The Battle of Mobile Bay, 150 Years Ago

On August 5, 1864, a naval fleet commanded by Union Admiral David Farragut captured one of the last major ports remaining in Confederate hands. The Battle of Mobile Bay was perhaps the most important naval battle of the Civil War, but it is better remembered for the immortal order supposedly delivered by Farragut.

More than three years into the Civil War, the Union naval blockade of Southern ports had choked most of the Confederacy’s nautical lifelines. Blockade runners, however, still operated out of one major haven along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico—Mobile, Alabama.

Ever since his capture of New Orleans in April 1862, Union Admiral David Farragut had itched to storm Mobile Bay, but his commanders had held him back. “If I had the permission I can tell you it would not be long before I would raise a row with the rebels in Mobile,” he wrote to his son in February 1864. When General Ulysses S. Grant, who made the capture of the Alabama port one of his top priorities, assumed command of the Union forces weeks later, Farragut finally received his chance.

On August 5, 1864, the sailors in Farragut’s 18-ship flotilla awoke at 3 a.m. to prepare for battle. A formidable obstacle awaited them. The imposing knuckles of Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines guarded the entrance to the bay, which was so heavily seeded with floating sea mines—called “torpedoes” during the Civil War—that ships were forced to thread a narrow channel directly under the citadels’ guns.

David Farragut David Farragut The good news for Farragut was that if his fleet could slip by the torpedoes and forts, Mobile Bay was defended by only four Confederate ships under the command of Admiral Franklin Buchanan, the only man to hold that rank in the Confederacy. Few dogs were saltier than “Old Buck,” who had spent 49 years at sea, but the 63-year-old Farragut was one of them. The Union admiral had joined the U.S. Navy at the age of nine. Three years later he became a prize master responsible for captured British vessels during the War of 1812. The Civil War successes of the man whose naval career spanned more than a half-century were particularly rankling to the South, which viewed him as a traitor. Born in Tennessee, Farragut was raised in New Orleans, the city he had seized earlier in the war, and married to a Southerner. (Buchanan, a Maryland native, shared a similar treacherous reputation in the North.)

Implementing a battle plan he had plotted on a map using small wooden boats carved by his ship’s carpenter, Farragut ordered his vessels into two parallel columns, with four ironclad monitors in one line to pass nearest Fort Morgan and seven pairs of wooden vessels in the other. Larger ships were lashed side by side to smaller gunboats to shield them from Fort Morgan’s devastating fire. Farragut initially announced that his flagship, USS Hartford, would take the lead, but the admiral reluctantly changed his mind after his captains lobbied to have USS Brooklyn, which had a mine-sweeping device under its bow, go first.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the battle commenced as shots rang out through the overcast skies. With black cannon smoke mixing with the summer haze, Farragut could no longer see the action. Although he suffered from vertigo, the admiral climbed 20 feet up the rigging, nearly level with the pilot, for a better perch. With one hand clinging to the ropes and another clutching a pair of binoculars, Farragut surveyed the battle as shots whizzed by him. Percival Drayton, Hartford’s captain, worried for the admiral’s safety and dispatched a signalman with a piece of line to tie Farragut to the rigging.

Then suddenly on Hartford’s starboard side, an explosion rang out and the bow of one of the Union’s iron-hulled monitors, USS Tecumseh, suddenly heaved up out of the water. It turned on its starboard side like a wounded whale. The stern rose high in the air with Tecumseh’s exposed propeller still revolving before the ship suddenly sank out of sight with 90 men still on board.

Realizing that a torpedo had sunk Tecumseh and fearful of striking another, the commander of the lead ship, Brooklyn, ordered the engines stopped. Farragut watched as confusion spread across the Union fleet as it began to pile up directly in the firing line of Fort Morgan’s pounding guns. A private reported that Hartford’s “cockpit looked more like a slaughter house.” Sensing impending disaster, the admiral took control to rally his confused charges and ordered Hartford and its consort to pass through the minefield to get to the front of the line. Although not prone to swearing, Farragut supposedly exhorted, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Nervous sailors heard the bobbing torpedoes banging and scraping Hartford’s hull as well as the primers snapping on the mines. Fortunately for Farragut’s men, the torpedoes were either faulty or corroded by salt water and failed to ignite.

Hartford safely led the Union flotilla through the mines and out of range of Fort Morgan’s guns. All that remained was the badly outnumbered Confederate force. Although he faced overwhelming odds, Buchanan ordered his flagship, the 200-foot-long ironclad CSS Tennessee, to charge Hartford. The two vessels passed so closely to each other that a sailor on board Hartford threw a spittoon at the enemy while a rebel leaned out of a gun port and stabbed a Union sailor with a bayonet. Farragut’s forces pounded Tennessee until it could no longer fight. The crippled iron monster raised a white flag in surrender.

The Union had seized control of Mobile Bay and sealed it off from blockade runners. Fort Gaines surrendered three days later followed by Fort Morgan on August 23. The city of Mobile itself remained too fortified to capture, and it did not surrender until April 12, 1865, three days after Appomattox.

The Battle of Mobile Bay was Farragut’s crowning achievement and also the last naval combat he ever saw. The admiral never claimed to have spoken his immortal words, but they became legendary. By Farragut’s death in 1870, they began to find their way into print with variations of the second line of the order including “Four bells!” or “Go ahead!” Whether Farragut’s iconic phrase was ever uttered or not, his actions in Mobile Bay certainly embodied the words.

http://www.al.com/specialreport/mobileregister/index.ssf?finalresting.html

Tecumseh’s final resting place

By CASANDRA ANDREWS
Living Reporter
08/05/01

FORT MORGAN — An orange and white buoy floating atop murky seas serves as their headstone.

For the nearly 100 men who lie entombed in the Civil War ship the USS Tecumseh, the metal can-shaped marker is the only visible reminder of the Union soldiers presence in Mobile Bay.

On Aug. 5, 1864, the Tecumseh, a Union iron-hull, fired the first shot in the Battle of Mobile Bay, the bloodiest naval fight of the Civil War.

Within half an hour of shattering a cannon shell over Fort Morgan, the Tecumseh struck a mine — known then as a torpedo — lurched, rolled on its side and sank nearly 30 feet.

It took about two minutes.

Twenty-one men escaped, some swimming to shore and others using rafts to reach safety. Most historic accounts maintain that 93 others went down with the ship.

For 137 years, the pride of Rear Adm. David Farragut’s fleet during the Union attack has been stuck in the mud at the entrance of Mobile Bay.

“The Tecumseh is the only surviving, intact Civil War-era, Ericsson-design Union monitor,” said W. Wilson West, a maritime historian. “There are three others but they are all on the bottom and in various states of disrepair. Tecumseh, by far, is the jewel in the crown.”

Efforts to raise the ship — or at least protect it from scavengers and commercial boat anchors — have made little headway in recent years.

The boat that took 120 seconds to sink would take at least 10 years to pull up and restore, historians said.

“Here is a national treasure. It should not be just ignored,” said Jack Friend, a Mobile naval historian. “We have a responsibility not to let it rust away or be destroyed in some manner. Someday, it might be raised.”

He doesn’t imagine that day will come in his lifetime, though. Friend, who was commissioned to examine the feasibility of raising the ship in 1974, said then it would cost about $10 million to bring it up and restore it. He estimates that the cost would be much greater today.

A full recovery and restoration could take as long as 15 years and cost at least $80 million, said West, who wrote the “USS Tecumseh Shipwreck Management Plan” in 1997.

Among the plan’s recommendations:

Establish a regulated navigation area with a 100-yard radius around the wreck;

Set up a closed circuit surveillance system at Fort Morgan;

Create a heritage zone for sites important to the Battle of Mobile Bay.

An effort of that magnitude would require a fleet of historians, archaeologists, engineers, investors, fund-raisers, government officials and salvage crews, he said.

So far, none of his plan has been implemented.

“People consider the Tecum seh sort of safe at the moment, in the sense that it’s not going anywhere,” West said of why he thinks the government isn’t taking action. “It’s on the shelf at the Naval Historical Center. They have other priorities right now like the Hunley, and other naval wrecks. It’s a money issue and a priority issue for them.”

Bill Dudley, director of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, said the government is aware of Wilson’s management plan.

“We suggest leaving it as it is, which is called a ‘preservation in place option,’ which costs less money,” Dudley said. Tecumseh holds the “remains of 93 sailors. We feel we owe them the respect they have earned. We don’t feel like we should disturb it any more than it’s been.”

One reason the project would carry such a hefty price tag is because the Tecumseh was built of thick wood and massive iron. It weighs about 2,100 tons and measures 225 feet long.

The weight of the vessel and the soft bottom of the bay would work against recovery. Nearly 99 percent of the Tecumseh is buried in mud, according to numerous surveys. One-inch thick iron plates are bolted and riveted to the outside, with 10 plates stacked on each other.

By comparison, the USS Hunley weighs about 7 tons and is 40 feet long. The price of raising and restoring it is running into several million dollars, Friend said.

Other recoveries haven’t gone so well. The raising of the USS Cairo from the Yazoo River in Mississippi in the 1960s is an example of what can go wrong. Cables were used to pull the boat out of the river. The vessel was so heavy that the cables cut through the hull, severing a portion of the stern. Hundreds of artifacts plunged back into the river.

Historians estimate there are at least 50,000 artifacts lodged in the muck inside the Tecumseh, including the ships two 15-inch cannons. Divers for the Smithsonian Institute removed an anchor and dishes from the ships’ dining hall during a 1967 expedition.

West supports launching a new comprehensive study to determine the ironclad’s latest co ordinates and condition as well as changes in the surrounding sand, sediment and environment in the last three decades.

The last such survey was conducted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Tecumseh Project Team. Funds dried up and the project was suspended. He said the government isn’t likely to pay for a new survey any time soon.

West, who lives in Toronto, said keeping commercial barges and shrimp boats away from the area would help keep future damage of the wreckage to a minimum.

“Shrimp trawlers go up and down every season,” West said. “I’ve watched them go up and down each side of the buoy at will. And I think local divers might go out there every once in a while thinking they can get something off of it.”

Dudley, who is also director of naval history for the government, said one reason a navigation zone hasn’t already been created around the wreckage is because it’s in the middle of the Mobile ship channel.

“We feel it’s under careful observation from Fort Morgan,” Dudley said. “The Coast Guard and Marine Police are ready to report any folks who look like they are going to go down and do something.”

Friend, who is writing a book on the Battle of Mobile Bay, said he would like to see someone create a virtual reality tour that explores the Tecumseh, inside and out. He said Fort Morgan would be the perfect spot to show such a presentation.

The Mobile historian, who fought in a tank while serving in the Korean War, said he’s been ensconced in naval history since he came home more than three decades ago. Fishing off Fort Morgan also drew him to the Tecumseh.

“I would be out on the water.... on a late August day, all peaceful and serene,” Friend said. “The noise, the smoke, the men being wounded, it was difficult to imagine.”

Friend came to see the Tecumseh as a tank that floated on water.

“There was certainly a similarity that exists between people in ironclads during the Civil War and people who fought in tanks in later wars.”

Despite the passage of time, interest in restoring the ship continues.

“People are always asking me if I think it can be raised,” Friend said. “If it could be raised it would be wonderful. People from all over the world would come to see it.”

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