David Glasgow Farragut

David Glasgow Farragut went to sea as a midshipman in the early republic and spent decades in the Navy before the Civil War made him a national name. In April 1862, commanding the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, he forced the forts below New Orleans and took the Confederacy's largest city — a strategic blow written into operational reports and still taught as a model of combined river and harbor attack. On August 5, 1864, he led the wooden and iron ships into Mobile Bay. When the monitor Tecumseh struck a mine and sank, Farragut ordered his squadron ahead through the minefield; the clipped order that later became "Damn the torpedoes" belongs to that morning's fight for the bay.

He became the U.S. Navy's first full admiral. This register lists New Orleans and Mobile Bay as documented campaigns, not every toast or statue that followed. Tennessee-born and Union-loyal, he fought a war that split the service he had grown up in.

Farragut died in 1870 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The restored wet-collodion portrait (Library of Congress lineage, public domain on Commons) is the image used here. He is accounted for — not missing — and the Navy still puts his name on ships.