David Farragut

• 1. Introduction

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  David Glasgow Farragut was lashed to the mast of his flagship, hanging over a battle he could barely see through the smoke, when he gave the order that would define his life. It was the 5th of August, 1864, and the bay ahead was thick with naval mines. A Union monitor had just struck one and sunk. His fleet was pulling back. Farragut shouted through a speaking trumpet: "Damn the torpedoes. Four bells, Captain Drayton, go ahead. Jouett, full speed." The fleet charged in. He won.

  That moment did not come from nowhere. It came from six decades at sea, starting when Farragut was nine years old. He was born in 1801 on the banks of the Holston River in Tennessee, the son of a merchant sailor from the Mediterranean island of Menorca. He lost his mother before he was ten. He was raised by a naval officer who was not his father. By the time he was eleven, he had already sailed to the Pacific and commanded a captured enemy vessel. What drives a man to spend his entire life at war on the water? And what did it cost him, and the men who served beside him, to get there?

• 2. A Child of the Sea

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  George Farragut, born Jorge Farragut Mesquida in 1755 on the Spanish island of Menorca, arrived in North America in 1776 and fought in the American Revolutionary War. First with the South Carolina Navy, then with the Continental Navy, he was already a man shaped by the Atlantic and the Caribbean by the time he settled with his wife Elizabeth in Tennessee. David's first voyage came at age four, riding a flatboat roughly 1,700 miles from New Orleans guided by hired rivermen, after George accepted a position at the city's U.S. port.

  Elizabeth died of yellow fever while the family was still living in New Orleans. George Farragut, a widower with young children and a sailor's itinerant life ahead of him, arranged for friends and family to take them in. In 1808, young James, as he was then still named, went to live with U.S. Navy officer David Porter, whose own father had served alongside George during the Revolution. Two years later, in honor of his foster father, James adopted the name David. He went to sea with Porter late in 1810 and was formally warranted a midshipman on the 17th of December, 1810, at the age of nine.

  Foster brothers David Dixon Porter and William D. Porter grew up alongside him. David Dixon Porter would go on to become a Civil War admiral in his own right. The household was not just a family; it was an apprenticeship for naval command.

• 3. Tested Early

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  By the spring of 1810, Farragut had been added to the U.S. Navy's rolls with the rank of "boy." Within two years he was at war. Serving under Captain Porter aboard the frigate Essex during the War of 1812, Farragut participated in the capture of HMS Alert on the 13th of August, 1812. He also helped establish Fort Madison, America's first naval base and colony in the Pacific, during the Nuku Hiva Campaign in the Marquesas Islands, where American forces fought alongside Te I'i allies against hostile island tribes.

  At eleven, Farragut was assigned to bring a ship the Essex had captured safely back to port on his own. He did it. Then on the 28th of March, 1814, the Essex was engaged by British forces at Valparaiso Bay, Chile. Farragut was wounded in the fight and taken prisoner. He was still twelve years old.

  In 1823, at age twenty-two, he received his first formal command of a U.S. naval vessel and was assigned to the Mosquito Fleet, a force created to drive pirates from the Caribbean Sea. After one vessel was lost in a storm, Farragut moved to another under the command of John Porter, brother of his foster father. By February 1823 the fleet was in the West Indies, spending six months clearing pirates from the islands. Farragut finished that campaign as executive officer aboard the USS Experiment, and was promoted to lieutenant in 1825.

• 4. From Norfolk to New Orleans

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  When the Mexican-American War broke out, Farragut, now a commander, took charge of the sloop-of-war Saratoga when she was recommissioned at Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia. Saratoga left Norfolk on the 29th of March, 1847, bound for the Gulf of Mexico. Arriving off Veracruz on the 26th of April, Farragut reported to Commodore Matthew C. Perry and was ordered north to blockade Tuxpan, 150 nautical miles away. He held that position from April through July, then rotated back. Despite a yellow fever outbreak aboard his ship, Farragut returned for a second stint blockading Tuxpan before finally sailing for Pensacola and then New York City, where Saratoga was decommissioned on the 26th of February, 1848.

  In 1853, Secretary of the Navy James C. Dobbin chose Farragut for a different kind of mission: build a navy yard from scratch on the Pacific Coast. President Franklin Pierce offered personal congratulations. On the 16th of September, 1854, Farragut arrived at Vallejo, California, to oversee the construction of Mare Island Navy Yard in San Pablo Bay, near San Francisco. He commissioned the facility on the 16th of July, 1858. It became the West Coast's primary port for ship repairs, the first U.S. Navy base established on the Pacific Ocean. When he left the assignment, Mare Island gave him a hero's welcome on the 11th of August, 1859.

  Farragut had been living in Norfolk, Virginia, when the Civil War broke out. He was a Southerner by birth but a Unionist by conviction. He told everyone who knew him that he regarded secession as treason. He moved with his Virginia-born wife to Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town just outside New York City, and offered his services to the Union.

• 5. Taking New Orleans

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  On the 3rd of February, 1862, Farragut was appointed under secret instructions to command the Gulf Blockading Squadron. He sailed from Hampton Roads aboard a screw steamer carrying 25 guns, accompanied by a fleet of 17 ships. At the mouth of the Mississippi River stood Confederate Forts Jackson and St. Philip, positioned on opposite banks, with a combined armament of more than 100 heavy guns and a garrison of 700 men. Beyond them waited a Confederate fleet of 16 gunboats guarding New Orleans.

  On the 18th of April, Farragut ordered his mortar boats, under the command of his foster brother David Dixon Porter, to begin bombarding the two forts. The bombardment went on for two days. It inflicted considerable damage but failed to force a surrender. Farragut decided to run past the forts rather than wait them out. On the 29th of April, he drove his fleet past Forts Jackson and St. Philip and the Chalmette batteries to capture New Orleans. It was one of the most consequential Union naval actions of the war.

  Congress responded by creating the rank of rear admiral on the 16th of July, 1862, a rank that had never before existed in the U.S. Navy. The American military had long resisted using the title, preferring the term "flag officer" to distance itself from European naval tradition. Farragut was promoted to rear admiral along with thirteen other officers. Later that year he attempted to pass the batteries defending Vicksburg but was repulsed. A makeshift Confederate ironclad forced his flotilla of 38 ships to withdraw in July 1862.

• 6. Port Hudson and Its Cost

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  Port Hudson, Louisiana, tested something other than Farragut's courage. The plan for the night of the 15th of March, 1863, was coordinated: Farragut's flotilla would run past the Confederate stronghold's guns while General Nathaniel Banks's Army of the Gulf launched a diversionary land attack at 8:00 a.m. Farragut unilaterally moved his timetable to 9:00 p.m. the night before. He moved without waiting for Union ground forces to reach their positions.

  The Confederates, no longer distracted by any land assault, turned their full firepower on Farragut's ships. Only two vessels made it through. His flotilla was broken. The Union Army pressed on without naval support and launched two major ground assaults on Port Hudson, both of which were repulsed with heavy casualties. The siege became the longest in U.S. military history. Farragut's decision was widely understood to have cost the Union Navy and the Union Army dearly; the Army suffered its highest casualty rate of the entire war at Port Hudson.

  Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th of July, 1863, leaving Port Hudson isolated as the last Confederate position on the Mississippi. General Banks accepted its surrender on the 9th of July. With that, the Confederacy was cut in two. Control of the Mississippi had been the central pillar of Union war strategy, and it was now achieved, though the price at Port Hudson had been steep.

• 7. Mobile Bay and After

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  Mobile, Alabama, was the last major Confederate port open on the Gulf of Mexico as the summer of 1864 arrived. Mobile Bay was heavily mined; in the naval terminology of the time, those mines were called torpedoes. When Farragut's fleet entered the bay on the 5th of August, 1864, smoke from the guns of Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines obscured his view from the deck of USS Hartford. He climbed the rigging until he reached the futtock shrouds below the main top. Fearing he would fall, his crew lashed him to the mast.

  When a monitor struck a mine and sank and the fleet began to pull back, Farragut gave the order that his generation would not forget. The bulk of his fleet pressed into the bay. He defeated the squadron of Admiral Franklin Buchanan, the same Confederate officer who had been the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy before the war. Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines both fell. On the 21st of December, 1864, President Lincoln promoted Farragut to vice admiral, making him the senior ranking officer in the United States Navy.

  After the war, Farragut was promoted to full admiral on the 25th of July, 1866, becoming the first U.S. Navy officer ever to hold that rank. His final active command was the European Squadron, from 1867 to 1868, aboard a screw frigate as his flagship. He remained on active duty for the rest of his life, one of only seven U.S. Navy officers after the Civil War to receive that distinction. He died of a heart attack on the 14th of August, 1870, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during a vacation, having served nearly sixty years in the navy.

• 8. A Name That Stayed

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  Few American military figures left a deeper geographic footprint than Farragut. Campbell's Station, Tennessee, the settlement nearest his birthplace on the Holston River, was renamed Farragut when it incorporated in 1982. Two Washington Metro stations, Farragut North and Farragut West, take their names from Farragut Square, where a bronze statue by Vinnie Ream was unveiled in 1881. A stained glass window in the United States Naval Academy Chapel shows Farragut lashed in the rigging of USS Hartford at Mobile Bay.

  Farragut Naval Training Station on Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho trained over 293,000 sailors during World War II. In 1966 the state of Idaho converted the land into Farragut State Park. The Navy named two separate classes of destroyers for him: one in 1934 and another in 1958, in addition to individual ships bearing the name in 1898, 1920, and 2006.

  In 1903 the U.S. Postal Service issued a one-dollar black stamp bearing his portrait. Treasury notes of the Series 1890 and 1891, known to collectors as $100 Watermelon Notes for the ornate large zeroes on the reverse, feature Farragut on the obverse. The Superintendent's residence at the Naval Academy was renamed Farragut House in May 2023, replacing the name it had carried in honor of Confederate Admiral Buchanan, the man Farragut defeated at Mobile Bay. The monument at his birthplace in Concord, Tennessee, was dedicated by Admiral Dewey on the 15th of May, 1900.