Today in History

On August 23, 1864, the Union navy captured...

Fort Morgan, Alabama, breaking the Confederate dominance of the ports of the Gulf of Mexico. As the Union fleet of four ironclad and fourteen wooden ships sailed into the channel on August 5, one of the lead ships, the Tecumseh, hit a mine, at the time known as a "torpedo." In reply to the warning, "Torpedoes ahead!" given by the forward ships, commander Admiral David Farragut called out, "Damn the torpedoes!" and, taking the lead with his flagship the Hartford, sailed over the double row of mines and into Mobile Bay.

Although the bottom of the ship scraped the mines, none exploded, and the rest of the fleet followed Farragut's flagship to victory in the engagement with the Confederate flotilla. During the next weeks, the Union navy consolidated its hold on the bay by dispersing and capturing Southern ships and tightening the blockade. With the surrender of Fort Morgan, the Union was able to cut the South off from its overseas supply routes.

A Southerner who lived through the Civil War remembered the effects of the Union's coastline blockade:

We had to get our cotton to Brownsville during the war and send it through Mexico to the markets in Europe . . . One could see, the long wagon trains of cotton . . . as they slowly mended their way to the Mexican border . . . the Texas ports were blockaded and all the time enemies were on the watch to confiscate produce of any kind, and especially cotton.

"Mr. Edwin Punchard,"
Siesel, Texas,
Miss Effie Cowan, interviewer,
circa 1936-1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940
Others recounted tales of the privations caused by the blockade and the makeshifts necessitated by them:

We scraped the salt from the floor of the old smoke houses that were used in the days before the war when all those things were so plentiful.

"Sarah Ann Poss Pringle,"
Marlin, Texas,
Miss Effie Cowan, interviewer,
circa 1936-1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Mrs. Ida Baker explained:

Everybody had to use parched wheat, parched okra seed or parched raw sweet potato chips for coffee. Not even tea came in. We used sassafras and other native herb teas both daily and at parties when the herb teas were in season. Some were good, but the substitute coffee was not.

"At Christmas Times,"
Spartanburg, South Carolina,
Caldwell Sims, interviewer,
January 12, 1938.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

For more American Memory information related to the U.S. Civil War:

• Search on blockade and Confederacy in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 for more accounts of Southerners' experiences during the Civil War.
• To learn about Confederate ships, Liberian bound emigrants, and canal travel search on the term ship or boat in Southern Voices. Comprised of diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives, Southern Voices consists of two collections from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
  • The Church in the Southern Black Community, 1780-1925
    
  • First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920
  
  
• Visit the collections Civil War Maps and Selected Civil War Photographs to view a wealth of primary source material illustrating the war. In the former see, for example, a Chart Showing the Entrance of Rear Admiral Farragut into Mobile Bay. In the latter see, for example, a portrait of Commander Matthew F. Maury, C.S.N., the "Father of Oceanography."
• Search the Today in History Archives on Civil War to find features about the First Battle of Bull Run, the three day Battle of Gettysburg (July 1, July 2, and July 3, 1863), Lee's surrender to Grant, and many other events of the Civil War.
• View Rear Admiral David Farragut's photograph and his signature on his carte de visite in the Civil War Photograph Album, circa 1861-1865 contained in the collection Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years. The album, probably compiled by President Lincoln's secretary John Hays, contains two hundred of these photographic calling cards.
• Search on the keyword ironclad in Words and Deeds in American History to see and learn more about Watercolors of Civil War Ironclads painted by Ens. D. M. N. Stouffer, circa 1864-65.
• Read a nineteenth-century song about Farragut's battle, "Farragut's Ball, a Parody on Lanigan's Ball," an undated sheet of lyrics found in the collection America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets. The lyrics of the first verse are reproduced below. The tune meant to accompany them was a popular melody of the period, "Lanigan's Ball; The Popular Irish Song," 1863, available in Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920.