Review - "'Digging All Night and Fighting All Day': The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865" by Paul Brueske

["Digging All Night and Fighting All Day": The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865 by Paul Brueske (Savas Beatie, 2024). Hardcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiv,243/331. ISBN:978-1-61121-710-0. $32.95]

By the summer of 1864, northern military planners and political leaders had been advocating a combined operation to seize Mobile, one of the South's largest cities and the western theater's most significant remaining blockade-running haven in the Gulf, for nearly two years. Everyone recognized Mobile's strategic importance, but organizing a campaign against it always got derailed by other priorities. When finally underway, Mobile's reduction proceeded in two major phases: (1) the August 1864 sea and land assault that wrested control of Mobile Bay from Confederate naval forces and captured the masonry forts guarding the bay's entrance, and (2) the March-April 1865 operation that drove the Confederates from their eastern shore fortifications and forced the evacuation of the city. One can argue that each of these stages was sufficiently spaced apart from the other to be considered a separate campaign, and no existing scholarship integrates the two into a single study devoting equal detail and attention to the events of 1864 and 1865.

In terms of modern book-length treatments currently available, readers wanting to learn about the August 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay commonly consult Chester Hearn's Mobile Bay and the Mobile Campaign: The Last Great Battles of the Civil War (1993), its content overwhelmingly weighted toward the 1864 campaign, or Jack Friend's West Wind, Flood Tide: The Battle of Mobile Bay (2004). Preceded only by Sean Michael O'Brien's scantily detailed Mobile, 1865: Last Stand of the Confederacy (2001) and even briefer works from John Waugh and Russell Blount, Paul Brueske's The Last Siege: The Mobile Campaign, Alabama 1865 (2018) provided readers with the first truly satisfactory book-length overview of the land campaign against Mobile. Even then, though, only limited space could be devoted to the campaign's two main actions, the siege of Spanish Fort and the storming of Fort Blakeley. In his new book, "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day": The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865, Brueske is able to offer his full attention to the strongly contested fight over the east bay's southernmost guardian.

Some contend that the results of the 1864 Mobile Bay campaign effectively neutered the city of Mobile's strategic significance, rendering a massive spring campaign against it unnecessary, but Brueske effectively argues that proponents of that view unduly benefit from the advantages of hindsight. In addition to its value as a logistics and communications hub that effectively blocked Union forces from gaining river access into the Alabama interior, Mobile's defenses also housed in early 1865 one of the western theater's few remaining Confederate troop concentrations of any great consequence. The Confederate Army of Tennessee was never again able to conduct army-scale operations after its devastating defeat at Nashville in December 1864, but it was nevertheless the case that powerful sub-units, though reduced in manpower strength, retained combat effectiveness. Some were dispatched east to North Carolina and others south to Mobile. The handful of veteran brigades sent to Mobile formed the backbone of its defense in 1865, and Brueske makes a strong case for the city's enduring military significance during this waning period of the war.

Brueske's deeply researched operational and tactical-level narrative devotes equal attention to the military actions and strategic concerns of both sides. Union land forces during the 1865 Mobile Campaign were led by Major General Edward S. Canby, and strong elements of two army corps (Thirteenth and Sixteenth) were directed against Spanish Fort upon completion of a brief west bay diversion. Canby's men outnumbered the Confederate defenders of Spanish Fort, initially a mixture of garrison troops and Army of Tennessee veterans under Brigadier General Randall Gibson, by roughly eight to one. Many expected Canby to launch an immediate assault, but he elected instead to reduce the fort by siege approaches. After nearly two weeks of progress, Colonel James Geddes's brigade was able to traverse a covered route around and behind the Confederate left that was previously thought impassable to organized forces. His thinning defenses finally unhinged by Geddes's bold action, Gibson withdrew the garrison overnight, escaping under the enemy's noses using a previously built plank causeway to march north to safety. There was little time for Gibson and his men to celebrate their close call, however, as the subsequent storming of Fort Blakeley left too few men overall to attempt a final combined defense of Mobile. The city's remaining garrison, including Gibson's command, withdrew upriver to Meridian, Mississippi and surrendered soon after.

Events of the two-week siege are meticulously recounted in the text and their details visually well represented in the accompanying cartography. All of the elements of offensive and defensive siegecraft honed by both sides during the war were displayed by the Spanish Fort combatants, including controversial use by the Confederates of subterra shells. Brueske credits the veteran presence of Gibson and the stubborn fortitude of his men for dragging out the operation as long as possible. Gibson's Confederates were able to make expert use of the preexisting earthworks and slowed enemy progress through well-timed sorties and effective sharpshooting. The besiegers were initially stymied through lavish expenditures of rifle and artillery ammunition along with naval support fire, but dwindling powder, bullet, and shell stocks eventually forced the Confederates to adopt drastic cutbacks. With Rebel guns increasingly silent in response, Union superiority in manpower and firepower gradually gained ascendancy. After two weeks, the garrison was forced to either surrender or withdraw. As Brueske details in the book, the latter operation was astoundingly successful.

The siege was noteworthy for the Confederate Navy arguably having a greater impact than its more typically dominant Union counterpart. Before ammunition ran short, the heavy guns of the Confederate naval squadron, in particular its pair of partially completed ironclads, was able to successfully hinder the Union advance by providing enfilade fire down the line. Rear areas also came under heavy fire, disrupting Union command and control. Additionally, Confederate vessels were able to ferry men, guns, and supplies into the fort (and out, as necessary) relatively unhindered. On the Union side, Admiral Henry Thatcher struggled to get his ships within range close enough to materially affect events. The east bay's network of distant shoals, water obstructions, and well-placed torpedoes hindered Thatcher's approach toward Spanish Fort and its supporting batteries, and the admiral's insufficient precautions against floating mines contributed to the shallow water sinking of two monitors and a tinclad.

Though respected by his peers, Canby was widely known to be an abundantly cautious general, and many critics (including U.S. Grant then and later) condemned his methodical approach to reducing the east bay forts as not keeping requisite pace with military events developing elsewhere. Nothing in Brueske's study is about significantly elevating Canby's modest historical stature among Union Civil War army commanders, but he does persuasively lead readers to approach Canby by fairly assessing the general's actions within the context of what was known and expected at the time. Canby initially had to overcome challenging weather limitations (ones that his critics consistently overlook), but he also got the job done with relatively low casualties. We can never know for certain whether an all-out assault to open the campaign would have resulted in fewer overall casualties than those accumulated over the two-week siege, but one can certainly take the position that the probability of suffering high casualties against the small but well led, strongly situated, and highly motivated band of Confederate defenders backed by plentiful artillery made an immediate attack not worth the risks involved. At this stage of the war, no apology was needed for employing a methodical approach that minimized casualties.

A very useful compilation of supplemental material is assembled in the volume's extensive appendix section. Found within are detailed army and navy orders of battle for both sides, lists of casualties and naval vessels lost, POW numbers, and an inventory of captured stores. Another appendix traces the postwar journey of the siege's most famous cannon, the Lady Slocomb. Preservation information is also provided as is a brief but interesting look at the history of the old Spanish Fort, its colonial period origins (Spanish versus British) still in dispute.

In addition to providing the Civil War literature with the first full-length account of the siege of Spanish Fort, the strategic arguments presented in Paul Brueske's "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day" (combined with the author's earlier work on the campaign) offer powerful counterpoints to those that maintain that the late timing and slow pacing of the 1865 Mobile Campaign essentially erased its strategic utility within the overall plan to end the war that spring. Highly recommended.