August 5, 1864---"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

AUGUST 5, 1864:  

The Battle of Mobile Bay: 

With Fort Gaines under assault from the landward side, Rear Admiral David Glasgow Farragut leads a Union fleet against Mobile Bay, the largest remaining Confederate port on the Gulf of Mexico, and the major blockade-running port on the Gulf Coast. Holding on to Mobile is crucial for holding on to the Confederacy’s Southern tier. 

The harbor is protected by the outlying and under-attack Fort Gaines, Fort Morgan with 46 guns, and tiny Fort Powell. Unfortunately, all of the forts have fixed guns that cannot be turned landward and the forts are not positioned to be mutually supportive. Thus, investing Fort Gaines from the land is in effect, kicking in the front door to Mobile. The main remaining defenses of the harbor consist of mines (called “torpedoes”) anchored in the mouth of the bay. Along with the torpedoes, the Confederacy has three small sidewheelers, the C.S.S. SELMA, the C.S.S. GAINES, and the C.S.S. MORGAN, none of which can withstand a concentrated fleet action. 

Fort Gaines

 

Fort Morgan

The only real weapon the Confederacy can bring to bear on the attacking Union fleet is the new ironclad C.S.S. TENNESSEE. The TENNESSEE is 209 feet L.O.A. with a beam of 48 feet. Her plate is six inches thick. She carries 2 7-inch Brooke rifles and 4 6-inch Brooke rifles, and a wicked ram. She represents the main Confederate force against the Union’s 14 sidewheel steamers and 4 ironclad monitors. All the Union vessels have been upgraded, two are “heavy” monitors with extra ironcladding and additional and larger guns, and one wooden ship, U.S.S. BROOKLYN, is outfitted as an experimental minesweeper. 

C.S.S. TENNESSEE

Unfortunately, even with four boilers, TENNESSEE is slow-moving, making not more than 5 knots at best. This disparity in maneuverability allows the monitors to buzz around the TENNESSEE like gnats around an elephant, landing shots all over her. Fortunately, the TENNESSEE is impervious to the blows, and trades fire with the Union ships for three hours until a lucky shot from one of the monitors disables her steering gear. The Union fleet swarms in and batters TENNESSEE with shot at closer range. Eventually, the disparity in numbers tells. TENNESSEE is blasted into submission, and runs out of powder and shot long before the Union fleet does. Farragut demands that the drifting ship strike its colors. The badly damaged ship surrenders, eventually to become the U.S.S. TENNESSEE. 

"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

Having removed the main seaward barrier to entering Mobile Bay, the Union fleet passes Fort Gaines. Against orders, the U.S.S. TECUMSEH tries to rush the minefield, and gets blown up, losing all but 21 of her crew of 114, including her Captain. This briefly causes the fleet to reduce headway. 

Farragut, who has lashed himself to the mast of his flagship, the U.S.S. HARTFORD the better to maintain a complete view of the battle, contacts Captain James Alden of the minesweeper BROOKLYN by speaking tube: “What is the delay?” Farragut asks. “There are torpedoes in our path,” Alden replies, to which Farragut famously bellows back, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” 

U.S.S. BROOKLYN

The typical Civil War “torpedo” was a pitch-sealed gunpowder barrel or else a conical wooden or metallic container loaded with explosives and anchored to the bottom by a heavy plate anchor. The rode was usually rope, though sometimes chain. The Civil war torpedo was a simple contact mine. 

Luckily for the Union fleet, the BROOKLYN’s improvised “cowcatcher” works, and the ship clears a path for the others. Once inside the bay proper, the Union ships open fire on the forts. Dispirited at the loss of the mighty TENNESSEE, the men at Fort Powell run up the white flag almost immediately. Fort Gaines, already in a precarious state, cannot hold out against the combined land and sea assault of the Union and surrenders several hours later. 

A columbiad gun salvaged from Fort Powell

After the surrender of Fort Gaines, the Union troops involved there are moved to Fort Morgan, and a naval bombardment begins. Although the fort is completely isolated and unable to deter the Union occupation of Mobile Bay, the Confederates inside the fort hold out until August 22nd. 

The Union loses the U.S.S. TECUMSEH and 114 of its crew, along with 40 other men killed and some 200 wounded; roughly 320 men are casualties out of a Union force of 5,500. The Confederacy loses three of its four ships (including C.S.S. TENNESSEE, which becomes a Union vessel), two forts, 1,600 captured, and about 50 men killed or wounded. 

Despite the seizure of the waterway, the city of Mobile itself remains in Confederate hands. However, in order to hold the city, a large number of garrison troops are effectively immobilized who might otherwise have been sent to assist Lee or Hood; thus, the Battle of Mobile Bay has far-reaching implications for the Confederate cause. 

The Battle of Mobile Bay receives intense news coverage in the North and Farragut is lionized for his daring. Union morale, which has been arguably the worst of the entire war, rises dramatically. In the crude polls of the day, President Lincoln’s re-election chances go from nil to fair. Conversely, the South’s morale is devastated by the loss of the harbor, the forts, its newest ironclad, and the fact that Lincoln may yet win re-election. 

An anchor of the U.S.S. HARTFORD on display at Fort Gaines

August 4, 1864---The gold-plated Governor

AUGUST 4, 1864:

Once again, the Union command structure aided the Confederacy by lengthening the war and raising its cost in blood. 

Having by this point reduced C.S. General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee to a defensive-only force, General William Tecumseh Sherman decided to envelop Atlanta. He issued orders to the commanders of the three armies he controlled to flank around the city in the vicinity of Ezra Church. 

It is a simple order, but one of Sherman’s second-level subordinates, a General John Palmer (1817-1900), refused to accept orders from anyone but his official chain-of-command superior, General George Thomas, Commander of The Army of The Cumberland. Palmer’s refusal set off an imbroglio among Sherman’s subordinates. Stepping in, Sherman issued direct orders to Palmer to move his force. Palmer responded by resigning his commission and leaving the war to return to Illinois. 

Sherman undoubtedly had some choice words for the departing ex-General’s back. This delay in acting allowed the Confederates to build an additional ring of earthworks, and when the Union finally did move, 300 men lost their lives who otherwise not might have had to.

Palmer’s is the only example of an officer’s resignation in the middle of a military operation during the history of the United States. 

Perhaps even more bizarre, the histrionic Palmer was restored to rank and later made the Military Governor of Kentucky, a job he attended to while being conveyed in a gold-plated carriage.

A strident Abolitionist, he ordered the emancipation of Kentucky’s slaves by fiat in early 1865 (Kentucky was not bound by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment was not yet effective). 

President Lincoln never had an opportunity to act on Palmer’s fiat, but former slaveowners and the State Legislature sued Palmer for damages due to loss of property, a series of suits Palmer ignored. 

In May 1865, he undertook a bloody campaign (with the aid of former slaves now enrolled in the Kentucky State Militia) against remnant rebels in Kentucky, driving most of the survivors to the frontier where they numbered among the gunslingers of the Old West. 

Palmer later served as Governor of Illinois, and made a brief, unsuccessful third-party run for the Presidency. 

August 3, 1864---"Force it"

AUGUST 3, 1864: 

Although President Lincoln has great faith in Ulysses S. Grant as his General, the terrible fiasco of the Crater and Jubal Early’s same-day destruction of Chambersburg PA have disturbed Lincoln profoundly. The President doubts he can win re-election in November, and though that would be a personal failure, losing the Presidency while the Union is at a military disadvantage would be an historical disaster. He sends Grant a telegram reminding Grant that he needs to exercise vigilance "every day, and hour, and force it" if he is to win the war before Lincoln leaves office. 

 

Neither Lincoln nor his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis is aware that the Confederacy’s Spring of victories is about to end. General Philip Sheridan U.S.A. arrives in the Shenandoah Valley this day spoiling for a fight with Jubal Early C.S.A.; and much further away, General Gordon Granger U.S.A. finally takes the first step to seize control of Mobile (Alabama) Bay from the Confederacy by investing Fort Gaines, one of the harbor fortifications. The taking of Mobile had been on the Union drawing board for a long time, but it had been deferred in favor of the wasted Red River Campaign in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. 

August 2, 1864---The Two Generals T.W. Brevard

AUGUST 2, 1864:

Colonel Theodore Washington Brevard (d. 1882) was a Southern politician before and after the war, and a Confederate soldier during, whose activities spanned a large geographical area from Florida to North Carolina. Brevard was an anti-secessionist, but when the South went out he followed the crowd. He was present at the Siege of Petersburg and witnessed the Battle of The Crater. Afterward, he wrote home to his mother:

The “situation” here is unchanged. The armies occupying the same relative positions held five weeks ago. Grant varied the monotony which had so long “dragged its slow length along” by a few days since exploding a mine beneath one of our batteries. The affair was managed very well and came very near resulting seriously to us but in the end proved a decided disaster to Genl Grant himself. Great secrecy was observed by the enemy relative to the operation, and although they were several weeks in excavating the mine, it was completed through without detection, with several tons of powder. A few days since, it was sprung, a little after good day-light. The battery was destroyed and the men in it blown up. The enemy poured in through the breach in large numbers and succeeded in establishing themselves upon a portion of our line. A portion of our division was ordered promptly to the point assailed, and after some obstinate fighting recaptured our works or rather our line—the works being destroyed with a large number of provisions. The slaughter of the enemy was very great. Our Brigade was not engaged in this affair. I visited the scene of the explosion and fight, however, shortly afterwards, and the sight was ghastly enough to have satisfied Abe Lincoln himself. The dead covered the ground more thickly than I have ever seen them elsewhere; the victims of the explosion particularly were mutilated and disfigured beyond description, and the whole spectacle was at once grotesque and horrible.

 
Colonel Brevard was the near-namesake of his father, General Theodorius Washington Brevard (b. 1804), who was also serving in the Confederate States Army during the war. The two Brevards were often confused. Orders for Brevard pere often reached Brevard fils and vice-versa. As the two men did not serve together in the field, this often led to misunderstandings and command delays that vexed their superiors. Even today, historical records sometimes conflate or confuse the two men who had similar civilian careers and who died in relative time proximity (the elder in 1877, the younger in 1882). 

In fact, the confusion may have contributed to Brevard the Younger’s death, as he was taken prisoner in 1864, and was unable (and no doubt unwilling anyway) to give information to his Union captors that they expected him to have. Thus, he was kept in solitary confinement under poor conditions that no doubt shortened his life (he died at age 46). Even more confusing, the captive Colonel Brevard was promoted to General by Jefferson Davis in absentia in 1865. He did not find this out until after his release.



To the credit of his captors, when they discovered they were holding the wrong man, Brevard fils was released on March 31, 1865. He returned to his unit to lead it in combat one last time, on April 6, 1865. 

After the surrender, he was denied the general amnesty and was re-arrested (historians now believe that the arrest warrant, made out for General T.W. Brevard, was for his father, as the Union would not have likely known of Brevard the Younger’s  eleventh hour promotion). 

How ever it was, Brevard spent the balance of April, and May, June, and July in prison before being released for the final time in August. Shortly thereafter, he took up politics again, eventually to become Comptroller of Florida. 

Brevard County, Florida was named for the two men (some sources say one, some the other, so we will say both).

August 1, 1864---Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley

AUGUST 1, 1864:      

General Philip Sheridan U.S.A. is given command of the Union Army of The Shenandoah Valley with orders to destroy Jubal Early’s force and take back the Valley for the United States.

  

The Battle of Folck’s Mill:     As General Jubal Early C.S.A.'s forces cross the Potomac back into Virginia, they attempt to cripple the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and burn the bridges over the river. Union forces disrupt their attacks, and Early is pushed back into the Valley having done much less mischief than he intended. 

July 31, 1864---"I propose to do nothing about them."

JULY 31, 1864:                   

Under the direction of Confederate Chief Surgeon Isaiah H. White, the inmate hospital at Andersonville P.O.W. Camp (Fort Sumter) is enlarged to accommodate 1,400 patients. This improves conditions almost not at all. The men are living in 700 tents, there are few permanent structures, and the food is a thin gruel (when it is available at all). 6,315 of the 30,000 prisoners are sick with scurvy, gangrene, and dysentery, along with 517 of the 2,700 Confederates on post.

 

Brigham Young, the leader of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) gives a fiery sermon castigating all non-Mormon gentiles and criticizing the form of government of the United States as being “an ursurpation of the government of the Son of God.”

Young loathes the United States. Presidents Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan had all dispatched troops to subdue Mormon hostility toward gentiles. Buchanan, in one of his few assertive acts as President, forcibly removed Young as Governor of the Utah Territory, citing the Establishment Clause.

Young likewise dislikes the Confederacy which he sees as “godless” --- but he refuses to aid the Union.  During the Civil War, a Mormon cavalry troop based in Salt Lake City, “The Nauvoo Legion” made up of 100 young men sides with the Union until Young threatens them with banishment. They quickly disband. Only a very few banished Mormons actually fight in the Civil War, and as might be expected, they fight on both sides.

When asked what he is going to do about the Mormons, who have begun harassing transcontinental settlers who wander into their realm of Deseret, President Lincoln answers sagely, “As they are the least of my problems right now I propose to do nothing about them.”

July 30, 1864---The Burning of Chambersburg, PA; The Battle of The Crater

JULY 30, 1864:         

The Burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: 

General Jubal Early C.S.A. and his troops reached Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Chambersburg had been occupied and raided twice before in the war, in October 1862 by Jeb Stuart, and in June 1863 by Jubal Early himself as part of the run-up to the Battle of Gettysburg. Today, an angry Early seized whatever could be seized (including robbing the town’s banks), and deciding that "it was time to open the eyes of the people of the North to this enormity, by example in the way of retaliation" for General David Hunter U.S.A.’s destruction of Lynchburg, VA, he put Chambersburg to the torch. 600 buildings and farms are burnt, and most of Chambersburg’s citizens were left homeless and destitute.  Against orders, a few Confederates tried to aid the suffering citizens. One Northerner was killed, an elderly African-American. Five Confederates were shot down by angry citizens.

General Darius Couch U.S.A., who made his Headquarters in Chambersburg, had evacuated his staff and small garrison of troops upon hearing of Early’s approach. When Couch learned that the town had been destroyed, he sent cavalry after Early, and a series of small battles and skirmishes lit up the Pennsylvania and Maryland countrysides. When photos of destroyed Chambersburg made the Northern papers there was a cry for vengeance, but it also seemed that President Abraham Lincoln’s re-election chances utterly went up in smoke with the town. 

The Battle of The Crater:       

While the goddess Kali rode with a flaming torch in Pennsylvania, the goddess Nemesis walked in Virginia.  In June, an enterprising Union engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a miner in civilian life, had approached General George Meade with an audacious plan to construct a tunnel from the Union lines across No-Man’s Land and under the Confederate defenses at Petersburg. Pleasants’ plan was to pack the tunnel with explosives, detonate it, and then rush the breach in the Dimmock Line with a mass of troops, seizing the Confederate emplacements before the stunned Southerners knew what was happening. 

Almost every Civil War historian agrees that Pleasants’ plan bid fair to be a success, but Meade was unimpressed. For one thing, the longest tunnel yet built had only been 400 feet long, and the distance to the Confederate lines was over 500 feet. Secondly, Meade was uncertain as to whether explosives could be successfully detonated at that distance (it would take a 600 foot fuse with a great number of splices to reach the detonation chamber) or what the result would be. Meade went to Grant and discussed the plan, which they both decided to disregard.

In a perfect example, however, of the confusion that defined the command structure of The Army of The Potomac, General Ambrose Burnside, Pleasants’ immediate superior, approved the plan. Construction of the tunnel began on June 25^th.

Pleasants’ tunnel was an engineering marvel, especially considering that he had to build it with catch-as-catch-can materials since the plan had had no officially approved requisitions for materials. Built fifty feet underground on an upward slope (to minimize moisture in the tunnel) that brought it to a level 20 feet below the Confederate position, the tunnel had a cleverly designed air vent system, and a coal-fired automatic bellows at the near end to draw air down through the tunnel.  

The tunnel was built in the shape of a “T” with the transverse chamber at the far end. The base of the “T” was 511 feet long and 4 ½ feet high, the transverse chamber 80 feet long. After the transverse chamber was packed floor-to-ceiling and wall to wall with 10,000 pounds of powder and other explosives, it was sealed off.  

Though they ballyhooed it, both Grant and Meade had looked on the project as “something to keep the men from being idle” during the boring stretches of inactivity that marked the Siege of Petersburg, but after the Battle of Deep Bottom, they became more interested in the tunnel. On the Confederate side, Robert E. Lee had heard rumors of a tunnel, but after a few half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts at detection, he dismissed the idea as so much poppycock.

Ambrose Burnside, however, had looked on the tunnel as a way to salvage his increasingly dented reputation. Burnside had done well in the early months of the war commanding the land forces that retook much of the North Carolina coast in early 1862, but since then he had proven to be a hard luck commander, leading the tragicomic Mud March, the futile Battle of Burnside’s Bridge during Antietam, the tragic Battle of Fredericksburg as Commanding General of The Army of The Potomac, and most recently, lost many men in the Battle of The Wilderness. The tunnel, he hoped, would resuscitate his military career.

Instead, it ended it. Burnside had trained brigades of U.S.C.T. who were expected, after the detonation, to move around the circumference of the anticipated blast site. However, the night before the detonation Burnside, under pressure from Meade, began to worry that if something went terribly wrong he would be blamed for throwing away the lives of his African-American men. At the last minute, he decided to lead the attack with a white Division. Although this was intelligent political thinking on Burnside’s part, Burnside subsequently proved to be just as inept as he was thought to be, by assigning the lead force through the expedient of having his subcommanders draw straws.  

As only Burnside’s luck would have it, the short straw was drawn by the morbidly alcoholic General James H. Ledlie who nearly had his men slaughtered at the Battle of The North Anna River in May by leading an infantry charge against cannons.

 

Ledlie, who was as was his wont, on a blind drunk bender, neglected to tell the commander of his Division to go around the crater. Ledlie also had no faith in the intelligence of black troops to follow any but the simplest of orders, and merely sent word that the U.S.C.T. were to follow his Division. Ledlie then collapsed into his tent with a fresh bottle and took no further interest in the battle.

The fuse was lit at 3:45 A.M. on this July 30^th, and --- nothing happened.  After a long wait, two iron-nerved volunteers descended into the tunnel to discover that the fuse had parted at a splice.  They lit the fuse again and ran for their lives.

 

The blast, when it came at 4:44 A.M., was like nothing anyone had ever experienced. It was the largest single explosion in North American history until the Trinity A-bomb test of July 24, 1945. Body parts, rocks and earth flew in all directions. Two entire Confederate regiments were instantly vaporized and a battery of men was buried alive. The resulting crater (still visible) was 170 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 40 feet deep. Church bells jangled in Petersburg and the roar was heard in Richmond.  

The blast stunned the Confederates as planned --- but it also stunned the Federals who were expecting it. It took a full ten minutes for Ledlie’s men to advance, and when they did, they advanced by jumping down into the crater, followed by most of the U.S.C.T. (some U.S.C.T. followed their original orders, and actually entered the Confederate lines where they engaged in bloody hand-to-hand fighting and were killed to a man). Historian William Marvel posits that part of the delay was caused when Federals stopped advancing in order to help dig half-buried Confederate wounded out of the soil.

Once inside the Crater, the Federal troops discovered that they could advance no further since the walls of the Crater were too steep. Since they had jumped into the Crater and were being followed by their fellows, they literally could do nothing but mill around inside the Crater as it became more densely packed with trapped troops.

It was at this point, about fifteen minutes after the blast that the recovered Confederates appeared at the edges of the Crater, and began firing down upon the Union men within. The Crater became a roiling mass of desperate men.

Some of the more hysterical Yankees attacked each other. A number of Union whites killed U.S.C.T., calling up to the Confederates for mercy. They died anyway.  

A few men used the bodies of their dead comrades as ladders to climb up and out of the Crater, but they were met by men in gray who shot or bayoneted them and threw their corpses into the Crater.

A few grimly determined Federals did manage to make it to the lip of the Crater to engage in close-quarter combat. Like the U.S.C.T who had gone around the Crater, these men were likewise slaughtered.

“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!” one of the Rebels exulted. Confederate General William Mahone C.S.A. called it “a turkey shoot.”

Burnside called off the attack (and any support for the attack) at 9:30 A.M., while it was still going on. The men being slain in the Crater had no way of knowing this, nor any way of retreating. All they knew is that they were dying en masse and far from help. Although he knew what was happening in the Crater, Burnside, unwilling to risk more men, did nothing to help the trapped.

The Southerners took few prisoners. Instead, as had become the grisly Southern custom, they executed all captured U.S.C.T. and their officers, turning the Crater into a mass grave. Almost 4,000 Union men were lost in the Battle of The Crater, almost all dead or presumed to be dead. The 1,500 Confederates lost were all but a few killed in the initial blast.

The military fallout from the Battle of The Crater was dire for Burnside who was censured and sent on leave, never to fight in the war again. His greatest claim to fame would be his impressive muttonchop whiskers, called ever after “sideburns.” Ledlie was cashiered in disgrace. Lieutenant Colonel Pleasants however, was promoted to Brevet Brigadier General.

Ulysses S. Grant wrote:

"It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war .  .  .”

He also lamented:

“Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have."

Grant later testified on Burnside’s behalf that:

General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front, and I believe if he had done so it would have been a success .  . . General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front and it should prove a failure, it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them.

On the strength of Grant’s comments, Burnside, the walking Peter Principle, was exonerated of any wrongdoing, but his reputation, and his career along with it, was destroyed.

Today, kind time has softened the edges of The Crater, but it still scars the Virginia landscape, a violent pockmark among the suburban sprawl of Petersburg.