This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [229]
At the start there was trouble. The torpedoes were a menace, and when the fort and the Confederate ships opened fire the Union fleet fell into confusion. Monitor Tecumseh, at the head of the line, put her forefoot on one of the torpedoes and blew up, going to the bottom like a stone and carrying her captain and most of her crew down with her. Ships behind her sheered off, slowed down, and stopped. Farragut, in the flagship Hartford, was astern of them; he scampered up the rigging to a point just below the main top, peering ahead into the smoke while an anxious junior passed the bight of a line around him to keep him from falling into the water. For the fleet to stay here, huddled under the fire of the fort’s big guns, was to invite complete destruction. Angrily Farragut demanded to know the reason for the delay.
Torpedoes ahead, he was told: Tecumseh is gone already, and if we go on we will lose more ships.
Farragut exploded: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! The line began to move again; firing mechanisms in the torpedoes proved defective — Hartford brushed against one, but it failed to explode — and the fleet exchanged enormous broadsides with the fort while it plowed on into the bay. The fight was hot and heavy while it lasted, and Hartford took a brutal pounding. An army signal officer who was stationed aboard her recalled afterward that he had read, in stories about sea fights, tales about decks running with blood and had thought it all imagination; he really saw it this morning.
The fleet passed the fort at last and got well inside the bay. The Confederate ships drew off briefly, and Farragut had his ships anchor and repair damages. Then Tennessee came steaming in to the attack, and the fight was renewed — a whole fleet coming to grips with one grim black ironclad. One of the wooden sloops rammed Tennessee, hurting the Confederate not at all but wrecking her own bow; another tried to ram, missed, and crashed into Hartford, almost sinking the flagship, and again Farragut sprang into the rigging for a better view of what was going on. The guns of the fleet could not penetrate Tennessee’s mailed sides, but they kept hammering, surrounding her and penning her in; a monitor held position just astern of the big ironclad and slammed away with fifteen-inch solid shot; Tennessee lost her stacks, her steering failed, she was helpless, her gun ports could not be opened — and finally, with the other Confederate ships sunk, the fort by-passed, and no hope remaining, she pulled down her flag.
Farragut’s victory was complete. His men had paid for it — one hundred and forty-five killed and one hundred and seventy-four wounded — and some of his ships were badly racked, but he had Mobile Bay. Mobile was no longer a seaport, Fort Morgan would fall whenever an effort was made, and here, suddenly, was encouraging news for war-weary people in the North.5
It was followed a few weeks later by even better news. Sherman captured Atlanta.
Sherman had been extending his lines around to the east and south of the city, trying to cut its railway connections, and at the beginning of September he finally succeeded. He hoped to bag Hood’s army as well — after all, this army was really his primary objective — but the Hood who could not quite tell when to go in and slug and when to spar and play for time was canny enough to keep his army from being involved in the loss of the citadel, and when he saw that Atlanta could not be saved he got his army out intact. In a sense he kept Sherman from getting the prize he wanted. But in the end it did not matter.
It did not matter because the news that Atlanta had fallen was a mighty intoxicant for the people back home. Mobile Bay, then Atlanta — the war was being won, after all, the stalemate was being broken, and certain victory