The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (98 page)

He was not, of course, “all ready,” nor would he be so until the monitors were on hand, the
Albemarle
having redemonstrated in April and May, at Plymouth and in the North Carolina Sound from which she took her name, what was likely to happen to his wooden ships if he had no ironclads of his own to stand between them and the
Tennessee
. Then on July 20 the first of the promised four arrived from the Atlantic coast;
Manhattan
she was called, wearing ten inches of armor on her revolving turret, which carried two 15-inch guns. Ten days later the
Chickasaw
put in from New Orleans, double turreted with a pair of 11-inch guns in each, followed next day by her sister ship
Winnebago
. All were on hand by August 1 except the
Tecumseh
, en route from the Atlantic in the wake of her twin
Manhattan
. Farragut found the waiting even harder now that it was about to end; he improved the time by instructing his skippers in their duties, using the tabletop wooden blocks to show just where he expected their ships to be put in all eventualities. Meantime, as he had been doing for the past ten days, he continued to send out nightly boat crews, under cover of darkness and with muffled oars, to grapple for or sink as many as possible of the torpedoes anchored between the end of the line of pilings southeast of Dauphin Island and the red buoy just off Mobile Point. A number were so removed or destroyed, and the admiral was pleased to learn that many were found to be duds, their firing mechanisms having long been exposed to the corrosive effect of salt water.

Granger’s 2000 soldiers arrived on August 2. They were taken around into Mississippi Sound the following night for a landing on the west end of Dauphin Island, and from there began working their way through heavy sand toward the back door of Fort Gaines.
Tecumseh
still had not appeared, but Farragut now was committed. “I can lose no more days,” he declared. “I must go in day after tomorrow morning at daylight or a little later. It is a bad time, but when you do not take fortune at her offer you must take her as you can find her.” Despite a heavy squall that evening, the grapplers went about their work in the mine field, undetected, and early next morning, August 4, the admiral took his fleet captains aboard the tender
Cowslip
for a closer look at the objective, cruising under the lee of Sand Island where the three monitors were anchored, ready to move out. Returning he went to his cabin, took out pen and paper, and composed a provisional farewell. “My dearest Wife: I write and leave this letter for you. I am going into Mobile Bay in the morning, if God is my leader, as I hope He is, and in Him I place my trust.… The Army landed last night, and are in full view of us this morning. The
Tecumseh
has not yet arrived.”

Just then she did, steaming in from Pensacola to take position at the head of the iron column on the far side of Sand Island. The Union line of battle was complete. Asked at bedtime if he would consent to giving the men a glass of grog to nerve them up for the fight next
morning, Farragut replied: “No, sir. I never found that I needed rum to enable me to do my duty. I will order two cups of good coffee to each man at 2 o’clock, and at 8 o’clock I will pipe all hands to breakfast in Mobile Bay.”

Fog delayed the forming of the line past daybreak, the prearranged time for the start of the run, but a dawn breeze cleared the mist away by sunup, which came at 5.30 this Friday morning, August 5. As the four monitors began their movement eastward off the lee shore of Sand Island, in preparation for turning north beyond the line of pilings and the mine field — at which point the wooden column of seven heavy ships, each with a gunboat lashed to its port side for reserve power in case its boilers or engines were knocked out, would come up in their left rear for the dash past Mobile Point and the brick pentagon looming huge and black against the sunrise — Farragut was pleased to see that fortune had given him the two things he prayed for: a westerly wind to blow the smoke of battle away from the fleet and toward the fort, and a flood tide that would carry any pair of vessels on into the bay, even if both were disabled. Captain James Alden’s 2000-ton 24-gun
Brooklyn
led the way, given the honor because she was equipped with chase guns and an antitorpedo device called a cowcatcher. Then came Flag Captain Percival Drayton’s
Hartford
with the admiral aboard, followed by the remaining five,
Richmond, Lackawanna, Monongahela, Ossipee
, and
Oneida
, each with its gunboat consort attached to the flank away from the fort and otherwise readied for action in accordance with instructions issued as far back as mid-July: “Strip your vessels and prepare for the conflict. Send down all superfluous spars and rigging. Trice up or remove the whiskers. Put up the splinter nets on the starboard side, and barricade the wheel and steersmen with sails and hammocks. Lay chains or sandbags on the deck over the machinery to resist a plunging fire. Hang the sheet chains over the side, or make any other arrangements for security that your ingenuity may suggest.” As a result, according to a Confederate who studied the uncluttered ships from Mobile Point, “They appeared like prize fighters ready for the ring.”

Buchanan, aboard the
Tennessee
, got word that they were coming at 5.45, shortly after they started his way. He hurried on deck in his drawers for a look at the Yankee vessels, iron and wood, and while he dressed passed orders for the ram and its three attendant gunboats to move westward and take up a position athwart the main channel, just in rear of the inner line of torpedoes, for crossing the Union T if the enemy warships — eighteen of them, mounting 199 guns, as compared to his own four with 22 — passed Fort Morgan in an attempt to enter the bay. Balding, clean-shaven like Farragut, with bright blue eyes and a hawk nose, the Marylander assembled the
Tennessee’s
officers and crew on her gun deck and made them a speech that managed to be at once brief and rambling. “Now, men, the enemy is coming, and I want
you to do your duty,” he began, and ended: “You shall not have it said when you leave this vessel that you were not near enough to the enemy, for I will meet them, and you can fight them alongside of their own ships. And if I fall, lay me on the side and go on with the fight.”

Farragut came on deliberately in accordance with his plan, the flagship crossing the outer bar at 6.10 while the iron column up ahead was making its turn north into the channel. Ten minutes later the lead monitor
Tecumseh
fired the opening shot, a 15-inch shell packed with sixty pounds of powder and half a bushel of cylindrical flathead bolts. It burst squarely over the fort, which did not reply until shortly after 7 o’clock, when the range to
Brooklyn
, leading the wooden column, had been closed to about a mile. Morgan’s heaviest weapon was a 10-inch Columbiad, throwing a projectile less than half the weight of the one from
Tecumseh
, but the effect was altogether memorable for a young surgeon on the
Lackawanna
, midway down the line of high-masted vessels. “It is a curious sight to catch a single shot from so heavy a piece of ordnance,” he later wrote. “First you see the puff of white smoke upon the distant ramparts, and then you see the shot coming, looking exactly as if some gigantic hand has thrown in play a ball toward you. By the time it is half way, you get the boom of the report, and then the howl of the missile, which apparently grows so rapidly in size that every green hand on board who can see it is certain that it will hit him between the eyes. Then, as it goes past with a shriek like a thousand devils, the inclination to do reverence is so strong that it is almost impossible to resist it.”

Now the action became general, and by 7.30 the leading sloops, closing fast on the sluggish monitors, had their broadsides bearing fairly on the fort, whose gun crews were distracted by flying masonry, clouds of brickdust, and an avalanche of shells. Then two things happened, one in each of the tandem columns, for which Farragut had not planned while rehearsing the operation on the table in his cabin. Directly ahead of the flagship,
Brooklyn
had to slow to keep from overtaking the rear monitor
Chickasaw
. Presently, to the consternation of all astern, Alden stopped and began making signals: “The monitors are right ahead. We cannot go on without passing them. What shall we do?” While Farragut was testily replying, “Go ahead!” — and the guns of the fort and water battery, less than half a mile away, were stepping up their fire — Commander Tunis Craven of the
Tecumseh
, at the head of the iron column, reacted to a similar crisis in quite a different way, though it too involved a departure from instructions. Approaching the red buoy that marked the eastern limit of the mine field, he saw the breakers off Mobile Point, just off his starboard bow, and said to his pilot, out of fear of running aground: “It is impossible that the admiral means us to go inside that buoy.” He ordered a hard turn to port, which carried the
Tecumseh
to the left, not right, of the red marker. But not for long. A
sudden, horrendous explosion against her bottom, square amidships — whether of one or more torpedoes was later disputed — shook and stopped the iron vessel, set her lurching from side to side, and sent water pouring down her turret as she wallowed in the waves.

All aboard her must have known the hurt was mortal, though no one guessed how short her agony would be. Craven and his pilot, for example, standing face to face at the foot of the ladder that led to the only escape hatch, staged a brief, courtly debate.

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“After you, Pilot.”

So they said; “But there was nothing after me,” the pilot later testified. As he put his foot on the top rung of the ladder,
Tecumseh
and her captain dropped from under him.

Through a sight slit in the turret of
Manhattan
, next in line, an engineer watched the lead monitor vanish almost too abruptly for belief. “Her stern lifted high in the air with the propeller still revolving, and the ship pitched out of sight like an arrow twanged from the bow.” With her went all but a score of her 114-man crew, including four who swam to Mobile Point and were taken captive, while the others who managed to wriggle out before she hit bottom were picked up by a boat from the
Hartford’s
consort,
Metacomet
.

Farragut sent the boat, though the fact was he had problems enough on his hands by then, including the apparent likelihood that such rescue work was about to be required in his own direction.
Brooklyn’s
untimely halt, practically under Morgan’s guns, had thrown the wooden column into confusion; for when she stopped her bow yawed off to starboard, subtracting her broadside from the pounding the fort was taking, and what was worse she lay nearly athwart the channel, blocking the path of the other ships. Nor was that the end of the trouble she and her captain made. Alarmed by the sudden dive of the
Tecumseh
(“Sunk by a torpedo! Assassination in its worst form!” he would protest in his report) Alden spotted, just under his vessel’s prow, “a row of suspicious-looking buoys” which he took to be floats attached to mines. He reacted by ordering
Brooklyn’s
engines reversed, and this brought her bearing down, stern foremost, on the
Hartford
. Farragut, who had climbed the mainmast rigging as far as the futtock shrouds for a view above the smoke — he was tied there with a rope passed round his body by a sailor, sent aloft by Drayton, lest a collision or a chance shot bring him crashing to the deck some twenty feet below — angrily hailed the approaching sloop, demanding to know the cause for such behavior, and got the reply: “Torpedoes ahead.”

Like the
Brooklyn
, which took 59 hits in the course of the fight,
Hartford
was absorbing cruel punishment from the guns on Mobile Point: particularly from those in the water battery, whose fire was point-blank and deadly. Men were falling fast, their mangled bodies placed in
a row on one side of the deck, while the wounded were sent below in numbers too great for the surgeons to handle. A rifled solid tore a gunner’s head off; another took both legs off a sailor who threw up his arms as he fell, only to have them carried away by still another. Farragut looked back down the line, where the rest of his stalled vessels were being served in much the same fashion, and saw that it would not do. He either had to go forward or turn back. In his extremity, he said later, he called on God: “Shall I go on?” and received the answer from a commanding voice inside his head: “Go on.”
Brooklyn
blocked the channel on the right, so he asked the pilot, directly above him in the maintop, whether there was enough water for the
Hartford
to pass her on the left. The pilot said there was, and the admiral, exultant, shouted down to Drayton on the quarterdeck: “I will take the lead!” Signaling “close order” to the ships astern, he had the
Metacomet
back her engines and the flagship go all forward. This turned her westward, clear of
Brooklyn
, which she passed as she moved out. Someone called up a reminder of Alden’s warning, but Farragut, lashed to the rigging high above the smoke of battle, with Mobile Bay in full view before him, had no time or mind for caution. “Damn the torpedoes!” he cried. “Full speed ahead!”

Ahead he went, followed by the others, west of where the
Brooklyn
lay until she rejoined the column — and west, too, of the red buoy marking the eastern limit of the mine field. Though Farragut had been encouraged by the work of his nighttime grapplers, who not only had removed a considerable number of mines in the course of the past two weeks, but also reported a high percentage of duds among them,
Tecumseh
had just given an only-too-graphic demonstration of what might await him and all his warships, iron or wood, as a result of this sudden departure from his plan to avoid the doom-infested stretch of water the
Hartford
now was crossing. And sure enough, while she steamed ahead with all the speed her engines could provide, the men on deck — and, even worse, the ones cooped up below — could hear the knock and scrape of torpedo cases against her hull and the snap of primers designed to ignite the charges that would blast her to the bottom. None did, either under the
Hartford
or any of the vessels in her wake, but the passage of Morgan became progressively more difficult as the lead sloops steamed out of range and left the tail of the column, along with the slow-moving monitors, to the less-divided attention of the cannoneers in the fort and on the beach.
Oneida
, which brought up the rear, took a 7-inch shell in the starboard boiler, scalding her firemen with escaping steam, and another that burst in the cabin, cutting both wheel ropes. Powerless and out of control, she too made it past, tugged along by her consort, only to emerge upon a scene of even worse destruction, just inside the bay.