This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[785]
that order to General Weitzel on the date of its receipt,1 and on the 8th of December at 9.15 A. M. I received a telegram from him stating that he was at Bermuda embarking his troops.2 We took out one steamer at Fortress Monroe to make out our complement of transportation.
On the night of the 8th of December, I took Lieutenant-Colonel Comstock on board my boat, shook hands with General Grant, and said: “Now, we will get off as soon as we can.”
I went down the river and met Admiral Porter on the morning of the 9th, stating that we were ready to proceed.
He said that the powder vessel was not quite ready, but it would be ready directly; and he said that at any rate it would not be advisable to go to sea in the state of the weather then.
On Saturday afternoon, December 10, I asked Colonel Comstock and General Weitzel to go with me to Norfolk to see Admiral Porter on board his flag-ship.
The conversation with Porter related mostly to the powder-boat and the time when it would be ready.
Both Comstock and myself told Porter that haste was necessary, and that probably it would be better to dispense with the powder vessels rather than to delay and give the enemy a chance to send down reinforcements; that the enemy, having made a reconnoissance of my position that morning, might have discovered that some of our troops had been withdrawn, and knowing that the expedition had been contemplated would probably guess its destination.
The admiral said he was hurrying up the putting of the powder on board as much as he could.
We then discussed the weather, which looked unfavorable, and I telegraphed General Grant that the army was ready, and was waiting for the navy.3
On the next Monday evening the fleet not having yet sailed, I ordered nearly all the transports to move up Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac River and Matthias Point, and then if they could, to return in the night-time and anchor off Cape Henry.
They were started at 3 o'clock on the morning of Tuesday the 13th.
We knew the enemy continually kept scouts in Northumberland County, Va., at the mouth of the Potomac, to report every transport that passed up and down the bay, in fact, everything that occurred there.
We had frequently seen their reports in the Richmond papers.
I ordered the
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.