Yeoman in Farragut's Fleet: The Civil War Diary of Josiah Parker Higgins

A limited edition

Edited and Annotated by

E.C. Herrmann

The diary is an eyewitness journal by Josiah Parker Higgins, a 21-year old yeoman on the Kennebec, a Navy Union gunboat commissioned on February 8, 1862. The Kennebec became part of Rear Admiral David Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron, a fleet of warships and mortar vessels destined to play a major role in the Civil War.

Higgins' entries were corroborated and explained through research at the Navy Postgraduate School Library in Monterey, California. The resulting appendices included in the book cite communication among Farragut, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, ships' captains, and surrendering Confederate officers.

Raised with firm religious beliefs and practices, Higgins felt socially and spiritually isolated from his rowdier shipmates. Starved for intellectual stimulation, he expressed his frustrations and experiences in the journal every two or three days for 2-1/2 years. Higgins itemized numbers of men wounded, masts broken, and bales of cotton seized. He noted frequency of coaling; more than 120 Navy Union ships encountered and Confederate ships captured as prizes; deserters and prisoners taken on board; deaths of officers and outcomes of battles elsewhere as he learned of them. He described with youthful horror the navy bombardment of the Confederate forts and their retaliation. He also committed to the privacy of his diary angry criticisms of his fleet's wartime strategy.

Higgins participated in the attack on Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which guarded New Orleans, and witnessed the lowering of the Confederate flag and the raising of the stars and stripes over Fort Jackson. Farragut's victorious naval assault on the dual target dealt a crippling blow to the Confederacy.

Higgins left the Kennebec for home on July 16, 1864. Had Higgins remained on board the Kennebec for another three weeks, he would have been present at the attack on Mobile, Alabama, a notoriously bloody naval battle. If that had been the case, his journal might well have been lost at sea. Instead, it was recently discovered in the basement of a California home, dormant in a dusty cardboard box beneath old photo albums.

Excerpts from the Diary:

A man-of-war is a very poor place for a young man to be, the associations are very unpleasant. Not only unpleasant but disagreeable, often times disgusting: are these the stuff of which heroes are made?

Sunday morning a deserter from the rebels came down to the bank of the river and was taken on board the Flag Ship: he reported that five men were killed the first day in the fort and had we kept up the fire all night Fort Jackson would have had to been (sic) evacuated as it was on fire and they worked all night to extinguish the flames.

(Re: a captured schooner) A more desperate "black leg" set of men I never saw than came from her: they were all dressed in the best manner, and looked like a set of gamblers. The schooner was named "John Scott", and was a beauty of a vessel - new, clean, clipper built, about 75 or 80 tons. She had on board 110 bales - had thrown over 60 half bales. We took her in tow and ran until 7 o'clock P.M. when we signalised the Flagship and anchored.

Discovery:

Herrmann found the dusty diary at the bottom of an old cardboard box in a basement corner and over ten years occasionally glanced through its pages but found the lacey script too time consuming to decipher. Whoever had written it was careful to preserve leaves between some of the pages --- and not careful enough to prevent an occasional insect from being trapped between pages. Was the writer a housewife of the plains? Or perhaps a New England banker's wife? Was the diary maybe a journalist's record of germinating ideas?

During yet another casual effort to read it, the word "Farragut" jumped out from one of the pages. Thanks to a junior high school history class, Herrmann recalled Farragut's vital role in the American Civil War and wondered if the diary might instead be a Civil War account. Feeling duty-bound to preserve what might be an important historical document, Herrmann set about attempting to transcribe the diary verbatim. Within only a few weeks, however, the sense of duty was replaced by an urgency to discover "what happened next?" Soon the diary transcription was the overwhelming concern of each day, as Herrmann became intent on making young Higgins' eyewitness account available to historians today. Six months later, Herrmann completed the transcription, commemorating the achievement by rationing the last few pages of Higgins' entries in order to complete the transcription in celebratory solitude at midnight on New Year's Eve.

The edited transcription is offered now to the public in hopes that Higgins' observations and experiences will shed light on events studied by historians and others with a serious interest in the Naval Civil War.