Mobile in the American Civil War

Mobile, Alabama, was an important port city on the Gulf of Mexico for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

"[2] As war erupted, military fervor in Mobile was high, and hundreds of able-bodied men responded to recruitment drives and signed up for service in the Confederate army.

The CSS Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel in combat, was built and tested in Mobile before being shipped to Charleston, South Carolina.

Supervised by Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan, The innovative boat successfully attacked a coal flatboat in Mobile Bay, suggesting that the relatively new concept of submarine warfare might be viable.

Mobile City Hospital treated a significant number of civilians who became sick during the war from yellow fever and other diseases.

[7] Food and others shortages were common in Mobile as the blockade tightened and cut the city off from external sources of raw materials, cloth, and other sundries.

[9] Ironically, on May 25, 1865, the city suffered loss when some three hundred people died as a result of an explosion at a federal ammunition depot on Beauregard Street.

The explosion left a 30-foot (9 m) deep hole at the depot's location, sank ships docked on the Mobile River, and the resulting fires destroyed the northern portion of the city.

Gen. Zachariah C. Deas (a Mobile merchant and cotton broker whose brigade fought at the Battle of Chickamauga, where they routed the Union division of Philip H. Sheridan and killed Brig.

[11] Mobile resident Augusta Jane Evans was a staunch states' rights activist who became a leading pro-Confederacy propagandist during the war.