The Federals prevailed in that engagement, but the sinking of Tecumseh would go down as the most decisive Confederate torpedo victory of the war—and perhaps the quickest and complete destruction of an enemy vessel ever witnessed.

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McClintock and Watson soon managed to mine all the water routes leading to Shreveport. At Galveston, meanwhile, Dunn supervised the construction of one ironclad torpedo boat, and in nearby Buffalo Bayou Braman began fabricating a second. Both were being financed with $160,000 that General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of the Confederate trans-Mississippi forces, had dedicated to the Singer project.

As the two huge ironclads were taking shape in Texas in the fall of 1864, attention in the East turned to the one vital Richmond rail link not in Grant’s hands—the supply line between the Confederate capital and the port of Wilmington, N.C. With Lee’s army entrenched before Petersburg and supplies barely trickling to his troops, Grant made plans to sever this last lifeline. Anticipating Grant’s move, Confederate leaders ordered Singer’s Richmond-based operatives southward. Planning to destroy a railway bridge over the Roanoke River, a fleet of nine Federal gunboats headed upriver. “When [they] nearly arrived at their destination,” a German naval historian wrote later, “the vessels were either sunk or severely injured by submarine mines. Thus the expedition ended in a most disastrous failure.”

In early April 1865, Richmond fell, triggering the government’s abandonment of the capital. Although the Confederate states east of the Mississippi then lay in ruins, Union forces had barely touched Texas and much of western Arkansas and Louisiana. With Galveston still open to blockade runners and military supplies readily available across the Rio Grande in friendly Mexico, diehard Confederates believed organized resistance might perhaps be prolonged indefinitely.

Optimistic that he could make a new start west of the Mississippi, Jefferson Davis and his caravan headed steadily south toward Charlotte. En route, Davis received the news that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and on May 2, 1865, he called his cabinet together for the last time and ordered the destruction of many official papers, in part to lighten the load that would be transferred to the West.

While Davis and remnants of his tattered government were playing a cat-and-mouse game with Federal cavalry, word of Lee’s surrender reached Kirby Smith in Shreveport. Smith immediately made plans to establish an army of 15,000 troops at Marshall, Texas, to be placed at Davis’ disposal upon his presumed arrival. In Houston Mag­ruder released a directive ordering the citizens and soldiers of Texas not to give up the fight. Furthermore, he stipulated, construction on the two mammoth Singer ironclads was to continue around the clock.

By this time, however, Confederate deserters had given the Federals off Galveston detailed descriptions of Singer’s boats. One report stated that the enemy “are building a torpedo boat at Goose Creek, One hundred and Forty feet long to be clad in rail road iron.” Another revealed that “one of the men saw what was shown to him as a torpedo boat lying in the main channel at Galveston. It was shaped like a box, with square corners, and was quite low in the water. He could not tell whether she was plated or not.”

On May 10, at about the same time the Galveston torpedo boat was readied for sea, Davis and a 40-person entourage were captured near Irwinville, Ga. The next day Benjamin and Leovy were overtaken and informed that the Confederate government was no more.

The last battle of the Civil War was fought near Palmetto Ranch on the Rio Grande on May 12-13, 1865. Ironically, it ended in a Southern victory. But the clock had run out on the Confederacy. The governors of Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana were convinced their armies would be no match for a determined Union invasion force and sent word to Smith to negotiate surrender terms.

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