Fortunately for both men, heavy fire from Farragut’s ironclads drove Tennessee off and saved their vessels from further mauling. And while Galena’s assistant surgeon George P. Wright lent his skills to Oneida’s busy medical staff, Wells used Galena’s 800-hp engine to keep the much heavier Oneida moving speedily to deeper and safer waters. “The safety of the ship after the explosion depended upon the Galena,” Huntington wrote. “That we are here quietly at anchor attests how nobly…Wells stood by us.”

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The fight for Mobile Bay was soon over. With Oneida and Galena out, the rest of Farragut’s fleet blasted Selma and Gaines out of action (Morgan escaped up the bay), then turned on the still-prowling Tennessee. Ramming it failed, but the combined point-blank fire of Farragut’s heavy ironclads eventually put Tennessee out of action. A gravely wounded Buchanan surrendered at 10 a.m.

Farragut next put his battle-torn fleet to work forcing the surrenders of the three defending Confederate forts. Powell, well east of Gaines, fell that night; Gaines surrendered three days later; but Fort Morgan’s garrison held out in defiance until Galena, now operating free of the damaged Oneida, and the rest of the fleet pounded it into submission on August 23.

Although its place on Oneida’s port side in the initial attack on August 5 had meant that Galena was partially shielded from Fort Morgan’s guns, Wells’ gunboat was raked by grape and struck repeatedly by 10-inch shot, but its crew suffered only three casualties, with only one death.

USS Galena finished out its days quietly. After three months of duty in the East Gulf and four months of repairs, it returned to river duty in the Eastern theater, where its career had begun so ignobly. In 1872, a decade after its celebrated birth in Mystic, the ironclad-turned-gunboat was broken up at the Norfolk Navy Yard.

Louis Goldsborough had called Galena “a poor stick for an iron clad,” and it would be hard to argue otherwise. The failure of Samuel Pook’s skimpy armor arrangement doomed Galena to become the forgotten ironclad—the only one of the Union’s famed first three to fail. Given the opportunity to fight “in her own skin” alongside other anonymous wooden gunboats, however, the vessel at least lived up to the faith placed in it back in Mystic.

This article was written by Eric Ethier and originally published in the February 2008 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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