Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip
The Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip decided who would hold New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy. Two Confederate forts stood on the Mississippi River south of the city, and nothing else stood behind them. If the forts held, New Orleans was safe. If they fell, or if ships slipped past them, no other defenses waited upriver.
New Orleans already faced a threat from the north, where Union forces were pushing down the Mississippi. Then Flag Officer David Farragut turned a fleet toward the river's mouth from the Gulf of Mexico, opening a second front from the south. Confederate gunboats had already beaten back a Union blockade fleet at the Head of Passes the previous October. The river approach had not always favored the Union.
But a run of Confederate losses in Kentucky and Tennessee had pulled soldiers and equipment away from the city's southern defenses. By the middle of April, almost nothing remained south of New Orleans except the two forts and a handful of gunboats of uncertain value. President Abraham Lincoln set a combined Army and Navy operation in motion to strike from the south anyway.
What two forts built for an older kind of war could do against that operation is one question. What it would cost both sides to find out is another.
Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip sat on the Mississippi River, about 40 kilometers above Head of Passes, where the river splits before finally reaching the Gulf of Mexico. The forts were also about 120 kilometers downstream from New Orleans.
177 guns from the two forts bore on one bend in the Mississippi, a stretch narrow enough to force passing ships to slow down. The forts had been sited there generations earlier, built for an era when invasion meant sailing ships, not steam-powered fleets.
Whether that fixed line of guns could still stop a fleet that no longer depended on the wind remained to be tested.
On the 7th of November 1861, the Battle of Port Royal, South Carolina, challenged an old assumption. For years, land forts had been considered safe from naval gunfire. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox pushed to expand the Union Navy's role in attacking Confederate coastal positions after that fight. He argued especially for an assault on New Orleans from the Gulf.
Fox's plan called for a mortar barrage to weaken or destroy the two forts first. A relatively small Army force could then assault whatever remained standing. Once the forts were reduced, or even during the Army's assault, a fleet could steam past to strike New Orleans directly.
General-in-Chief George B. McClellan opposed the idea at first. He believed it would take 30,000-50,000 troops to succeed, a force he could not spare from the Peninsula Campaign he was directing against Richmond, Virginia.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles found a way around McClellan's objection by giving the political general Benjamin F. Butler command of the expedition's land forces. With Butler's backing, Welles persuaded President Lincoln to approve the campaign. On the 23rd of February 1862, Butler learned he would lead forces "destined to cooperate with the Navy in the attack on New Orleans." His troop allotment was later cut down from McClellan's original estimate to just 18,000 men.
On the 23rd of December 1861, the Navy split the Gulf Blockading Squadron into East Gulf and West Gulf commands. Welles chose Captain David Glasgow Farragut to lead the new West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Farragut reached Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico on the 20th of February 1862, the date usually marked as the campaign's start.
Farragut had two problems beyond the Confederates waiting upriver. The first, Benjamin Butler and his army, he solved simply by ignoring; the Army played no further part in his plans. The second could not be dismissed so easily. Part of his fleet was a semi-autonomous group of mortar schooners led by his own foster brother, David Dixon Porter. Porter had the ear of Assistant Secretary Fox and a talent for intrigue, so Farragut let the mortars be tried anyway, despite privately believing they would prove worthless.
In mid-March, Farragut began moving his ships across the sandbar at the river's mouth. The water there measured only 15 feet deep instead of the 18 feet expected, and USS Colorado drew too much to cross at all. To Farragut, the bigger cost was not the ship he lost but the time the delay cost him. Without Colorado, the fleet inside the bar counted six ships and twelve gunboats.
Porter's 26 mortar schooners and their support vessels crossed the bar without trouble, starting on the 18th of March. Over the following month Farragut worked to gauge the forts' strength, find the range of their guns, and map obstructions in the channel. Men from the United States Coast Survey went ashore to survey the forts from a distance, working under intermittent fire from the forts and Confederate gunboats, and placed buoys in the channel to mark where the gunboats should anchor.
In the final days before running the forts, Farragut divided his fleet into three sections. Captain Theodorus Bailey commanded the first division of gunboats and was named second in overall command, ready to take over if Farragut became incapacitated. Captain Henry H. Bell led the second division, while Farragut kept a division under his own command. The United States Navy had rarely organized full fleets this way before the Civil War. Britain's Royal Navy, by contrast, had long split its fleets into a van, a main body, and a rear.
Farragut's careful preparations answered one set of questions. How the Confederates on the far bank had prepared for him answered another.
In Richmond, the Confederate War Department believed the main threat to New Orleans came from the north. Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin held that view first, followed later by George W. Randolph. Acting on it, Richmond sent most of the region's defensive material to strongpoints upriver, including Island Number 10, Fort Pillow, and Memphis. Guns were pulled from the city's immediate surroundings for distant campaigns, including the one that led to the Battle of Shiloh, and the region was stripped of men of military age too.
Confederate Major General Mansfield Lovell, commander of Department No. 1, put far more stock in the Gulf buildup than his superiors did. Flag Officer George N. Hollins, who commanded Confederate naval forces on the Mississippi, privately agreed with Lovell, but his orders did not let him act on it.
Brigadier General Johnson K. Duncan commanded Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip locally. The garrison's quality was probably not what Duncan and Lovell would have liked. The most capable soldiers had already gone to other fronts, leaving behind the irresolute and the unfit. Because New Orleans was an international city, its garrison held a greater share of foreign-born soldiers than most Confederate units. They could still be counted on to do their duty, even without extraordinary effort.
Two defensive chains, sometimes called rafts or booms, stretched across the river to block passage. One, placed above the city, played no part in the battle. The other sat just below the forts, where any ship breaking it would come under fort fire, making it the more important barrier. Installed soon after Lovell took command, it broke under debris carried down by spring floods. It was repaired, but Lovell judged the replacement inferior to the original.
Beyond the forts, three separate fleets defended the river with no shared command. The Confederate States Navy supplied the largest force by firepower: three ironclads, two former merchant ships converted into warships, and several unarmed support craft. The state of Louisiana added two ships of its own Louisiana Provisional Navy. The River Defense Fleet contributed six cottonclad rams, nominally under Confederate Army authority but commanded by civilian captains with mostly civilian crews. One of the six rams was also known as the R. J. Breckinridge. A scattering of tugs and unarmored harbor craft rounded out the defense.
Flag Officer Hollins was near Memphis when Farragut's buildup in the lower river became impossible to ignore. Richmond insisted Memphis, then the Confederacy's northernmost hold on the river, not be given up, but Hollins believed the Gulf threat was worse than Richmond understood. At Lovell's urging, Hollins came down to New Orleans to help defend it. He then sent Richmond a telegram asking permission to attack Farragut's ships while they were still being lightened to cross the bar. His pleas were so insistent that they amounted almost to insubordination. Richmond called Hollins back, ostensibly to sit on an examination board, but in effect to remove him from active service.
Command of the Confederate Navy vessels near New Orleans then fell by default to Commander William C. Whittle, the navy yard's commandant. Whittle did not think he could handle every duty alone. On the 18th of April, he passed command of CSS McRae, Jackson, and Manassas to his executive officer, Commander John K. Mitchell, along with their support vessels. Louisiana and Mississippi had not yet launched, so neither ship fell under Whittle or Mitchell's control at that point; Louisiana joined Mitchell's command only later, once she was launched but still unfinished.
General Lovell tried to simplify matters by ordering every vessel afloat to take orders from Commander Mitchell. Captain John A. Stephenson, leading the River Defense Fleet, simply refused. He got away with what amounted to mutiny because his fleet's relationship to the Army was contractual, not military.
None of these arrangements, Confederate or Union, had yet been tested by a shot fired in anger.
On the 18th of April, Porter's 21 mortar schooners were already in place downstream from the barrier chain. Their masts were covered in bushes for camouflage, though the shock of firing soon stripped the branches away. Porter wanted each mortar fired once every ten minutes, enough to keep a shell in the air at all times. That pace could not be sustained, but more than 1,400 shots went out on the first day alone, and the rate slowed somewhat on the days that followed.
By the second day, Porter's mortar shells were proving unreliable, exploding before many reached the ground. Porter ordered every fuse cut to its full length from then on. The shells then buried themselves in the soft earth before exploding, which muffled the force of the blast.
Fort Jackson, closer to the Federal mortars, took more damage than Fort St. Philip, though even that damage was minimal. Only seven pieces of artillery were disabled, and only two men were killed during the entire bombardment. Porter's own fleet fared about as well: one schooner sank, one sailor died to enemy fire, and another died falling from the rigging.
Porter had rashly promised Secretary Welles and Assistant Secretary Fox that his mortars would reduce both forts to rubble within 48 hours. That did not happen, and the forts' fighting strength was only marginally affected. A survey of Fort Jackson taken after the battle still tallied heavy damage. The drawbridge, hot shot furnaces, and fresh water cisterns were destroyed, and a broken levee flooded the casemate floors. The outer walls were cracked from top to bottom, admitting daylight freely, and four guns had been dismounted. Investigators counted 1,113 mortar shells and 87 round shot lodged in the fort's solid ground and levees, with another 3,339 shells estimated to have fallen into the ditches and flooded ground around it. Roughly 1,080 shells were reckoned to have exploded in the air above the fort, out of about 7,500 bombs fired in total.
Brigadier General Johnson K. Duncan described the fort's ordeal in his own report, writing that "the mortar fire was accurate and terrible, many of the shells falling everywhere within the fort and disabling some of our best guns." By his own count, 2,997 mortar shells fell on the fort on the 18th of April alone.
Inside Fort Jackson, constant flooding made the dank, partly submerged casemates the only real shelter from falling debris. Men went short of food, blankets, dry sleeping quarters, and drinkable water while enduring days of shelling they could not answer. Combined with sickness and constant fear, those conditions wore away at the garrison's morale, a strain that would resurface before the battle was over.
The ironclad Louisiana, still unfinished, was towed on the bombardment's second day to a spot upstream from Fort St. Philip, where she served as a floating battery. Commander Mitchell would not risk moving her closer, fearing her armor could not withstand Porter's plunging mortar fire. Because her guns could not be elevated, they could not reach the enemy so long as she stayed below the forts.
On the 20th of April, Farragut ordered three of his gunboats to break the chain still blocking the river. They did not clear it away entirely, but they tore open a gap wide enough for what Farragut needed. For several more days, though, he could not yet make his attempt to run past the forts.
That attempt would finally come in the dark, early hours of the 24th of April.
Shortly before the 24th of April, Farragut reshuffled his fleet, folding two extra ships into Captain Bailey's lead section and dropping one section altogether. His plan called for two columns passing the forts together, the starboard column firing on Fort St. Philip and the port column on Fort Jackson. Rather than stop to trade fire with the forts, the ships were meant to pass by as fast as possible. Farragut was counting on darkness and gunsmoke to blind the fort's gunners long enough for his ships to get through largely unscathed.
At about 03:00 on the 24th of April, the fleet got underway toward the gap torn in the chain days before. Soon after clearing that obstacle, lookouts in the forts spotted the ships and opened up with everything they had. Just as Farragut had hoped, the poor visibility blunted both sides' aim, so his fleet took little damage and the forts suffered little in return. Three gunboats at the rear of the column turned back: Itasca after a shot disabled her boilers and left her adrift, and Pinola and Winona simply because dawn was breaking, not because of enemy fire.
The Confederate ram Manassas came in early to engage the passing fleet. But gunners in the forts could not tell her apart from Federal ships and fired on friend and foe alike. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Alexander F. Warley, pulled her back upriver to wait for a moment when only Union guns would be firing at her.
Once past the forts, the head of the Federal column ran into Confederate ships while its rear was still under fire from the forts themselves. With three separate Confederate commands never coordinating, the fighting broke down into scattered, one-on-one duels between individual ships.
Manassas rammed two Union ships without managing to disable either one. Caught at dawn between two Federal vessels, Warley ran her aground and had the crew abandon her, setting her afire. She later drifted free of the bank, still burning, and sank within view of Porter's mortar schooners.
A Confederate tug pushed a fire raft toward Farragut's flagship and, for the attempt, took a broadside that sent her to the bottom. Hartford, dodging that same raft, ran aground not far upstream from Fort St. Philip. Though within range of the fort's guns, she was not at an angle they could hit, and she freed herself with little damage.
The Confederate ship Governor Moore, just getting underway, fouled a companion vessel and rammed a tug outright, sinking it. She then spotted the Union ship Varuna ahead of the rest of the Federal fleet and gave chase, both ships firing as they went. Governor Moore lost much of her crew during the pursuit but still managed to ram Varuna, and a cottonclad ram from the River Defense Fleet rammed Varuna as well. Varuna sank near the bank in shallow water, the only vessel the Union lost during the run past the forts. Lieutenant Beverly Kennon, captaining Governor Moore, wanted to keep fighting, but his steersman had had enough and drove the ship ashore. Recognizing his steersman was right, Kennon ordered the crew to abandon ship and set her afire.
McRae fought an uneven battle against several Federal vessels, and her captain, Lieutenant Commander Thomas B. Huger, was mortally wounded in the fight. Badly holed but still afloat, she survived the battle, only to sink later at her moorings in New Orleans.
Of the twelve Confederate vessels lost that morning, most went down either to enemy fire or by their own crews' hands, having done no harm to the Union fleet. Aside from McRae, the survivors were a single ram, a transport, and two unarmed tenders that surrendered to the mortar flotilla along with the forts. Louisiana survived the run too, though she was scuttled rather than handed over. In all, the Union lost one ship passing the forts, while the Confederates lost twelve.
Historian John D. Winters, writing in The Civil War in Louisiana in 1963, judged that the Confederate fleet had "made a sorry showing." He blamed "self-destruction, lack of co-operation, cowardice of untrained officers, and the murderous fire of the Federal gunboats," which he wrote reduced the fleet to "a demoralized shambles." Historian Allan Nevins likewise called the Confederate defenses defective, writing that "Confederate leaders had made a tardy, ill-coordinated effort to muster at the river barrier," hampered by "poverty, disorganization, lack of skilled engineers and craftsmen, friction between State authorities and Richmond, and want of foresight."
None of that settled what would happen to the two forts the fleet had simply left behind.
Meeting only token resistance at Chalmette, the Union fleet had clear passage the rest of the way to New Orleans. Fourteen surviving vessels arrived off the city on the afternoon of the 25th of April and trained their guns on it. General Lovell had already evacuated his troops from the city, leaving no defense possible. Panic-stricken residents broke into stores, burned cotton and other supplies, and wrecked much of the waterfront.
The unfinished ironclad Mississippi was hastily launched in hopes of towing her to Memphis. No towboats could be found, so her captain ordered the ship burned instead.
Farragut demanded the city's surrender, and the mayor and city council tried to pass that decision to General Lovell, who handed it right back. After three days of fruitless negotiation, Farragut sent two officers ashore with a detachment of sailors and marines. At the Custom House, they lowered the state flag and raised the United States flag, marking the city's formal return to the Union.
While the city changed hands, General Butler was still preparing his soldiers to attack the forts, now cut off in Farragut's rear. Commodore Porter, commanding the flotilla still below the forts, demanded their surrender, but General Duncan refused. Porter resumed the bombardment in preparation for Butler's coming assault.
On the night of the 29th of April, Fort Jackson's enlisted garrison mutinied, refusing to endure any more. Fort St. Philip had no part in the mutiny itself, but the two forts depended on each other closely enough that it was affected all the same. Unable to keep fighting, Duncan surrendered both forts the following day.
Commander John K. Mitchell, representing the Confederate Navy near the forts, had been left out of the surrender talks entirely. Feeling no duty to honor a truce he had no part in, he ordered Louisiana destroyed. Set afire, the ship broke loose from her moorings and drifted downriver, exploding as she passed Fort St. Philip and killing one soldier inside it.
With the forts silenced and the city in Union hands, only the river above New Orleans still lay open to question.
With Forts Jackson and St. Philip gone, nothing else stood between the Gulf of Mexico and Memphis. After a few days spent repairing his ships, Farragut sent expeditions upriver to demand the surrender of other cities. Baton Rouge and Natchez complied, having no way to defend themselves.
At Vicksburg, though, the guns of Farragut's ships could not reach Confederate positions high on the bluffs, and his small army detachment there could not force the issue alone. Farragut settled in for a siege but had to withdraw when the falling river threatened to strand his deep-water ships. Vicksburg itself would not fall for another year.
The fall of New Orleans may also have discouraged Great Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy diplomatically. Confederate agents abroad noticed a distinctly cooler reception once word of the city's fall reached London and Paris.
Common questions
When was the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip fought?
The battle was fought from the 18th to the 28th of April 1862 on the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. It was the decisive battle for possession of the city during the American Civil War.
Who commanded the Union forces at Forts Jackson and St. Philip?
Flag Officer David G. Farragut commanded the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, the main Union naval force. Commander David Dixon Porter led an attached flotilla of mortar schooners, and Benjamin F. Butler commanded the accompanying Union Army troops.
Where are Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip located?
Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip stand on the Mississippi River, about 40 kilometers above Head of Passes and roughly 120 kilometers downstream from New Orleans. Fort Jackson sits on the river's right bank and Fort St. Philip on the left.
Why did the garrison at Fort Jackson mutiny?
The enlisted garrison at Fort Jackson mutinied on the night of the 29th of April 1862 after enduring constant flooding, shortages of food and clean water, and days of shelling they could not answer. Unable to keep fighting, Brigadier General Johnson K. Duncan surrendered both forts the following day.
How many ships did the Union and Confederate fleets lose in the battle?
The Union Navy lost one ship, Varuna, while passing the forts on the 24th of April 1862. The Confederate fleet lost twelve vessels in the same action.
What happened to New Orleans after the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip?
Union forces occupied New Orleans starting on the 25th of April 1862, after Farragut's fleet passed the forts with no further serious opposition. The loss of the city was a serious blow to the Confederacy and may also have discouraged Great Britain and France from recognizing it diplomatically.
All sources
1 references cited across the entry