In failing health, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut looked forward to the salubrious effects of a sea voyage. Hearing that Farragut’s physicians had advised him to forsake New York for New Hampshire in the summer, Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter placed the dispatch vessel Tallapoosa at the disposal of the Navy’s first four-star. “My physicians are decidedly of the opinion that a change of air will be highly beneficial for me,” Farragut wrote Porter on 26 June 1870, “and I do not doubt that this little trip by sea will be of service.”
The ailing admiral was in bed on Independence Day as the Tallapoosa neared Portsmouth, where Farragut and his wife had planned to visit Commodore Alexander Pennock, commandant of the navy yard there, and Mrs. Pennock. But when he heard the sound of guns—a salute fired in his honor—Farragut arose and dressed in his uniform. Emerging on deck, the victor at New Orleans and Mobile Bay gazed at his flag flying at the Tallapoosa’s masthead. “It would be well if I died now,” he mused, “in harness.”
The ship that carried Admiral Farragut on what proved to be his final voyage (he passed away in Portsmouth on 14 August) had been designed as a Sassacus-class “double-ender,” a side-wheel steamer with rudders at each end. Workmen at the Boston Navy Yard laid the keel for the wooden-hulled Tallapoosa in 1862. Launched on 17 February 1863, the ship was christened by Miss Mary Montgomery, the daughter of Commodore John Berrien Montgomery, commandant of the yard. “In the name of the Government of the United States,” she declared, “I name this vessel ‘Tallapoosa.’ May her career be triumphant.”
Although built in Boston, the Tallapoosa was commissioned at the New York Navy Yard on 13 September 1864, with Lieutenant Commander Joseph E. DeHaven, who had entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1841, in command. Less than a month later, on 10 October, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles telegraphed Rear Admiral Hiram Paulding, commandant of the New York yard: “Let the Tallapoosa go direct to Hampton Roads.”
There, the new double-ender gunboat joined the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron under then–Rear Admiral Porter, who assigned her to the First Division commanded by Commodore Henry K. Thatcher. Soon thereafter, on 14 October, Porter ordered the Tallapoosa to proceed to Norfolk, Virginia, to load stores and ammunition for the monitor Mahopac, then prepare to tow her down the coast past Cape Hatteras.
Less than two weeks later, however, alarming developments off the Eastern Seaboard resulted in the Tallapoosa’s being given another, more urgent, mission. Porter ordered her and the screw gunboats Maumee and Yantic to “get underway without delay and go in pursuit of the Tallahassee,” the Confederate steamer that had already wreaked havoc in the Atlantic. Between 11 and 20 August, the cruiser had intercepted 33 vessels, burning 16, scuttling 10, bonding 5, and releasing but 2.
Porter ordered his captains to “keep 40 miles off the coast until you get up to the latitude of Boston, then proceed off the port of Halifax.” He enjoined them to inquire as they went along, and pursue her wherever she was heard to be. “Keep a good lookout off the port of Halifax for her, and see that she does not get in. Sink her at all hazards.” Once they had searched northern waters, they were to return southward “on the track blockade runners would take if going to Wilmington [North Carolina].”
The Tallapoosa, “speaking [communicating with] numerous vessels, but obtaining no intelligence,” proceeded to Portland, Maine, reaching there on 30 October. Commander DeHaven telegraphed Secretary Welles: “No news thus far of [the Tallahassee]. I proceed immediately to Halifax. No delay here.” The ship put in to the Nova Scotian port the next evening, with DeHaven informing Porter of the weather encountered and reporting “some difficulty with the wheel ropes,” in addition to the enormous coal consumption—20 to 22 tons a day—that compelled him to refuel.
Entering Halifax once more on the morning of 3 November to coal his ship again before proceeding to Hampton Roads, DeHaven learned through the U.S. consul “that the Tallahassee [which, renamed the Olustee, actually had not slipped out of Wilmington until 29 October] was committing depredations on the Long Island coast and in the vicinity of Boston.” The Tallapoosa took on only 20 tons of coal and then sailed that evening to resume her hunt for the Confederate cruiser.
On the night of 4 November, however, the Union ship encountered a heavy southeasterly gale that lasted 12 hours, after which she was battered by a northwesterly gale, “considerably retard[ing]” the side-wheeler’s progress. On the evening of 5 November, the key, which confined the “spindle to the [after] rudder casing,” broke. The Tallapoosa’s men finally secured the rudder “but not without much difficulty and delay” at the end of which time, as DeHaven observed with relief, “accident alone favored the insertion of the securing bolt.” In addition, heavy seas cascading on her decks as the ship rolled combined with the weight of the pivot guns to spring, or crack, the spar deck. The Tallapoosa’s sailors immediately shored up the decks, preventing the heavy iron ordnance (the four Dahlgren shell guns weighed at least 9,000 pounds apiece, the two Parrott 100-pounder rifles 9,700 each) “from forcing their way through.”
As if that were not enough, the next morning the forward rudder key gave way, “leaving the vessel to all intent rudderless.” Providentially, DeHaven managed to keep the vessel’s head into the wind, enabling the rudder to be “secured at a favorable moment.” Within a month’s time, the commander reported, the ship had been disabled twice by defective rudder keys. “That the spar deck has not strength to support its present battery,” he added, “can be seen at once by its giving way and the necessity of shoring the deck.”
The Tallapoosa never did catch her quarry, but following repairs, was assigned to the East Gulf Blockading Squadron and participated in the salvage of the Union screw sloop San Jacinto after she grounded off Green Turtle Cay on 1 January 1865. Laid up in Washington in 1867 after operating with the Gulf Squadron the previous year, she performed “special service,” carrying freight and passengers and, in 1872, serving as a practice ship for cadet engineers at the U.S. Naval Academy.
The Tallapoosa was rebuilt twice, first in 1874–75, and a second time after having been sunk in a collision with the schooner J. S. Howell on 24 August 1884. Ultimately assigned to the South Atlantic Squadron, she was condemned on 30 January 1892 as “unfit for service” and auctioned off at Montevideo, Uruguay, on 2 March 1892. Her officers and men sailed home in a merchant ship.
While her career may not have been as “triumphant” as her sponsor had wished, of the 27 sisters of the Sassacus class, the Tallapoosa turned out to be the longest-lived and thus assured of a unique place in the Navy’s history.