MOBILE.
Above the forts the merchant fleet lies at anchor, twenty-five miles
from Mobile,—the shallowness of the bay preventing at all times vessels
drawing more than ten feet of water from going up to the city. The
extensive gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, presents
not a single first-class harbor. The first you meet with is that of
Pensacola.
Steamers were plying between the ships and the city, receiving and
delivering cargoes. We met or passed them as we kept on our course.
Blueish lines of forests enclosed the Bay. Four miles below the city we
came in sight of the Rebel defences. On our right were the bastion and
extensive fortifications of Spanish Fort, commanding Minetta Bay and
several miles of the coast of Mobile Bay. This work, originally built by
De Soto more than three centuries ago, was finally invested by our fleet
and land forces on the day of the fall of Richmond. It surrendered on
the ninth of April, and on the eleventh Mobile was evacuated. The water
approaches to this fort, and to the other defences of the city, were
strewn with torpedoes, by which four or five vessels of our fleet were
blown up.
We passed a line of obstructions, consisting of piles and sunken wrecks
thrown across the channel; and Mobile, a smoking, sunlit city, lay
before us on the low shore. By the direct channel it was less than three
miles distant; but, in order to reach it, we were compelled to ascend
Spanish River to the Mobile River, and descend that stream, a circuit of
over twenty miles. It was four o’clock when we reached the wharf.
[Illustration: EXPLOSION AT MOBILE.]
Mobile is a level, shady town, regularly laid out, and built on a dry,
sandy plain. It is the principal city of Alabama, and the second city in
importance in the Gulf States; its commerce ranking next to that of New
Orleans. For several years before the war its annual exports of cotton
were between six and seven hundred thousand bales. It endured a four
years’ blockade, falling into Federal hands only at the latter end of
the war.
But its great catastrophe did not occur until some time after the
termination of hostilities. It would seem as if the genius of
Destruction was determined to strike a final blow at the city. The
explosion of the lately captured Confederate ammunition was one of the
most terrible disasters of the kind ever known. It was stored in a large
three-story warehouse one street back from the river. The last of Dick
Taylor’s shells were going in, when, it is supposed, one of them
accidentally ignited. Twenty brick blocks, and portions of other blocks,
were instantly blown to atoms. Four or five hundred persons were
killed,—it was never known how many. A black volcanic cloud of smoke and
fragments went up into the sky: “It was big as a mountain,” said one. It
was succeeded by a fearful conflagration sweeping over the field of
ruins. Ten thousand bales of cotton were burned. The loss of property
was so immense that nobody ventured to estimate it.
In the vicinity of the explosion, citizens were thrown off their feet,
chimneys knocked down, and windows and doors demolished. Lights of glass
were broken all over the city, a mile or more from the scene of the
explosion.
“I was lifted from the ground, and my hat thrown off,” said one. “Then I
looked up, and there were great black blocks of something in the air,
high as I could see, and shells exploding.”
Said another: “I was riding out a mile and a half from the city. I heard
a sound, and at the same time my head and shoulders were thrown forward
on my horse’s neck, as if I had dodged. ‘That’s the first time I’ve
dodged a cannon,’ I said, ‘and that’s after the war is over.’ I looked
around, and saw the strangest cloud going up slowly over the city. Then
I knew it was the shock that had thrown me down.”
The town had neither the means nor the material to rebuild: “We made no
bricks during the war.” I found the scene of the disaster a vast field
of ruins. Where had stood the warehouse in which the ammunition was
stored, there was a pit twenty feet deep, half filled with water, and
surrounded by fragments of iron and bricks, and unexploded shells. A
large brick block, containing a cotton-press, which stood between the
magazine and the river, had entirely disappeared. “The bricks were all
blown into the water, and we never saw them any more.”
Business was brisk. “There are more goods on Dauphin Street to-day,” an
old merchant told me, “than I have ever before seen in the whole of
Mobile.” And the captain of the Mobile steamer, who took me up the
Alabama to Selma, said: “There was never such a trade on this river
before. Nobody ever expected such a freight on this boat: her guards are
all under water.” Her upward-bound lading consisted mostly of supplies
for plantations and provincial stores,—barrels of Western flour and
whiskey that had come down the Mississippi, and boxes of fine liquors,
soap, starch, and case goods, from the North Atlantic ports. Her
downward freight was chiefly cotton.