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The U.S. Mississippi Squadron, Summer 1863
Sailors aboard the Federal warships participating in the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, became aware on July 7, 1863, that many of their bluejacket colleagues deployed 130 miles upstream were present at the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, three days earlier. News of the victory, which was forwarded from the scene by steamer and telegraph, reached the U.S. capital at Washington, D.C., simultaneously and was hence passed to the populace. Almost simultaneously, the 6,000 Confederate soldiers penned into Port Hudson’s defenses—virtually without rations after 47 days of confinement—also learned of the Southern disaster. Realizing further resistance was futile, the post surrendered two days later. The 2,348-mile-long Mississippi River—the North’s most important internal trade route closed for the past two years—was opened. The Union had now retrieved full access to the Gulf and other commercial markets and points of engagement and ended a growing regional anxiety in the Northwestern states. At the same time, it was faced with the occupation, use (both political and economic), and protection of far more territory. Although slicing off Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from the Southeast effectively cut the Confederacy in half, it did not end the war.1
During the last week of July 1863, RAdm. David Dixon Porter, commander of the U.S. Mississippi Squadron, steamed south from Vicksburg to New Orleans, Louisiana, aboard his flagboat, the Black Hawk. He had learned soon after the fall of Port Hudson that the West Gulf Blockading Squadron had been ordered back downstream and that its commander, his foster brother RAdm. David Glasgow Farragut, was ordered to concentrate its activities in the Gulf of Mexico. Responsibility for the inland naval campaign above the Crescent City now passed to his fleet, based at Cairo, Illinois. Upon his August 1 arrival, Porter met Farragut for most of the day aboard the latter’s flagship, USS Hartford, to coordinate the transfer of responsibilities. During the discussions, Porter proudly let it be known that “the Mississippi River was undisturbed by the enemy from Cairo to New Orleans.” Farragut departed the port the next morning for the Brooklyn Navy Yard while Porter remained for staff discussions and local inspections.
RAdm. David Dixon Porter. Porter led the Union’s Mississippi Squadron from October 1863 to October 1864, working closely with top U.S. Army generals in the Western theater. During this time, he occasioned important administrative and logistical improvements while supporting various operations and campaigns, including the capture of Vicksburg and the Red River Expedition (Library of Congress).
The Black Hawk departed New Orleans on August 5 and returned to the main squadron base at Cairo eleven days later. Coming within sight of his units’ two-year-old main anchorage, Porter may have thought unconsciously of an observation written by the Englishman William H. Russell, as he approached the place aboard a commercial steamer just after the outbreak of the war. “With the exception of the large hotel, which rises far above the levee of the river,” the famous war correspondent recorded, “the public edifices are represented by a church and spire, and the rest of the town by a line of shanties and small houses, the rooms and upper stories of which are just visible above the embankment.”
After anchoring, the first person Porter welcomed aboard his steamer was Capt. Alexander M. Pennock, who, as fleet captain, was his top subordinate. A favorite, noticeably far less colorful than his chief, Pennock was regarded by the admiral and others as one of the smartest and best administrative officers in the entire USN. It was Pennock who had ensured the constant flow of men, ships, and material to the Mississippi Squadron during the Vicksburg campaign while also supervising naval operations on the rivers in the upper part of the theater. As the two men reviewed recent events and exchanged thoughts on future operations and necessities, they appreciated that their nautical organization, despite some continuing problems and needs, had grown significantly since RAdm. Andrew H. Foote had officially launched it in September 1861.
Union president Abraham Lincoln would offer a sincere appreciation of the navy on August 26 in a letter to James C. Conkling: “Nor must Uncle Sam’s web feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but … wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks.” Although the two Illinois politicians did not know the Civil War had reached its halfway point in length of time, it is possible that they, like other Westerners, sensed the public attention paid to the opening of the Mississippi would now begin to fade. Still the commerce plying the great waterway, which again flowed “unvexed to the sea,” would need to be protected and the military work of ending the rebellion in this area supported to its completion.
Before, however, progressing to the after-Vicksburg river war, let’s begin with a brief midwar profile of the Mississippi Squadron, starting with, to borrow a modern and somewhat inappropriate term, its shore establishment.2
Boot-shaped Cairo (locally pronounced Kay’ro or Care’o) lay 215 miles down the Mississippi by water at the junction with the Ohio River. The main headquarters for Western naval operations, the town, with an 1860 population of 2,000, was located at the southernmost tip of Illinois in an area called “Little Egypt.” An important railroad destination, it was named a “port of delivery” for steamboat traffic by an 1854 Act of Congress. The state’s politicians, realizing it was one of the most strategic locations in the entire Midwest, chose it for the military just after Fort Sumter and speedily provided a garrison. Cmdr. John Rodgers, USN, and his successor, RAdm. Andrew Hull Foote, who had charge of the U.S. Army’s Western Gunboat Flotillla, also saw the value of Cairo, making it the squadron’s primary upriver depot or base a few days after Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assumed command of the town in September 1861.
As James B. Eads explained to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles while painting a visual picture of the town’s geography several months earlier, batteries established there could “control the passage of vessels bound up or down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.” The cross-channel banks of the Ohio were within cannon shot of Cairo; however, those on the Missouri shore across the Mississippi were nearly two miles away on the other side of a large sandbar.
A highly regarded riverman and father of the City Series ironclads, Eads had originally informed Washington leadership that the little community had “a broad three-mile long levee front on the Ohio River that was raised about 14 feet above the natural level of the city.” Indeed, it was the only Illinois city surrounded by levees. A barrier of the same height and almost the same length as on the Ohio extended on the Mississippi River side of the town. This one was set back 100 to 1,000 yards from the river’s edge to keep it safe from the natural caving of the riverbank. From this levee, across from the Ohio River, a levee extends of the same height, “by which the town is protected from the backwater.”
The city’s historian later revealed that the city essentially sat in a basin from which people ascended and descended the levee on foot via “long flights of wooden steps at the intersections of the unimproved and often very muddy streets.” If they had been privy to Eads’ originally boosterism, Porter and Pennock might have been intrigued by the famed salvage expert’s description of this place as a delta when in fact, as John M. Lansden noted, it sat in a long flat plain with the lowest elevation of any place in Illinois. So it was that Cairo, as noted by the blogger “Taylor,” “became extremely muddy during heavy rains or swollen-river stages, in spite of the levee, which made it a virtual mud pond.” While steam pumps constantly addressed the seepage, the streets seemed covered in some amount of muck at all times.
Swamps also covered the land north of the city to such an extent that the only reliable year-round land access to Cairo was provided by the Illinois Central Railroad, which began in 1856. Operating south from Galena in the northwest corner of the state, it was now the state’s longest rail company. Service into its southernmost terminus came via a causeway over the outlying morass. Inside town limits, the road split into a loop running down just inland of the Ohio River levee and then up the Mississippi levee to join once more. Upon reaching the station, passengers and freight requiring further lift transferred to steamers. During the Civil War, the Illinois Central proved a vital communication link, bringing in many of the required military and naval men and supplies. Specially designated construction trains also brought in carloads of sand to help address the river seepage.
The Cairo base. The Ohio River levee and wharf boats at Cairo, Illinois, ca. 1862–1863. As no land in the town could be spared for a naval facility, the USN presence existed aboard old steamers, wharf boats, flatboats, rafts, and tugboats. Also visible are Union Army horse stables and the Illinois Central Rail Road passenger depot and sheds (Library of Congress).
Cairo’s principal thoroughfare, Ohio Street, sat parallel to the eastern levee on that stream. It was home to the famous five-storied St. Charles Hotel that correspondent Russell observed just before his 1861 arrival, as well as the railroad station, military headquarters in the Ohio Building, and offices and warehouses for the quartermasters. The next street over was Halliday Street while the furthest west was Commercial, with a huge parade ground a block south. In addition to churches and saloons, other community establishments available included the post office, several businesses, the Atheneum Theater, stables, a blacksmith and a harness shop, a druggist, a gun shop, a wheelwright shop, and a small hospital. The sidewalks, such as they were, were wooden planks, and citizens and all those coming in from outside to swell the population were unhappy with Cairo’s humid climate, disease, bugs and numerous rats.
It seemed that the edges of the town bristled with artillery and, in early 1862, the military established the town’s two bastions, Fort Holt and Fort Defiance. The latter, today the site of a state park, was the largest, “a large flat-topped mound on which cannon were placed,” three 24-pounders and an 8-inch mortar to be exact.
Cairo’s steamboat landing was located at its foot of the Ohio Street levee, just up from the Ohio River confluence with the Mississippi. Here patrons and freight arrived from up and down the rivers, went ashore or departed. Given that the height of the water was so variable that fixed wharfs were impractical, a line of barges and floating wharf boats ran up and down the shoreline. The former held bulk items like coal while the latter provided storage and office space. Wharf boats were common to most larger landing sites on the Western rivers and were either covered-over flatboat hulls upon which sheds were constructed or cut-down steamers no longer fit for service.
Wharf boats and gun boats. City Class ironclad gunboats (left to right) Baron de Kalb, Cincinnati, and Mound City off Cairo, Illinois, in 1863, with wharf boats moored in the foreground. The base was largely formed from wharf boats before its transfer upstream to Mound City (Naval History and Heritage Command).
Many of Cairo’s wharf boats—and other businesses—were owned in partnership by two of the town’s foremost entrepreneurs, William P. Halliday and his partner, George Washington (“Wash”) Graham. A former steamboat captain, newspaperman, and government surveyor, Halliday had relocated a giant wharf boat to the base of the levee in February 1861, where it was available to be rented by Gen. Grant that summer and later provided needed space for the offices of the Western Gunboat Flotilla and the Mississippi Squadron.
RAdm. Foote and his two successors outfitted their vessels afloat at this Cairo location, providing them with men, supplies, ordnance, and ammunition and effecting some basic repairs. Since Cairo had no land available for base facilities, sundry specific functions (like the repair shop), as well as vital supplies and some fixed ammunition, were initially housed afloat aboard the principal wharf boat, near and to which some vessels moored as needed or when not anchored in designated river locations. Coal supplies were kept in nearby barges and, as the number or size of specialized tasks (like shell storage or disease isolation) increased other dedicated steamers, flatboats and rafts were acquired. From fall 1861, new hands forwarded from recruiting rendezvous (stations) near or far by boat or train or transferred from other vessels reported aboard a designated receiving ship.
By the time Vicksburg fell, it was not uncommon to see numerous gunboats and auxiliaries anchored offshore or tied to one of the stationary support craft, with small boats or tugs ferrying men and materiel around. At one point in mid-November 1863, a Philadelphia reporter counted in excess of two dozen Mississippi Squadron and Mississippi Marine Brigade boats, plus a number of laid-up mortar boats, in port.3
While Cairo remained the inland Union Navy’s principal base in the weeks after the fall of Vicksburg, it was, in fact, already being eclipsed in importance by the station at Mound City, Illinois. This village, which lay seven miles up the Ohio River at its confluence with the Cache River, was founded by Maj. Gen. Moses Marshal Rawlings in 1854 on the site of Trinity, an abandoned settlement. A series of Indian burial mounds were in the area, the largest of which was adjacent to the Ohio River. A hotel was built near this landmark, honored with the simple moniker “Big Mound,” and during the summer guests slept atop it to escape the heat. Most of the other mounds were lost to farming.
Cairo to Mound City river bend. In 1863, the functions of the Cairo naval base were transferred to a leased 10-acre riverbank location at Mound City, Illinois, six miles upstream and adjacent to the private shipyard where three of the “City Series” gunboats were built. Here a naval station was opened and it continued beyond the end of the war. Wharf boats, stationary contract steamers, flatboats, tugs, and barges were also employed, while various ironclads were, on occasion, anchored in the river bend downstream (Library of Congress).
When it merged with Emporium City in 1857, Mound City retained its corporate name. The subsumed location was begun as a real estate venture by Cincinnati businessmen who hoped to create a rival for Cairo. To do so, they established a business center along the riverbank, where construction of a large brick storehouse was begun at Commerce Avenue and Center Avenue. and a shipyard with a tracked marine ways running into the river was started. Also employed by James B. Eads at Carondelet, Missouri, this kind of equipment could raise or lower a steamboat from or to the water by cables attached to a small steam engine. Unfortunately for the capitalists, as Paymaster Edward Huling tells us, their “speculation was a failure.”
In an effort to salvage something of the project after their town closed, the Emporium Company sold the newly finished shipyard to Samuel and William Hambleton of the Queen City in 1859, with the latter serving as superintendent. The Hambletons operated the Cincinnati Marine Ways, which later partnered with Joseph Brown in the conversion of the Union Navy’s tinclads. In 1861 when Capt. Eads won a contract to construct seven ironclad gunboats for the U.S. Army, he sublet the work on three of them—subsequently named USS Cairo, Cincinnati, and Mound City—to Hambleton at Mound City. Meanwhile, private interests had constructed a Mound City Railroad, which connected with the Illinois Central Railroad at Mounds, Illinois, six miles inland, and ensured the delivery of supplies, construction materials, and workmen.
Upon the capture of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River in February 1862, the three available Federal timberclads mounted a raid downstream during which they captured the incomplete Confederate ironclad Eastport. Arrangements were made to take her to Mound City for an expensive completion as a Union gunboat. Hambleton, who had signed an exclusive $40,000 a year construction and repair contract for the marine ways with the U.S. government “for the duration,” was retained in charge of the operation, subject to certain USN direction. The yard, with whatever improvements were made, would revert to the owners when peace returned. Henceforth, major ship repairs and some construction or conversion was handled at Mound City and the workforce grew to almost 1,800 men. On October 1, 1862, the War Department transferred the Western Gunboat Flotilla to the Navy Department, along with responsibility for Mound City’s nautical activities. In 1862 alone, in excess of 50 vessels were built, altered, repaired or docked at the shipyard and so important would the facility become that, at war’s end, it would be the site chosen for demobilization of the Mississippi Squadron and sale of most of its warships.
On July 1, 1863, the U.S. government received a lease and took possession of a ten-acre portion of the Mound City riverfront known as Rawlings’ Reservation in order to build a regular navy station. The land acquired included several warehouses and the town railroad station that was necessarily moved elsewhere. Porter and Pennock busily reviewed how they would develop their new base, transfer most of the Cairo operation to it, and grow the amount of work to be performed by the mechanics and laborers commanded by Chief Engineer William Faulkner and Naval Constructor Romeo Frigansa. Despite access to maintenance facilities at Memphis and New Orleans, Mound City would become the principal Mississippi Squadron repair, refitting, and outfitting location for the reminder of its existence.
On May 13, 1864, the Eastern public was officially reminded of what area citizens already knew: “The Navy Department has been removed from this place [Cairo] to Mound City, six miles above.” In addition to her military duties, Cairo, herself, had “become a great cotton mart,” with “vast piles of cotton on every side,” growing larger every day. On May 7, for example, a barge containing over 1,000 bales arrived from the Ouachita River, with “much of it only tied, having no covering.”
Over the next couple of years, the naval station and depot, which was situated right along the Ohio River shore, would grow further out on both sides of “Big Mound,” with new buildings added and older ones enhanced. Because Mound City, like Cairo, was frequently inundated by high water, plank walks were also abundant here as well and some of the buildings were built on piles.
Mound City wharf boat. A view from the shore (right); stores were kept below deck while supply and administrative offices were above. The floating depot was destroyed by fire on June 2, 1864, and Paymaster Charles E. Boggs, USN, was badly injured trying to save the squadron’s funds and accounts. Notice the chimneys of two steamers moored nearby (Library of Congress).
Entrance to the station was through a gate (protected by a Marine) in front of “Big Mound.” For safety, a guard post was established on the landmark’s flat summit, complete with a shack, a cannon, and a flagpole. The squadron anchorage lay in the river directly to the east and, as at Cairo, the coal supply and certain repair and other functions would be maintained afloat aboard specialized barges. A wharf boat for certain supplies was also employed but, unhappily, it caught fire and was destroyed with its contents, valued at approximately $500,000, on June 2, 1864. As at all squadron anchorages, a guardship and picket boats were regularly on duty.
Located along the bank on either side of “Big Mound” were the marine ways, the lumberyard, sawmill and other woodworking facilities, the foundry, machine shops, carpenters shops, the blacksmith shop, supply and stores shops, a large ordnance office, a gun carriage storage building, barracks for the marine guard, and offices. Homes for residents of the hamlet lay inland of the base, along with some contractor housing.
Upstream from the naval station and slightly inland was the huge naval hospital, seized by the government in fall 1861 and converted from the Emporium Company’s large unfinished warehouse. Its medical staff included nurses from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Indiana. Even with over a thousand beds, it had proved necessary to relocate most of the hospital’s services to the more centrally located Memphis Naval Hospital in spring 1863. During the squadron liquidation in the summer of 1865, many patients were transferred back. At the same time, the U.S. Army Medical Department, in cooperation with the Western Sanitary Commission, was also served by the Mound City facility, as well as hospitals in other locations (principally Memphis), and a small fleet of hospital boats: D. A. January and City of Nashville on the Mississippi River and City of Memphis and City of New Orleans, later R. C. Wood, on the Ohio.
Mound City hospital and tugboat USS Daisy. Upstream from the Mound City Naval Station and slightly inland was a huge hospital, seized by the government in fall 1861 and converted from a large unfinished warehouse owned by the Emporium Company. Its medical staff included nurses from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Indiana. The steam tugboat Mulford was transferred to the USN on October 1, 1862, and renamed Daisy. She would be sold out of service at war’s end (Naval History and Heritage Command).
When Chicago Daily News reporter J. A. Austen visited Mound City in August 1865 to report on the sale of a part of the fleet, he would find the community of approximately 3,000 a “struggling collection of good, bad and indifferent buildings scattered along the Ohio shore for about two miles and extending a few hundred yards back to the timber.” As they had every spring, usually in June, her streets would show the effects of flooding that extended into nearly every house. Although the boom of wartime business at the naval station would generate a temporary town “animation,” its withdrawal would prove economically disastrous. Mound City, with the basis of her prosperity removed, would have a “dull sleepy look and cheerless aspect,” coming to appear “as near played out as well can be.”4
In addition to the Cairo and Mound City complexes, the Mississippi Squadron in summer 1863 maintained a widely spaced network of regular landings, anchorages, bases and stations running up the Big Muddy from New Orleans to the tip of Illinois and across the Ohio River east to Cincinnati. Among the more important facilities or functions were those found at New Orleans, Louisiana; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Helena, Arkansas; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; Carondelet, Missouri; Paducah, Smithland, and Louisville, Kentucky; New Albany, Indiana; and Cincinnati, Ohio. Given the great length of the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, guarded coal barges were stationed not only at those locations, but at certain river mouths or communities where steamboats normally put in. Among these were the mouths of the White and Red Rivers, towns (not listed in order) such as Morganza, Donaldsonville, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and Bayou Sara, and steamer landings such as Gaines Landing, Arkansas, and Skipwith’s Landing, Mississippi. Fleet auxiliaries or contracted towboats and civilian transports regularly delivered coal barges and sometimes equipment/building supplies or even herds of cattle to these places. They were also visited by the hospital boat Red Rover and replenishment or dispatch vessels. In 1864, a dedicated floating machine shop, USS Samson, would be assigned to Skipwith’s, supplementing repair facilities at Memphis, and by war’s end that location, the mouth of the Red River, and the Memphis naval station, besides New Orleans and Cairo/Mound City, would be the principal sites of the squadron’s major coal depots.
Lesser anchorages were maintained at certain forward locations on the tributaries as well, including but not limited to Bridgeport, Alabama; Johnsonville, Fort Donelson/Dover, and Carthage, Tennessee; Point Isabel, Kentucky; and Clarendon and DeValls Bluff, Arkansas. Amenities for the gunboatmen were few and shore leave nonexistent.5
The number of vessels in the Mississippi Squadron in mid-1863 had grown considerably since Cmdr. John Rodgers arrived at Cairo with the timberclads two years earlier. Indeed, RAdm. Porter informed Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that the command, including the craft strung out downstream and on the tributaries, comprised almost 100 vessels. These mounted 462 guns divided between ironclads, timberclads, miscellaneous gunboats and rams, tinclads, auxiliary vessels and tugboats, and seven rams of the Marine Brigade, an amphibious outfit originally established by the U.S. Army.
The ironclads included thirteen warships, including six of the seven original purpose-built City Series boats (the Cairo was destroyed in December 1862) and the huge conversions Essex and Benton. These original armorclads (in service or under repair) included the Cincinnati (badly damaged in May 1863), Carondelet, Baron de Kalb (soon a loss), Mound City, Pittsburg, and Louisville. Later arrivals were the giant Choctaw, Lafayette, Tuscumbia, Chillicothe (damaged), Eastport, Osage (in commission only since July 10), Neosho, and Indianola (being salvaged). The hybrid monitor Ozark, constructed at Mound City, was being outfitted at St. Louis and was expected soon. Contracts for four double-turreted monitors (Chickasaw, Kickapoo, Milwaukee, and Winnebago) had been awarded to James B. Eads, builder of the original City Series ironclads, and were laid down at his Carondelet, Missouri, yards in 1862. They would be commissioned between April and August 1864; however, two other river monitors, the Marietta and Sandusky, under construction at the Tomlinson and Hartupee yards in Pittsburgh, would not be ready before war’s end.
The inaugural Mississippi Squadron gunboats, converted from civilian steamers under authority of the U.S. War Department for the Western Gunboat Flotilla, were the so-called “timberclads,” Lexington, Tyler, and Conestoga. Converted at Cincinnati in late spring 1861, the three were protected by thick wood and were devoid of any metallic armor. Heavily armed with 32-pounders, they were in service by that September. Although the Conestoga would be accidentally sunk in March 1864, her sisters would continue to give yeoman service late into the conflict.
Contemporaries of the timberclads, Benton, and City Series ironclads were a fleet of converted reinforced towboats authorized in March 1862 as the U.S. Army Ram Fleet, under the command of Charles Ellet, Jr. Without armor or armament, the Lancaster, Lioness, Mingo, Monarch, Queen of the West, Dick Fulton, and Switzerland had reinforced bows for ramming opposing vessels and played a leading role in the June Battle of Memphis. A few other craft were later acquired, and the entire organization was rebranded as the Mississippi Marine Brigade in early 1863, but would not be transferred to the navy with the rest of the Mississippi Squadron in October. The Queen was captured that February and the Lancaster sunk in March. The MMB would remain a semi-independent command, much to the displeasure of RAdm. Porter, until August 1864, when it would be disestablished and its surviving steamers given other duties.
Three Confederate gunboats (CSS General Bragg, CSS General Sumter, and CSS General Sterling Price—the last a ram) were captured at the Battle of Memphis in June 1862, repaired, rearmed, and returned to service under new names: USS General Bragg, USS Sumter, and USS General Price. The Sumter was lost to grounding that August. The 750-ton Vindicator, built at New Albany, Indiana, in 1862, was turned over to the War Department before documentation for its Marine Brigade and was subsequently transferred to the navy in October. The wooden-hulled vessel was, under supervision of Joseph Brown, converted into a ram in 1863 and would be commissioned in 1864. Brown also converted the ram Avenger, built, acquired, and converted under the same circumstances. Both craft were unarmored but heavily armed.
Mississippi Squadron flagboat Black Hawk. Originally purchased as the New Uncle Sam, this 900-ton sidewheeler was outfitted as the fleet flagship and renamed Black Hawk in December 1862. She carried eight cannon and participated in several major operations, though most of her time was spent on administrative service. She would be accidentally destroyed by fire in April 1865 (Naval History and Heritage Command).
Conceived of as a separate warship class in late spring 1862, the lightly protected “tinclads” were converted, mostly stern-wheel, steamers armed with boat howitzers in broadside and rifled cannon forward. A total of 55 of the 66 vessels altered were, after capture or USN acquisition, turned over for conversion by Joseph Brown, builder of the ironclads Chillicothe, Indianola, and Tuscumbia, at Cincinnati. When altered, they steamed with skeleton crews to Cairo or Mound City, where they were then armed, outfitted (complete with a number painted on the pilothouse), and crewed. A total of 38 had been placed in commission by August 1863 with only one (Glide) lost so far and that to accident. There was at this time one “large tinclad,” the 902-ton squadron flagboat Black Hawk, formerly the civilian New Uncle Sam, purchased into service in November 1862. These craft were the multitask units of the squadron and all served, at one time or another, as dispatch and light replenishment vessels, towboats, patrol boats, swift raiders or gunfire support vessels, and anchorage guardians or pickets.
Auxiliary vessels of the Mississippi Squadron, often armed for defense, were not primarily combatants, but steamed in support of the warships or on various assigned tasks and services. They could, if necessary, offer convoy to transports steaming alone or help beat off guerrilla attacks. Duties included ordnance, powder and ammunition; dispatch and communication; general transportation and replenishment, including mail and supply distribution and personnel rotation; towing; repair; harbor support, including wharf boat inspection and storage; receiving and barracks; and medical.
Two auxiliary transports were normally employed on the Mississippi as dispatch boats, leaving downstream from Cairo or Mound City on the first and fifteenth of each month with mail, certain personal supplies, and passengers. Stops would be made along the way during which an officially licensed sutler carried aboard each craft would, per naval regulations, oversee the sale of authorized items to officers and men. Crewmen on leave and discharge often returned to Cairo aboard while the sick were dropped off at the Memphis naval hospital.
A Cincinnati Daily Commercial account reprinted in the December 1, 1863, issue of The Natchez Courier tells us what it was like to be an officer or visitor (e.g., correspondent, clergyman, etc.) taking passage or visiting the fleet aboard one of the dispatch vessels. Each person was
charged one dollar per day for meals; no charge being made for the fare, or staterooms, and at the end of the trip, fifty cents extra is charged for the use of bedding. No liquors are allowed to be sold on board or brought on board by officers, and games of chance, cards and dice, are prohibited. Chess and draughts [checkers] may be played. Good hours are required to be kept and the strictest order is preserved.
Among the auxiliaries of RAdm. Porter’s command in service in mid-1863 were, alphabetically, the Cairo storeship, inspection vessel, and wharf boat Abraham, renamed from Virginia, her name when captured at Memphis in June 1862; the transport Clara Dolson, taken on the White River a few weeks later; the ordnance, stores, and dispatch vessel General Lyon, originally named De Soto and captured at Island No. 10 in April 1862; the newly purchased Cincinnati-based receiving ship Grampus; the ordnance and (and after 1864) Cairo and Mound City receiving ship Great Western; the mail, supply, and temporary receiving ship New National seized at Memphis in June 1862; the floating machine shop Samson, originally a unit of the Ellet Ram Fleet; the Cairo commissary and barracks ship Sovereign, also captured at Memphis in 1862; and the dispatch and transport vessel William H. Brown (also known as Brown), purchased into service by the War Department two years earlier and transferred to the navy in October 1862. Eleven flora-named tugboats were also available: Dahlia, Daisy, Fern, Laurel, Lily, Mignonette, Mistletoe, Myrtle, Nettle, Pansy, and Thistle.
Dispatch-transport William H. Brown. Transferred to the USN from the War Department in September 1862, this sternwheeler (also known as Brown or W. H. Brown) carried dispatches and supplies from Cairo and Mound City, Illinois, to Union naval vessels and facilities up and down the Mississippi River. Her two howitzers were fired in anger only once, during the 1864 Red River campaign. She would be sold out of service in August 1865 (Naval History and Heritage Command).
The most famous of the Mississippi Squadron auxiliaries was the hospital boat Red Rover, long known as the first USN hospital ship, a captured Confederate steamer converted by the U.S. Army as an auxiliary for its Western Gunboat Flotilla. With financing and support from the Western Sanitary Commission, the side-wheeler entered service in June 1862 with a crew of 47 and a 30-person medical department, including four white nurses from the Sisters of the Holy Cross and “a select, specially trained group of female contraband nurses.” In addition to an operating room, she was equipped with two water closets on each deck, a galley featuring separate kitchen facilities for patients and staff, an icebox of 300 tons ice capacity, a laundry room with a steam boiler, an elevator for transporting patients between decks, and sufficient supplies and medicines for 200 souls. Transferred to the U.S. Navy in October 1862 and officially commissioned on December 26, 1862, her medical activities were thereafter directed by Fleet Surgeon Ninian A. Pickney. For the next two years, she would cruise up and down the Mississippi caring for the squadron’s sick and wounded afloat and ashore, supplementing her mercy activities by also delivering fresh meat and ice to other naval vessels and providing burial details as requested.6
U.S. Navy hospital boat Red Rover. Outfitted as a true floating hospital by the Western Sanitary Commission, this former Confederate vessel had full medical accommodations and staff, including female nurses from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Indiana. Under Surgeon in Charge Dr. George Bixby, who took this photograph, the Navy’s first hospital ship entered service in June 1862. She would accommodate over 2,400 patients before her November 1865 decommissioning (Naval History and Heritage Command).
U.S. Army hospital boat D. A. January. Purchased into service in early 1862, this 450-ton sidewheeler was converted into a hospital boat by the Western Sanitary Commission after first delivering medical supplies to Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, during the Battle of Shiloh. She was outfitted with 400 beds, and her medical staff included four surgeons, nurses (male), attendants, and cooks, under Surgeon in Charge Dr. A. H. Hoff and later Dr. Lewis C. Rice, whose administrative authorities were the same as those exercised by the Surgeon in Charge aboard USS Red Rover. During her service, 23,738 patients were accommodated (description of the Models of Hospital Steam Vessels from the Army Medical Museum, Washington, D.C., 1892).
Much of the combat in the West, both from the earliest days of the Western Gunboat Flotilla and in the years we cover below, was conducted by men, both officers and enlisted, who were neither professional soldiers nor sailors. Just as the Mississippi Squadron had physically grown and its area of responsibility and influence had increased, so too did the number of its personnel. By the end of 1863, despite recruiting difficulties and innovations, the total crew aggregate would total some 5,500 men. Again, as in more recent 21st-century conflicts, the regular military and naval establishments involved were augmented by large numbers of volunteers or draftees.
The exodus of naval officers to the South at the start of the war together with the needs and prejudices of the ocean-going Union fleet meant that the Western brown water navy received few regularly commissioned officers during the Civil War. A handful of former naval officers did join (like John McLeod Murphy of the famous river ironclad Carondelet), but most regulars posted to Cairo as Mississippi Squadron officers were either men of questionable character (like RAdm. Porter’s brother, Cmdr. William “Dirty Bill Porter” of the ironclad Essex) or quite junior in rank. A few had perhaps a little combat experience as lieutenants on vessels, say, in the Mexican War or on the East Indies and China Station. “Many of the younger [naval] officers, too junior to have important sea commands during the course of the war, performed outstanding jobs in individual commands,” wrote naval historian Bern Anderson in 1961. “Henry Walke and Leroy Fitch, on the Western rivers … to name a few, fall within this category.” Fortunately, the volunteer officer corps program, created by Congress in July 1861, allowed RAdm. Foote and his successors to draw upon a significant number of recruits. Many of these gunboatmen, fortunately, had some previous experience on civilian steamboats or sailing traders/whalers and became efficient officers. These men could advance through the ranks from Acting Master’s Mates to Acting Lieutenant Commanders, and in 1864 a Navy Department circular would set out the prerequisites for each.
In practice from the beginning of the conflict, it was, for a variety of reasons, more difficult to recruit Mississippi Squadron rankers than officers. However they joined, officers and men from civilian life received much on-the-job training—particularly the enlisted sailors. Those military men with actual naval service had something of a leg up and received top postings and often received priority over merchantman veterans. Steamboatmen and merchant sailors were familiar with the basics of seamanship and could more easily transition to naval service than farmhands. Civilian mechanics often made excellent engineers; bookkeepers and teachers were turned into paymasters; and doctors (called surgeons) were frequently recruited right after graduating medical school and sent to the fleet after passing a basic qualifying test. Some who volunteered or transferred to the gunboats by choice did prove effective, yet others were failures, not well regarded by their officers or fellows, and not just because they were seen as “light built (mostly boys)” or physically unequal to their new responsibilities.
Regardless of the quality of the men filling the Northern squadron’s hammocks, they were at least on duty. Their education was provided through mostly regular drill and admonition (particularly Sunday services) from officers, as well as newspapers and other materials obtained in ports visited. After Vicksburg was taken, furloughs and liberty were increased for men lucky enough to spend time at a major base town, though those serving off remote locations in the various districts were kept aboard except for sanctioned shore visits. Discipline was, with several notable lapses, maintained at all locations.
In one respect, the men were more fortunate than blue water sailors in their GI rations. Their victuals could be supplemented through locally purchased or foraged foodstuffs ranging from blackberries to beef. Space does not permit us to look further at the daily lives of the men who manned the Mississippi Squadron, and so we now leave that to others.
During the late spring of 1863 as the Vicksburg campaign reached a climax, RAdm. Porter worried over a recurring manpower deficiency which had plagued his organization since 1861. Relatively few regular officers (about 50) were available, and even worse, enlisted recruits to the engine rooms and lower decks were few despite active recruiting that extended to foreigners and Confederate POWs. At the time of the famous dash past the fortress guns in April, Porter was forced to take a mass transfer of 600 soldiers from the Army of the Tennessee, with 800 African American “contrabands” signed on just to replace discharged bluejackets.
As 1863 wore on, both the Union Army and Navy found the contrabands a source of manpower that could be continuously tapped in large numbers and molded into useful soldiers and sailors. Many were recently unshackled slaves, while some were freedmen. Their contribution, though, was not immediately appreciated. A correspondent, writing in the November 30 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune, summed up a widespread belief that “although most every gunboat of the Mississippi River Squadron has more or less of them … they are more efficient as soldiers.”
“I could get no men,” RAdm. Porter, not an initial supporter of the idea, later wrote to RAdm. Andrew H. Foote, “so I work in the darkies.” Perhaps remembering his ordeal aboard the tinclad Cricket in the Red River in April 1864, the commander of the Mississippi Squadron confessed his change-of-heart to his predecessor concerning the use of contraband sailors: “They do first-rate, and are far better behaved than their masters.” He became an effective advocate for their recruitment, believing that, by shipping African Americans, he helped to lessen Southern white resistance, politically and militarily. Bringing them into his fleet also partially addressed a continuing scarcity of Caucasian nautical manpower. By fall 1864, “contraband” bluejackets would fill 23 percent of all USN enlisted billets.
Being an African American in the Mississippi Squadron was not easy. Segregated and stigmatized by their white fellows, they were paid lower wages as well and were unable to rise above the rank of petty officer. Though he never saw them as equals, Porter still found them healthier and sturdier than sailors recruited further north. Although many were integrated when necessary, say, into gun crews, they usually performed the most menial tasks, afloat and ashore, including all manner of busywork and manual labor, such as shifting stores and coaling ship. Yet and all, the Black contribution to the Western waters war effort was considerable and the participation proud.7
To keep their men informed and to supplement the rules and regulations issued by the Navy Department, most of the Union’s Civil War admirals made their expectations known to the men of their commands through a series of General Orders. One of the more literate of 19th-century naval commanders, Porter was among the most prolific, sending out a large number of these orders from the 1862 day he took over the Mississippi Squadron until the day in 1864 he went east. Topics ranged from campaign expectations to ordnance and hygiene instruction. All are reproduced in the Official Records.8
Among the matters of greatest concern to history’s admirals has been the administration and efficient operation of their fleets or squadrons, and Porter was certainly no different in this regard. During his voyage back up the Mississippi from New Orleans in early August, it is probable that he devoted some time to a consideration of what changes might be made in or added to an organizational directive he had first issued as General Order No. 80 three months earlier. In a meeting with Capt. Pennock following his Cairo return, he likely sought the captain’s advice on a revised and forthcoming administrative edict.
While the final push against Vicksburg was underway back in May, it is probable that the squadron commander, when taking the time to consider his unit’s deployment in the months ahead, had recalled a preliminary and partial divisional reconfiguration in April. While Porter was below in the months after Christmas, he left Pennock largely in charge of the fleet’s upriver section, with particular responsibility for ensuring smooth logistical support for the U.S. Army campaigns in Kentucky and Tennessee. Although the fleet captain had appointed an efficient executive officer for this mission, it was soon found that there were too few gunboats and sailors to accomplish all that was expected over the huge area. In March, Pennock asked his superior, then off Vicksburg, to permit him to divide the upper river task force into two tasks groups, to be coordinated from Cairo. The scheme was ordered implemented by Porter on April 15.
When General Order No. 84 was issued on August 20, it, together with continued portions of No. 80, would provide the Union’s brown water navy with a detailed operational guide. From time to time over the next year as the squadron grew in size, it would be amplified by later General Orders. As this blueprint would be followed for the remainder of the conflict (though strained considerably during the 1864 Red River and Nashville campaigns), it is worthwhile to review it here in some detail.
RAdm. Porter issued the inaugural outline of his divisional administrative plan “with characteristic energy” on May 20, General Order No. 20, for the U.S. Mississippi Squadron. His directive divided the operational area of the Mississippi Squadron into six geographical “sections,” each, as the admiral later wrote, “extending between specified points” that corresponded to certain river lengths. Given the July triumph at Vicksburg and the withdrawal of RAdm. Farragut’s fleet from the river, the district scheme was first modified in mid-August, when the sections became “districts” and a new disposition was announced.
The waters within these boundaries were “filled up with light-draft or ‘tinclad’ vessels, to cruise up and down the river and carry dispatches.” The light draughts in this chain were intended to be “strung along the river between ironclads.” Lookouts aboard were “to watch the shore very close and capture every strolling party they may come across.” Boats and skiffs encountered along the banks were to be captured and “every available method” taken to break up and disperse guerrillas, preventing troops and munitions from crossing. Ferries were regulated to prevent the passage to and fro of unauthorized persons.
The new geographical units, initially called “sections,” were led by divisional officers, all trusted regular navy officers, who commanded a certain number of named vessels. For example, Division Four from Natchez to Vicksburg was led from the Benton by Lt. Cmdr. James A. Greer. It also included four tinclads, as well as two other ironclads, Carondelet and Pittsburg. It was seen as particularly important for these officers to cultivate “good feelings” with local inhabitants and prevent any improprieties ashore by their sailors.
Porter’s leaders were also charged with the maintenance of “strict discipline,” for cooperation with various U.S. Army officers, and were to employ all of their spare time directly or by mandate to their subordinates “exercising the men with the great guns and small arms.” The district chiefs would approve all acquisitions (except money) and forward on all communications from subordinates to Cairo. It went without saying, as many of the tinclad captains and officers were new or untested, that considerable guidance for them was also required.
Additionally, it was understood that vessels within a district could not leave station without the authority of the district leader and could not depart the district except in great emergency or with an order from RAdm. Porter. When a transport or convoy was to be escorted across several districts, gunboats from each district would rendezvous with it and provide escort through the assigned area. Confinement of these task groups to certain river sectors and familiar association between their personnel allowed those involved, including the district officer, gunboat commanders, pilots, and crews, to develop significant knowledge of local river conditions as well as intelligence concerning Confederate activities and practice.
The vessels in these new districts would serve in all manner of capacities, with all but the heaviest support usually provided by the light draughts. At any given time, they would be, in single mission or combination, patrol and convoy escort boats, gunfire support vessels, swift raiders, minesweepers, troop ship guardians or anchorage pickets, dispatch and light replenishment vessels, towboats, and occasionally VIP transports. As additional light draughts became available to the districts in 1864, ironclads would largely remain all but stationary, some of them being quite battle weary after three years of war. For speed, district commanders would usually oversee activities within their commands from the deck of a tinclad.
As the war intensified further east and down the Western rivers following the spring 1864 Red River campaign, RAdm. Porter found it necessary to revise his district plan in order to increased demand with the resources available. Two more administrative-operational units were promulgated in new General Orders published on May 20 and 27. This chart represents the district breakdown which, with the fall addition of an Eleventh District to cover the Upper Tennessee, would remain largely the same for the rest of the war:
This decentralized district plan worked well and, having provided these general rules, RAdm. Porter did not often interfere with the routine work of his area commanders. All of his officers—particularly battle-tested leaders—were given the necessary authority to carry out their duties, were supported in their actions, and, for the most part, were not second-guessed.
“It is difficult to determine the importance of Porter’s district policy in Union naval control of the rivers,” wrote a group of distinguished scholars in 1986, “but the evidence strongly suggests that it was effective and efficient.” Writing in 2007, Gary D. Joiner stated that this “district system worked as planned.” He continued: “The rivers were never without a well-armed patrol, and the gunboats appeared along the same stretch of river often, but at irregular intervals.” Mark Jenkins amplified this opinion in 2013 when he wrote that the approach permitted the warships to reach “trouble spots and deal with matters, and then [to] leave once the job was done, so that there was no stationary ‘occupying’ force that might have increased local resentment.”
Ever since his assumption of squadron command, Porter had one organizational headache he could not cure—the Mississippi Marine Brigade (MMB), referenced above under our vessel discussion. This 350-or-so-man amphibious unit, comprising infantry, cavalry, and artillery, was established earlier in 1863 as successor to the War Department’s U.S. Ram Fleet and was commanded by Brig. Gen. Alfred W. Ellet. The MMB was supposed to function under USN direction like a Marine force, but, because it was not officially subject to its orders, it became, due in part to a series of miscommunications, a source of great displeasure for the admiral after the Vicksburg campaign. At the end of August 1863, both the MMB and it boats were placed under authority of Maj. Gen. Grant, though Porter would not receive official notification of the changeover until October. Thereafter until the unit was disbanded in 1864, it more fully concentrated on land operations than amphibious.9
During his deliberations on squadron strengths and organization, RAdm. Porter also gave further thought to the way in which his mission was impacted by the new strategic situation in the West. While preparing his report on his New Orleans visit to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles on August 16, RAdm. Porter indicated that the river, during his entire trip up, was “unusually quiet.” How long would it remain so?
Based on information gleaned from various sources during his return voyage to Cairo, a previous understanding gained from his own experience in 1862, and reports from civilian rivermen and his own subordinates, Porter had developed a detailed understanding of the geography and navigational peculiarities of the Western rivers. Likewise, he appreciated the “rumors of trouble” ahead as the enemy recovered from the Vicksburg/Port Hudson catastrophes. The squadron commander now set off to “visit the different stations on the river,” and as during his voyage he considered the challenges that lay ahead, let us look at the immediate strategic situation.10
As the news of the victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg spread across the North a few weeks earlier, it had caused a sense of joy and some relief in even wavering circles that the cause of the Union just might triumph. The twin achievement was, as Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman wrote his wife on July 5, “the first gleam of daylight in this war.” President Abraham Lincoln, who had long doubted the river campaign wisdom of his principal Western field commander, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, wrote to him on July 13 admitting “you were right and I was wrong.” In Richmond and across the Confederacy, the defeats brought, in the words of War Secretary James A. Seddon, a “shock of despondency and foreboding.” The capture of Vicksburg was devastating as the map of the seceded nation was cut in half along the line of the Mississippi. Fully blocked by river since 1861, commerce from the upper Midwest—site, because of its dependence on trade, of the greatest resistance to the Lincoln government—could now flow to the Gulf and world markets. Any Southern dream of a Northwestern breakaway died on July 4.11
Although the steamy summer months in the West were now golden with opportunity, the strategic situation for the Federals was cloudy at best. To be frank, as Donald Stoker opined in his 2010 review: “The Union left Grant to go to seed not long after his great victory at Vicksburg. For nearly three months he did not exercise a major command, particularly one in the field, and saw his army broken up and scattered from Chattanooga to Arkansas to Louisiana.” Numerous ideas for campaigns were advanced by generals and politicians in Northern military circles and possible goals like the capture of Mobile, Alabama, or occupation and pacification of Arkansas, Louisiana, or even Texas were discussed. After much talk, General in Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck advised simply: “Wherever the enemy concentrates we must concentrate to oppose him.”12
The Western setbacks of July were also—and naturally—a great concern to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Secretary Seddon, and most of the South’s generals. General Josiah Gorgas, Chief of Ordnance, wrote in his diary on the 28th: “Yesterday, we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.” Indeed, the setbacks proved a source of backbiting among certain of them as they lobbied for new incursions into Union-held territory, both east and west, as well as a variety of schemes to once more block Northern river commerce and transport.
Following the final destruction of the small naval station at Yazoo City, Mississippi, in mid-July 1863, the Confederate Navy had only a tiny brown water naval presence on the Western waters, principally at Shreveport, Louisiana, where the ironclad CSS Missouri was being completed. The organization would have no operational impact in the area for the remainder of the conflict. Resistance to Northern transit of the Mississippi would rely, as it had for most of the past year, upon Confederate land troops (regular and irregular). If available, a few surviving military steamers could intervene. An example was the cottonclad Dr. Beatty, now hiding at Harrisonburg, Louisiana, on the Ouachita River, which had participated in the destruction of USS Indianola in February.
After Vicksburg fell, Davis, Seddon and most Confederate generals came to believe that, even if it could no longer employ fixed river fortresses for defense, it remained imperative for the South to close down the Mississippi “at least for trade,” even if it could not prevent its use by the Northern army and navy. To that end, attacks on civilian transport would be as frequent and heavy as possible and any previous scruples over firing into passenger steamers would be abandoned. While the ultimate political target of this campaign would be the United States as a whole, in particular, it was aimed at the voters of the Northwestern states who relied upon the Big Muddy to get their goods to a world market.
Every manner of military officer, politician, and newspaper editor in the South voiced opinions on exactly how the anti-commercial campaign should be run. Some suggested raids on riverfront communities while others believed that large bands of irregulars or batteries of “flying” artillery could do the job. As late as March 21, 1864, Gen. Leonidas Polk would write President Davis suggesting a scheme to employ mounted troops to capture steamboats and create a new fleet of Rebel gunboats. The campaign which followed would be intense with all of those tactics employed. Unhappily for the Confederacy, however, it could not consistently pursue any approach because it did not have the manpower to operate sustained anti-shipping missions. There were other war-fighting concerns to be addressed, in the East, in the Southeast, and along the coasts, in addition to halting river commerce and remaining in communication with the Trans-Mississippi area.
After a period of command-level consternation, conversation, and correspondence in which he participated, President Davis, in an effort to reclaim his infant nation’s Western position, would reorganize the staff list of his Confederate generals in that area. Lack of elan, real or perceived, would hopefully be replaced by a more aggressive approach. In mid-July, Gen. Polk, whose river hopes we’ve noted, would write the chief executive suggesting a new Middle Tennessee campaign, for which planning was immediately begun.13
Meanwhile in the Department of the Tennessee, the commander, General Grant, unlike certain of his Civil War contemporaries, did not like to wait around hoping a superior would soon come up with an actionable plan for operations. As the hot and thirsty summer, with attendant sickness and uncertainty, walked by hand in hand with the paper shuffling of uncertain planners, the victorious Union champion, who wished to advance on Mobile, Alabama, was, instead, required to transfer numerous troops from the Vicksburg environs to Louisiana, Kentucky, and Missouri. Counterinsurgency and river protection now occupied Grant and his subordinates, who launched raids on the Southern war effort within their departmental region. Every item of possible use to Dixie’s independence supporters (and, unhappily, others besides) appeared on the list, including railroads, mills and small industrial plants or service facilities, ferries, storage facilities, and agricultural products, including cotton. These assaults, both large and small, actually foreshadowed a key war-fighting approach employed during the remainder of the conflict. While alert to the possibilities of larger-scale battle, these usually smaller operations, conducted in an amphibious mode with the Mississippi Squadron when advantageous or necessary, were coupled with the continuing difficulties of contraband interdiction and a growing counterinsurgency campaign.
Ulysses S. Grant. Victorious captor of Vicksburg in July 1863, Maj. Gen. Grant would be promoted and transferred east in early 1864 to face the Confederates under Gen. Robert E. Lee. Before his departure and afterwards as chief of all Federal armies, he would continue participation in or oversight of Western campaigns and administrative matters both large and small (Library of Congress).
As earlier, military operations in the Department of the Tennessee were where possible coordinated with the Mississippi Squadron under RAdm. Porter. In addition to direct combat and logistical support, the sailors continued to conduct their own counterinsurgency and riverbank amphibious actions, while protecting waterborne commerce, assisting refugees and contrabands, and participating in the enforcement of civilian trading regulations.14
1. 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. 20, 253, 272, 393, 801–803 (cited hereafter as ORN, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]); ORN, I, 25: 332; Richard B. Irwin, ”The Capture of Port Hudson,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, edited by Robert V. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (4 vols.; New York: The Century Company, 1884–1887; reprint, New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), III, 597–598 (whole 586–598); Chester G. Hearn, Admiral David Dixon Porter: The Civil War Years (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 235–237; Donald M. Browning, Jr., Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron During the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 322; Richard E. Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 263; Spencer C. Tucker, “Capturing the Confederacy’s Western Waters,” Naval History, XX (June 2006), 21 (whole 16–23).
2. ORN, I, 20: 392–394, 433, 442–443; ORN, I, 25: 335; Hearn, Admiral David Dixon Porter, 237; Browning, Lincoln’s Trident, 325; George S. Burkhardt, ed., Sailing with Farragut: The Civil War Recollections of Bartholomew Diggins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016), 94, 108–109; Roy Baslr, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (6 vols.; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), VI, 409–410. Pennock would serve as acting squadron commander from July to November 1864, when he transferred east and Acting RAdm. Samuel Lee took over. Cmdr. Andrew Bryson, a district commander and veteran ironclad captain, would serve as fleet captain from January 1865.
3. William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 121; Chicago Daily Tribune, May 19, 24, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, November 26, 1863; William H. Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T. O. H. P Burnham, 1863), 331; Taylor, pseud., “American Civil War News & Events, October 3, 2012: The Importance of Cairo,” American Civil War Forum, https://www.americancivilwarforum.com/the-importance-of-cairo-1902715.html (accessed September 3, 2019); James M. Merrill, "Cairo, Illinois: Strategic Civil War River Port," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, LXXVI (Winter 1983), 242–257; T. K. Kionka, Key Command: Ulysses S. Grant’s District of Cairo (Shades of Blue and Gray Series; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 117–118; Edward J. Huling, Reminiscences of Gunboat Life in the Mississippi Squadron (Saratoga Springs, NY: Sentinel Print, 1881), 3–4; Donald L. Canney, The Old Steam Navy, Vol. 2: The Ironclads, 1842–1885 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), 41; James B. Eads to Gideon Welles, May 8, 1861, Gideon Welles Papers, Library of Congress; Francis Trevelyan Miller, The Photographic History of The Civil War, Vol. 6: The Navies (New York: Castle Books, 1957), 213–215; John McMurray Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois (Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Son, 1910), 130–137; “The Illinois Central and the Civil War—Railroading Under Two Flags,” Illinois Central Magazine, LII (April 1961), 1–30. As noted, it was not uncommon at this time for several vessels to be moored near and/or to the principal wharf boat, particularly those under repair or being outfitted or provisioned. This could be dangerous, as a near disaster of February 7, 1863 revealed. While being outfitted, the tinclad Glide was moored astern of and to the wharf boat outboard of the provision/inspection boat Abraham and the gunboat General Price. That night, the new warship caught fire and would have consumed all four units except that Capt. Pennock and rapidly responding sailors quickly had her towed out into the river by a tug, where she drifted downstream and burnt out on the Kentucky shore. ORN, I, 24: 305–308.
4. Huling, Reminiscences of Gunboat Life, 2–3; William Henry Perrin, History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois (2 vols.; Chicago: G. L. Baskin & Co., 1883), II, 543–550; New York Daily Tribune, May 13, 1864; Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1864, August 21, 1865; Louisville Daily Democrat, June 3, 1864; Mark Jenkins, “The Naval War: Mound City Naval Station,” Civil War Talk, https://civilwartalk.com/threads/mound-city-naval-station.88968/ (accessed October 20, 2019); Mark J. Wegner and Go Matsumoto, “The Mound City Naval Base: Illinois’ Forgotten Civil War Site,” Illinois Antiquity, XLIX (September 2014), 3–6; Spencer C. Tucker, “Mound City Naval Station,” in Tucker, ed., American Civil War: A State by State Encyclopedia (2 vols.; Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2015), I, 186–187; Ellen Ryan Jolly, Nuns of the Battlefield (Providence, RI: The Providence Visitor Press, 1927), 124–157; Louis A. La Garde, Description of the Models of Hospital Steam Vessels from the Army Medical Museum, Washington, D.C. (War Department Exhibit, No. 2; Chicago: World’s Columbian Exhibition, 1892), 3–10; William E. Parrish, "The Western Sanitary Commission," Civil War History, XXXVI (March 1990), 17–35.
5. After Vicksburg fell, the Mississippi Squadron continued to forward monthly vessel location reports to the Navy Department and these are cited in the Navy Official Records.
6. ORN, I, 27: 264–265, 282; Hearn, Admiral David Dixon Porter, 150–151; U.S. Navy Department, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1863 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1863), ix; The Natchez Courier, December 1, 1863; Paul H. Silverstone, Warships of the Civil War Navies (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1989), 147–186; Donald L. Caney, The Old Steam Navy, Vol. 2: The Ironclads, 1842–1885 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1993), 35–118; Hearn, Ellet’s Brigade: The Strangest Outfit of All (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Frederick Way, Jr., Way’s Packet Directory, 1848–1994: Passenger Steamboats of the Mississippi River System Since the Advent of Photography in Mid-Continent America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983; rev. ed., 1994), 31, 470; Steven Louis Roca, “Presence and Precedents: The USS Red Rover Suring the American Civil War, 1861–1865,” Civil War History, XLIV (June 1998), 91–110; William L. Dike, U.S.S. Red Rover: Civil War Hospital Ship (Baltimore, MD: Publish America, 2004), 5,14, 22, 56, 60; Peggy Brase Seigel, “She Went to War: Indiana Nurses in the Civil War,” Indiana Magazine of History, LXXXVI (March 1990), 11–12; Judith E. Harper, Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2004), 199. Some controversy has developed over whether or not the Sisters of the Holy Cross were, as has been claimed, the forerunners of the Navy Nurse Corps or whether the Red Rover was the premier USN hospital ship. Raising this very question while undertaking a review of the Sisters of the Holy Cross Civil War roadside marker, the Indiana Historical Bureau noted that, henceforth, it would avoid “the use of subjective and superlative terms such as ‘first,’ ‘best,’ and ‘most.’ Such claims are often not verifiable and/or require extensive qualification to be truly accurate.” Indiana Historical Bureau, IHB Marker Review 71.1965.1, Sisters of the Holy Cross, Civil War Nurses, 1861–1865 St. Joseph County Marker Text Review Report, June 17, 2013, https://www.in.gov/history/files/71.1965.1review.pdf (accessed October 31, 2019).
7. Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1863, ix; Bern Anderson, By Sea and by River: The Naval History of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1962), 196; Chicago Daily Tribune, November 30, 1863; Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 155–181; Michael J. Bennett, “Dissenters from the American Mood: Why Men Became Yankee Sailors During the Civil War,” North & South, VIII (February 2005), 12–21; Hearn, Admiral David Dixon Porter, 239; Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (DeKalb: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 120–122; Charles C. Brewer, “African-American Sailors and the Unvexing of the Mississippi River,” Prologue, XXX (Winter 1996), 279–28; ORN, I, 23: 535, 603, 638; Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 195–196; ORN, I, 23: 603; ORN, 1, 25: 325; ORN, I, 24: 545; Charles O. Paullin, Paullin’s History of Naval Administration, 1775–1911 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1968), 299; Donald L. Canney, Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861–65 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1998), 141, 144; U.S. Navy Department, General Orders and Circulars, 1863–1887 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 56. Porter’s advocacy of Black sailor recruitment was most clearly shown by his famous General Order No. 76 penned in July 1863. It is often seen as a de facto summarization of the contemporary USN attitude toward African American enlistees. Canney, Lincoln’s Navy, 138–139.
8. Christopher H. Sterling, Military Communications: From Ancient Times to the 21st Century (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2008), 19, 483; Timothy S. Wolters, Information at Sea: Shipboard Command and Control in the U.S. Navy, from Mobile Bay to Okinawa (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), chap. 1; Hearn, Admiral David Dixon Porter, 153.
9. ORN, I, 24:50–54, 463–464, 472, 672; ORN, I, 25:124–125, 295, 319, 377–379; 11 ORN, I, 26: 329–330; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 216–217; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, October 2, 1863; Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986), 191–192; Gary D. Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 173; David Dixon Porter, Naval History of the Civil War (New York: Sherman Publishing Company, 1886; reprint, Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1984), 339; Mark F. Jenkins, “War on the Mississippi, Post Vicksburg,” Civil War Talk, July 15, 2013, https://civilwartalk.com/threads/war-on-the-mississippi-post-vicksburg.86763/#post-677882 (accessed November 1, 2019); Warren D. Crandall and Isaac D. Newell, History of the Ram Fleet and Mississippi Marine Brigade (St. Louis, MO: Buschart Brothers, 1907), 304; Hearn, Ellet’s Brigade, 179–186; Thomas E. Walker, “The Origins of the Mississippi Marine Brigade: The First Use of Brown Water Tactics by the United States in the Civil War” (unpublished MA thesis, Texas Christian University, 2006), 18–52. Creation and administration of the district arrangement of the Mississippi Squadron is worthy of further study, perhaps a lengthy article or PhD dissertation.
10. ORN, I, 25: 370–371; Alfred T. Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, Vol. 3 of The Navy in the Civil War (New York: Scribner's, 1883), 174. Porter commanded Farragut’s mortar flotilla in the New Orleans and Vicksburg campaigns the previous summer, participating not only in the bombardment of those towns, but the effort to halt the South’s only successful Western waters ironclad, the CSS Arkansas.
11. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 499; 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 IV, Vol. 2, 991 (cited hereafter as OR, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]); OR, I, 52, 1:406; Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp 157–159.
12. Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 307; OR, I, 24, 3:497–498, 552–553); Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: A Modern Abridgment (New York: Premier Books, 1962), 388–389.
13. OR, I, 22, 2: 946, 952–953, 971, 988; OR, I, 26, 2: 114; OR, I, 30, 4: 508–509; OR, I, 34, 2: 1065–1067; OR, I, 52, 2: 599–601, 638–39; Frank E. Vandiver, ed., The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1947), 55; Hess, The Civil War in the West, 162–163; Stoker, The Grand Design, 316–322; Michael Cassamasse, “Re: CSS Missouri Ram,” Civil War Message Board, July 30, 2005, http://www.history-sites.net/cgi-bin/bbs62x/cwnavy/webbbs_config.pl?md=read;id=1077 (accessed November 1, 2019).
14. OR, I, 24, 3: 528, 546–547; Stoker, The Grand Design, 308; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: A Modern Abridgment (New York: Premier Books, 1962), 342, 389; Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 159–163; Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won the Civil War (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 489–490; Archer Jones, “Military Means, Political Ends: Strategy,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 70–71.