Mobile Bay

Mobile and Mobile Bay

Where the Mobile and Tensaw rivers converge, they carve out a natural harbor near the top of Mobile Bay, giving rise to the city of Mobile itself. Stretching roughly 33 miles (53 km) in length, the bay widens to about 23 miles (37 km) across its lower reaches. Ocean-going ships could travel through this lower section without any need for dredging, but past the mouth of Dog River the waters grow too shallow for vessels with a deep draft to reach the city.

On the eastern side of the bay's entrance stretches a slender sand peninsula called Mobile Point, which divides Bon Secour Bay, fed by the Bon Secour River, from the open gulf. Where this point meets the main shipping channel into Mobile Bay, the federal government had constructed a fort before the war began, meant to guard the city against naval attack.

Beyond the entrance, the peninsula's outline carries on through a chain of barrier islands starting with Dauphin Island. Little Dauphin Island sits to its northwest, followed by a scattering of smaller islands broken up by Grant's Pass, a secondary route into the bay. Additional small islands and shoal areas extend south of Dauphin Island, shaping the main channel for up to 10 miles (16 km) beyond the bay's mouth.

Rather than attempt to protect its whole coast, the Confederacy chose early on to focus its defenses on a handful of vital ports and harbors. Once New Orleans fell in April 1862, Mobile stood as the last major port requiring protection along the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

From then on, Mobile served as the primary hub for gulf blockade running, handling most of the commerce flowing between the Confederacy and destinations such as Havana and other Caribbean ports. Though a handful of efforts were made to break through the blockade, none carried enough weight to produce a lasting effect. One particularly humiliating moment for the U.S. Navy came when the Confederate raider CSS Florida slipped past the blockade and into Mobile Bay on September 4, 1862, only to escape back through it on January 15, 1863.

When Flag Officer David G. Farragut took command of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, his orders called for the capture of both New Orleans and Mobile. Yet the squadron's early commitment to the lower Mississippi campaign meant Mobile and its harbor had to wait, not gaining full attention until Vicksburg fell in July 1863.

This delay gave Confederate forces time to reinforce Mobile Bay's defenses, bolstering both Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines at the bay's mouth. They also built Fort Powell, a smaller installation positioned to defend the Grant's Pass channel, and blocked that passage with piles and other barriers, a move that redirected the tidal current toward Heron Pass.

Confederate defenses

Command over Mobile and its bay rested with Major General Dabney H. Maury, who headed the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana. Even though his headquarters sat in the city itself, Maury never took direct charge of the forts guarding the bay's mouth, and he was absent both when the battle unfolded and throughout the siege that followed. Instead, that responsibility fell to Brigadier General Richard L. Page, who managed matters on the ground.

Three forts formed the backbone of the army's effort to guard the bay. Fort Morgan, built of masonry back in 1834, held 46 guns, eleven of them rifled pieces, with roughly 600 soldiers stationed inside. Facing it across the channel on Dauphin Island stood Fort Gaines, armed with 26 guns and manned by a similar force of about 600; whenever Page was elsewhere, Colonel Charles D. Anderson took charge there. Smallest among the trio was Fort Powell at the bay's western edge, holding just 18 guns and around 140 defenders under Lieutenant Colonel James M. Williams whenever Page could not attend to it personally. A shared weakness plagued all three positions: none had guns shielded from an attack approaching from behind, and Powell and Gaines further suffered from insufficient traverses.

Sheer troop counts, though, tell little about actual fighting capacity. By this stage the conflict was drawing toward its close, and accounts suggest the defenders' spirits had grown poor

The United States

By the time the Union fleet moved against Mobile Bay, its commander was no longer known as Flag Officer David G. Farragut but as Rear Admiral Farragut. This change reflected a broader reorganization within the U.S. Navy during the war's second year, part of which involved introducing the rank of rear admiral itself. The shift carried real meaning: ships would now operate together as a unified fleet rather than as loosely connected vessels sharing a single objective.

Farragut's assembled force of eighteen ships spanned a variety of designs, some so new they hadn't even existed at the war's outset. Eight were traditional wooden vessels bristling with broadside guns. Among these, four (the flagship Hartford, along with Brooklyn, Richmond, and Oneida) had served with the West Gulf Blockading Squadron since its inception and had already seen combat along the Mississippi. Two smaller gunboats, Kennebec and Itasca, had likewise stood alongside Farragut since New Orleans fell.

Galena, though functioning much like the other conventional ships by this point, had originally been built as an experimental ironclad; her armor plating proved more burdensome than beneficial and was eventually stripped away. Three vessels, Octorara, Metacomet, and Port Royal, belonged to the double-ender class, a design born during the war specifically to handle the winding channels of inland rivers. Rounding out the fleet were four ironclad monitors representing the navy's newest generation of warships. Manhattan and Tecumseh followed an upgraded version of the original Monitor's layout, each carrying two heavy guns within a single turret. Chickasaw and Winnebago, by contrast, were shallow draft river monitors fitted with twin turrets, each bearing four guns of lighter caliber than those on their counterparts.

Seizing and holding the enemy's fortifications demanded cooperation from ground forces as well. Major General Edward Richard Sprigg Canby, an experienced soldier heading the Military Division of West Mississippi, joined Farragut in mapping out the assault on Mobile. Canby estimated that some 5,000 troops might be drawn from other duties within his division, sufficient to land forces behind Fort Morgan and sever its link to Mobile. These plans faltered, though, once General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant demanded reinforcements for the Virginia campaign, which was approaching a decisive stage.

Faced with this constraint, Canby concluded he could spare only 2,000 men, not nearly enough to besiege the fort at Morgan but sufficient to seize Dauphin Island and thereby link the fleet within the bay to gulf-based support. Both commanders understood that Mobile itself would remain out of reach, yet they agreed that controlling the lower bay offered enough strategic value to the blockading effort that the operation deserved to proceed regardless.

Recognizing that coordination between naval and ground forces would prove essential, Canby proposed embedding some of his signal corpsmen aboard Farragut's principal warships. Farragut agreed to the arrangement, and this seemingly minor blending of army and navy personnel ended up proving quite valuable once fighting began.

On August 3, 1864, roughly 1,500 troops came ashore about fifteen miles west of the fort, shielded by one of Farragut's naval detachments, marking the start of what would become the Siege of Fort Gaines. This landing force drew from infantry units of the 77th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the 34th Iowa Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the 96th Ohio Infantry, and the 3rd Maryland Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, all under General Gordon Granger's command. From there the soldiers advanced on Fort Gaines itself. By the close of August 4, they had dug in and established a skirmish line positioned less than half a mile from their objective.