Episode Details

By August 1864, Mobile, Alabama, was the last major Confederate port on the eastern Gulf. Its narrow entrance was covered by Fort Morgan's 46 guns, Forts Gaines and Powell, and 67 mines that left only a 500 yard gap beneath Fort Morgan. Rear Admiral David Farragut brought 14 wooden ships, lashed in pairs so a disabled ship could be towed, and four monitors. Admiral Franklin Buchanan waited with three gunboats and the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee, floated over the sandbar on wooden camels.

On August 5, the monitor Tecumseh under Tunis Craven veered into the minefield and sank in under three minutes with over 90 men. The Brooklyn stopped, jamming the column under the fort's guns, and Farragut, tied in the Hartford's rigging, led the fleet through the mines, whose primers could be heard clicking against the hulls. Buchanan then attacked the whole fleet alone; heavy shot from Union monitors disabled the Tennessee and he surrendered. Fort Morgan held out under siege until General Richard L. Page surrendered on August 23.

• Farragut kept steam pressure low so a hit boiler would scald fewer men.
• Army Signal Corps men aboard the ships relayed orders with wigwag flags through the smoke.
• The famous line damn the torpedoes did not appear in print until years later.
• Page was tried for spiking his guns under a flag of truce and was found not guilty.
• 115 Medals of Honor were awarded for the battle, four of them to African American sailors.