Battle of Mobile Bay - Summing Up

Summing Up

The Battle of Mobile Bay was not sanguinary by standards set by the armies of the Civil War, but it was by naval standards. It was only marginally, if at all, less bloody than the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip and the Battle of Hampton Roads. The Federal fleet had lost 150 men killed and 170 wounded; on the Confederate ships, only 12 were dead and 19 wounded. Union Army losses were very light; in the siege of Fort Morgan, only one man was killed and seven wounded. Confederate losses, though not stated explicitly, seem to have been only slightly greater.

The continued presence of a Union Army force near Mobile constrained the Confederate Army in its last desperate campaigns. Maury realized that the numbers opposite him were inadequate for an attack, but the possibility of loss of Mobile would have been such a severe blow to the public mood that he would not send his guns or spare troops to support other missions.

This was particularly important to Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, who was at that time engaged in the Atlanta campaign. Because Mobile remained unconquered the significance of Farragut's victory initially had little effect on Northern public opinion. As time passed and a sequence of other Union victories seemed to show that the war was winding down, the battle began to loom larger.

When Atlanta fell, in the words of historian James M. McPherson, "In retrospect the victory at Mobile Bay suddenly took on new importance as the first blow of a lethal one-two punch." The dispersal of Northern gloom assured Pres. Abraham Lincoln's reelection in what was regarded as a referendum on continuation of the war.

With the capture of Fort Morgan, the campaign for the lower Mobile Bay was complete. Canby and Farragut had already decided before the first landings on Dauphin Island that the army could not provide enough men to attack Mobile itself; furthermore, the Dog River Bar that had impeded bringing CSS Tennessee down now prevented Farragut's fleet from going up. Mobile did come under combined army-navy attack, but only in March and April 1865, after Farragut had been replaced by Rear Adm. Henry K. Thatcher. The city finally fell in the last days of the war.

A number of Civil War-era shipwrecks from the battle and its aftermath remain in the bay into the present, including American Diver, CSS Gaines, CSS Huntsville, USS Philippi, CSS Phoenix, USS Rodolph, USS Tecumseh, and CSS Tuscaloosa.