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Protracted Naval War

Ships and Commanders Confederate Navy

The naval war was subdivided into three theaters: the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the great inland rivers, and the blue water over the horizon. The Union was victorious in the first two, the Confederacy in the third.

On 9 January 1862 Flag Officer David G. Farragut was assigned command of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron and charged with taking New Orleans. The nation's leading exporter of cotton prior to the war, and second only to New York in total exports, New Orleans was the kev to the South's "King Cotton" strategy of coercing Great Britain into full diplomatic recognition and military assistance. Located 100 miles up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans controlled the exit and entrance of the greatest maritime highway in North America. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Fox and Commander David Dixon Porter concluded that the navy could take the city. They would send mortar boats from the Gulf to knock out the two forts, ~Jackson and St. Philip, 10 miles above the river's mouth. Then deep-draft warships could steam past and threaten New Orleans itself.

In February 1862, Farragut assembled a fleet of four first-class steam sloops and twelve gunboats. His flagship was the powerful sloop Hartford, a veteran of the East India Squadron built for coastal and riverine operations prior to the war. Farragut placed Porter in subordinate command of twenty-one schooners that had been converted into mortar boats for lobbing 13-inch fused shells into the wooden and earthen forts. Porter began his attack on 18 April. He failed to knock out the forts, but two gunboats commanded by Captain Henry H. Bell cut a narrow path through the massive log obstruction the Confederates had placed in the river just under their guns. With characteristic impatience and audacity, Farragut on 24 April ordered his sloops and gunboats to charge through the gap opened by Bell and past the forts Porter had not fully silenced. New Orleans surrendered to the fleet the next day. Stunned by the reversal, the defenders of the navy yard at Pensacola followed suit on 10 May. On 16 July Congress created the rank of rear admiral to honor Farragut for capturing the South's major entrepot and the gateway to the Mississippi.

The Union goal now was to win control of the entire Mississippi River in order to cut off the Western states, notably Texas, from the rest of the Confederacy, and to restore the export trade of the upriver corn belt states. It took the army and navy more than a year to achieve that objective. The Confederacy had several strongholds between New Orleans and the Ohio River, notably Memphis, Tennessee, and Port Hudson, Louisiana. The South also controlled key tributaries flowing into the Mississippi, which could be used to resupply or reinforce Confederate troops or to outflank Union operations. Principal among these was the Red River, which drained Texas and western Louisiana. But the nearly insurmountable obstacle to wresting control of the Mississippi was. the great fort on the bluffs of the eastern bank at Vicksburg.

The navy's operations on the Mississippi River from April 1862 until 4 July 1863 became a two-man show masterminded by the step-brothers David G. Farragut and David Dixon Porter. Farragut di rectly commanded the deep-draft steamers operating on the river, and Porter held semi-autonomous command of the smaller gunboats and mortar boats. A combination of army troops and navy gunboats took Memphis in early June 1862, leaving Farragut the dubious opportunity to dash past Vicksburg with his big ships to satisfy the secretary of the navy's orders for some decisive move on the Father of the Waters. Three of his eleven ships were turned back by artillery fire from Vicksburg. Farragut's Hartford and eight others made it past, but the navy's first rear admiral concluded from the operation that naval gunfire could not reduce this particular bastion.

Isolated above Vicksburg, Farragut began to worry that Coufederate sorties to the south could threaten the entire Union naval force on the river. He charged past the fort once more and returned to his base of operations at New Orleans. He and his heavy ships remained there until March 1863, when they pressed north one last time. The Confederate batteries at Port Hudson stopped all but the Hartford and one gunboat, but those two got through to establish a permanent blockade at the confluence of the Red and Mississippi rivers. Farragut established direct communications with Porter, now a rear admiral, who together with Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman was trying to unlock the hack door of Vicksburg.

Porter assembled a flotilla of army transports and escorted them south past Vicksburg with his gunboats. While Sherman made a convincing feint against the fort's northern salient, Porter ferried the bulk of Grant's army from the western to the eastern shore of the river about 30 miles ldownstream. Once on the eastern side, Grant's troops laid siege to Vicksburg from its rear. The surrender came on 4 July 1863, at the same time as Lee's defeat at Gettysburg. Grant and Shennan had split the Confederacy along the Mississippi. Porter and Farragut had provided three essential elements of naval support for the operations along the river's banks: gunfire, troop transport, and logistical reinforcements. If one conceives of the Mississippi operations as analogous to naval operations along an extended enemy coastline, one can see that the Union navy acted as a traditional blockading force, just as its senior officers had during the Mexican War a decade and a half earlier.

The reopening of the Mississippi in July 1863 was followed in March 1864 by a strategically pointless army-navy expedition up the Red River toward Texas. David llixon Porter's ironclad gunboats led the way, as an army under Major General Nathaniel P. Banks advanced along the shore. Banks was stopped by a Confederate army, and Porter was blocked by a sunken steamer in early April. The withdrawal of the gunboats was imperiled by the falling level of the river and Confederate harassment, but in May Porter finally got all of his ships but one back to the Mississippi. The sortie, described by one historian as "the greatest fiasco of the war," diverted energy from renewed large-scale offensive operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the Mississippi, Farragut and Porter found that they could establish a local blockade and seize relativelv minor settlements pretty much at will, but the active cooperation of the Union army was absolutely essential in taking well-garrisoned strongholds.

The blue-water navy learned the same lesson about the same time. In 1862 Union blockaders based in Port Royal and Hilton Head, South Carolina, cut blockade running from Charleston to a trickle. The city itself, the most strongly defended port in the Confederacy, lay untouched. Secretary of the Navy Welles pressed the commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, to use his new monitors to bombard and take Fort Sumter, the taunting symbol of rebel insolence. The question was whether well-armored gunships could batter heavy forts into submission. On 7 April 1863 Du Pont, in the New Ironsides, led eight monitors into Charleston harbor for a point-blank fifty-minute slugfest with the forts. Du Pont's ironclads took more than 325 direct hits; none sank immediately, but all were damaged.

The question was answered. Ships could survive a vicious pounding from forts, but they could not silence or capture them. The army would be needed to mount a conventional siege from the rear or flanks of coastal forts. Du Pont yielded command to Rear Admiral John A. llahlgren, who opened a joint army-navy siege of the Charleston forts with Brigadier General Quincy A. Gillmore in July. Despite their best efforts, the city held out for 567 days. It was evacuated by its defenders only when General William T. Shennan's army approached it in February 1865 at the end of the march from Atlanta to the Atlantic.

In the Gulf of Mexico, planning for a serious offensive had intensified once Rear Admiral Porter extracted himself from the unfortunate diversion on the Red River in May 1864. For some time Farragut had wanted to hit Mobile, Alabama, "the last Gulf Coast port of any consequence left in Southern hands." With General Sherman calling for a diversion to prevent Confederate units in Mobile from reinforcing his target of Atlanta, Washington finally gave Farragut the go-ahead. In July, at the Pensacola Navy Yard, he assembled a fleet for the stroke that earned him immortality.

Just before dawn on 5 August 1864, Farragut's force of fourteen wooden ships and four monitors began its approach to Mobile Bay. The combination of a fort, submerged pilings, and buoyed mines forced the attackers into a narrow passage under a second fort on the eastern side of the channel. In the bay itself waited the Tennessee, a new Confederate ironclad improvement on the ill-fated Virginia, supported by three light gunboats. The squadron mounted a total of sixteen guns against the Union's 159.

Farragut's Hartford was second in column behind another screwsloop, the Brooklyn, but the monitor Tecumseh dashed past the older ships and headed straight toward the Confederate flagship Tennessee. Hitting one of the submerged mines - called torpedoes at the time - Tecumseh went down almost instantly. Eighty of the crew of one hundred perished in a catastrophe that suggested for the first time the real vulnerability of ironclads to weapons lurking below the waterline.

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! The Battle of Mobile Bay would be Farragut's last. Overcome with fatigue he returned to New York in December 1864 a national hero. In 1866, Farragut became the first person in the history of the United States Navy to be awarded the rank of Admiral. Two years later In 1868, he was even asked run for the office of President of the United States, but replied, "I hasten to assure you that I have never for one moment entertained the idea of political life." Farragut would have only two years to live. The first Admiral of the Navy died on August 14, 1870 it the age of 69. His funeral procession in New York City included 10,000 soldiers and sailors and was headed by President Ulysses S. Grant. A statue of Admiral Farragut was erected in the heart of our nation's capital known as Farragut Square. It remains a lasting tribute to the most distinguished naval officer of the Civil War.

The frightened Brooklyn went dead in the water, blocking the Hartford and the other ships in column astern. From the port rigging where he was lashed for visibility, the old firebrand in command shouted to the Hartford's helmsmen and all others who would hear, "Damn the torpedoes! Full steam ahead." Hartford cut left through the mines, some of which bounced off her hull without exploding. The ensuing four-hour melee ended only when the South's Rear Admiral Franklin Buehanan squandered the Tennessee in a singular attack on the Hartford and seventeen other Federal warships. The heavy Confederate ram could have been a potent threat to lighter ships outside the bay or in night attacks, but "Old Buck" wanted to duel with his antagonist personally. Farragut's ships and monitors hammered the unwieldy Tennessee into submission, and by 10:00 A.M. Mobile Bay was in Union hands. Although the city and its forts did not succumb to the besieging Union army until 12 April 1865, this naval victory closed the last major Gulf port to Confederate blockade runners.

The Battle of Mobile Bay coincided with Sherman's sack of Atlanta, which in turn set the stage for his sweep to Savannah and subsequent foray north into the Carolinas. While Dahlgren was giving Sherman some token help in coercing Charleston into surrendering, the navy and army were mounting a joint assault on Fort Fisher, the seaward protector of Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington's rail line to Richmond, Virginia, carried supplies for Robert E. Lee's army, and General Grant was willing to divert troops to cut off Lee's resupply from the rear.

Farragut declined command because of battle fatigue, so Porter took charge for the navy. At Hampton Roads he assembled almost a hundred ships, everything from new screw-frigates to ferries converted into gunboats. His plan was to soften Fort Fisher with naval gunfire and then cover about 8,000 troops landing in a frontal assault. The first attempt, on Christmas Day 1864, failed when General Benjamin F. Butler concluded that he could not safely assault the fort, which "was left substantially uninjured as a defensive work by the navy fire."

The army removed Butler, and Grant assigned Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry to cooperate with Porter. The new team tried again on 12-15 January, and this time they succeeded. Terry's men went ashore north of the fort, which was situated on a peninsula. They cut it off from the land link with Wilmington and moved on it from behind. Porter's ships kept the installation under fairly continuous fire, and a landing party of about 2,000 marines and bluejackets tried a frontal attack. They fell back in bloody confusion, and just as the Confederate defenders were shouting their victory Terry's men came at them from the rear. The Confederates held on as long as possible, but by 10:00 P.m. on 15 January they had surrendered to Terry as an alternative to being pushed into the sea at the tip of the promontory. The navy lost three hundred men on the beach that day, the army almost seven hundred, and the Confederacy more than seven hundred. But Wilmington was now Union property, and Lee could not draw supplies from its railhead.

Kenneth J. Hagan. A Navy Divided Against Itself. This People's Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. The Free Press. Copyright 1991.

Last Stand at Mobile Waugh. "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!" Admiral David Farragut's words, some of the most famous in American history, were written in fire and blood as the United States Navy came of age in August 1864. This book takes a fresh look at the stirring land and sea battles surrounding the capture of one of the confederacy's most important cities, Mobile, Alabama.

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