On 5 August 1864 Rear Admiral David Farragut led a Union fleet of 18 ships into Mobile Bay, Alabama, past the guns of Fort Morgan. The leading monitor, USS Tecumseh, struck a mine and sank with more than ninety of her crew, and the column stalled under the fort's fire until Farragut took his flagship Hartford straight through the minefield, with words remembered as "Damn the torpedoes!" Inside the bay the Confederate ironclad CSS Tennessee fought the whole fleet and surrendered that morning, and Mobile was closed to blockade runners.
The last open port
By 1864 Mobile was one of the last important ports still open to the Confederacy. The entrance to its bay was covered by Fort Morgan on Mobile Point and Fort Gaines on Dauphin Island, with Fort Powell guarding a second, shallower passage, and much of the main channel was sown with mines, then called torpedoes. Inside waited Admiral Franklin Buchanan with the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee and three gunboats.1
Farragut had waited until he had ironclads of his own; by the end of July he had four monitors. On 3 August army troops under Major General Gordon Granger landed on Dauphin Island to move against Fort Gaines. Farragut planned to run past the forts in two columns, the monitors nearest Fort Morgan and the wooden ships lashed together in pairs beside them, so that a disabled ship could be towed through.2
Damn the torpedoes
Early on 5 August the fleet crossed the bar and steamed into the channel under fire from Fort Morgan. When the Tecumseh turned toward the Tennessee, she struck a mine and went down within moments. The Naval History and Heritage Command counts her captain and 92 crewmen lost with her; the Encyclopedia of Alabama gives 94 men. Ahead of the flagship, the sloop Brooklyn stopped and began to back, and the line was about to pile up under the fort's guns.3
Farragut, who had climbed into the rigging to see over the smoke and been tied there for safety, ordered the Hartford out of line and straight through the minefield. His reply to the warning about torpedoes ahead is remembered as "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!"; the historian Craig Symonds notes that the phrase is purported and that Farragut in any case had little choice but to go on. The rest of the fleet followed in his wake, and no more mines exploded.4
The Tennessee alone
Inside the bay the Union ships captured or drove off the Confederate gunboats. Buchanan then brought the slow Tennessee out against the entire fleet. Rammed and pounded at close range, with her steering chains shot away, her smokestack gone and Buchanan wounded in the leg, she surrendered at about 10 a.m.. The Encyclopedia of Alabama puts Union casualties in the battle at 315 and Confederate naval casualties at 32; the American Battlefield Trust gives over 300 and under 50.5
Fort Powell was abandoned and blown up that evening, Fort Gaines surrendered on 8 August and Fort Morgan on 23 August, after a siege. The city of Mobile held out until April 1865, but its port was closed to blockade runners, and the victory helped restore Northern morale before Abraham Lincoln's re-election that November. Farragut was promoted to vice admiral in December. The full story is in our article on the Battle of Mobile Bay, and the admiral's life in our biography of David Farragut.6
Also on this day
- 1716: Battle of Petrovaradin. At Petrovaradin on the Danube, the Habsburg army of Prince Eugene of Savoy took on a much larger Ottoman army under Grand Vizier Damad Ali Pasha in the Austro-Turkish War of 1716-1718.
