Combat· American Civil War
Forts St. Philip and Jackson / New Orleans Dash
The night battle that opened the lower Mississippi and doomed New Orleans.
Before dawn on 24 April 1862, Admiral Farragut ran his wooden fleet upriver past Forts Jackson and St. Philip, the two strong works guarding the approach to the city, in a furious night action lit by gun flashes and fire rafts. The ships fought their way through a gantlet of fort batteries and Confederate gunboats; the Varuna's Marines opened fire on a ram that attacked her, and aboard the gunboat Iroquois the Marine guard, serving the guns through the passage, suffered two killed and twenty-four wounded. The fleet got past with most of its strength intact and stood on toward New Orleans, whose fall followed within days. The running of the forts was the decisive stroke of the campaign, the most important Union strategic victory of the war's first year.
Podcast episodes on American Civil War
Record no. 435