The Battle of Mobile Bay, 1864: Damn the torpedoes

On a summer morning in 1864 a line of Union warships steamed toward the narrow entrance of Mobile Bay. Ahead lay the guns of Fort Morgan, a field of hidden mines and the most powerful ironclad the Confederacy had in the Gulf. High in the rigging of his flagship, the wooden sloop Hartford, stood Rear Admiral David Farragut, tied in place with a line so that a wound would not send him crashing to the deck.⁶

A battle of the American Civil War, part of the greatest battles of the Civil War · Related: Fort Sumter, Vicksburg · Before: The Siege of Petersburg · Next: Sherman's March to the Sea

The last Gulf port

From the start of the war the Union had tried to strangle the South by closing its ports, the strategy known as the Anaconda Plan. By 1864 New Orleans had long since fallen, to Farragut himself, and Mobile, Alabama, was the last major Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico east of the Mississippi still open; only Galveston, in Texas, held out longer. A rail center and harbor, it was a haven for blockade runners, and taking it would also give the North a route into the Deep South.⁷

Forts, mines and an ironclad

The bay's entrance was well guarded. On Mobile Point stood Fort Morgan, a star-shaped brick fort built in 1834 and armed with more than forty guns, covering the deep main channel. Across the water on Dauphin Island was Fort Gaines, and to the west Fort Powell watched Grant's Pass. Brigadier General Richard Page, commanding Fort Morgan, declared he would surrender only when he had no means of defense left.⁸

The Confederates also blocked much of the channel with torpedoes, as naval mines were then called, kegs and barrels of powder moored below the surface in a triple line. That left a narrow passage close under the guns of Fort Morgan. Inside the bay lay Admiral Franklin Buchanan's small squadron: three gunboats, the Selma, Gaines and Morgan, and the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee, commissioned in February 1864 and armed with six heavy Brooke rifles behind sloping iron armor.⁹

The two admirals knew each other's world well. Farragut had gone to sea as a boy and, at twelve, had been put in charge of a captured prize ship. In April 1862 he had run his fleet past the forts below New Orleans in the dark and taken the South's greatest port, and in 1863 he had helped Grant by forcing his way past Port Hudson on the Mississippi. Buchanan, his opponent, had commanded the ironclad CSS Virginia in 1862 and been wounded in action. His Tennessee carried a crew of about 190.¹⁰

Farragut's plan

By August Farragut had four monitors, the Tecumseh and Manhattan with a two-gun turret each and the Chickasaw and Winnebago with four guns each, and fourteen wooden ships. He lashed the wooden ships together in seven pairs, each big sloop with a smaller gunboat lashed to its port side. The monitors would steam in a separate column nearest the fort. The army played its part too. On 3 August Major General Gordon Granger landed some 2,000 soldiers on Dauphin Island to threaten Fort Gaines.¹¹

Farragut meant to lead in the Hartford, but his captains persuaded him to let the Brooklyn go first. That decision almost cost him the battle.¹²

The Tecumseh goes down

Early on 5 August the fleet started in. As the columns came under the guns of Fort Morgan, Tunis Craven, captain of the lead monitor Tecumseh saw the Tennessee waiting inside and edged across to engage her, into the edge of the minefield. At about 7:35 she struck a torpedo. The monitor rose by the bow, rolled onto her side and went down, in about 25 seconds by one account and two minutes by another. Of about 114 men aboard, only 21 survived. Craven himself, the story goes, stepped aside at the escape ladder to let his pilot go first.¹³

Damn the torpedoes

Ahead of the Hartford, Captain James Alden of the Brooklyn saw buoys marking the minefield and stopped, then began to back his engines. The whole line bunched up and drifted under the fort's guns, the worst place it could possibly be. Farragut could not stop and could not go back. He took the Hartford out of line, past the Brooklyn and straight across the torpedoes.¹⁴

What he said is a matter of record only in later accounts. The famous version, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!", is the one Britannica and most histories give. Another account, quoted by Christopher Kolakowski, has him call to his flag captain, "Damn the torpedoes! Drayton, four bells!" and to the gunboat lashed alongside, "Jouett, full speed!" The American Battlefield Trust notes that he purportedly shouted his reply after Alden warned of torpedoes ahead. The Hartford and the rest of the fleet passed over the mines without a single explosion. Sailors later said they heard primers snapping against the hulls, but none exploded, probably because of faulty primers.¹⁵

The Tennessee alone

Once inside the bay, the Union gunboats cast off from their partners and chased Buchanan's three gunboats. The Selma was captured, the Gaines was badly damaged and later sank, and only the Morgan escaped up the bay to Mobile. The fleet then anchored above the forts.¹⁶

Then the Tennessee came out alone to fight the whole fleet. When Farragut was told she was coming, Kolakowski records, he remarked that he had not thought old Buck was such a fool. The ironclad was slow, about five or six knots, and could not catch the Union sloops to ram them. Instead they rammed her, one after another, and pounded her at close range, while the monitors' 11-inch and 15-inch guns did the real damage. At one point the Hartford and the Tennessee passed so close that a sailor on the Hartford threw a spittoon and a holystone at the ironclad.¹⁷

Shot jammed the Tennessee's gunport shutters and carried away her smokestack and the chains that worked her rudder. Buchanan, struck in the leg by iron splinters, told his flag captain James Johnston to do the best he could, and to surrender when all was done. Around 10:00 a.m., unable to steer or fire, the Tennessee struck her colors, and Johnston raised a white handkerchief on a boarding pike. She had taken on the whole Union fleet at once.¹⁸

The monitors did the heaviest work. The Chickasaw, the American Battlefield Trust records, fired 52 shells into the Tennessee in less than an hour. Between them the monitors' heavy guns and the rams of the wooden ships cracked her armor, carried away her smokestack and cut her steering chains, and once she could no longer steer the fight was effectively over.¹⁹

The forts fall

With the fleet inside the bay, the forts were cut off. That night the garrison of Fort Powell abandoned it and blew it up. Fort Gaines, cut off and besieged by Granger's troops, surrendered on 8 August with about 800 men. Fort Morgan held out longer. After a heavy bombardment from land and sea that began on 22 August, Page surrendered the fort and some 600 men on 23 August.²⁰

How many died at the Battle of Mobile Bay?

Union losses were heavier. Britannica and the historian Christopher Kolakowski count 151 Union men killed and 177 wounded, and more than 90 of the dead went down with the Tecumseh. By the same counts the Confederates lost only 13 killed and 22 wounded afloat, but about 1,500 of their men were captured when the Tennessee and the forts surrendered.²¹

Why was the Battle of Mobile Bay important?

It closed Mobile, the last major Confederate port on the Gulf still open east of the Mississippi, to blockade runners and cut one of the South's last supply lines. Coming with the fall of Atlanta and the victory at Cedar Creek, it lifted Northern morale and helped Abraham Lincoln win re-election in November 1864.²²

The city of Mobile itself held out until 12 April 1865, when it surrendered after the fall of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley across the bay, exactly four years after the first shots at Fort Sumter. Lincoln proclaimed a day of thanks and praised the brilliant success of Farragut and Granger.²³

Mobile Bay was the capstone of Farragut's career. Already the navy's first rear admiral, he was made vice admiral in 1864 and full admiral in 1866, and his order at the edge of the minefield became one of the most quoted lines in American history.²⁴ › David Farragut