Why Did Farragut Order His Fleet Through a Live Minefield?

The Clash and the Stakes

Mobile, Alabama, had become the last major Confederate port left open on the Gulf of Mexico east of the Mississippi by the summer of 1864, and the Confederate government had chosen it as one of the few coastal cities worth defending with real resources rather than spread its forces thin along the whole coastline. Blockade runners carrying goods to and from Havana and other Caribbean ports had made the city the center of Gulf smuggling once New Orleans fell to the Union in April 1862, and the Confederate Army had used the years since to strengthen the bay's defenses, reinforcing Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines at the entrance and adding the smaller Fort Powell to guard a secondary channel called Grant's Pass.

Rear Admiral David G. Farragut, who had already taken New Orleans and helped force the surrender of Port Hudson on the Mississippi, arrived off Mobile Bay in the summer of 1864 with orders to finish the job the Union Navy had delayed while it was busy elsewhere on the river. Facing him were three forts bristling with roughly 90 guns between them, a field of 67 tethered mines that Confederate engineers called torpedoes, and a small Confederate flotilla built around the ironclad ram CSS Tennessee, a slow but heavily armored vessel that had only reached the lower bay in May after workers strapped buoyant caissons to her hull to float her over a sandbar too shallow for her draft.

Reports From the Front

On the morning of August 5, 1864, Farragut sent his fleet of wooden warships and ironclad monitors straight at the narrow channel between Fort Morgan and the Confederate minefield, lashing himself into the rigging of his flagship, the Hartford, so he could see over the smoke of battle. Early in the run, the monitor Tecumseh struck one of the mines and sank within minutes, and the ships behind her began to falter under the fort's guns rather than follow her into what looked like a death trap. It was in that moment of hesitation that Farragut is said to have given the order remembered ever since, urging his fleet to push through the mined water rather than turn back into range of the fort's cannon.

The gamble worked. Farragut's ships crossed the minefield without further loss and came out into open water beyond the reach of Fort Morgan's shore guns, where they turned to face the waiting Confederate flotilla. The three small Confederate gunboats scattered or were driven off in short order, leaving the ironclad Tennessee to fight the entire Union fleet alone. Admiral Franklin Buchanan, who had commanded the Confederate ironclad Virginia in her famous duel with the Monitor two years earlier, pressed the attack anyway, and for a time Tennessee's iron plating let her absorb far more punishment than she handed out. Union ships rammed her repeatedly and pounded her armor at close range until her steering chains were shot away and her gun ports jammed, and with the ship reduced to a helpless hulk, Buchanan finally struck his flag and surrendered.

The Military and Political Fallout

With Tennessee gone, the Confederate Navy at Mobile had nothing left to contest the bay, and the three forts guarding its entrance now stood alone against Farragut's fleet and a supporting force of Union soldiers who had landed on the barrier islands. Fort Powell, the smallest and weakest of the three, was abandoned and blown up by its own garrison the night after the naval battle rather than face a bombardment it could not survive. Fort Gaines surrendered on August 8, and Fort Morgan, the strongest of the three, held out under bombardment for another three weeks before its garrison surrendered on August 23, giving the Union complete control of lower Mobile Bay.

The city of Mobile itself did not fall in 1864. Union forces controlled the bay and had shut off its use as a port, but the city stayed in Confederate hands for the rest of the war and would not be occupied until April 1865, in the war's final weeks. Even so, the practical purpose of the campaign was achieved the moment the forts fell, since closing Mobile Bay to blockade runners completed the Union naval blockade along that stretch of the Gulf coast and cut off one of the Confederacy's last working links to the outside world.

How the Balance of Power Shifted

Mobile Bay turned out to be Farragut's last engagement of the war and the last naval battle fought in Alabama waters. He had already become the Union Navy's first rear admiral after New Orleans, and Mobile Bay stands as the last of the battles that built that reputation. News of the victory reached Northern newspapers alongside reports of the fall of Atlanta that same summer, and the two victories together gave a meaningful lift to Abraham Lincoln's re election campaign just three months before voters went to the polls that November.

The men who fought in the confined, smoke filled decks of Farragut's fleet were remembered too. John Lawson, a Black fireman who kept passing gunpowder up from below deck aboard Farragut's flagship even after being wounded and knocked unconscious by an exploding shell, was among the first Black sailors awarded the Medal of Honor for his conduct that day, a recognition that took its place alongside the more famous story of Farragut's run through the minefield.

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