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| A Louisiana Swamp. |
1863. |
Jan. |
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[596]
These difficulties were enhanced by obstructions placed in the streams, and fortifications at important points.
Near Pattersonville, on the Teche, was an earthwork called Fort Bisland, with revetments; and well up the Atchafalaya, at Butte à la Rose, was another.
There was also an armed steamer called the J. A. Cotton on the Bayou Teche.
These were intended to dispute the passage of those important waters by National gun-boats from Red River, or forces by land from New Orleans.
Some operations by National forces had already been made on the Teche, and it was now determined to drive the Confederates from their strong places in the vicinity of Brashear City, and to destroy their gun-boat.
An expedition for that purpose was led by General Weitzel, accompanied by a squadron of gunboats under Commodore McKean Buchanan, who fought his traitor brother so bravely on the Congress in
Hampton Roads.1 Weitzel left Thibodeaux on the 11th of January,
and placing his infantry on the gun-boats at Brashear City, he sent his cavalry and artillery by land.2 All moved slowly up the Bayou to Pattersonville, and at Carney's Bridge, just above, they encountered the first formidable obstacles.
These consisted of the piles of the demolished bridge, against which lay a sunken old steamboat laden with brick, and in the bayou below, some torpedoes.
Just above these was the very formidable steamer Cotton, ready for battle, and batteries (one of them Fort Bisland) were planted on each side of the bayou, and defended by the Twenty-eighth Louisiana and artillerymen, in all about eleven hundred men.
Buchanan proceeded to attack the obstructions and the batteries on the morning of the 15th,
when, after a short engagement, the stern of the Kinsman was lifted fearfully but not fatally by a torpedo that exploded under it. Just then a negro, who had escaped from the Cotton for the purpose, warned them of another torpedo just ahead.3 Without
1 See note 2, page 362. His squadron consisted of the gun-boats Calhoun (flag-ship), Kinsman, Estrella, and Diana.
2 Weitzel's force consisted of the Eighth Vermont, Seventy-fifth and One Hundred and Sixtieth New York, Twelfth Connecticut, Twenty-first Indiana, Sixth Michigan, a company of the First Louisiana Union cavalry, and artillery under Lieutenants Bradley, Carruth, and Briggs. A portion of the Seventy-fifth New York, under Captain Fitch, volunteered as sharp-shooters.
3 A correspondent of the New York Times, with the expedition, wrote that one of the torpedoes fished up bore, the name of a New York firm who manufactured them, and remarked, concerning the good offices of the fugitive slave who warned them of their danger,--“While people in the North are enriching themselves by manufacturing these hellish things to blow our brave men to atoms, a poor black ‘animal’ down here has friendship and humanity enough to come and warn them off from their terrible doom.”
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