The South’s Last Stand on the Gulf
August 1864: Mobile Bay, Alabama
John Helfers
By 1864, the Anaconda plan was working better in some areas than in others. Grant’s brilliant campaign to take the Mississippi River in the west had cut the Confederacy in two, preventing supplies from reaching the beleaguered states east of the river. The blockade in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean was less successful, as fast cargo ships and Confederate raiders ran the Union gauntlet with apparent ease. The CSS Florida was a particular thorn in the Federal navy’s side; the ship slipped past the blockade into Mobile Bay in December 1862, where it received a heroes’ welcome. In January 1863, it left port and evaded the enemy fleet again. But by August 1864, the Union Navy was ready to stop the traffic in and out of Mobile Bay once and for all.
With Vicksburg and the entire Mississippi River securely in Union hands, Rear Admiral David G. Farragut could now pursue one of his original goals for the West Gulf Blockading Squadron: capture Mobile Bay. Thirty-three miles long and twenty-three miles wide where it flowed out into the Gulf, the critically important bay was the South’s last active large port in the eastern half of the country. Anything that could be transported by sea came in and out of it, so one would think it would surely have been heavily defended to keep it out of the Union’s hands.
The Confederates certainly seemed to think they had matters well in hand. On land, three forts protected the harbor, under the command of Brigadier General Richard L. Page. Fort Morgan was the largest, containing forty-six cannons, twelve of them rifled, and a garrison of 600 men. On Dauphin Island, across from Fort Morgan in the channel, was Fort Gaines, which held twenty-six guns and another 600 men. Finally, on the western side of the bay was Fort Powell, containing eighteen guns and about 140 men. All three forts had tactical problems, however; none was protected from the rear, and none of the guns in Forts Powell and Gaines could traverse the bay.
The Rebels’ naval force was also small, but determined. In addition to three small side-wheel gunboats, the CSS Selma, the Morgan, and the Gaines, they also had the Tennessee, an ironclad ram. The flagship of the small fleet, the Tennessee was commanded by Admiral Franklin Buchanan, with its guns prepared by Commander Catesby ap Roger Jones; both of them had commanded the CSS Virginia at separate times during her famous duel with the USS Monitor in 1862.
Finally, the entrance to the channel had also been mined with sixty-seven torpedoes set by the Confederate Torpedo Bureau, a department of the Confederate Secret Service tasked with developing and placing munitions. The minefield was clearly marked, both as a warning to friendly vessels and to try to force enemy ships to steer closer to Fort Morgan’s guns as they attempted to enter the bay.
The Union fleet had sheer numbers on its side. Among the eighteen ships were seven wooden vessels (the Hartford, Brooklyn, Richmond, Oneida, Kennebec, Itasca, and Galena) that fired traditional broadsides from the cannons mounted in the sides of their hulls. Three ships, the Octorara, Metacomet, and Port Royal, were double-enders, built with a bow and rudder at each end especially for river duty. Finally, the Union had four ironclads; the Manhattan and the Tecumseh were improved versions of the prototype Monitor, while the Chickasaw and the Winnebago were river monitors with twin turrets.
Like the Vicksburg assault, this operation would also be a joint mission between the Union Army and the Union Navy. Major General Edward Richard Sprigg Canby estimated that 5,000 men would be enough to take Fort Morgan, but before the attack could commence, Grant called all available men up to Virginia, where the fighting was entering a critical phase. Left with only 2,000 men, Canby modified his strategy, planning to take Dauphin Island and thereby control the lower bay and provide communication between the fleet in the bay and the blockade in the gulf. They wouldn’t be able to take the city of Mobile, but they would be able to stop shipping into and out of the waterway.
Early on the morning of August 5, with the tide running into the bay and a southwestern wind that would carry cannon smoke into the eyes of the soldiers at Fort Morgan, Farragut gave the signal to begin the attack. The wooden Union ships were lashed together in pairs; if the engines of one were damaged, the other could still maneuver them out of the fight. The fleet approached in two columns, with the Tecumseh leading, followed by the Manhattan, Winnebago, and Chickasaw.
The second column was headed by the USS Brooklyn, with its “cow catcher” mine remover, which would detonate any mine before it could hit the hull, and four chase guns, small cannons used to destroy enemy sails and rigging, pointing forward, lashed to the Octorara. Following were Hartford and Metacomet, Richmond and Port Royal, Lackawanna and Seminole, Monongahela and Kennebec, Ossipee and Itasca, and Oneida and Galena.
At the first shot fired by the Tecumseh at 6:47 A.M., the forts returned fire and the battle was joined. Except for the lead ship Brooklyn, the rest of the second column could not fire at the Rebel ships and instead had to concentrate on the forts.
Minutes after the fighting began, Commander Tunis A. M. Craven sailed the Tecumseh toward the Tennessee, apparently intending to engage her. Either forgetting or disregarding the orders to avoid the mines in the channel, he sailed his ship directly into the field. A mine detonated under the ironclad’s hull, and the ship sank within three minutes. Rescue boats recovered only 21 of her 114 crew members, with Commander Craven going down with his ship, so he could never explain what he had been thinking.
On the Brooklyn, Captain James Alden was confused by conflicting orders, which said to stay both on the left side of the monitors and to the right of the minefield, effectively preventing him from going anywhere. Halting his ship, he signaled Admiral Farragut for orders. The rear admiral, who had been lashed into the rigging to get a better view of the battle, ordered Captain Percival Drayton to sail around the stopped ironclad and into the minefield with the immortal order, “Damn the torpedoes. Four bells, Mr. Drayton.” Despite the lethal effectiveness they’d had on the Tecumseh, Farragut gambled that the rest of the explosives, which had been in the channel for several months, had been submerged too long to still be active. His bold action paid off, and the rest of the column passed through the mines without incident.
Now Farragut ordered his fast gunboats to take on the three Confederate gunboats. The Metacomet subdued the Selma; the Gaines, breached by cannon shot at the waterline, was beached by her crew before she could sink. The Morgan retreated behind the guns of Fort Morgan; she would sneak through the Union lines and escape the following night.
With only the Tennessee left, Buchanan went on the offensive. He would have rammed the Union ships as they passed, but his ironclad was too slow. Nevertheless, he intended to take out as many enemy vessels as he could. But hampered by his ship’s slow speed, and facing multiple vessels, he became the prey instead of the attacker. Several Union ships rammed the Tennessee during the seemingly lopsided fight, but each time the attacker took more damage than its target. The same results happened with each volley of fire between the Federal fleet and the Confederate ironclad—the Union’s shots bounced off the enemy ship, while the Tennessee’s volleys caused significant but not fatal damage. The harm would have been more severe except for the poor-quality powder in the Rebel ironclad’s guns, which often failed to ignite when the cannon was fired.
But even protected as she was, the Tennessee took significant damage by the time the monitors Chickasaw and Manhattan arrived. With her smokestack destroyed and several of her gunport shutters jammed, the ironclad was in no condition to take on two fresh ships. The first volley from the Manhattan’s fifteen-inch guns hit the Tennessee’s ram, bending the iron shield and smashing its oak backing, sending splinters into the crew compartment. Several were injured, including Admiral Buchanan. Unable to keep fighting, Commander James D. Johnston requested orders from Buchanan and received permission to surrender the vessel three hours after the first shot had been fired.
With the Confederate ships out of the way, Farragut moved to capture the forts on the bay. When troops landed to take Fort Powell, they found the soldiers had spiked the guns and waded to the mainland. The garrison at Fort Gaines held out a little while longer, but Colonel Anderson, realizing the futility of his position, opened communications with Farragut and surrendered his fort on August 8.
The Union soldiers then besieged Fort Morgan by establishing parallel lines on the island that could be moved ever closer to the fort, supported by shelling from mortars and the ships offshore, including the repaired Tennessee. On August 22, Fort Morgan was subjected to a daylong bombardment, forcing Brigadier General Page to flood his powder stores to prevent accidental detonation. After part of his fort caught fire, he spiked or destroyed his guns and surrendered early on the morning of August 23. The last open southern port on the Gulf of Mexico was now closed.
The battle was fairly bloody by Civil War naval standards; the Union fleet lost 150 men and had 170 wounded, but the Confederate ships only suffered 12 dead and 19 wounded. The armies of both sides fared much better, due to little hand-to-hand fighting, with 1 dead and 7 wounded on the Union side, and only slightly more on that of the Rebels.
Because the city of Mobile wasn’t taken, the victory didn’t receive as much attention as it might have until the last days of the war, when, in conjunction with the fall of Atlanta, it was seen as one of the final blows against the Confederacy. Mobile itself lasted until 1865, when it fell to another combined Army-Navy attack.
The Confederate defenses at Mobile Bay suffered from the same limitations that plagued the South all through the war—lack of men and lack of materials. Outnumbered and outgunned by a ratio of four to one, the Rebels relied on the untrustworthy mines (which, if they had done their job on the rest of the fleet as effectively as they did on the Tecumseh, would have given this article quite a different ending) to thin the fleet’s ranks, and when that didn’t happen, tried to repel the invaders as best they could, but to no avail. The forts had little effect on the battle (which makes sense, since once the two fleets joined, the forts could hardly fire in the battle for risk of hitting their own people). And there is no doubt that the superior naval technology of the North played a vital role in defeating the bay’s defenses. But when it comes down to it, by the time the Battle of Mobile Bay occurred, the Confederacy was already on its way to defeat. It is suspected that many of the men in the forts and on the ships defending the bay already knew this, which accounted for their already low morale and lackluster performance. Even with Admiral Buchanan’s spirited defense in the Tennessee, by the time the Union fleet steamed into Mobile Bay, it, like the rest of the South, was only waiting to fall.