It was 7:00 a.m. on Friday, October 3, 1862, when the first musket shots cracked from the woods below Crumpler’s Bluff at a sudden bend of the Blackwater River in southeastern Virginia. On the sluggish river, a trio of Union gunboats strained to out-race the enemy fire.
Leading the way was the twenty-eight-man USS Commodore Perry, skippered by Lieutenant Commander Charles Flusser, with Lieutenant William Barker Cushing serving as his executive officer. Following behind were two light gunboats: the USS Hunchback, commanded by acting Lieutenant Edmund R. Calhoun, and the diminutive USS Whitehead under the command of Lieutenant Charles A. French.
Their destination was a small town called Franklin, a transportation hub of the Seaboard and Roanoke Railway of great logistical value to Confederate general Robert E. Lee. On a joint mission to destroy the rail bridge with Major General John A. Dix, Flusser’s job was to cut off the seven thousand Confederate soldiers in and around Franklin as they retreated, driven from town by Dix’s 7th Army Corps.
The evening before, Flusser had brought the group to a point three miles south of Franklin, where the gunboats stopped to wait out the darkness in company. Morning broke surprisingly clear and mild for autumn, and after 5:45 a.m. breakfast, the men pushed slowly upriver, shelling the banks as they went.
The Blackwater River, which fed into the Albemarle Sound, was narrow and crooked, and as the ships moved upstream, their crews had to run hawsers ashore at the bends, “making them fast to the trees to haul their bows around.”
Three-quarters of a mile below Franklin, the Perry came to the first of several sharp turns in the channel. Flusser ordered a line hauled out to shore … and that was when the rebels sprung their trap. Riflemen concealed high on the bluff sheeted the gunboats with fire.
Flusser reacted quickly, trying to steam past the ambush—but the river was so narrow the Perry ran hard into the bank.
As she thumped to a halt, Will, in charge of her forward gun, looked over the ship’s side and saw a large group of infantry emerge from the woods. Their leader and standard-bearer, a “splendid fellow with long curly hair” rushed toward the ship waving his sword, cheering on his men, urging them to board the steamer.
He was unaware that his comrades had not followed him down the bank. Muskets fired from the Perry’s deck, and he fell dead into the mud not ten feet from her rail.
Within a few minutes, Flusser had the boat off the bank and steamed ahead, Will’s bow gun ripping into the treeline with nine-inch grape, shell, canister, and shrapnel. “This fire covered the Hunchback as she rounded the bend, and she in turn covered the Whitehead.”
But the Commodore Perry was first around the bend—and first to come close to the barricade ahead. Made of trees “felled from both banks,” it reached “right across the stream” to impede the gunboats’ progress.
Her crew no sooner realized they were caught in an ambush than “every tree and bush and log sent forth a storm of lead—and a yell burst forth that seemed to come from all directions.”
Flusser normally would have had the barricade cleared away, but the intense fire made sending anyone ashore out of the question. Instead he ordered his few men to take cover below. “It seemed madness to fight [them] on an open deck,” Will recalled. The rebels vastly outnumbered them and held the high ground atop the bluff to the right. Howling like demons, they poured torrents of musket fire down on the Perry’s deck.
The situation worsened. With one side of the boat still against the land, her decks level with the elevated bank, and not twelve feet of water on the other side, Will “saw a mass of infantry rushing to board us under cover of their comrades’ fire.”
There was no place to hide. The choice, he knew, was to fight or die.
His instincts took over at once. “Calling for volunteers, I dashed out [into the open], cast loose the howitzer (on field carriage), and assisted by six men and an officer, Mr. [John] Lynch, wheeled it to the [right] side of the deck,” he recalled vividly. Under withering fire, Lynch, a master’s mate, took a rifle ball to the heart and fell dead on the spot. The rest of the men also became quick casualties under the hail of fire. “I was again alone, all the volunteers being dead or wounded at my feet. Without waiting a minute, I sighted the piece, and sent the canister crashing against the dense mass [of rebels], now about thirty yards away.”
As Flusser reported, Will, “amid a storm of bullets, took sure and deliberate aim at the enemy … and completely silenced their fire at that point.”
But it was only a brief lull. The rebel snipers kept shooting down from the bluff, their infantrymen resuming their charge until Flusser had to call his men back on deck to fend them off. “[We] were now sent to quarters and a general fight commenced.” Will remembered. “The sailors working the great guns, throwing grape and canister, and our marines shielded by the hammocks [placed against the rails for cover] picking the sharpshooters out of the treetops—from whence they fell with a crash and shriek [at] every moment. Our only hope was now to fight our way out—as no army force appeared to aid us.”
In fact, Dix’s troops were nowhere near the action. On September 30, the general had sent a messenger to inform Flusser he intended to delay the attack on Franklin a week because of “unexpected obstacles,” but the messenger missed the departure of the Perry and her companions by five hours, and the dispatch went undelivered. Surrounded by thousands of rebel troops, Flusser’s little fleet with its two hundred men—their numbers depleted by the typhoid epidemic—was on its own.
“For four hours we fought them at the barricade,” Will wrote, “and in that time routed them five times.” Flusser kept “hoping to hear the guns of the land force” but was disappointed. “No such welcome sound” reached his ears.
At 10:15 a.m., he abandoned any lingering hopes that help might arrive and ordered his vessels to turn downstream, keeping up “a fire of great guns and musketry.” As they made hard back toward the Chowan, the order of the boats reversed—the Hunchback now leading the way at a heavy steam, followed by the Whitehead, with the Commodore Perry bringing up the rear.
But the Confederates continued springing their ambush. To block the gunboats’ retreat “trees were cut down below [them] and rifle pits thrown up on every bluff and wooded point.” Flusser and his crew were trapped.
Will remembered the harrowing passage years later. “The leading vessels, rounding a bend, caught the fire of about a thousand infantry concealed in [one of the rifle pits]—and after suffering severely, ran by. We were some distance behind, and when we came around were entirely unexpected by the butternuts … right on their flank and only two hundred yards [away].”
The rebels meant to sweep the crews of the first two gunboats with fire from either shore, wiping them out to a man before they could pass through the log barrier. But the Perry, coming on from some distance behind, caught the ambushers with “an awful raking fire,” pouring “a terrific fire of shrapnel and grape shot through their trench till we could actually hear the bones crack, and see the limbs fly from the mangled bodies. In five minutes, the place was in our possession and that of the dead.”
But Flusser’s gunboats still needed to escape before enemy reinforcements arrived—and their one path to safety remained closed off by the fallen trees. Unable to get around them, they plunged straight on through, the Hunchback leading the trio of vessels on a full head of steam.
Its skipper, Lieutenant Colhoun, must have had his prayers answered. Somehow the barrier gave way before the Hunchback’s bow. Crashing past it, the boats were soon out of danger and into the Chowan.
“At last, tired and feeble, we fired our last shot, and were clear once more, but with decks covered with the dead and wounded, and slippery with blood—and the whole ship like a sieve, so full of bullet holes was she,” Will recalled. “We had done our duty and could only regret that the army had failed us, and that our blue jackets had fallen in vain.”
Casualties aboard the Perry were bearable. Of her twenty-eight hands, two were dead, and ten wounded—two mortally, Flusser believed. In his post-action report, he cited several officers and crewmen for meritorious conduct, but reserved his most detailed comments for his former student.
“I desire to mention as worthy of praise for great gallantry Lieutenant William B. Cushing, who ran the fieldpiece out amid a storm of bullets, took a sure and deliberate aim at the rebels, and sent a charge of canister among them that completely silenced their fire.” He did not fail to commend John Lynch, who “assisted Mr. Cushing, and here met his death like a brave fellow, as he was.”
All in all, the outcome could have been worse. “Bullets seemed to miss our small party purposely,” Will later wrote Cousin Mary. “There are more than a thousand bullet marks on our vessel.”
He understandably believed the mission a “fortunate action” for himself. Though he was no stranger to naval combat, the close-up fighting on the Blackwater River was a baptism of fire. He had taken charge of a deadly situation to save his boat under Lieutenant Flusser’s supportive eye. It was the first time in his career that Will gained proper recognition for his bold leadership qualities and was rewarded in a manner he’d only dreamed of in the past.
Will was maturing under fire. “The official report will probably be published, in which case you will see it,” he informed Mary. “I could tell you what it says, but will not do so, for fear you might think me too set up.” Whether “set up” or not, he delivered his news in a subdued tone that distinguished him from the prankish adolescent booted out of Annapolis. “I will only say that I have since been given command of [a] gunboat for my services. I can justly be proud of [this] at the age of nineteen. It is a thing before unheard of in the service.”
The name of Will’s gunboat was the Ellis, the rebel steamer seized off Roanoke back in February after her captain, James W. Cooke, defiantly met the Union boarding party with an upraised cutlass. As federal sailors poured over the Ellis’s sides, Cooke had ordered his men to blow up the ship, but a coal heaver discovered them trying to ignite her magazine and quickly alerted the boarders. Thwarted in his explosive designs, the sword-waving Cooke had resisted capture until shot in the right arm, bayoneted, and thrown down to the deck.
If Will heard about Cook’s tigerish defense of his ship, he certainly would have thought him a man after his own heart. In any event, Will was impressed by the gunboat’s capabilities. As he informed Cousin Mary about the Ellis, “She was of iron—three eighths of an inch in thickness, measured about one hundred tons, [mounting] an eighty-pounder rifle gun forward and a twelve-pounder howitzer aft.” Most importantly, the Ellis was small and light-drafted, a vessel that “could penetrate every little nook and corner” and enable him to stage the kind of opportunistic cutting-out expeditions in which Charles Flusser had adeptly schooled him.
“I was of course delighted, and made up my mind to gain distinction or an honorable grave before many months should go by,” Will wrote.
Those were no mere words, as he was quick to demonstrate.
Located about thirty miles south of Beaufort, Bogue Inlet was an opening into the Atlantic, where, “the bar is shallow, the breakers usually high, a tall bluff guards the entrance, and the little town of Swansboro nestles in the rear, about three miles from the mouth.”
In early-to-mid October, Rear Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee, supreme commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, received information that blockade runners were taking advantage of the inlet “by means of small schooners to Nassau.” He informed Flag Officer Davenport of his concerns, who, in turn, ordered “Lieutenant W. B. Cushing to proceed to that point with the USS Ellis under his command, and use all available power … to ascertain whether any trade is being carried on through that inlet with or by the rebels.”
The Ellis was the only vessel in Davenport’s fleet of sufficiently light draft to send to the inlet, and even then, he expected the ship to anchor outside the channel on reaching Beaufort. Will’s orders were to do his best under the circumstances.
As they pulled up to Swansboro, Will’s men exchanged a few rounds of musket fire with a company of enemy soldiers at the shore’s edge. But the rebels quickly raised the white flag and hightailed it, leaving the town to its small population of civilians and slaves. Will saw no sign of Confederate trade, and locals denied it occurred; though he was told he might have better luck at nearby inlets, especially New Topsail about thirty miles down the coast.
Following through on the tip without delay, Will steamed southward. The closest his men had come to any real action at Bogue was to poach “a hog, a cow or a sheep” from Southern farmers, giving the ship’s cook a chance to add some fresh meat to their otherwise bland meals.
“I have a sort of roving commission, and can run around to suit myself. For the present, I am my own master,” Will wrote his cousin Mary, exaggerating. He had no such license but was eager to follow Lieutenant Flusser’s lead, attacking enemy shipping whenever and wherever possible. “If under these circumstances I cannot stir the rebels up in more places than one it will be strange indeed.”
On October 22, he entered the inlet and found it unfortified—but by no means unoccupied. A large steam ship lay at anchor about a mile from the inlet’s mouth. Will had no pilot aboard the Ellis familiar with local waters—few blockaders did, which rebels knew and used to their advantage. Undeterred, he made for the steamer at full speed, coming within a hundred yards of her before bumping up against a sandbar.
The steamer’s crew, meanwhile, had set a fire on the quarterdeck and abandoned ship, spooked as the Ellis dashed heedlessly toward them. But Will’s boarding party extinguished the flames before any real damage was done.
After a hurried search, they discovered their prize was the Adelaide out of Halifax, England. Her papers revealed a Southern captain was in command, ready to sail for Bermuda with six-hundred barrels of spirits of turpentine in the hold, and thirty-six bales of cotton and some tobacco for a deck load. Altogether the value of the cargo was around a hundred thousand dollars, a handsome catch.
Will immediately ordered lines run to the prize. But with darkness falling, he had to wait until first light before trying to maneuver off the bar. At 4:00 a.m., he tried hauling off with the Adelaide in tow, but the schooner drew even more water than the Ellis and “grounded incessantly.”
Finally, at 8:00 a.m., with the tide low, Will gave up. Waiting for high water was too risky. Unable to pull the vessel out to sea, he decided to destroy her instead, setting fire to the hold full of turpentine.
Unlike the Adelaide’s rebel crew, he succeeded in setting her ablaze. Before he left the inlet, flames were lapping at her mastheads, the barrels exploding with a roar heard for miles around.
Although Will was not pleased with losing his prize, he hadn’t finished with New Topsail Inlet. In his report to Flag Officer Davenport, he laid out strong reasons for concluding illicit trade was happening along the North Carolina coast. Davenport replied three days later, “Continue to act in accordance with your best judgment and discretion, and carry out to the extent of your ability the views of the Government and the admiral.”
Will must have found the note enormously gratifying. Davenport could have admonished him for leaving his station without orders. But instead he’d rewarded the very “imaginative and speculative” qualities that Silas Stringham used to smother and Commandant Raymond Perry Rodgers of Annapolis had insisted gave him “no promise of usefulness” in the Navy.
At last Will had earned the freedom to stalk the enemy at will. He went to it like a wolf on the prowl.