The USS Rodolph: The Last Mine of the War
Near Mobile, Alabama
The Civil War was effectively over when a Confederate torpedo ended it for four sailors in a river near Mobile.
The USS Rodolph was a stern-wheel tinclad gunboat, one of the flat-bottomed shallow-draft vessels the Union Navy used to project force into the rivers and bays of the Gulf Coast. Built in Cincinnati in eighteen sixty-three and commissioned at New Orleans in the spring of eighteen sixty-four, the Rodolph had spent months doing the unglamorous but essential work of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron: towing supply barges, escorting troop movements, conducting mop-up operations after the main fighting was done.
She had done that work well. After Admiral Farragut's famous passage through the minefield at Mobile Bay in August of eighteen sixty-four, the Rodolph's shallow draft allowed her to push into waters the larger ships could not reach. In September of that year, she steamed up the Bon Secours River with another vessel and dismantled salt works that had been producing two thousand bushels of salt daily for Confederate forces, a quiet contribution to the slow strangling of Southern supply lines.
By April of eighteen sixty-five, the Confederacy was in its final collapse. Richmond had fallen. Lee would surrender at Appomattox on April ninth. But the campaigns in Alabama were still in motion. On April first, eighteen sixty-five, the Rodolph was working in the Blakely River, towing a salvage barge to raise the recently sunken monitor USS Milwaukee, when a Confederate torpedo detonated thirty feet aft of her bow. The explosion tore a ten-foot hole in the starboard side and the vessel sank in a few minutes in twelve feet of water. Four men were killed and eleven wounded.
The Confederates who had planted that torpedo had no way of knowing they were placing the last of their mines just eight days before Lee's surrender. The Rodolph's crew had no way of knowing the war would be over in a week. Union divers later retrieved her guns. The wreck remained in the Blakely River, a reminder that wars do not end cleanly, and that the men who die at their edges die no less completely than those who die at their center.
