duty to Commodore William B. Shubrick aboard the warship Pennsylvania, in Norfolk, Virginia. Having never seen a boat, let alone a 120-gun man-of-war, he was mightily impressed.
Commodore Shubrick told him, ‘Young gentleman, you must remember that you are now a servant of the people. They are taxed for your support, and you should at all times be respectful to the people. They can dismantle the Navy whenever they choose to exercise the power.’2 Waddell would reflect on these words in later years, when the old ideals of service to the people were compromised; made complicated and dangerous by fickle winds of change and the whims of politics.
After graduating from the Annapolis Naval Academy in 1841, his career took him to the Gulf of Mexico for three years during the Mexican–American war provoked by the US annexation of Texas. He went on to serve in Brazil, during which time he was promoted to Second Lieutenant, thence in Panama, the Mediterranean, and China, where he saw action during the Second Opium War, of 1856–1860, so called because British demands for opening all of China to foreign merchants included legalising the opium trade. In that conflict, the US Navy provided fire support to British and French ground forces attacking Chinese positions.
Contemporaries described Lieutenant Waddell as a tall, strong, broad-shouldered and handsome man with a quick temper and a somewhat aloof air belying a kind heart. He spoke only when he had something to say and chose his words carefully. Of noble bearing, gracious and courtly in the finest traditions of Dixie, he walked with a slight limp – a wound acquired not in battle but in a duel fought with a fellow officer over the honour of a lady. Here, then, was the quintessential Southern gentleman.
In China, Waddell served on the Saginaw, a California-built vessel he considered inferior. ‘The laurel of California is fit only for furniture,’ he wrote. ‘The Saginaw was built of laurel, and she was never considered seaworthy.’3 Waddell’s assessment of the Saginaw would one day inspire his most daring plan of attack.
By 1861, he was married – to Anne Sellman Inglehart of Annapolis, Maryland – had a two-year-old daughter, Annie, and was stationed in Hong Kong. It was there word reached him that war was likely to break out between the states.
‘I was detached from the Saginaw, and ordered to the John Adams,’ he would write in his memoirs. ‘I was pleased to receive the order, I had determined if the North made war on the South to go south and assist those people. I hoped there would be peace between the sections, war would intensify hatred, without even a hope of ever restoring good fellowship, it mattered not which were victorious. I still hoped for a better feeling to prevail.’4
A better feeling did not prevail, and when the John Adams, en route to New York, reached the island of St Helena in November, Waddell was saddened to learn that the dogs of war, let loose in April after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, were now in full cry.
The first major battle of the war had been fought and won, by the South, on 21 July, on a bloody field in Virginia, just 25 miles (40km) south-west of the Union capital. The Northerners, who named battlefields after geographical features, called it Bull Run, after the river of that name. The Southerners, who named battles for localities, called it Manassas, after the nearby town.
On that field, the rebel general Thomas Jackson earned a nickname and a place in American folklore. With the Confederate line about to break under a fierce Union attack, the sight of Jackson ‘standing like a stone wall’ rallied the rebel troops to launch a successful counter-attack.5
On that day, Union casualties were 460 killed, 1,124 wounded and 1
,312 missing in action or taken prisoner. On the Confederate side, the toll was 387 killed, 1,582 wounded and 13 missing in action. It was the biggest and bloodiest battle fought on American soil thus far, yet there were longer casualty lists to come and much more blood to flow. On the same field, over three days the following August, Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee would again win the day, but the casualty count for the Second Battle of Bull Run or Second Manassas would be 14,000 for the Union and 8,000 for the Confederacy. Each battle to follow would take a heavier toll until, in the end, that grim tally would rise to 596,670 killed, wounded or missing for the North, and 490,309 for the South.
Lieutenant Waddell, like many Southerners serving in the US Navy, was shaken by the news of First Manassas. Accepting the sad fact that the war was likely to be longer and more terrible than he had imagined, and mindful that, like most men of his era, his first loyalty lay with his home state – he considered himself a Carolinian first, a US citizen second – he saw no alternative but to quit the service. By late 1861, some 370 serving commissioned officers, warrant officers and midshipmen had resigned or been discharged from the US Navy and joined the Confederate Navy, mostly retaining their Union rank.
Observing the formalities, Waddell wrote to the Secretary of the Navy resigning his commission: ‘The people of the State of North Carolina having withdrawn their allegiance to the Government, and the State from the Confederacy of the United States; and owing to these circumstances, and for reasons to be hereafter mentioned, I return to his Excellency the President of the United States the commission which appointed me a Lieutenant in the Navy, with other public documents, asking acceptance thereof.’6
Making it clear this decision had not been taken lightly, he added, ‘In thus separating myself from associations which I have cherished for 20 years, I wish it to be understood that no doctrine of the right of secession, no wish for disunion of the States impelled me, but simply because my home is the home of my people in the South, and I cannot bear arms against it or them.’7
When the John Adams arrived at New York, Waddell was visited by an old friend and roommate from naval college, Lieutenant Watson Smith, who surprised him with an offer of a senior command in the US Navy. When Waddell politely declined the offer, Smith said coldly, ‘I shall not respect friendship on the field.’
Waddell replied, ‘I shall be pleased to meet you, since you shall not respect friendship on the field.’8
The two former friends never faced each other in battle, and Watson Smith was killed in the war.
Having had no reply from the Secretary of the Navy, and assuming he had perhaps not made his position plain enough, Waddell wrote another letter of resignation – this time to President Lincoln himself – repeating his assertion that ‘it is impossible that I could bear arms against the South in this war’.9
There was no reply, and so he waited, expecting to be arrested any day. At last, a letter came from the Navy Department accepting his resignation. ‘By order of the President,’ it informed him, blunt and to the point, ‘your name has, this day, been stricken from the rolls.’10
In a seemingly chivalrous gesture, former US Navy officers were entitled to claim pay owing from their prewar service, but there was a catch, as Waddell would discover.
The catch was that the money would only be paid ‘if you will address a communication with the Department, engaging upon your word of honour, to take no part in the war now being waged against the Government’.11
Waddell would not, could not, take such an oath, and the money was never paid.
His problem now was to make his way south from a Yankee port. A friend told him that if he went to a certain stall at the Baltimore markets – the first stall on the right at the southern end of the market – and asked a certain fat butcher the price of beef, a passage south would be arranged for him.
Having satisfied himself that his wife and child were as far from harm’s way as possible – the risks in such a wartime journey being considerable – he and an unnamed companion paid the butcher $100 and boarded a schooner bound for Virginia. On learning that a Union cavalry force was sniffing about for rebels fleeing the North, Waddell and his friend disembarked at a creek on the south shore of the Potomac River. Hoping to get help from sympathetic locals to find a way overland to Richmond, they knocked at the door of a nearby house.
As Waddell tells it, ‘An old man of kind demeanour opened the door and said, “Friend or foe?”
‘“Friends,” I replied.
‘“Come in friends.”
‘I entered. The old man’s wife sat at one corner of the fire-place, and a lad of 16 years sat at the other corner, dressed in a Confederate grey uniform, infantry.
‘I was in the act of stating my mission, when turning to address the old man, he said, “That boy is my grandson. He was in the battle of Bull Run and was sent home to die,” and a big crystal tear rolled down his furrowed cheeks.’
‘“We are old and alone. They can’t hurt us. Our sons, all of them are gone. Some to return no more.”’12
Despite his grief, the old man helped the two rebels reach a village where they hired a wagon to take them to the Rappahannock River ferry. After crossing, they took a train to Richmond, where they applied for commissions in the Confederate States Navy.
The Confederate Navy, when established in 1861, had only 14 seaworthy ships compared with more than 90 US Navy vessels. Four years on, even though the rebel fleet had swelled to about 100, including submarines – one such, the Hunley, was the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in wartime – the Confederacy was still hopelessly outgunned for traditional naval warfare.
Some among the Confederate Navy top brass, convinced the war at sea would never be won by lumbering men-of-war pounding away at each other with heavy cannon, favoured guerrilla tactics: disrupting Union commerce worldwide by attacking its merchant fleet, and breaking the Union blockade of Southern ports by enticing US Navy ships to give chase to rebel raiders. It would be a game of hit and run; of catch us if you can. And it would be a game the raiders could win. Others remained unconvinced, believing what was needed was armoured ships with superior firepower.
James Waddell received his commission as a lieutenant on 27 March 1862, and was ordered to an ‘ironclad ram’ under construction and near completion in the New Orleans shipyards.
Ironclad warships were the floating fortresses of the age. Powered by steam, they were protected by armour plates and designed to ram opposing ships. At the start of the Civil War, the Union had many more warships than the Confederacy but none was armour-plated. The South did all in its power to compensate for its smaller fleet, buying ironclads from overseas, building ironclads and also converting wooden ships in Southern shipyards. The Union followed suit and rushed to armour-plate its ships.
The first battle between ironclads was fought between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia in March 1862 – just a few weeks before Waddell received his commission and his orders. The outcome, although inconclusive, proved to the South that ironclads were its best hope of breaking the Union blockade. To the navies of the world, watching with interest, it proved that the age of the wooden warship was over.
Lieutenant Waddell never got the chance to go to war on a floating fortress. He arrived in New Orleans to find the ironclad nowhere near completion, and a Union fleet steaming towards the city. He had no choice but to destroy the ship to prevent it falling into enemy hands.
James Waddell set fire to the ironclad ram. It was the first of many ships he would put to the torch, but the irony was that the first was one of his own.
Chapter 6
Into the breach
Come listen all you gals and boys,
I’s jist from Tuckyhoe.
I’m going to sing a little song,
My name’s Jim Crow.
Weel about and turn about, and do jis so,
Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.1
On Monday 16 February 1863, the world-
famous Christie Minstrels were performing at the Theatre Royal in Bourke St, Melbourne. It was a sell-out; the hit of the season. Australians just couldn’t get enough of ‘nigger minstrel’ shows featuring white men in blackface, whether on stage, on the street outside pubs or on steamers carrying crowds to race meetings.
The song and dance routine ‘Jim Crow’ – a crude caricature of a black man, and in time a term for racial segregation laws and attitudes in the post-war South – had been a crowd favourite in Australia since first performed at Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre in 1838. The minstrel shows it inspired would continue to reinforce racial stereotypes well into the 20th century, but on that particular Monday the colonists had other distractions.
The hottest table-talk topic, and the big story in Australian newspapers in February of 1863, was outrage over a popular proposal in England to reintroduce the transportation of convicts to the Australian colonies.
Transportation had officially ended in the eastern states 10 years earlier, and would continue on a limited basis in Western Australia until 1868. The last convict ship sent to eastern Australia was the Adelaide, out of London, bound for Melbourne, in 1849. Aboard were 303 male convicts who, on arrival, were to be granted conditional pardons, allowing them to live as free settlers.
When the Adelaide sailed into Port Phillip Bay, however, it was met by crowds on the docks, howling in protest, and the colonial authorities refused permission for the ship to land. The Adelaide sailed on to Sydney, arriving on Christmas Eve 1849. There, too, it was met by angry crowds but managed to get its convicts safely ashore.
Tub-thumping editorials condemned the 1863 plan to reintroduce transportation as monstrously unjust, a dangerous folly and an affront to law-abiding colonists. The Sydney Morning Herald thundered, ‘A few daring robbers who have seized people in the streets of London, and seemed to defy the control of the police and the penalties of justice, have awakened that periodical alarm which now and then seizes the English mind, and affects the penal administration of Great Britain.
