1
Before launching into the post–Vicksburg history of the Civil War on midcontinent rivers, it would perhaps be of interest to readers to review the physical situation in which the contest took place. Below we examine, river by river beginning with the Mississippi, the topography of our story, along with attention to the navigational challenges faced by those engaged upon these streams. In addition, we notice many of the communities which lined the riverbanks, those thriving then and some now extinct. Amplification for all these particulars is also given, where appropriate, within the chapters following.
When taken together with the Missouri River (slightly longer than the Mississippi, but outside of our story), the Mississippi is the largest water artery in the United States. From the headwaters of the former, the two streams flow a combined distance of 3,872 miles. Taken alone from its source in Lake Igasca in northwest Minnesota, the Mississippi flows 2,480 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. Only the watersheds of the Amazon River and the Congo River exceed the size of her drainage basin, which covers over 1.2 million square miles, including all or parts of 31 states, some of which were not yet in the Union in 1861.
The river’s name was taken originally from the Ojibwa (Chippewa) tribe word Misi-ziibi or the Algonquin term Missi Sepe, which translated poetically as “father of waters.” In his 1842 American Notes, English novelist and visitor Charles Dickens was more blunt: “But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to heaven) has no children like him! An enormous ditch … running liquid mud.” Noted British journalist William H. Russell was far from impressed during a mid-June 1861 steamboat passage from New Orleans to Cairo, calling it “assuredly the most uninteresting river in the world.” “Not a particle of romance,” he observed, “in spite of oratorical patriots and prophets, can ever shine from its depths, sacred to cat and buffalo fish, or vivify its turbid waters.”
The Mississippi River, known as early as 1814 as the “Nile of North America,” is divided into three geographical parts: the Headwaters, the Upper Mississippi River, and the Lower Mississippi River. For purposes of this account, we are concerned primarily with the latter section, which begins at the 37th parallel of north latitude at the mouth of the Ohio, where it splashes the tip of Illinois and divides Kentucky on the east from Missouri on the west. From this point, the Lower Mississippi meanders southward 1,097 miles to Head-of-Passes in the Gulf of Mexico at the meridian of Cairo, Illinois. It was the great trunk route for steamboat traffic; the Upper Mississippi and all of the tributaries were secondary.
Mississippi River and upper tributaries. This Kentucky-Tennessee map encompasses the Mississippi and its tributaries from north of Cairo to south of Memphis and east beyond Nashville and Knoxville to the Appalachian Mountains (Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, v. 1).
Mississippi River and lower tributaries. This 1912 rendering depicts the “Big Muddy” from south of Memphis to New Orleans, noting such major tributaries as the White, Arkansas, Red, and Yazoo Rivers (Mary Johnston, Cease Firing, 1912).
The valley through which the river flows is known as the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, comprising floodplains and low terraces that are almost level to slightly sloping and which are joined by a number of southerly flowing tributaries. From Cairo, at the tip of Illinois, the Mississippi passed through a long alluvial stretch forming the eastern or western borders of six states. This great basin reaches out to an average width of some 75 miles with few natural barriers to impede the river flow. The banks on the western or right side of the stream are not high. There are, however, numerous heights, hills or bluffs, on the left or eastern edge, and these provided the most inhabitable sites.
Relief along the Mississippi banks is generally slight, and floods remain common. Almost every settlement at lower points along the river was then protected by built-up embankments or dikes, known as levees. Many are so guarded still today. Indeed, the lower river’s natural floodplain has been reduced about 90 percent in area by levee construction, which began in 1727. The Lower Mississippi River valley contains about 2,700 kilometers of levees along both sides of the river.
Bottomland hardwood forests cover some areas (though not as many as in the early part of the 19th century) and swamps are not uncommon. A large amount of hardwood was burned for fuel and employed other purposes a century ago (including the construction of steamboats). Cottonwoods and willows were among the most common of trees viewed from the water. Today much of the floodplain supports agriculture.
Although the Illinois-Louisiana portion of the Mississippi was not provided with locks and dams over the last century akin to the upper stretch, it has been extensively channeled to help regulate its width and depth, a serious 19th-century problem. At the time of the Civil War, however, the course of the twisting lower silt-laden river was so devious few realized that, as the crow flew north to south in a straight line, the Ohio was only 480 miles from the Gulf of Mexico.1
Just after the outbreak of war in 1861, the Union Army’s chief engineer, Bvt. Brig. Gen. Joseph G. Totten, was ordered west to ascertain and inventory from local sources the region’s logistical challenges and possibilities, with particular attention to river transportation. Among those people interviewed was veteran steamboat outfitter and captain J. S. Neal of Madison, Indiana, who enumerated all of the important landing places for steamers from Cairo to New Orleans. In addition, the soldier also had access to a number of printed directories, the most famous being that of Uriah Pierson James. We have chosen the Neal list and James’ River Guide, with their mileage data and attendant remarks, as the basis for our review of the principal towns and points of the Lower Mississippi. Neal’s list and the James book are supplemented by the views of other 19th-century rivermen and visitors, including Mark Twain, navy paymaster Edward J. Huling, New York Herald correspondent Henry Thompson, and British journalist Russell.2
In addition to New Orleans, Louisiana, and Cairo, Illinois, the Mississippi River hosts a number of communities along her tree-lined or marshy banks that are important in this account. Aside from the metropolis of St. Louis, its suburb of Carondelet further down was an important boat-building site during the Civil War. Birthplace in 1861 for several of the famous City Series ironclads, the Neosho-class monitor Osage was commissioned there in July 1863, while four Milwaukee-class monitors remained under construction. The next point of importance below was Cairo, discussed at length in Chapter 2.3
City Series gunboats building at Carondelet, Missouri. Four of the Union’s first seven Western rivers ironclads are shown under construction at the boatyard of James B. Eads in fall 1861. Built in pairs on two levels of the riverbank, their casemate side timbers are shown largely installed. Two will have been lost in action by late July 1863 (National Archives).
In September 1863, New York Herald newsman Henry Thompson, in a piece entitled “The Old Route,” observed that the lighter or darker color of the Mississippi was often determined by the soil content in the rising of the various rivers flowing into it. For example, the Ohio gave a yellower or clear hue while the Red offered a reddish cast.
The journalist told his readers that a great struggle appeared to occur at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, as the “immense body of clear water of the former” rushed with great force into the turbid latter. Indeed, “for some two or three miles below Cairo, there appear to be two channels,” he wrote. “The clear water of the Ohio took the eastern side and the muddy Mississippi the western.” Later, the water in the eastern channel became progressively more yellow and dark as it became one with the “Father of Waters.”
The usually brownish river current was very swift (three to five mph and sometimes faster during rises or flooding). Interestingly, little thought was given to using the turbid water for drinking and culinary purposes. One observer, a gunboat paymaster, later recalled that “though at first the appearance of it is rather forbidding, a person soon comes to like it, and it is drunk with a relish.” He forgot to add that, to make it more palatable, the water was often held in jars overnight, allowing the sediment to settle.
Journalist Thompson added: “I have seen a tumbler of Mississippi water, after standing a short time, become clear as crystal to within an inch of the bottom, but that inch is formed of fine particles we in the North call mud.” He went on to note: “Many prefer drinking this water to any other in the country; spring water not excepted.”
Heading south on the Kentucky bank below Cairo, the initial town of major importance was Columbus, 18 miles, or about two hours steaming time distant. With approximately 2,000 residents, it lay directly along the waterway in wooded lowlands. “From the river, it has a very clean and beautiful appearance,” opined the Herald’s Thompson. Today, a large portion of the original village location is submerged.
A great embankment, known as Iron and Chalk Bluffs, ran into the river behind Columbus. The names of these ridges were based on earth color and composition, and from atop these 250-foot high summits, which gradually declined inland for five or six miles, one could see some 20 miles upriver and down. The county seat of Fulton County, the town of Hickman, once known as Mills Point, is 12 miles beyond and was noted for its tobacco trade in prewar days. People landing here found a village with four churches, one bank, and a newspaper office.
The islands in the Lower Mississippi below Cairo were recorded in order beginning with Island No. 1, five miles downstream close to the left shore. Island No. 10, which has since disappeared, was a two-mile-long atoll located in a great horseshoe river bend just above New Madrid, Missouri, 70 miles below Cairo. Surrounded by marshland, the low-lying village remains famous for its December 1811 destruction by earthquakes along the New Madrid Fault.
As the great Mississippi meandered southward with bluffs on one side and unremarkable scenery upon the other, its pea-soup-colored water threw up for the unwary the occasional tree trunk or sandbar. Travelers like journalist Russell also spied “masses of leaves, decaying vegetation, stumps of trees, forming small floating islands, or giant cotton-tree, pines, and balks of timber whirling down the current.” Many a gunboatman would observe the same phenomenon in the years ahead.
The first of four Chickasaw bluffs, also known as the Cane Hills, rose in the Volunteer State some 80 miles below Island No. 10 and an equal distance above Memphis. It was home to the cotton-trading center of Fulton, in Lauderdale County, at its foot and Fort Pillow at its head atop a promontory between the Mississippi and the Hatchie River. The main shipping channel ran within musket shot of the riverbank.
Twelve miles below Fort Pillow, just below the mouth of the Hatchie and opposite Island No. 40, was the town of Randolph, in Tipton County. The second Chickasaw bluff rises gradually from the Mississippi, forming a ridge behind the town, which was a large trading point. The third Chickasaw bluff, like the others named for the Native American tribe, rose at Old River, near Island No. 36.
Memphis, a Tennessee city of 25,000 inhabitants in Shelby County, was situated 30 feet up atop the fourth and lowest of the Chickasaw bluffs, 257 miles south of Cairo. It was the most significant trading community between the mouth of the Ohio and Vicksburg, Mississippi, a distance of 600 miles.
Memphis. Following its capture in mid-1862, the Tennessee river town became the site of major Union military and naval facilities. The already-existing local naval base/shipyard was quickly put to work, while a supply depot and repair center were added, along with a hospital. This illustration from Every Saturday Magazine depicts the scene in September 1871 (Library of Congress).
Following the Union capture of Memphis in spring 1862, the Western Gunboat Flotilla, precursor of the Mississippi Squadron, took control of the already existing local naval base/shipyard and also established a major supply depot and repair center. The naval hospital at Mound City was transferred to a Memphis hotel in March 1863.
The next important town below Memphis was Helena, Arkansas, 340 miles downstream from Cairo, built on one of the few high banks on the west (right) side of the stream at a point about halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg. “With its buildings and sawmills,” remarked one Northern observer, it “resembles Greenpoint, Brooklyn.” High hills rose immediately to the community’s rear; they could be “seen for miles and miles along the Mississippi.”
Approximately 380 miles south of Cairo, also on the west bank, near the location of Island No. 72, lies the mouth of the White River, four miles below and opposite Victoria, Mississippi (now extinct), where the explorer de Soto first saw the magnificent artery in the 1500s. A Federal military post was established here in early 1863. About 10 miles downstream lay Napoleon, Arkansas, situated a few hundred yards south of the mouth of the Arkansas River and site of a U.S. government hospital. Rivermen supposedly informed New York Herald writer Finley Anderson in 1863 that they expected the Father of Waters to sweep away Napoleon. “To all lovers of decency and good morals,” the scribe suggested, “this is a consummation devoutly to be wished.” In fact, the town gradually died due to floods which began shortly after the USN cut a new channel through the peninsula used as a Confederate ambush point at Beulah Bend in the Mississippi, east of the community that April. Paymaster Huling recalled that both Helena and Napoleon had terrible reputations before and during the war as hellholes plagued with “gamblers, thieves, murderers, and people of those classes.”
What proved a natural site for confrontation appeared next. Adjacent to Chicot County, Arkansas, and Washington County, Mississippi, lay a series of contiguous river curves (Rowdy, Miller’s, Spanish Moss, Batchelor’s) known collectively as the Greenville Bends. Site of hotly contested ship-shore duels from 1862 almost to war’s end, these sharp arcs ran for about 40 miles from just above the village of Arkansas City to just below Greenville, Mississippi. They were separated by four narrow necks of land; several islands (Nos. 80, 81, and 82) dotted the center of the great river here, narrowing the main channel.
The Greenville Bends. The states of Arkansas and Mississippi bordered this series of Mississippi River curves through which steamboats, alone or escorted, passed and were often repeatedly attacked by Confederate forces. Today, nothing remains of the Arkansas riverfront communities of Gaines Landing and Columbia, Arkansas, or of Old Greenville, Mississippi (Library of Congress).
Initially presumed less evil than other small Chicot County points was Gaines Landing, on Rowdy Bend, about nine miles beyond Arkansas City. Prior to the war, Texas-bound settlers debarked at this point and formed a small community with two stores and several houses. Because Southern gunners came to frequently attack Union shipping from this locale, it was frequently bombarded by Mississippi Squadron gunboats. Eunice, nearby and also in the same county, likewise hosted Confederates. After attacking a Federal tinclad in June 1863, a number of them escaped only to watch from hiding as the community was torched by a landing party in retaliation.
Eighteen miles further down on the Greenville Bends lay Columbia, Arkansas, seat of Chicot County, with an 1860 population of 400, and from here the banks of the Big Muddy were “almost one succession of plantations.” After Confederate artillery attacked Union shipping from its riverfront, Union forces destroyed the community.
Over on the east (left) side of the river in Mississippi is a string of noteworthy communities both large and small mostly built atop bluffs, which would be recorded in military reports. Included in the number was Skipwith’s Landing, 52 miles below Gaines, where the USN would station coal barges and, after Vicksburg’s surrender, establish a repair station with a carpenter’s shop. Greeneville, Mississippi, was eight miles below that, but was largely destroyed on May 18, 1863, by Federal troops landed from five troop transports after an attack by mobile Confederate field guns located at Argyle Landing three miles above. Those portions which remained served Federal purposes, including as a base for boats of the Mississippi Marine Brigade. The community would later be rebuilt.
The Yazoo River enters the Mississippi below Island No. 103, approximately nine miles above the curve adjacent to the Walnut Hills and north of Vicksburg, the noted Yazoo delta community and celebrated Confederate “Gibraltar of the West.” Further up the Yazoo lay the river-shipping town of Yazoo City. Having outfitted the famous CSS Arkansas at this location, the Confederate Navy subsequently attempted to build additional ironclads before the town was briefly occupied in May 1863.
The important prewar landing of Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, about 15 miles west above Vicksburg, gained prominence as a logistics center and training base for United States Colored Troops. With gunboat aid, a Southern attack was driven off in June 1863. Paw Paw Island, at the foot of the curve, rose some 40–50 feet higher than the river and is currently home to a private hunting resort. Young’s Point, Louisiana, just above Vicksburg, was the principal encampment of the Union Army during the siege of Vicksburg, while Yankee warships and transports tied up in the willows along the shoreline.
Pywell’s Vicksburg Levy. Steamboats at the Vicksburg levee in February 1864 as captured by Matthew Brady’s photographer William R. Pywell (Library of Congress).
Vicksburg, across the Mississippi from Young’s Point, achieved everlasting fame as an elevated fortress city. It is 90 miles down from Memphis, while the heavily bombarded village of Warrenton, Mississippi, which had a prewar population of about 300, is 10 miles further. After the war, the Mississippi moved westward and today nothing is left of that original community. Hurricane and Brierfield plantations, located in a close-by eastern river bend, were owned by the Davis brothers, Joseph E. and Jefferson Davis, the latter president of the Confederacy. Nine miles below lies the mouth of the Big Black River.
Just below the mouth of the Big Black, 30 miles beyond Vicksburg, is Grand Gulf, Mississippi, the strongpoint on top of a high and rocky bluff attacked by the Mississippi Squadron on April 29, 1863. Abandoned thereafter, it became the site of a state park. Rodney, Mississippi, is 20 miles beyond Grand Gulf, but became a ghost town after the Mississippi changed course there as well.
Waterproof, Louisiana, is an agriculture-based village approximately eight miles south near Island No. 113. A small garrison was maintained during the conflict by United States Colored Troops. Some 18 miles downstream, Natchez, Mississippi, with 15,000–20,000 inhabitants, was built on the east bank’s highest ground. It surrendered to Union forces without a fight in September 1862.
The mouth of the Red River appears on the west bank about 11 or so miles below Natchez in a great bend along the Louisiana shore about 175 miles south of Vicksburg and some 765 miles south of Cairo. Red River Landing, a steamboat stop for most going up the Red, was six miles further on. It was immediately followed by two big right-side river bends, Raccourei and Tunica, four and six miles on, and Hog Point, Louisiana, a wooded site of a river crossing. The small agricultural and shipping communities of Bayou Sara and St. Francisville, Louisiana, are 24 miles further. While the former was regarded as “loyal” by Federal forces, the latter was seen as “a hotbed of secession.”
Across the Mississippi from St. Francisville lay Point Coupee, a settlement of wealthy French-speaking planters where a Grand Levee, or embankment, began running down to the Gulf. Built on the White Cliffs, Port Hudson, Louisiana, the other recently captured fortress town, was 11 miles downstream, with the state capital of Baton Rouge, seized by the U.S. in spring 1862, 30 miles further. Also occupied by the Union in early 1862, Donaldsonville, Louisiana, 24 miles down, was thereafter a site of several Confederate attacks. New Orleans appears another 80 miles downstream.
From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, wrote Mark Twain in the 1870s, “the great sugar-plantations border both sides of the river all the way.” Island No. 126, the final island of the Lower Mississippi, was approximately 45 miles south of Baton Rouge.4
Steamer at a Mississippi River landing. Whenever a steamboat put into shore to fuel or accommodate passengers or freight, it was said to be “landing.” The locations of these numerous large and small stops on the Western rivers were so labeled, being regular and often well-known with given names. Here (ca. 1904) the sternwheel boat America has delivered passengers to Ashwood Landing in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, during her regular New Orleans to Vicksburg service (Library of Congress).
A significant number of major and minor watersheds are tributary to the Mississippi and were involved in the gunboat war after Vicksburg’s 1863 surrender. Those rivers of the Lower Mississippi flowed south (often in a roundabout manner) and included such natural highways as the White, Arkansas, Yazoo, and Red. Likewise, the huge Ohio River also flows south, but its two major southern tributaries, the Tennessee and Cumberland, move north. That we might better understand the physical restraints under which certain operations were conducted, these seven rivers are here described, beginning with those exiting directly into the Lower Mississippi.
The first major tributary to enter the Lower Mississippi south of the Ohio River is the White River, a 722-mile confluence that flows swiftly south from the Boston Mountains in northwest Arkansas.
After looping north toward Branson, Missouri, the White then streams to the southeast through Arkansas, exiting into the Mississippi near the head of Island No. 72, about 380 miles south of Cairo, Illinois. Its mouth is opposite Montgomery Point, Mississippi. Steamboatmen of the day noted that, in the upper part of its course, the river flowed between hills and high bluffs, while its lower course wound through a huge alluvial bottom.
The Civil War–era river was narrow and crooked but navigable about 400 miles up from its mouth, past St. Charles, Clarendon, Des Arc, and Augusta to Batesville, and, at times of low water, was often employed as a substitute for the Arkansas River. The color of the river water was light gray, giving the stream its name. Compared to the dark hue of the Mississippi, the White looked almost clear to some observers.
About 10 miles north of the White’s mouth was a stream known as “the Cut-off” that provided a connection with the Arkansas River. This passage was sufficiently wide and deep to accommodate most of the steamers plying the two streams, though it was prone to occasionally throw up a snag. The water levels, higher or lower, between the two rivers flowed back and forth between the two depending upon each other’s stage, and if the water level of the Mississippi were higher than either, it flowed first up the White then through the Cut-off and into the Arkansas.5
The mouth of the Arkansas River was about 10 miles down the Mississippi River beyond that of the White River. The fifth longest river in the United States and the second largest tributary of the Mississippi-Missouri system, this 1,450-mile-long waterway rises in Colorado. Flowing east through Kansas and Oklahoma, it enters Arkansas at Fort Smith and continues 600 miles southeast past Little Rock to exit into the Mississippi at Napoleon.
Long since taken over by the forces of nature, the Post of Arkansas was located about 50 miles from the river’s mouth. Smaller steamboats were able, often with great difficulty, to navigate much of the stream, though most prewar boats worked the Napoleon–Little Rock–Fort Smith route, connecting with larger steamers at Napoleon.
As the lower channel of the Arkansas was at the time covered by our writing very winding and prone to snags and sandbars, steamboats often chose to avoid as much of it as possible. Instead, they would enter the Arkansas via the Cut-off from the White River, returning to the Mississippi by the same route.6
After the Ohio, the Yazoo is the second longest tributary to flow into the Mississippi River from the east. Confined within the borders of the state of Mississippi, the 188-mile-long stream is formed by the confluence of the Tallahatchie River and the Yalobusha River at Greenwood.
Lined with natural levees, the Yazoo parallels the Mississippi for miles before finally joining it at a point below Island No. 103, approximately nine miles above the curve adjacent to the Walnut Hills and north of Vicksburg. This waterway and the ones entering it were home to great swaths of underbrush and wildlife and could be very difficult to navigate.
In July 1862 when the Confederate armorclad Arkansas dashed down the stream to Vicksburg, New York Herald reporter Henry Knox told his readers something about the Yazoo. Though narrow and sluggish, he said, it was very deep in places, often “showing no bottom to a line of 50 feet in length.” The water had a slightly brackish taste and was very dark, contrasting with the lighter yellow of the Mississippi. The point of junction between the two was visible for a considerable distance.
Knox went on to say that the banks of the river were generally high “and the bluffs afford excellent positions for planting batteries and stopping navigation.” There were few settlements, “an occasional cotton plantation being all that can be seen.” We enhanced the travelogue in 2012 at the beginning of The Fight for the Yazoo.7
The most southerly Mississippi tributary to appear in our account is the Red, sometimes known as the Red River of Louisiana. It owes its inclusion in our list primarily to the great Banks-Porter expedition of 1864. The 1,360-mile-long Red rises near Amarillo in northern Texas, in the northern part of the Staked Plains, or Llano Estacado, flows east by south in Texas, between Texas and Oklahoma, and to Fulton, in southwestern Arkansas, there turns southeast and continues in a general southeasterly direction through Louisiana past Shreveport.
A cotton center, Shreveport’s prewar population was about 3,000. During the war, a Confederate shipyard was established on the south side of Cross Bayou at the Red River and here the CSS Missouri was built. Some 65 miles below lay the small city of Natchitoches, and Alexandria was 80 miles, being occupied by Union forces on May 7, 1863. A stretch of rapids above the latter town prevented steamboat navigation upstream save at times of very high water. The Red below, however, smoothly flowed 100 miles to the banks of the Mississippi, where it discharges partly into the Mississippi above Baton Rouge. The stream’s mouth was in a great bend along the Louisiana shore about 175 miles south of Vicksburg and some 765 miles south of Cairo.
Reviewing the Red River expedition some years later, Admiral Mahan also commented upon the difficulties of the stream in the area between Alexandria and Shreveport:
The river, which gets its name from the color of its water, flows through a fertile and populous country, the banks in many places being high, following in a very crooked channel a general southeasterly direction. In this portion of its course it has a width of seven hundred to eight hundred feet, and at low water a depth of four feet. The slope from Shreveport to Alexandria at high water is a little over a hundred feet, but immediately above the latter place there are two small rapids, called the Falls of Alexandria, which interrupt navigation when the water is low. The annual rise begins in the early winter…. The river, however, can never be confidently trusted.8
The Ohio River begins at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at the Point in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and flows 981 miles to join the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. It flows through or along the border of six states, and its watershed encompasses 14 states. The Ohio carries the largest volume of water of any upper tributary of the Mississippi. In fact, it typically carries a much greater volume of water than the Upper Mississippi itself.
From Pittsburgh, the Ohio flows to the northwest through western Pennsylvania before making an abrupt, almost 180-degree, turn to the south-southwest at the state line with West Virginia (Virginia until 1863), where it then forms the border between that state and Ohio. The stream then follows a roughly southwestern and then western course between Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky until it joins the Mississippi from the east at Cairo, Illinois.
During the Civil War era, the medial width of the Ohio during ordinary stages of water was about half a mile, though at some points it contracted to far less and at others expanded to a mile or more. At its mouth, this great stream is wider than the Mississippi itself. The average range between high and low water reached 50 feet, but in flood could go much higher. At low water during the summer when rainfall was slight, the Ohio had an average depth of 30 inches over the bars, most of which were sandy and not dangerous. At Cincinnati, the pool stage was about 10 feet, two to five feet less than at other times of the year. In the 21st century, the pool stage through most of the year is around 28 feet. During the Civil War, historian David M. Smith has said, the Ohio was “significantly shallower and as importantly, not as wide as it is today.”
Interestingly, the original Virginia charter went not to the middle of the Ohio River, but to its far shore so the entire river was included. Wherever the river serves as a boundary between states—Kentucky and Virginia, now West Virginia, on the south and Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, also on the south, the river essentially belongs to the two states on the south that were later divided from Virginia. Due to its role as a natural geographic dividing line between North and South, the Ohio River was earlier seen as the watery stripe dividing free states and slave states.
In addition to Pittsburgh and Cairo, the Ohio River has a number of historic communities along its banks. Those in Virginia (now West Virginia) include, in alphabetical order, Huntington, New Martinsville, Paden City, Parkersburg, Weirton, and Wheeling.
Also to the south, in Kentucky, we have Ashland, Brandenburg, Caseyville, Concordia, Covington, Henderson, Lewisport, Louisville, Newport, Owensboro, Paducah at the mouth of the Tennessee River (with a population of 4,000 in 1863), Smithland at the mouth of the Cumberland River, Stephensport, and Union Town, exactly 400 miles west of Cincinnati. The key city of Louisville, 369 miles from the mouth of the Ohio and 150 miles west of Cincinnati, was founded at the river’s only major natural navigational barrier, the Falls of the Ohio.
These falls were a series of rapids where the river flowed over hard, fossil-rich limestone beds. The first Ohio River locks were built here before the Civil War to circumnavigate the falls; the Louisville and Portland Canal was 2.5 miles long, 50-foot wide, and its lock could pass a boat through which was 180 feet long and 49.7 feet wide. In 1860, 1,520 steamboats and 1,299 other craft transited the canal. The Cumberland Bar, near Smithland, marked the mouth of the Cumberland River.
To the north in Ohio, the riverbank towns include Belpre; the “Queen City,” Cincinnati, the largest city in the Midwest; Gallipolis; Ironton; Marietta; Pomeroy; and Steubenville. Cincinnati was the region’s chief river port, industrial and agricultural center, and home for many shipbuilders and outfitters. Most of the USN tinclads converted by builder Joseph Brown were transformed there.
Continuing on with our list of leading Hoosier Ohio River communities, there was Aurora and Carrolton before Madison (100 miles west of Cincinnati and 50 miles east of Louisville), Amsterdam (now New Amsterdam), Clarksville, Derby Landing (now Derby), Enterprise, Grandview, Jeffersonville, New Albany, Mauckport, Leavenworth, Fredonia, Cannelton (with many coal mines), Rockport (a center of coal production), Tell City, Troy (the state’s second oldest city), Newburg, Evansville (350 miles west of Cincinnati with a direct rail line to Indianapolis) and Mount Vernon.
Below the Ohio River in Kentucky were Louisville, Shippingsport, Brandenburg, positioned atop a tall bluff, Concordia, Rome, Stephensport, Cloverport, Hawesville, Lewisport, Owensboro, Henderson, Union Town, Caseyville, and Smithland. The state’s largest city, Louisville, is the second leading town on the great stream after Cincinnati and served as a major Federal logistical hub.
Illinois river communities include Cairo, Elizabethtown, Brookport, Golconda, Metropolis (with a population of 400 in 1863), Shawneetown, and Mound City, the latter superseding Cairo as home to the USN Mississippi Squadron. The distance from Cincinnati to Cairo by steamer in 1861 was 550.7 miles.9
A packet at Mound City. Mound City, IL, which outgrew Cairo, Illinois, as the principal base for the U.S. Navy’s Mississippi Squadron, was visited by military, naval, civilian, and government contract steamers. Fitted out early in the war with 310 berths, the Jacob Strader, originally based at Cincinnati, Ohio, transported wounded and sick soldiers to the city’s military hospital (Naval History and Heritage Command).
The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio River. It is approximately 650 miles long, covers 41,000 square miles, and drains portions of 60 Tennessee counties and seven states. It is formed at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers on the east side of Knoxville, Tennessee. From Knoxville, it flows southwest toward Chattanooga before crossing into Alabama. The Flint and Elk Rivers enter at the great bend of the river as it loops through north Alabama, eventually forming a small part of the state’s border with Mississippi, before returning to the Volunteer State.
Flowing north again through the Western Tennessee Valley, the Duck River (fed by the Buffalo River) enters the Tennessee south of New Johnsonville (the original Johnsonville was lost to the TVA dams of the 1930s), while the Big Sandy River joins not far from Paris Landing. The final part of the Tennessee’s run is in Kentucky, where it flows into the Ohio River at Paducah, some 12 miles west of the mouth of the Cumberland River.
Of the three rivers above the Lower Mississippi discussed here, the Tennessee saw the least use by antebellum steamboat companies. Two huge natural obstructions gave those who employed the river considerable pause and halted others from considering the prospect. The first was a 30-mile-long gorge cut through Walden’s Ridge at Chattanooga.
Second, in North Alabama, the Foot of Big Muscle, the Muscle Shoals, began a half mile beyond Florence and effectively divided the stream into the Upper Tennessee and the Lower Tennessee. This series of obstructions, almost 40 miles long, divided Lauderdale and Lawrence Counties. It was made up of shifting gravel bars, rapids, snags, rock reefs, and a narrow channel which often fatally wounded boats. Of the Foot, or head of navigation, it was noted in 1863 that “only four foot at the highest stages of water [was] ever known.”
During the war, Union gunboats were forced to guard the Tennessee River above and below the Muscle Shoals because the great river could be readily crossed by Confederates in many spots.
The Duck River Sucks, 134 miles from the mouth of the river, were considered very dangerous due to its extremely crooked channel and the strong current over its rocks. At low water, these shoals were considered by the USN to be “one of the most favorable places for locating a battery on the river.” This and the other named natural obstacles played such a significant role in Northern river naval strategy that, when RAdm. Porter divided the rivers under his command up into districts in 1863, he employed two to cover the Tennessee, one above the Muscle Shoals and one below.
The Tennessee River as far as the Muscle Shoals at Florence, Alabama, has a number of historic communities along its banks, though not as many large towns as are found along the huge Ohio. Those in Kentucky, with 1863 populations as provided by Lt. Cmdr. Fitch include Paducah, located on the west bank near the Ohio confluence and 50 miles from Cairo (population 4,000), Birmingham (population 200), Aurora, and Callowaytown (disappeared by 1870). It was approximately 90 miles from Paducah to the state line.
In the 1860s, the Tennessee River averaged about 1,420 feet in width. The wooded banks were mostly flat and overflowed at high water. High hills were situated about one to two miles back of the banks.
Crawford, a correspondent for the Wisconsin State Journal, has left a detailed travelogue of a trip he made up the Tennessee in May 1862 to visit the battlefield at Shiloh. His information-laden account offered readers then and now a visual picture of the sights experienced daily by the gunboatmen steaming upon those waters.
“The whole scenery along the Tennessee River is magnificent,” he wrote, “grand and lovely.” Heavy forests of timber skirted the banks, “sycamore, maple, hickory, and cypress.” From Paducah to the state line and beyond, “the trees on either shore hang full of the mistletoe, an evergreen parasite, which contrasted strangly enough, with the different hues of the various kinds of trees on which it fastens itself.”
The land beyond the river was “generally high, sometimes, and for miles, it is rocky, the ledges rising out of the water and extending up some eight to 20 feet.” Inland, the land extended back, “not unfrequently rising higher [and] covered with timber.” In many places, it “seems as if the bank is but a high ridge, dividing the river from vast swamps, which are nevertheless covered with magnificent trees.”
Perhaps the greatest surprise experienced by the Union sailors and soldiers passing up stream was “the almost entire want of the evidence of civilization along the broad and noble river.” In the whole distance from Paducah to Fort Henry, “there were not ten farms.” Occasionally, Crawford wrote home, a log hut or two would appear in small clearings, “but they are many miles apart.”
Locations of interest in Tennessee include Pine Bluff, Buffalo Landing, Paris Landing, New Portland, Reynoldsburg, Fowler’s Landing, Perryville and East Perryville (population 30), Marvin’s Bluffs, Brownsport, Cedar Creek, Decatur, and Carrollville.
Fort Henry, which first brought large numbers of Federals to the river, was located two miles over the Kentucky border on the eastern bank. Danville, site of a noted railroad bridge, was 115 miles from Paducah, while the east bank town of Clifton (population 300) was 75 miles further up. Clifton, according to Crawford, was a “neat-looking village” situated “on a high and uneven bank.” The defunct town of Carrollton was a mile below.
Additional towns included Point Pleasant, Cerro Gordo, Coffee’s Landing, and Savannah (population 500), the latter 33 miles above Clifton. “A very old town,” it had “but one street and that runs east from the river.”
Pittsburgh Landing (233 miles above Paducah and site of the famous 1862 battle) was the next important point, though hardly known before the fight. Big Bend Landing was above.
Eastport, now a ghost town, was the major Mississippi state community on the Tennessee River in the 1860s. Located 261 miles above Paducah, it was the head of navigation and thrived as a port until the Memphis and Charleston Railroad arrived at Iuka.
Alabama towns include Chickasaw, Waterloo, Tuscumbia (about a mile inland of the river), and Florence (population of 1,000). Today’s head of navigation is 280 miles from the river’s mouth; during the 19th century, it was noted for its fine cross-stream bridge. Much further below, just about 30 miles from Chattanooga, lies Bridgeport, which became an important Union shipbuilding center late in the war.10
The Cumberland drains an 18,000-square-mile watershed and runs north into the Ohio River at Smithland, Kentucky. The Lower Cumberland, which winds through highland valleys and ridges, runs 192 miles from Smithland to Nashville and has an average width of 600 to 700 feet. Steamers, usually stern-wheelers, could navigate it for about half the year. Burnside, 358 river miles above Nashville, was the head of low-water navigation on the Upper Cumberland, where the steaming season was confined to the higher water periods from December through May.
The 687-mile-long Cumberland River, the second largest tributary of the Ohio River after the Tennessee River, begins in Letcher County in eastern Kentucky on the Cumberland Plateau and flows southeast before crossing into northern Tennessee; it then curves back up into western Kentucky, running parallel as it does with the Tennessee. At one point prior to the TVA era, the two streams came to within about a mile of one another at a narrow neck of land which was known on the Cumberland as Kelly’s Landing. Upriver from Dover, the Cumberland veered away from her sister and headed east toward Nashville.
The Cumberland Valley between Burnside and Carthage, Tennessee, is about a mile to a mile and a half wide, with the river varying in width from 550 to 600 feet. At the time of the Civil War, the riverbanks were “generally very thickly wooded with heavy hills overlooking the banks.”
When the Cumberland began to fall, “the water recedes so fast that there is great danger to being caught,” wrote Lt. Cmdr. Fitch in 1863. The stream frequently rose and fell “with such rapidity that a difference of from eight to twelve feet in 24 hours” was “of no uncommon occurrence.”
At Carthage, the valley and the river widen south into the Central Basin, and the river eventually reenters the Highland Rim about 14 miles below Nashville. In the 1860s, the Upper Cumberland averaged about 600 feet in width “inside the trees” which lined its banks.
At least 10 major shoals obstructed the Lower Cumberland, with the most challenging being the 4.3-mile-long obstacle formed of gravel bars and rocky ledges and collectively known as the Harpeth Shoals. In the early 1860s, boats had “great difficulty” getting above this point, located “about 160 miles from the mouth and 35 miles from Nashville.”
At low water, the Cumberland River was not navigable for boats drawing over 15 inches, that being the average depth on Harpeth Shoals. Indeed, many Nashville-bound craft from Louisville and the north never made it that far, being halted by shoals at Eddyville, just upstream from Smithland.
The Upper Cumberland between Carthage and Burnside was impeded at low water by 16 shoals and bars. “At almost any time, the river became very narrow in making the turns and frequently boats got very much broken up,” Fitch reported in 1863. “In making the trip to Carthage,” he continued, “boats frequently are compelled to lower their smokestacks and then suffer much from having their upper works much broken up by the branches of trees.” The stream, Fitch observed, was “so low during the summer and the bars so frequent and close as to prevent an effectual patrol, even had we all the boats for it alone.”
Among the towns and cities on the Cumberland River in Tennessee and Kentucky between Carthage and Smithland which may be mentioned in our narrative are the following: in Tennessee, Ashland City (near the head of Harpeth Shoals, some 33 miles below Nashville), Betseytown (at the foot of Harpeth Shoals), Carthage, Clarksville (a major port due to Harpeth Shoals, which blocked access to Nashville below at low water), Cumberland City, Dover (near Fort Donelson), Gallatin, Gratton, Lebanon, Nashville, Palmyra, Rome, and Watkins.
River communities in Kentucky included Canton, Rockcastle, Eddyville (site of a large Union supply depot), Eureka, Kuttawa, Pickneyville, Smithland, which was something of a boomtown during the conflict, and Woodville.
Lt. Cmdr. Fitch gave Porter, his superior (and us), few notes as to his impressions of these towns, the most important of which were Nashville (“The Star of the Cumberland”), Clarksville (today, the state’s fifth largest town), and Smithland (“the first town on the bluff,” located a mile upstream from the mouth of the Cumberland). He did, however, note, in a March 17, 1863, review of the river itself that
Palmyra, between Donelson and Clarksville, and Beatstown [Betsy Town] Landing, at Harpeth Shoals, are the most noted guerrilla haunts. I have burned and destroyed all the stores or houses near the shoals frequented by guerrillas.11
With this slight review of the Western waters completed, it might be best to digress—before proceeding further—and review the impact of the seasons and tests of navigation. If not already known, these would have been among the first and most important lessons absorbed by gunboatmen, army officers, and military logisticians upon their arrival in the Western theater. The many new officers and men who joined the brown water war after Vicksburg—particularly those from the east—found then, as now, that the August weather along the lower rivers was very hot and the challenges of water movement quite different from what they were a few weeks past. Getting physically up and down the river safely would be as critical to the Union war effort in 1863–1865 as it was before Vicksburg was taken.
In his delightful early-20th-century illustrated children’s work Paddle Wheels and Pistols, Irvin Anthony wrote of the great rivers during the conflict. The Mississippi, he remarked, “remained neutral in the Civil War.” While its steamboats became gunboats and engaged in deadly struggle, “the great river paid no heed.” In its various hazards, it was not partisan, a “respecter of causes.” Often the streams “seemed to mock the efforts of the warriors” by snag, current, or low water. “The malice of the river was like that, it was ever so impartial,” Anthony concluded, adding the wry thought, “Perhaps, after all, it smiled.”
Hot, cold, wet, and dry weather, usually seasonal, fashioned the volume, speed, and depth of the Western rivers. These key factors determined nautical access for steam-powered vessels at any given time. Some of the larger streams, such as the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee, were, except at certain blocking points like the Muscle Shoals, usually wide and blessed with year-round deep channels scoured by fast water. These streams were home not only to the gunboats, but increasingly to large, side- or stern-wheel merchantmen not unlike those associated with the famous Broadway musical Showboat.
The hydrology of most of the tributaries for both the Mississippi and the Ohio, like the Cumberland and White, was less magnanimous. Narrow widths, curves and steep rock banks, slow water and buildups of silt and loose logs caused low water and navigational risk.
From the beginning of the steamboat period in the 1820s to its end in the 20th century, all riverboat activities were governed first and foremost by the moisture or lack thereof in the various seasons. These seasons were different in different parts of the Mississippi River system, depending upon geographical location. It was generally recognized that river depth increased as one moved from a stream’s headwaters to its mouth or from tributary to main river.
Rains, snow, floods, and drought determined the river depths and thus the size of vessel which could operate in any given stream at any given time. In the words of famed steamboat historian Louis Hunter: “Each part of the river system rose and fell almost continuously according to a variety of controlling conditions, many of which were not shared by other parts at the same time.” In practice, the maxim became the smaller the river or the lower the stream, the lighter the boat draft required. The key to commercial—and later, military—success, particularly on the tributaries, was employment of very light boats requiring very little water on which to float. These were often powered by a single paddle wheel mounted in the stern.
A sternwheeler. The key to Civil War Western rivers commercial and military success, particularly on the tributaries of the Mississippi, was the employment of very light boats requiring very little water in which to float. These were often powered by a single paddle wheel mounted in the stern, as shown here aboard the America, plying between Vicksburg and New Orleans (ca. 1904) (Library of Congress).
Usually beginning in the early spring, melting snow and ice plus rain swelled streams. These ran into the smaller rivers, like the Nolichuckey in Tennessee, which, in turn, ran into the intermediate tributaries like the Tennessee River, and then eventually raised the levels of the trunk rivers, Mississippi, Ohio, etc.
This annual “spring rise” marked the opening of the steamboat navigation season, the duration of which was different for every river depending upon its ecology and physical characteristics, particularly shoals. The steaming period on the larger rivers depended not only on this one rise, but on various rises or “freshs,” which were, in turn, determined by the weather.
Generally, the hotter summer months saw a drop in the river stages, particularly in the upper half of the Mississippi Valley; water levels could fall so far as to greatly restrict navigation or prohibit it entirely. In the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee Rivers, and even the White River in Arkansas, the low-water period usually began sometime in June and ended about the last of September. Even though, for example, the Lower Ohio could be “very high” at the end of April, it could be quite reduced by July.
Severe summer thunderstorms could result in a “fresh,” which might, at least briefly, allow intensification of previously restricted gunboat activities. Skilled rivermen aboard both naval and civilian steamers could tell a river’s stage, rising or falling, by using a lead or even watching floating driftwood.
Newspapers and publishers throughout the West had long provided readers, as they would into the future, with detailed information on the water stages of the rivers, both locally and regionally. The rivermen themselves, not only those working the boats but those in shore establishment, kept track as well. For example, the Neal brothers, owners of the Jefferson Foundry and Machine Works in Madison, Indiana, were among the first in 1861 to provide Federal officers with firsthand information regarding drafts of water in the Ohio:
Four feet draft with some certainty after middle of October; five feet draft 1st of November; six feet draft with great certainty after 15th of November. This, in ordinary seasons, a very dry summer and dry early autumn, will give less water in October, but the middle of November will very surely give from five to six feet draft.
Edward D. Mansfield, a well-known contemporary newspaperman, writer, and former college professor, has also given us data on the great rivers based upon his own travels up and down the Mississippi and Ohio. From him, we learn that Civil War gunboatmen could expect that “the lower Ohio will probably have as much as five feet of water ’till the middle of July, the lowest water being generally in September and October.” “In the Mississippi River,” he added, “there is more water so that from Cairo down there will be little or no difficulty.” The most dangerous places at low water from Mansfield’s own observations were between Cairo and Memphis.
Other physical aspects of the Western rivers not appreciated by those unfamiliar with them included such concepts as crooked channels; those watery paths were not straight, but tended to weave across the different expanses, often revealing themselves by depth or color. Just before RAdm. Porter assumed command of the Mississippi Squadron in October 1862, a report was sent to Navy Assistant Secretary Gustavus V. Fox by his predecessor that conveyed some sense of this phenomenon:
There are no fixed channels in these great rivers, as there are in the sounds, estuaries, and harbors of the Atlantic; quite otherwise; the channels are always changing, not only from year to year, but from season to season, during the period of rise and fall particularly.
Oftentimes, little hills, plateaus, bars, or even islands appeared in the rivers. At one point, it was noted that some 98 islands could be seen in the Ohio River. Rapids, particularly the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville and Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee, were the most dangerous navigational obstructions, though swift currents were always to be avoided.
Additionally, boulders, unmarked sunken boats, and thick foliage could pose navigational dangers. Trees often grew right down to the banks, and, largely due to erosion, just as often fell in; as “snags,” they could hit and even sink steamboats. By November of 1863, snags had become a major problem in the Mississippi, so much so that it was suggested they were as dangerous or maybe more so than guerrillas lurking along the riverbanks.
The underwater obstructions had become so numerous that seldom a week went by but what one or two steamers were not struck, “often becoming total losses.” Occasionally, through nature or military purpose, great collections of wood and other debris would form into channel-blocking obstructions called rafts. The collapse of a large Confederate raft would help lead to their loss at Vicksburg while the Federals would spend considerable time and money removing these blockages postwar.
The snagboat Montgomery. Large trees which fell into the rivers often became “snags,” able to hit or even sink steamers. By November of 1863, they had become a major problem in the Mississippi, so much so that it was suggested they were as dangerous or maybe more so than “guerrillas” lurking along the riverbanks. Both before and after the Civil War, the Federal government deployed special boats in an effort to diminish the navigational danger. The Montgomery, now a museum, was active on this duty from 1925 to 1982 (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).
The fall rise, which was more unpredictable as to its beginning or end than that in the spring, could often be counted upon to provide good steaming into December. Commonly, the main rivers in our Western of operations did not freeze in wintertime, allowing riverine warfare to continue. Conventional wharves were few; boats could and did tie up along or push into banks as required.12
1. James G. Wiener et al., “Mississippi River,” U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division homepage, http://biology.usgs.gov/s+t/SNT/noframe/ms137.htm (accessed August 26, 2006); U.S. National Park Service. “Mississippi River Facts.” Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, http://www.nps.gov (accessed November 12, 2019); Adam I. Kane, The Western River Steamboat (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 22–26; The Navigator, Containing Directions for Navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers (8th ed., Pittsburgh, PA: Cramer, Speark and Eichbau, 1814; reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 149–152, 174; Webster’s Geographical Dictionary, rev. ed. (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Co., Publishers, 1966), 712; Alfred T. Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, Vol. 3 of The Navy in the Civil War (New York: Scribner's, 1883), 9; Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1913), 186–188; William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T. O. H. Burnham, 1863), 295.
2. Charles Dana Gibson, with E. Kay Gibson, Assault and Logistics, Vol. 2: Union Army Coastal and River Operations, 1861–1866 (Camden, ME: Ensign Press, 1995), 56; U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (128 vols.; Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880–1901), Series I, Vol. 52, 165 (cited hereafter as OR, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]; e.g., OR, I, 52: 165); J. S. Neal and his brother R. S. Neal, together with William Johnson, owned the Jefferson Foundry and Machine Works behind Vine Street in Madison. Totten described their operation as “a large building establishment.” “Madison City Directory, 1859–1860,” Madison and Jefferson County Directories, http://myindianahome.net/gen/jeff/records/direct/maddir.html (September 30, 2006). Little is available concerning U. Jones (1811–1889), the transplanted New Yorker who published numerous reference works at Cincinnati, Ohio, from ca. 1850 to his death and was a noted regional paleontologist. Joseph F. James, “Uriah Pierson James,” American Geologist, III (May 1889), 281–285; Walter Sutton, The Western Book Trade (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1961), 88–107.
3. Paul H. Silverstone, Warships of the Civil War Navies (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), 149.
4. The Navigator, 150, 195–197, 206, 222; Russell, My Diary North and South, 306–308. 330; James G. Wiener et al., “Mississippi River,” U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, http://biology.usgs.gov/s+t/SNT/noframe/ms137.htm (accessed August 26, 2006); Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, 10–11; OR, I, 52: 165; Goodspeed’s General History of Tennessee (Chicago: Goodspeed Publishers, 1887; reprint, Nashville, TN: C. and R. Elder, 1973), 797; Harold Fisk, Geological Investigations of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1944), 27; Uriah Pierson James, James’ River Guide (Cincinnati, OH: U. James, 1860; reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 29–58; Marion Bragg, Historic Names and Places on the Lower Mississippi River (Vicksburg: Mississippi River Commission, 1977), 1–267; Donald L. Canney, Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861–65 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998); 53–55, 180; James M. Merrill, "Cairo, Illinois: Strategic Civil War River Port," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, LXXVI (Winter 1983), 242–257; S. Chamberlain, “Opening of the Upper Mississippi and the Siege of Vicksburg,” Magazine of Western History, V (March 1887), 619; Robert D. Whitesell, “Military and Naval Activities Between Cairo and Columbus,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, LXI (April 1963), 111; David E. Roth, “The Civil War at the Confluence: Where the Ohio Meets the Mississippi,” Blue & Gray Magazine, II (July 1985), 6–8, 13–14, 16; United States, Mississippi River Commission, Report (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1892), 3286; Francis Vinton Greene, The Mississippi, Vol. 8 of Campaigns of the Civil War (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1885), 7; Henry Walke, Naval Scenes and Reminiscences of the Civil War in the United States on the Southern and Western Waters During the Years 1861, 1862 and 1863 with the History of That Period Compared and Corrected from Authentic Sources (New York: F. R. Reed and Company, 1877), 27; Edward J. Huling, Reminiscences of Gunboat Life in the Mississippi Squadron (Saratoga Springs, NY: Sentinel Print, 1881), 11–27, 29; “Napoleon Cutoff in Desha County,” Programs of the Desha County Historical Society 12 (Spring 1986), 23–26; New York Herald, October 2, 1863; Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Modern Classics; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 215, 335–336; Steven E Woodworth, Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 30, 35.
5. The Navigator, 195–197; James Henry, Resources of the State of Arkansas; with Description of Counties, Railroads, Mines, and the City of Little Rock (Little Rock, AR: Price & McClure, 1872), 54; Turner Browne, The Last River: Life along Arkansas’s Lower White (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); Gibson, Assault and Logistics, Vol. 2, 617; Jerry M. Hay, White River Guidebook (Floyds Knobs, IN: Inland Waterways Books, 2008); Chicago Daily Tribune, January 20, 1863; New York Herald, January 21, 1863.
6. Henry, Resources of the State of Arkansas, 54; The Navigator, 197; Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 51; Grant Foreman, “River Navigation in the Early Southwest,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XV (June 1928), 39+; Edward N. Andrus, “The River Gave and the River Hath Taken Away: How the Arkansas River Shaped the Course of Arkansas History” (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2019); Chicago Daily Tribune, January 20, 1863.
7. The Navigator, 206; New York Herald, July 25, 1862.
8. The Navigator, 222; Carl Newton Tyson, The Red River in Southwestern History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 2006), 300; Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, 194–195.
9. Jerry M. Hay, Ohio River Guidebook (Floyds Knobs, IN: Inland Waterways Books, 2007); David M. Smith, “The Defense of Cincinnati—The Battle That Never Was: Past Presentations of the Cincinnati Civil War Roundtable, January 15, 1998,” Cincinnati Civil War Roundtable homepage, http://www.cincinnaticwrt.org/data/ccwrt_history/talks_text/smith_defense_cin.html (accessed September 4, 2006); U.S. Navy Department, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (31 vols.; Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1894–1922), Series, I, Vol. 25, 610–611 (cited hereafter as ORN, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]); ORN, I, 52: 166. In an 1863 Ohio River survey undertaken for RAdm. David Dixon Porter, Lt. Cmdr. Le Roy Fitch offered some thoughts on certain Ohio River communities. In this manner, his wartime observations, albeit from a Yankee perspective, will serve to enlighten us much as those of Paymaster Huling did for the Lower Mississippi. Cairo, IL, Fitch observed, had a "population floating"; Caledonia, IL, was a "small town"; Paducah, KY, had "very few loyal citizens"; Caseyville, KY, suffered from "guerrillas liv[ing] in [the] vicinity"; Uniontown, KY, was "very disloyal"; Evansville, IN, "requires watching"; and Owensboro, KY, was "very disloyal and smuggles goods."
10. Jerry M. Hay, Tennessee River Guidebook (Floyds Knobs, IN: Inland Waterways Books, 2010); Ann Toplovich, "Tennessee River System," in Carroll Van West, ed., The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press for the Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), 943–945; Stanley J. Folmsbee, Robert E. Corlew, and Enoch L. Mitchell, Tennessee: A Short History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 12–13; Donald Davidson, The Tennessee, Vol. 2: The New River, Civil War to TVA (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948), 1–118; ORN, I, 24: 59–60; Wisconsin State Journal, May 12, 1862; Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 1, 1931, December 19, 1976. In his 1863 Ohio River survey, Lt. Cmdr. Fitch offered some thoughts on certain communities: Paducah, KY, "very few loyal citizens"; Callowaytown, KY, "two houses"; Paris Landing, TN, "one house and mill"; New Portland, TN, "three houses, Union"; Reynoldsburg, TN, "three families, rebel"; Fowler's Landing, TN, "very bad rebels"; Perryville and East Perryville, TN, "rebels"; Marvin's Bluffs, TN, "two houses, Union"; Brownsport, TN, "iron foundry, Union"; Cedar Creek, TN, "iron furnace"; Decatur, TN, "iron furnace, Union, yet rebel"; Carrollville, TN, "four houses, Union"; Clifton, TN, "rebels town burned February 1863"; Point Pleasant, TN, "three houses"; Cerro Gordo, TN, "deserted"; Coffee's Landing, TN, "hot secesh"; Savannah, TN, "mixed, Union and rebels"; Pittsburgh Landing, TN, "deserted"; Big Bend Landing, TN, "deserted and destroyed"; Chickasaw, AL, " eight families, four Union, rest doubtful; Waterloo, AL, "all rebels"; Tuscumbia, AL, "all rebels back"; Florence, AL, "rebels."
11. Jerry M. Hay, Cumberland River Guidebook (Floyds Knobs, IN: Inland Waterways Books, 2010); Ann Toplovich, "Cumberland River," in Carroll Van West, ed., The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press for the Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), 227–228; Folmsbee, Tennessee: A Short History, 13–14; "Towns of the Cumberland," Save the Cumberland homepage, http://www.savethecumberland.org/towns.htm (accessed July 21, 2005); Byrd Douglas, Steamboatin’ on the Cumberland (Nashville: Tennessee Book Company, 1961), 28–31; ORN, I, 24: 58–59; ORN, I, 25: 160.
12. Irwin Anthony, Paddle Wheels and Pistols (New York: The Children’s Book Club, 1930), 282; Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Waters: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 219–222, 225, 231, 233–236; ORN, I, 52, 1: 158, 164; ORN, I, 23: 360; Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 83; The New York Times, May 2, 1861; New York Daily Tribune, November 17, 1863; Grant Foreman, “River Navigation in the Early Southwest,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XV (June 1928), 39+; Bobby Roberts, “Rivers of No Return,” in Mark K. Christ, ed., “The Earth Reeled and Trees Trembled”: Civil War Arkansas, 1863–1864 (Little Rock, AR: The Old State House Museum, 2007), 74–76. Mansfield (1801–1880) was editor of the Cincinnati Chronicle for 13 years and once employed Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dallas Bogan, “Edward Deering Mansfield Was a True Jack-of-All-Trades,” Warren County Ohio GenWeb Project, August 30, 2004, http://www.rootsweb.com/~ohwarren/Bogan/bogan235.htm (accessed October 1, 2006).