"I came to the Chickasaw; happy as my friend Perkins habitually is, I thought he would turn a somerset with joy, when I told him, 'The admiral wants you to go at once and fight the Tennessee.'"At the same time, the admiral directed the wooden vessels to charge the ram, bow on, at full speed, as well as to attack her with their guns. The monitors were very slow, and the wooden vessels began the attack. The first to reach the hostile ironclad was the Monongahela, which struck her square amidships; and five minutes later the Lackawanna, going at full speed, delivered another heavy blow. Both the Union vessels fired such guns as would bear as they swung round, but the shots glanced harmlessly from the armor, and the blows of the ship produced no serious injury to the ram, although their own stems were crushed in several feet above and below the water line. The Hartford then struck the Tennessee, which met her bows on. The two antagonists scraped by, their port sides touching. As they rasped past, the Hartford's guns were discharged against the ram, their muzzles only half a dozen feet distant from her iron-clad sides; but the shot made no impression. While the three ships were circling to repeat the charge, the Lackawanna ran square into the flagship, cutting the vessel down to within two feet of the water. For a moment the ship's company thought the vessel sinking, and almost as one man they cried: "Save the admiral! get the admiral on board the Lackawanna." But Farragut, leaping actively into the chains, saw that the ship was in no present danger, and ordered her again to be headed for the Tennessee. Meanwhile, the monitors had come up, and the battle raged between them and the great ram, Like the rest of the Union fleet, they carried smooth-bores, and their shot could not break through her iron plates; but by sustained and continuous hammering, her frame could be jarred and her timbers displaced. Two of the monitors had been more or less disabled already, but the third, the Chickasaw, was in fine trim, and Perkins got her into position under the stern of the Tennessee, just after the latter was struck by the Hartford; and there he stuck to the end, never over fifty yards distant, and keeping up a steady rapping of 11-inch shot upon the iron walls, which they could not penetrate, but which they racked and shattered. The Chickasaw fired fifty-two times at her antagonist, shooting away the exposed rudder-chains and the smokestack, while the commander of the ram, Buchanan, was wounded by an iron splinter which broke his leg. Under the hammering, the Tennessee became helpless. She could not be steered, and was unable to bring a gun to bear, while many of the shutters of the ports were jammed. For twenty minutes she had not fired a shot. The wooden vessels were again bearing down to ram her; and she hoisted the white flag.
Thus ended the battle of Mobile Bay, Farragut's crowning victory.
Less than three hours elapsed from the time that Fort Morgan fired its first gun to the moment when the Tennessee hauled down her flag. Three hundred and thirty-five men had been killed or wounded in the fleet, and one vessel, the Tecumseh, had gone down; but the Confederate flotilla was destroyed, the bay had been entered, and the forts around it were helpless to do anything further. One by one they surrendered, and the port of Mobile was thus sealed against blockade runners, so that the last source of communication between the Confederacy and the outside world was destroyed. Farragut had added to the annals of the Union the page which tells of the greatest sea-fight in our history.
