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 riggin
g 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.
Buchanan had succeeded in his design to cross the Union T; with the result that when Farragut ended his sprint across the mine field he found the Tennessee and the three rebel gunboats drawn up to receive him in line ahead, presenting their broadsides to the approaching column, whose return fire was limited to the vessels in the lead, and even these could bring only their bow guns into play. Hartford’s was promptly knocked out by a shot from Selma, smallest of the three, and this was followed by another that passed through the chain armor on the flagship’s starboard bow, killing ten men, wounding five, and hurling bodies, or parts of bodies, aft and onto the decks of the Metacomet, lashed alongside. Farragut kept coming, with Brooklyn and Richmond close astern, and managed to avoid an attempt by Buchanan to ram and sink him, meantime bringing his big Dahlgrens to bear on the gunboats, one of which then retired lamely toward Fort Morgan, taking water through a hole punched in her hull. This was the Gaines; she was out of the fight, and presently so were the others, Morgan and Selma; for Hartford and Richmond cast off their consorts to engage them and they fled. Metacomet led the chase, yawing twice to fire her bow gun, but then stopped firing to concentrate on speed. While Morgan made it to safety under the lee of Mobile Point, Selma kept running eastward across the shallows beyond the channel, still pursued despite the Metacomet’s deeper draft. Out on the bow of the northern vessel, a leadsman was already calling one foot less than the ship drew, but her captain, feeling the soft ooze of the bottom under her keel, refused to abandon the chase. “Call the man in,” he told his exec. “He is only intimidating me with his soundings.”
Persistence paid. Overtaken, Selma lost eight killed and seven wounded before she hauled down her flag. Westward, the Gaines burned briskly, set afire by her crew, who escaped in boats as she sank in shallow water. Only Morgan survived, anchored under the frown of the fort’s guns to wait for nightfall, when she would steal around the margin of the bay to gain the greater safety of Mobile, inside Dog River Bar.
Left to fight alone, Buchanan steamed after the Hartford for a time, still hoping to ram and sink her, despite the agility she had shown in avoiding his first attempt, but soon perceived that her speed made the chase a waste of effort; whereupon he turned back and made for the other half-dozen sloops, advancing in closer order. Tennessee passed down the line of high-walled wooden men-of-war, mauling and being mauled. Two shots went through and through the Brooklyn, increasing her toll of killed and wounded to 54, but another pair flew high to miss the Richmond. Both ships delivered point-blank broadsides that had no effect whatever on the armored vessel as she bore down on Lackawanna, next in line, and Monongahela, which she struck a glancing blow, then swung round to send two shells crashing into the Ossipee. That left Oneida, whose bad luck now turned good, at least for the moment. Aboard the ram, defective primers spared the crippled ship a pounding; then one gun fired a delayed shot that cost the northern skipper an arm and the use of his 11-inch after pivot, which was raked. Tennessee turned hard aport in time to meet the three surviving monitors, just arriving, and exchanged volleys in passing that did no harm on either side. Then she proceeded to Fort Morgan and pulled up, out of range on the far side of the channel.
Farragut dropped anchor four miles inside the bay, and the rest of the blue flotilla, wood and iron, steamed up to join him, their crews already at work clearing away debris and swabbing the blood from decks, while belowdecks surgeons continued to ply their scalpels and cooks got busy in the galleys. It was 8.35; he was only a bit over half an hour behind schedule on last night’s promise to “pipe all hands to breakfast in Mobile Bay” by 8 o’clock. All the same, despite the general elation at having completed another spectacular run past formidable works, rivaling those below New Orleans and at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, there was also a tempering sorrow over the loss of the Tecumseh and considerable apprehension, as well, from the fact that the murderous rebel iron ram was still afloat across the way.
Drayton promptly expressed this reservation to the admiral, who by now had come down from the flagship’s rigging and stood on the poop. “What we have done has been well done, sir,” he told him. “But it all counts for nothing so long as the Tennessee is there under the guns of Morgan.” Farragut nodded. “I know it,” he said, “and as soon as the people have had their breakfasts I am going for her.”
As it turned out, there was no need for that, and no time for breakfast. At 8.50, fifteen minutes after Hartford anchored, there was a startled cry from aloft. “The ram is coming!” So she was, and presently those on deck saw her steaming directly for the fleet, apparently too impatient to wait for a fight in which she would have the help of the guns ashore. Farragut prepared for battle, remarking as he did so: “I did not think Old
Buck was such a fool.”
Fool or not, throughout the pause Buchanan had been unwilling to admit the fight was over, whatever the odds and no matter how far he had to go from Fort Morgan to renew it. Instrumental in the founding of the academy at Annapolis, he had served as its first superintendent and thought too highly of naval tradition to accept even tacit defeat while his ship remained in any condition to engage the enemy. “If he won’t visit me, I will have to visit him,” his adversary had remarked three weeks ago, and Buchanan felt much the same about the matter now as he gazed across three miles of water at the Yankee warships riding at anchor in the bay — his bay — quite as if there was no longer any question of their right to be there. Gazing, he drew the corners of his mouth down in a frown of disapproval, then turned to the Tennessee’s captain. “Follow them up, Johnston. We can’t let them off that way.” With that, the ram started forward: one six-gun vessel against a total of seventeen, three of them wearing armor heavier than her own, mounting 157 guns, practically all of them larger than any weapon in her casemate. That Buchanan was in no mood for advice was demonstrated, however, when one of his officers tried to call his attention to the odds. “Now I am in the humor, I will have it out,” he said, and that was that. The ram continued on her way.
The monitors having proved unwieldy, Farragut’s main reliance was on his wooden sloops, particularly the Monongahela and the Lackawanna, which were equipped with iron prows for ramming. Their orders were to run the ram down, while the others pitched in to do her whatever damage they could manage with their guns. Accordingly, when the Tennessee came within range about 9.20, making hard for the flagship, Monongahela moved ahead at full speed and struck her amidships, a heavy blow that had no effect at all on the rebel vessel but cost the sloop her iron beak, torn off along with her cutwater. Lackawanna rammed in turn, with the result that an eight-foot section of her stem was crushed above and below the waterline. Tennessee lurched but held her course, and the two flagships collided nearly head on. “The port bow of the Hartford met the port bow of the ram,” an officer aboard the Federal vessel later wrote, “and the ships grated against each other as they passed. The Hartford poured her whole port broadside against the ram, but the solid shot merely dented the side and bounded into the air. The ram tried to return the salute, but owing to defective primers only one gun was discharged. This sent a shell through the berth-deck, killing five men and wounding eight. The muzzle of the gun was so close to the Hartford that the powder blackened her side.”