The Confederates built Fort Powell on Tower Island, an oyster shell bank fifty feet north of Grant's Pass, an easy route from Mobile Bay to New Orleans through Mississippi Sound. C.S. Lieutenant Colonel James M. Williams, only 25 years old, took command in August 1863 and commanded 140 men. Though Williams worked energetically hauling sand from the mainland, building a bombproof and new earthworks, and mounting guns, the fort was not finished when Farragut forced a passage into the lower bay on August 5, 1864. That morning at 8:30 a.m., a squadron of five U.S. Navy gunboats commanded by Lieutenant Commander James De Krafft opened on Fort Powell from the Sound. Williams returned a brisk fire with three guns on his west face until about 10:00 a.m. De Krafft continued his bombardment until 12:00 noon, but because shoals prevented him from getting any closer than 4,000 yards, the fort was relatively unscathed. The fort's danger was not past, however, because its east face mounted two guns but lacked parapets and transverses, leaving it fully exposed if attacked from the bay side. At 2:50 p.m. Lieutenant Commander George Perkins took the USS Chickasaw to within 350 yards of Powell and fired 25 times at its eastern side with shell and grape. Williams returned fire with three shells from his 7-inch Brooke gun mounted in the southeast angle of the fort, hitting the monitor twice and putting a hole through its smokestack, but this amounted to nothing. With Powell still threatened by the monitors in the bay and De Krafft's squadron in the Sound, Williams telegraphed his superior, Colonel Anderson, that he could hold his position no more than 48 hours. Anderson advised him to save his garrison once the fort was no longer tenable. That night Williams' command crossed at low tide to Cedar Point, Lieutenant E.G. Jeffers spiked the guns, and Lieutenant Thomas J. Savage laid a train of powder to the magazine and lit the fuse at 10:00 p.m. The fort blew up at 10:30 p.m., and Williams marched his command to Mobile. Cedar Point also had a shell battery mounting three guns, which was abandoned after the Battle of the Bay. Union troops later occupied both Fort Powell and Cedar Point.