Redemption Before Mobile Bay
A hailstorm of rebel artillery pounded Union Rear Adm. David Farragut’s flagship, the Hartford, as she steamed into Mobile Bay at the head of the attacking fleet on August 5, 1864. Shells tore through her planking as heavy metal fragments and wood splinters careened through the air at lightning speed and took a deadly toll on officers and men.
One well-aimed projectile ripped through the Hartford’s battle-scarred wooden hull and blasted the forward berth deck. The commander of this section of the ship, Ensign William S. Dana, recalled, “Fragments of the shell flew over my head and I was covered by the brains and blood of the man next to me.” This single shot killed three and wounded two, which removed more than a third of his 13-man crew.[1]
Dana, 21, had recently joined the cadre of officers of the Hartford. The youngest of three children born to prosperous international merchant and his wife,[2] Dana had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy less than a year earlier. His first assignment, an as ensign on the steam frigate Niagara, almost ended his fledgling navy career. In early 1864, he was one of six officers reported for leaving their watch before being properly relieved — an offense punishable by death.[3]
The officers, all young and inexperienced, plead ignorance. The Navy Department refused to accept the excuse. “It must, indeed, be obvious to the most ordinary intelligence that if an officer cannot be trusted in his watch, he has yet to learn the simplest practical duties of his profession, and is unfitted for a station where the lives of others, as well the honor of his country, may depend on his vigilance and fidelity,” admonished Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in a ruling dated March 22, 1864.[4]
Two of the officers, who had both been recently confirmed as lieutenants, were downgraded to ensigns. Dana and the others were stripped of their appointments as acting ensigns and sent back to the Naval Academy as midshipmen.[5]
Three months later, Dana was sent to the Gulf of Mexico with orders to report to Farragut outside Mobile Bay.
Dana checked in with the rear admiral on July 1 amidst a buzz of excitement: The previous night, a blockade-runner, the Ivanhoe, had steamed through the Union line with a cargo of valuables and run aground below formidable Fort Morgan at the entrance to Mobile Bay. Farragut was determined to destroy the Ivanhoe before the rebels could tow her in. After federal gunboats shelled the stranded ship without success, Farragut’s flag lieutenant, J. Crittenden Watson,[6] volunteered to lead a daring raid to board and burn her.
An expedition of four small boats in charge of Watson and assisted by six other officers, including Dana, carried out the mission under cover of darkness during the night of July 5. Hundreds of Union sailors watched as the expedition made their way to the Ivanhoe without alerting the batteries of Fort Morgan and set her afire in two places.[7]
The Ivanhoe was no more. Her destruction was a timely gift for the jubilant Farragut, who celebrated his 63rd birthday on the fifth. He released General Order No. 9 to the fleet on July 6. “The entire conduct of the expedition was marked by a promptness and energy which shows what may be expected of such officers and men on similar occasions. They have the thanks of the admiral commanding for the manner in which they performed their respective duties.”
Dana had redeemed himself. He was assigned to the Hartford and given command of the 13-man Powder Division that distributed ammunition for the warship’s 24 guns.
A month later at Mobile Bay, the Hartford sustained heavy losses — 51 killed and wounded of the 310-man compliment. Dana’s Powder Division suffered ten casualties. “One poor fellow,” recalled Dana, “after being struck down by a splinter, which carried away his left arm, was dreadfully mangled by a shell which came in before he could be attended to by the surgeons.”[8]
The carnage was worse above his forward berth station. “All over the decks you would see, here a leg, there an arm or head, and on some parts of the deck blood was nearly an inch deep,” Dana observed. “I went to bed, thanked God for my escape and felt very faint and weak from the sights and work I had gone through during the day.”[9]
Dana’s tenure on the Hartford was short-lived. He fell ill just a few weeks after the fall of Mobile Bay and was sent to the North to recuperate. He eventually returned to duty with the steam sloop Lancaster in the Pacific Squadron.[10]
Dana remained in the navy after the war ended. He was assigned to various duties that took him around the globe, and advanced in rank to commander by 1881.
On or about Christmas Day in 1889, Dana contracted the flu while on leave in Paris, France. Pneumonia set in, and he succumbed to the illness on January 1, 1890. He was 46 years old. His body was returned to New York and buried in Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery.
Dana left behind a wife, Frances, who was his junior by eighteen years. She was an amateur botanist and intimate childhood friend of Theodore Roosevelt.[11] The couple had married in 1884 and did not have children.
In 1893, writing under the name “Mrs. William Starr Dana,” her How to Know the Wildflowers was published in New York. Considered the first field guide to North American wildflowers, the volume became an instant bestseller and is still in print.
[1] Dana, “William Dana Has a Firsthand View of the Battle of Mobile Bay From Rear Adm. David Farragut’s Flagship Hartford.” America’s Civil War (Vol. 12, Issue 2 May 1999), pp. 14–17.
[2] Dana’s father, Richard Perkins Dana (1810–1894), was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. In 1835, he married Juliette Starr, a New York City native. Dana, A Fashionable Tour Through the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi: The 1852 Journal of Juliette Starr Dana, pp. 2–3.
[3] Reports of Committees of the Senate of the United States for the Second Session of the Fifty-First Congress, 1890-’91, House Report No. 3275; General Orders No. 31, General Orders and Circulars Issued by the Navy Department from 1863 to 1887, p. 15.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Farragut was especially fond of John Crittenden Watson (1842–1923), who served him as flag lieutenant. Farragut wrote a letter to his son on July 6, 1864, in which expressed his fears for Watson’s safety during the Ivanhoe raid. “It was an anxious night for me; for I am almost as fond of Watson as yourself, and interested in the others.” Watson, a native of Kentucky and grandson of noted political figure John J. Crittenden, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1860. He remained in the navy after the end of the Civil War, and went on to serve in the Spanish-American War. He retired as rear admiral in 1904. Farragut, Life of David Glasgow Farragut, First Admiral of the United States Navy, p. 403.
[7] Reports documenting the “Chasing ashore of the steamer Ivanhoe at Fort Morgan, June 30, and her destruction by boat expedition, July 6, 1864.” ORN, I, 21, 353–357.
[8] Dana, “William Dana Has a Firsthand View of the Battle of Mobile Bay From Rear Adm. David Farragut’s Flagship Hartford.” America’s Civil War (Vol. 12, Issue 2 May 1999), pp. 14–17.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Reports of Committees of the Senate of the United States for the Second Session of the Fifty-First Congress, 1890-’91, House Report No. 3275.
[11] New York-born Frances Theodora Smith (1861–1952) remarried six years after Dana died. In 1896 she wed James Russell Parsons, a diplomat who died in a carriage accident in Mexico City in 1905. She wrote several more books during her long life, but none as popular as her first. Active in Republican politics and women’s suffrage, “Fanny” exchanged numerous letters with Theodore Roosevelt.
Ron Coddington is a collector of Civil War era images, and the editor and publisher of Military Images magazine. He is the author of three books, and a contributing author to the New York Times series Disunion. His next book will profile men who served in the Union and Confederate navies. Visitfacesofwar.comfor more information and a complete index of past columns. Follow Ron onFacebook and Twitter.
This profile originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of the Civil War News.
