Battle of Spanish Fort: The Last Siege of the War
Near Mobile, Alabama
By the spring of eighteen sixty-five, the Confederate States were dissolving. Sherman had cut the South in two. Richmond had fallen. But Mobile, the Confederacy's last functioning Gulf port east of the Mississippi, was still in Confederate hands, defended by an elaborate ring of fortifications on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.
The key to those defenses was a bluff about twelve miles east of the city that the Spanish had used as a military site in the colonial era, giving it the name that had stuck: Spanish Fort. The Confederates had reinforced it heavily during the war, understanding that any Union attempt to take Mobile from the landward side would have to come through here first.
Union General Edward Canby landed thirty thousand men on the eastern shore beginning March thirteenth, eighteen sixty-five, and on March twenty-seventh he brought them forward to lay siege to Spanish Fort and its garrison of about two thousand Confederate troops under Brigadier General Randall Lee Gibson. The disparity in numbers, fifteen Union soldiers for every Confederate, meant the outcome was never truly in question. But the Confederate defenders were determined, and the fortifications were strong enough to hold for twelve days.
The siege was a brutal affair of siege trenches, artillery exchanges, and nighttime raids. Union engineers dug toward the Confederate lines under fire, pushing their trenches closer each night. By April seventh, the Union lines had enveloped the fort on three sides. That night, Gibson ordered a quiet evacuation. Most of his remaining force slipped away in the dark over a wooden treadway bridge and escaped toward Mobile by boat.
Union troops entered Spanish Fort on April eighth, finding it empty except for some five hundred prisoners who had not gotten away in time. Mobile fell without further resistance on April twelfth.
The Civil War's last major engagement, the Battle of Fort Blakely, was fought five miles north the day after Spanish Fort fell, on April ninth, eighteen sixty-five. It was the same afternoon Robert E. Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, more than a thousand miles away. The men fighting in Alabama did not yet know it was over.
