to put a stop
to the firing. "She was at this time sore beset," said Farragut in his
dispatch to the Navy Department; "the Chickasaw was pounding away at her
stern, the Ossipee was approaching her at full speed, and the
Monongahela, Lackawanna, and Hartford were bearing down upon her,
determined upon her destruction. Her smoke-stack had been shot away, her
steering chains were gone, compelling a resort to her relieving tackles,
and several of her port shutters were jammed. Indeed, from the time the
Hartford struck her until her surrender she never fired a gun." No
stronger evidence can be offered than this last sentence, which
Johnston's account corroborates, of how completely Buchanan
miscalculated, or disregarded, the capabilities of the important vessel
he controlled. Great as was her power to resist a single shot, or the
end-on charge of a heavy vessel, when she surrendered nearly all the
plating on the after side of the casemate was found to be started, and
the after gun-carriage was disabled; there being distinct marks of nine
eleven-inch solid shot having struck within a few square feet of that
port. Three of her port shutters also were so damaged that their guns
could not be fired.

Thus ended the great battle of Mobile Bay, the crowning achievement of
Farragut's naval career; "one of the hardest-earned victories of my
life," to quote his own words, "and the most desperate battle I ever
fought since the days of the old Essex." "You may pass through a long
career and see many an action," he remarked to one of the junior
officers of the Hartford, in the interval between first anchoring and
the conflict with the Tennessee, "without seeing as much bloodshed as
you have this day witnessed." The loss of the flag-ship herself had
been twenty-five killed and twenty-eight wounded out of a ship's company
of some three hundred souls. The Brooklyn, a ship of the same force, had
almost exactly the same number of casualties--eleven killed and
forty-three wounded. Contrasting the equal suffering of the
latter--delayed so long under the numerous guns of the fort, but
supported by the fire of the other vessels--with that of the flag-ship,
inflicted by the batteries of the enemy's gun-boats, few in number, but
worked for the time with impunity, we find an excellent illustration of
Farragut's oft-repeated maxim, that "to hurt your enemy is the best way
to keep him from hurting you." The total loss of the United States fleet
in t