Bombardment of Fort Powell:
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The Confederates built Fort Powell on Tower Island, an oyster shell bank fifty feet north of Grant's Pass. The Pass provided an easy route from Mobile Bay to New Orleans through Mississippi Sound. C.S. Lieutenant Colonel James M. Williams, only 25 years old, took command in August 1863. He commanded 140 men. Though Williams worked energetically hauling sand from the mainland, building a bombproof and new earthworks, and mounting guns; the fort was not finished when Farragut forced a passage into the lower bay on August 5, 1864.
That morning, at 8:30 a.m., a squadron of five U.S. Navy gunboats, commanded by Lieutenant Commander James De Krafft, opened on Fort Powell from the Sound. Williams returned a brisk fire with three guns on his west face until about 10:00 a.m. De Krafft continued his bombardment until 12:00 noon, but since shoals prevented him from getting any closer than 4,000 yards, the fort was relatively unscathed. The danger to the fort was not past, however. The fort's east face mounted two guns but lacked parapets and transverses. If attacked from the Bay side, his fort would be fully exposed to enemy fire.
This is exactly what happened. At 2:50 p.m. Lieutenant Commander George Perkins took the
USS Chickasaw to within 350 yards of Powell and fired 25 times at its eastern side with shell and grape. Williams returned fire with three shells from his 7-inch Brooke gun mounted in the southeast angle of the fort, hitting the monitor twice and putting a hole through its smokestack. This amounted to nothing. Powell was still threatened by the monitors in the Bay and De Krafft's squadron in the Sound. Williams telegraphed his superior, Colonel Anderson, that he could hold his position no more than 48 hours. Anderson advised Williams to "save your garrison once your fort is no longer tenable."
"A shell entered one of the sally ports, which are not traversed, passed entirely through the bomb-proof wall. Fortunately it did not explode. The shells exploding in the face of the work displaced the sand so rapidly that I was convinced unless the iron-clad was driven off it would explode my magazine and make the bomb-proof chambers untenable in two days at furthest. To drive it (the Chickasaw) from its position I believed impossible with my imperfect work."
Lieutenant Colonel James M. Williams
That night Williams' command crossed at low tide to Cedar Point. Lieutenant E.G. Jeffers spiked the guns and Lieutenant Thomas J. Savage laid a train of powder to the magazine and lit the fuse at 10:00 p.m. The fort blew up at 10:30 p.m. Williams marched his command to Mobile.
Cedar Point also had a shell battery, mounting three guns. This battery was abandoned after the Battle of the Bay. Union troops later occupied both Fort Powell and Cedar Point.
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