The minefield had a gap in it. The Confederates had left a roughly five-hundred-yard opening on the eastern side of the channel, the Fort Morgan side, so that their own blockade-runners could still slip in and out, and they had marked the edge of the live mines with a line of buoys. The safe lane ran between that buoy line and the fort. Everyone in Rear Admiral David G. Farragut’s (North) fleet had been told the same thing: stay east of the buoys, no matter how close that put you to Fort Morgan’s guns. East was the narrow safe strip. West of the buoys was the minefield.

Commander Tunis A. M. Craven (North), in the lead, did not stay east of the buoys. Trying to close on the Confederate ironclad waiting inside the bay, he steered Tecumseh west of the buoy line, across to the mined side. Almost at once she struck a torpedo. The monitor went down bow-first in something like twenty-five to thirty seconds, so fast there was no time to do anything. Of her crew (sources differ a little on the exact complement, but it was about a hundred men) only twenty-one were saved. Somewhere around ninety men went down with her. That single mine, in less than half a minute, killed more Union sailors than the entire rest of the battle combined.

And the attack stalled. With the lead monitor gone in front of everyone’s eyes and the channel now visibly full of mines, Brooklyn stopped. Captain James Alden (North) began to back his ship and signaled the flagship for instructions. But a column of warships under a fort’s guns cannot afford to stop. Brooklyn stalling fouled the whole line behind her, leaving the fleet piling up, motionless, directly beneath Fort Morgan. This was the moment the battle could have been lost.

This is where the most famous order in American naval history is supposed to have been given. The version on the monuments and in the schoolbooks is "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!", Farragut refusing to stop and driving his flagship through the mines. The action is exactly right and fully documented. Farragut ordered Hartford forward, swung her around the stalled Brooklyn into the lead, and drove straight through the mined water, over the very field that had just swallowed an ironclad in thirty seconds, with no way of knowing his own wooden flagship would not go the same way. The whole fleet followed Hartford through, and the mines they passed over did not explode. They had been in the water for weeks. Salt water had crept into many of them and spoiled the powder, or rusted the firing mechanisms, so that ship after ship bumped over live mines that simply failed to go off. That is what won the battle.

The words are a different matter. The famous line did not appear in print until years after the battle, first attributed to Farragut something like fourteen years later, and some historians doubt he said it at all. A signal officer close enough to have heard it wrote a detailed account of the action that never mentions the exclamation, and men who were there doubted any shouted order could even have been heard over the guns. What he more plausibly said, if he said anything, was an order to his flag captain and to Lieutenant Commander James E. Jouett (North), something on the order of "Damn the torpedoes. Four bells, Captain Drayton," then "Go ahead, Jouett, full speed." The line we remember was stitched together and polished in the retelling. What is certain is that the lead ship sank, the column froze, and Farragut shoved his own flagship into the front and went through the mines anyway.

There is a second iconic image from this morning, and the record qualifies it the same way. We picture Farragut lashed high in Hartford’s rigging, tied aloft so he could see over the gun smoke, binding himself to his ship. The truth is less theatrical and more human. His flag captain, Captain Percival Drayton (North), the officer who actually ran the flagship so the admiral could command the whole fleet, worried that Farragut might be hit and fall to the deck from where he stood up in the shrouds, and had a sailor secure him with a line. As the story is told, Farragut waved the man off, saying he was fine, but the sailor had his orders and lashed him anyway. He was tied up there for his own safety at his captain’s insistence, not out of bravado: the most famous sailor in the country, fussed over by his own crew.