The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote
When the two ships parted Farragut jumped to the port quarter rail and held to the mizzen rigging while he leaned out to assess the damage, which was by no means as great as he had feared. Finding the perch to his liking he remained there, lashed to the rigging by friendly hands for the second time that day, and called for Drayton to give the Tennessee another thump as soon as possible. As the Hartford came about, however, she was struck on the starboard flank by the Lackawanna, which was also trying to get in position, crushing her planking on that side and upsetting one of the Dahlgrens. “Save the admiral! Save the admiral!” the cry went up, for it was thought at first that the flagship was sinking, so great was the confusion on her decks. Farragut untied himself, leaped down, and crossed to the starboard mizzen rigging, where he again leaned out to inspect the damage, which though severe did not extend to within two feet of the water. Again he ordered full speed ahead, only to find the Lakawanna once more looming on his starboard quarter. At this, one witness later said, “the admiral became a trifle excited.” Forgetting that he had given the offending ship instructions to lead the ram attack, he turned to the communications officer on the bridge.
“Can you say ‘For God’s sake’ by signal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then say to the Lackawanna, ‘For God’s sake, get out of our way and anchor.’ ”
By now the ironclad had become the target for every ship that could get in position to give her a shot or a shove, including the double-turreted Chickasaw, which “hung close under our stern,” the Tennessee’s pilot afterwards declared, “firing the two 11-inch guns in her forward turret like pocket pistols.” Such punishment began to tell. Her flagstaff went and then her stack, giving the ram what one attacker called “a particularly shorn, stubby look” and greatly reducing the draft to her fires. Her steam went down, and then, as a sort of climax to her disablement, the monitor hard astern succeeded in cutting her rudder chain, exposed on the afterdeck, so that she would no longer mind her helm. Still she kept up the fight, exploiting her one advantage, which was that she could fire in any direction, surrounded as she was, without fear of hitting a friend or missing a foe. Presently, though, this too was reduced by shots that jammed half of her gunport shutters against the shield, thereby removing them from use. When this happened to the stern port, Buchanan sent for a machinist to unjam it, and while the man was at work on the cramped bolt, an 11-inch shell from the Chickasaw exploded against the edge of the cover just above him. “His remains had to be taken up with a shovel, placed in a bucket, and thrown overboard,” a shipmate would recall. One of the steel splinters that flew inside the casemate struck Buchanan, breaking his left leg below the knee. “Well, Johnston,” he said to the Tennessee’s captain as he was taken up to be carried down to the berth deck, “they’ve got me. You’ll have to look out for her now. This is your fight, you know.”
Johnston did what he could to sustain the contest with the rudderless, nearly steamless vessel, blind in most of her ports and taking heavy-caliber punches from two big sloops on each quarter and the monitor astern. Finally he went below and reported the situation to Buchanan. “Do the best you can, sir,” the admiral told him, teeth gritted against the pain from the compound fracture of his leg, “and when all is done, surrender.” Returning topside, the Alabamian found the battle going even worse. Unable to maneuver, the ram could not bring a single gun to bear on her tormentors; moreover, Johnston afterwards reported, “Shots were fairly raining upon the after end of the shield, which was now so thoroughly shattered that in a few moments it would have fallen and exposed the gun deck to a raking fire of shell and grape.” He lowered the Tennessee’s ensign, in token of her capitulation, and when this did not slacken the encircling fire — it had been shot down before, then raised again on the handle of a rammer staff poked through the overhead grille of the smoky casemate — “I then decided, although with an almost bursting heart, to hoist the white flag.”
At 10 o’clock the firing stopped, and presently Farragut sent an officer to demand the wounded admiral’s sword, which then was handed over. Tennessee’s loss of two men killed and nine wounded brought the Confederate total for all four ships to 12 killed and 20 wounded. Union losses were 172 killed, more than half in the Tecumseh, and 170 wounded. Their respective totals, 32 and 342, were thus about in ratio of the strength of the two fleets, though in addition 243 rebel sailors were captured aboard Selma and the ironclad.
“The Almighty has smiled upon me once more. I am in Mobile Bay,” Farragut wrote his wife that night, adding: “It was a hard fight, but Buck met his fate manfully. After we passed the forts, he came up in the ram to attack me. I made at him and ran him down, making all the others do the same. We butted and shot at him until he surrendered.”
Westward across the bay, as he wrote, there was a burst of flame and a loud explosion off Cedar Point. The garrison of Fort Powell, taken under bombardment from the rear that afternoon by one of the big-gunned monitors at a range of 400 yards, had evacuated the place under cover of darkness and set a slow match to the magazine. Next morning the fleet dropped down and began shelling the eastern end of Dauphin Island, where Fort Gaines was under pressure from the landward side by Granger and his soldiers. This continued past nightfall, and the fort’s commander asked for terms the following day, August 7. Told they were unconditional, he accepted and promptly surrendered his 818 men, together with all guns and stores. That left Fort Morgan; a much tougher proposition, as it turned out.
While the troops were being taken aboard transports for the shift to Mobile Point and a similar rear approach to the fortifications there, Farragut submitted under a flag of truce a note signed by himself and Granger, demanding the unconditional surrender of Fort Morgan “to prevent the unnecessary sacrifice of human life which must follow the opening of our batteries.” The reply was brief and negative. “Sirs: I am prepared to sacrifice life, and will only surrender when I have no means of defense.… Respectfully, etc. R. L. Page, Brigadier General.”
Approaching fifty-seven, Richard Page was a Virginian, a forty-year veteran of the Union and Confederate navies, who had transferred to the army five months ago when he assumed command of the outer defenses of Mobile Bay. His beard was white, his manner fiery; “Old Ramrod” and “Bombast Page” were two of his prewar nicknames, and if he bore a resemblance to R. E. Lee (both were born in 1807) it was no wonder. His mother had been Lee’s father’s sister.
Farragut’s run past Morgan had come as a shock to its defenders, who fired close to 500 shots at the slow-moving Yankee column. “I do not see how I failed to sink the Hartford,” Page said ruefully, shaking his head as the smoke cleared; “I do not see how I failed to sink her.” Fort Powell’s evacuation and the unresistant capitulation of Fort Gaines, neither of which had been done with his permission, angered and made him all the more determined to resist to the utmost the amphibious seige that got under way on August 9, shortly after he rejected unconditional surrender. Granger’s men had been put ashore that morning on the bay side of Mobile Point, just over a mile to the east of the fort, and by nightfall — after they had performed the back-breaking labor of hauling guns and ammunition through shin-deep sand, which one of them said was “hot enough during the day for roasting potatoes” — took the east curtain and ramparts under fire with their batteries, while the sloops and ironclads, including the captured Tennessee, poured in shells and hotshot from the bay and Gulf. The fort shook under this combined pounding, but Page was no more of a mind to surrender now than he had been when he first declined the combined demand at midday.
For two weeks this continued, and throughout that time the pressure grew. Daily the troops drew closer on the landward side, increasing the number of weapons they brought to bear until at last there were 25 guns and 16 heavy mortars, their discharges echoed by those from the ships beyond and on both sides of the point. The climax came on August 22, when 3000 rounds were flung at the fort in the course of a twelve-hour bombardment, unde
The admiral did get another 546 prisoners, however, which brought the total to better than 1700 on land and water — and he did get Mobile Bay, which after all was what he had come for. Blockade running might continue on the Atlantic coast, where Wilmington and Charleston still held out, but it was ended on the Gulf except for the sealed-off region west of the Mississippi, which in any case lay outside the constricting Anaconda coils. Mobile itself, thirty miles away at the head of the bay, was no part of Farragut’s objective. Except as a port, it contributed little to the South’s defense, and it was a port no longer. Moreover, Canby not only lacked the strength to expel the town’s defenders; he could not have afforded to garrison it afterwards, so urgent were the calls for replacements for the men who had fallen in Georgia and, above all, in Virginia.
Best of all the immediate gains obtained from the naval battle, though, was the elation that followed, throughout the North, the announcement of the first substantial victory that had been scored, East or West, in the three months since the opening of Grant’s spring offensive. Lincoln and his political supporters were pleased above all, perhaps, with the lift it seemed to give his chances for survival in the presidential contest, which by then was less than three months off.
As usual, there was bad news with the good, and in this case the bad was double-barreled, concerning as it did a pair of highly spectacular reverses, one afloat and one ashore. In Washington on August 12, while the celebration of Farragut’s week-old triumph over the Tennessee was still in progress at the Navy Department — word had come belatedly by wire from Ben Butler, who read of the bay battle in a Richmond paper smuggled through his Bermuda Hundred lines the day before — the telegraph line from coastal New Jersey began to chatter about a mysterious rebel cruiser at work off Sandy Hook. Yesterday she had taken seven prizes, and today she was adding six more to her list, which would reach a total of thirty U.S. merchant vessels within the week. It was as if the Alabama, eight weeks in her watery grave outside Cherbourg, had been raised, pumped out, and sped across the Atlantic to lay about her in a manner even more destructive than when she was in her prime. Quickly, all the available Federal warships within reach were ordered out to find and sink her at all costs. But who, or what, was she? Where had she come from? Who was her captain?
She was the Tallahassee, a former blockade runner, built up the Thames the year before and purchased that summer by the Confederates, who converted her into a raider by installing three guns and sent her out from Wilmington under Commander John T. Wood, a onetime Annapolis instructor, grandson of Zachary Taylor, aide to Jefferson Davis, and participant in a number of naval exploits, including the Merrimac-Monitor fight, New Bern, and the retaking of Plymouth. Setting out on the night of August 6 he showed the blockaders a clean pair of heels; for that was the ship’s main virtue, speed. Twin stacked, with a 100-horsepower engine driving each of her two screws, she was 220 feet in length and only 24 in the beam, a combination that gave her a top speed of seventeen knots and had enabled her, on her shakedown cruise, to make the Dover-Calais crossing in seventy-seven minutes. Five mornings later, 500 miles up the Atlantic coast, Tallahassee encountered her first prize, the schooner Sarah Boyce, and before the day was over she ran down six more Union merchant vessels, ransoming the last to put all prisoners ashore. That was Thursday, August 11; “Pirate off Sandy Hook capturing and burning,” the commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard wired Washington. Friday, off Long Island, she took six prizes, Saturday two, and Sunday — as if by way of resting on the Sabbath — one. By now she was cruising the New England coast, and on Monday she took six ships, Tuesday five, and Wednesday three, rounding out a week that netted her thirty prizes, all burned or scuttled except seven that were ransomed to clear her crowded decks of captured passengers and crews. On August 18, running low on coal, she put into the neutral port of Halifax to refuel.
Under instructions from the Queen, and over ardent protests from the American consul, the Nova Scotia authorities gave Wood twenty-four hours to fill his bunkers, and when this did not suffice they granted him a twelve-hour extension. Tallahassee steamed out the following night in time to avoid half a dozen enemy warships that arrived next day, the vanguard of a fleet of thirteen ordered to Halifax as soon as the consul telegraphed word of the raider’s presence in the harbor. She headed straight for Wilmington, taking so little chance on running out of coal that she only paused to seize one prize along the way, and arrived on the night of August 26 to speed and shoot her way through the blockade flotilla and drop anchor up the Cape Fear River, whose entrance was guarded by Fort Fisher. Her twenty-day cruise had cost the enemy 31 merchant vessels and had given Wood’s fellow countrymen some welcome news to offset the bad from Mobile Bay, where Fort Morgan had fallen three days ago. They took pride in the fact that “this extemporaneous man-of-war,” as Jefferson Davis called the Tallahassee, had “lit up the New England coast with her captures,” and they could tell themselves, as well, that no matter what misfortunes befell their regular navy, outnumbered as it invariably was in combat, their irregular navy (so to speak) had won them the admiration of the world and was rapidly scouring the seas of Yankee shipping.
That was the first Federal reverse. The second, which occurred simultaneously ashore, was quite as spectacular and, if anything, even more “irregular” — as was often the case in operations involving Bedford Forrest. He had been given a free rein to conduct the defense of North Mississippi by Major General Dabney Maury, who succeeded to command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana in late July, when Stephen Lee left to join Hood at Atlanta. “We must do the best we can with the little we have,” Maury wrote from Meridian in early August, “and it is with no small satisfaction I reflect that of all the commanders of the Confederacy you are accustomed to accomplish the very greatest results with small means when left to your own untrammeled judgment. Upon that judgment I now rely.”
Forrest took him at his word. “All that can be done shall be done,” he replied, adding that since he lacked “the force to risk a general engagement” in resisting the next blue incursion, he would “resort to all other means.” Other means, in this case, included a raid on Memphis, the enemy’s main base, under occupation for better than two years. Tactically, such a strike would be likely to disrupt the plans of the Federals for extending their conquest deep into Mississippi. Moreover, Forrest himself — a former alderman — would not only derive considerable personal satisfaction from returning to his home town, which no Confederate had entered, except as a spy or prisoner, since its fall in June of 1862; he would also be exacting vengeance for a battle fought the month before, near Tupelo, which was as close to a defeat as he had come so far in his career. Lee had been in command of the field, one week before his departure for Atlanta, but the memory rankled and Forrest was anxious to wipe it out or anyhow counterbalance it.
Hard on the heels of Brice’s Crossroads in mid-June, when he received orders from Sherman “to make up a force and go out and follow Forrest to the death, if it costs 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury,” C. C. Washburn, the Memphis commander, assigned the task to A. J. Smith, reinforcing two of his divisions, just returned from their excursion up and down Red River, with Bout
Three days out, and just over fifty miles down the road, Smith showed that he took this admonition to heart by burning much of the town of Ripley, including the courthouse, two churches, the Odd Fellows Hall, and a number of homes. Next day, July 9, still mindful of his instructions to “punish Forrest and the people,” he pressed on across the Tallahatchie and through New Albany, trailed by a swath of desolation ten miles wide.