4
Although the July Yazoo City raid ordered by RAdm. Porter was one of immediate army support, the next strike was more carefully planned. Others like it would follow. Specifically, these were designed, in the words of Lt. Cmdr. Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., “to make such captures of cotton and other stores as might prove practicable and to drive Confederate forces away from the vicinity of [river mouths].” Led by Selfridge in the old timberclad Conestoga, in company with the tinclads Forest Rose, Petrel, Manitou (later renamed Fort Hindman), and Rattler, this outing departed the mouth of the Red River on July 12 en route to Trinity, Louisiana. Interestingly, the task group flagboat towed a raft with a 100-pounder Parrott gun mounted.
Lt. Cmdr. Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., USN. The son of a rear admiral, Selfridge survived the sinking of the USS Cumberland by the CSS Virginia and two Western waters warships, Cairo and Conestoga, which he commanded. He was captain of the monitor Osage during the Red River Expedition of 1864 and, in 1898, retired with the same rank as his father (Naval History and Heritage Command).
The path chosen for ascent was, in fact, a waterline that ran parallel with the Mississippi and featured at its furthest extent a large region of navigable waters, Tensas Lake and Bayou Macon. This head of navigation for the Tensas River was at a point but 30 miles from Vicksburg and only five miles from the Mississippi.
The group’s specific mission was to capture cotton and fugitive steamers and to interrupt irregular Rebel attacks on Mississippi River transports by men firing from the shores of the intervening narrow strip of land.
Moving from the Red into the Black, Selfridge’s gunboats steamed with some care up the narrow channels of that stream and the connecting Tensas. Navigating the difficulties of the water approaches without incident, the timberclad and tinclads suddenly emerged that afternoon on the lake and bayou. At dusk, lookouts aboard the gunboats spied a pair of transports in the distance, the Dr. Batey (which had participated in the February capture of USS Indianola) and Nelson, both of which escaped. Still, a large quantity of ammunition from Natchez was seized after its landing on the lake shore. Overnight, July 12/13, the gunboats were divided into task units, with two tinclads sent up the Tensas at first light and two up the Little Red River, a tributary of the Black River.
Steamer on the Little Red River. While participating in a Mississippi Squadron raid in July 1863, two light draught gunboats ascended the Little Red River (shown in the 1930s), where they captured one of the South’s last big steamboats, the Louisville. She would be converted into the largest “tinclad,” the 40-gun Ouachita (Library of Congress).
The Manitou and Rattler, after groping their way carefully up the twisty Little Red River, returned at noon with a prize, the Louisville, one of the South’s largest remaining vessels. Indeed, the 227.6-foot-long side-wheel Mississippi packet would be converted into the largest tinclad, the 40-gun Ouachita. About the same time, the Petrel and Forest Rose exited from the Tensas with the stern-wheeler Elmira, caught with a cargo of Confederate sugar, rum, and military stores. A further but unsuccessful light draught scout was conducted up the Tensas that afternoon during which great quantities of burning cotton were observed.
While the Petrel convoyed the prizes to the mouth of the Red River on July 14, the Conestoga led the remaining three tinclads on a reconnaissance toward a fort reportedly being built near Harrisonburg, a town of about 800. The four boats anchored slightly below the wooden Confederate bastion that night and, at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, the Conestoga and Manitou cruised up to within two miles of the fort. Lt. Cmdr. Selfridge elected to test its strength by firing three shells toward it from the 100-pounder Parrot mounted on the raft the timberclad was towing. There was no response.
A thick fog came on about an hour later that required the gunboats to withdraw. The visit, Selfridge later wrote, did, however, reveal that the enclave “contained guns too heavy to be trifled with by wooden gunboats.” When Porter heard from Selfridge upon his return to Trinity that evening, he observed that the capture of the ammunition from Natchez left the Confederate river raiders without the bullets and powder needed and so they “moved [their] forces into the interior and troubled the Mississippi no more.”1
One of the larger concerns faced by the Mississippi Squadron in summer 1863 and thereafter had much more to do with economics than war fighting—trade, or specifically, cotton trade. “After the fall of Vicksburg,” wrote Philip Leich in 2014, the Confederates “depended almost entirely on cotton trade to obtain the necessities of war and many of the things required to merely avoid hunger and provide shelter for civilians.” Overseas export was one possibility, often via Mexico and the Gulf, to get the product out. “But as the conflict continued, an even greater market for Southerners who chose ‘self interest over nationalism’” was accessed with agreeable Northerners via interbelligerent trade along the Mississippi and her tributaries. New Orleans at one end of the great river, along with Helena and Memphis, became the new capitals for this enterprise, which was sometimes illicit and covertly sanctioned by military personnel for personal gain, but often licensed by government agencies as well for the benefit of “loyal” citizens in conquered areas.
Interbelligerent commerce was bitterly opposed by Maj. Gen. Grant, Sherman, and, initially, RAdm. Porter as unhelpful to the war effort. The Department of the Mississippi commander complained that traders, even those licensed by the Treasury Department, provided news and intelligence to the enemy while also requiring physical protection as they conducted their business. Indeed, many of the items traded directly assisted the Confederate military’s prosecution of the conflict.
Trading between the lines was also quite injurious to the morale of soldiers who were unpaid and endangered acting as guards for private gain, which, on occasion, included watching officers participate “in secret partnership with some operator of cotton.” Bluecoats would become quite incensed as the admiral more frequently applied naval prize law to cotton and other contraband goods seized by his vessels as opportunity arose.
The commanders used their influence to stop this commerce, finding methods such as strict convoy requirements or limiting gold-for-cotton payments. But because of political and economic pressures from Northern manufacturers and financiers, politicians from Lincoln downwards agreed to simplify the restrictions on this private practice and would overrule the military leaders. For example, on July 19, Grant wrote to Porter from Vicksburg suggesting “that the gunboats between here and Cairo be instructed to let all boats pass until further orders, without convoy.” The shippers had complained that the time needed to form several vessels into protectable groups ate time; the squadron commander complied with Grant’s note. The same complaints were heard in all the squadron districts, and were resisted by their local naval chiefs as possible, though rules for strict convoy, at least for the moment, disappeared.2
Illicit trade. Regulated or contraband trading in cotton and goods along the riverbanks proved difficult to control or eliminate. Federal customs regulations, permits, and other arrangements to handle, enforce, or protect goods changed frequently and ranged from outright prohibition to the requirement that Union gunboats guard trading vessels. When a landing by an independent steamer, like that depicted in this 1870 Currier and Ives print, was intercepted and judged illegal, gunboatmen were empowered to seize the suspect vessel and send it off to a prize court for adjudication (Library of Congress).
Despite the utmost vigilance on the part of the Federal navy, Confederate irregulars, occasionally supplemented by regular army flying artillery, continued as they had for the past two years to take every opportunity to attack Northern river traffic. Quoting from the “Memphis-Granada-Jackson-Atlanta” Appeal on August 8, the Cairo correspondent of the New York Herald reviewed the call by the Rebel paper’s editors for a “systematic plan of [guerrilla] operations on the banks,” one which would “see travelers on the Father of Waters bushwacked from every canebrake and bluff below Memphis.” Such action carried forward, below Memphis and elsewhere, including the upper tributaries, led to numerous sharp ship-shore engagements, but did not significantly impact Federal bulk carriage.
Unlike the Yazoo and Ouachita sweeps, the next sizeable Mississippi Squadron mission was more than a pinprick. The capture of Vicksburg freed thousands of Union troops for other duty and, some were now sent to Maj. Gen. John Scofield’s Department of the Missouri to assist in the subjugation of Confederate Arkansas. Before the end of July, Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele, a West Point classmate of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had arrived at Helena to take command of all Federal troops in Arkansas and to mount an assault ordered by General in Chief Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck on its capital, Little Rock.
RAdm. Porter was contacted for gunboat support on the White River and a task group was readied to provide assistance. At this time, Lt. George M. Bach, the Helena-based leader of Lt. Cmdr. Seth Ledyard Phelps’ Fifth Division, was operating interdiction missions off the mouth of the White River. Alerted that elements of the Federal army would soon be headed his way, it was his task group that was congregated in support near Montgomery Point, Mississippi, across from the White’s entrance.
As the naval vessels gathered, plans were finished for a ground attack on Little Rock. The incursion was not secret as The New York Times reported in an August 12 headline, “Gunboats to Co-Operate with Gen’l Steele’s Expedition.” The first Federal participant underway was Brig. Gen. John Davidson’s cavalry contingent from St. Louis. XVI Corps commander Maj. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut, upon orders from Grant, orchestrated the expedition from Memphis. Marching overland from Helena, the assigned VII Corps infantry would halt at Clarendon or Des Arc to join the cavalry from Missouri. Naval cooperation was desired at the final rendezvous point. While supply depots were established, Bache’s gunboats were to scout as far up the White as possible, hopefully to Jacksonport.
After a 350-mile ride, Davidson’s 6,000 “sabers” with three batteries of artillery reached the L’Anguille River at Crowley’s Ridge, Arkansas, on August 1–3. Heading west to Clarendon, they sought five days later the protection of a pair of gunboats while a bridge was thrown across the White River. Appraised of the campaign’s support requirements by Maj. Gen. Steele, Bache weighed for Clarendon, 130 miles upstream from Helena, on August 8. Led by the temporary flagboat Cricket, four light draughts proceeded, meeting neither natural nor human obstruction. St. Charles was found deserted and “but little signs of life” were seen on the river.3
The next day, the Bache group came to at Clarendon, where the lieutenant met with Davidson, who was frustrated by the river level, which prevented bridge construction and, indeed, was “higher than it has been at this season of the year since ’44.” After the two reviewed possibilities, the sailor dispatched the Marmora and Linden back downstream before dusk with the general’s request for a pair of coal barges adaptable into troop ferries.
On August 10, the tinclads convoyed Steele’s 6,000-man Army of Arkansas up, from Helena, with 39 cannon, the Marmora towing the barges. Simultaneously, the Cricket was on a Devalls Bluff reconnaissance while the big-gun timberclad Lexington arrived at Clarendon the next day, allowing plans to be finalized for a reconnaissance sweep toward Jacksonport.
USS Marmora. Joining the war in December 1862, this tinclad was a veteran of the naval war primarily in the Yazoo River area. Assigned to the Fifth District of the Mississippi Squadron, she was one of several tinclads that participated in the August 1863 Little Rock campaign. Following the city’s occupation, she returned to the Yazoo (Naval History and Heritage Command).
With two companies of 82nd Iowa Infantry and a St. Louis newspaperman also embarked, Bache, aboard the Lexington, weighed with the Marmora and Cricket on August 13. The voyage required two days and paid large dividends, even though it only reached Augusta, 75 miles below Jacksonport. Despite spirited Southern opposition from the riverbanks along the way, the expedition succeeded in destroying the telegraph at Des Arc, captured the fugitive Rebel steamers Kaskaskia and Tom Sugg, the last two Rebel transports known to be on the river, and most importantly, learned the location of Confederate Brig. Gen. John S. Marmaduke’s Confederate command northeast of Little Rock. When the task group returned to Clarendon on the evening of August 15, the White was falling at the rate of 12 inches per day, which, under protection from the Linden, had allowed Brig. Gen. Davidson to start the transfer of his men.
By August 19, all of Davidson’s cavalry division was across the river on the coal barge ferries. Writing to RAdm. Porter from Clarendon during the day, Lt. Bache predicted that Maj. Gen. Steele’s army would be over three days hence. Reporting on that achievement on August 23, the ground commander noted establishment of his new depot at DeValls Bluff, suggesting that “with such a base as this, it will be a very easy matter to carry on operations against Little Rock, if proper means be supplied.”
Little Rock was evacuated by the Confederacy on September 9 and occupied by the U.S. VII Corps within a day or so. Reporting from the newly liberated city on September 22, Maj. Gen. Steele praised his naval support, indicating to Maj. Gen. Grant that Phelps and Bache did “everything in their power to further the object of the expedition.” Their gunboats would now help protect his logistical chain, though Lt. Bache would be absent on sick leave for a short time. At the depot town of Devalls Bluff, where many others were also sick, there was considerable optimism that the port could be held against rumored Southern counterattacks. “The White River is navigable for gunboats up to that point,” boasted the Chicago Daily Tribune on September 20, “and the rebels have a holly horror of them!”4
Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele, USA. Following the surrender of Vicksburg, Union XV Army Corps. commander Steele, a West Point classmate of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, received orders to capture and hold Little Rock, Arkansas. His goal was accomplished on September 10, 1863, and he thereafter fought to secure the remainder of the state (Library of Congress).
Attacks on Union shipping continued throughout the late summer on the Mississippi and its tributaries. A tactic that sometimes brought Southern success with unescorted transient steamers was the hail from shore by people (including the occasional women) appearing to be in distress. Once an attracted boat put into the riverbank, guerrillas hidden further back could rush aboard, making an easy capture. Wherever steamers were forced to ease through a bend or otherwise approach the shore, regardless of the Southern river, the presence of Confederate riflemen, regular or irregular, was increasingly anticipated.5
In mid-August as the Little Rock campaign was unfolding, further north in the Volunteer State Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside and William S. Rosecrans, also by order of Maj. Gen. Halleck, had launched campaigns of their own. Aiming for Knoxville, the major city in East Tennessee, the former moved out on August 14 while the latter began climbing the Cumberland Mountains the next day en route to Chattanooga. Located in the Cumberland Mountains on a great bend in the Tennessee River not far from the Georgia border, that community, with a population of about 2,500, was an important railroad junction and communications center, the entry key to Atlanta, Georgia.
About two-thirds of the Army of the Ohio soldiers, including 1,500 cavalry under Col. William Sanders en route from the Buckeye State passed through the Big South Fork area of the Upper Cumberland between August 20 and September 3. Knoxville was occupied without opposition on September 2 as the Confederate Army of Tennessee further south was being reinforced by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s Army of Northern Virginia veterans from the east. Rosecrans arrived at Chattanooga on September 9, but after moving beyond the railroad hub into the northwest corner of Georgia, his troops were defeated at Chickamauga Creek on September 19–20.
Chattanooga and the Tennessee River. The 652-mile Tennessee River is formed at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers east of Knoxville, then passes that city and flows 112-miles south past Chattanooga into Alabama and Mississippi before continuing north into Kentucky to empty into the Ohio River. During the Civil War, Chattanooga was a major Confederate railroad hub and thus became a goal of Union armies in September 1863 (Library of Congress).
Retreating back to the south Tennessee metropolis, the Union soldiers were besieged and their logistics all but failed. The countryside for miles around had been stripped of food and fodder by troops from both sides. A way had to be found to get provisions where they were needed.
Although “Old Rosy” had mounds of supplies in Nashville, the terrain over which it had to be transshipped was awful and famished. The Muscle Shoals prevented steamboat access via the Tennessee River into Chattanooga. Once goods reached supply depots at Stephenson or Bridgeport by rail, they had to be sent across the Tennessee and then on to Chattanooga by wagon, over one of three roads cut through the northern end of Lookout Mountain, the largest of three ridges that slant southwest across the borders of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. These roads were steep and winding and often in disrepair. All Northern transport, ground and water, was subject to attack by Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s Confederate cavalry and irregulars.6
Low water in the upper rivers dramatically slowed the delivery of goods to the defenders of Chattanooga and Knoxville. This unhappy seasonal situation would continue until the water rose sometime in late fall. Quantities of supplies did, however, make it through; for example, on September 28, a shipment of goods that had originated in Louisville passed through Nashville en route to Chattanooga; it included 24,000 shirts, 5,000 blankets, 26,000 pairs of socks, and 5,000 axes. But other shipments were lost. Especially discouraging was the October 1 assault by General Wheeler’s cavalry on Union quartermaster columns in the Sequatchie Valley. Rebel troopers destroyed 350 army wagons and 40 private sutlers’ wagons and captured over a thousand mules. The same riders sacked the town of McMinnville the next day.
On October 5, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wired RAdm. Porter asking if the water were deep enough in the Tennessee River to allow USN protection of supply transportation as far as Florence, Alabama, or Eastport, Mississippi. His telegraph would open a lengthy period of naval cooperation with the army in support of the Chattanooga and Knoxville objectives. Before replying, Porter had an officer assess conditions. Employing this data, Porter replied to Washington that, although the Tennessee was rising, he could not get a gunboat even 45 miles above its mouth.
With the rail connection between Nashville and Bridgeport in poor shape due to Rebel raids and rain, the supply chain from the North to Chattanooga was closing. Confederate activities outside Chattanooga had, by October 8–10, reduced the number of operational and passable supply routes into the city to just one. Without a better logistical arrangement than that, the Army of the Cumberland was doomed.7
On October 10, Secretary Welles transmitted to RAdm. Porter at Mound City a War Department request for gunboat assistance for the operations of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman on the Tennessee River. Sherman was marching to the relief of Chattanooga, and naval craft were required not only to help transfer troops across the river but to convoy the additional supplies required. The precedent set by the Mississippi Squadron on the Mississippi below Vicksburg in April when the fleet crossed Grant’s army was well remembered.
Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. By October 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland, following its loss at Chickamauga, Georgia, was besieged at Chattanooga with only one operational and passable supply route. Sherman at Vicksburg received orders to relieve the trapped garrison, and the Mississippi Squadron was asked to help facilitate his movement across the Tennessee River. Later, after the campaign success that followed, he succeeded Grant as overall Western theater commander (Library of Congress).
The dry summer which had plagued his operations outside Jackson, Mississippi, back in July now frustrated both Sherman and the USN as it was cast into addressing the military challenge. The many bars and shoals in the Tennessee River between Fort Henry and Eastport were exposed, often under less than three feet of water, preventing waterborne movement.
Replying to his Washington superior, Porter confessed that the shallowness of the water prevented his immediate action but promised: “The gunboats will be ready to go up the moment a rise takes place.” Ten days later, Maj. Gen. Grant urged: “The sooner a gunboat can be got to him [Sherman] the better.” The admiral answered that gunboats were on their way. “My intention,” he wrote, “is to send every gunboat I can spare up the Tennessee. I have also sent below for light-drafts to come up. Am sorry to say the river is at a stand.”
Sherman’s XV Corps reached the Tennessee and camps sprang up along the 30-mile railroad stretch from Iuka, Mississippi, to Tuscumbia, Alabama. There it waited for a Tennessee River freshet sufficiently high to permit steamers to take the men across. Acting Master Edward M. King dispatched daily reports on water depth in that stream from Paducah while Lt. Cmdr. Le Roy Fitch communicated the same for the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
Maj. Gen. Grant was given supreme command in the West on October 16, and immediately, the new chief of the Department of the Mississippi moved to remedy the Chattanooga situation, changing commanders and arranging reinforcements and supply. As the month’s second week raced into the third, it also appeared as though there might soon be water enough upriver to allow further army-navy cooperation. Taking that bet, Porter ordered as many gunboats as possible into the upper streams and detailed Lt. Cmdr. Phelps to make an effort to reach Sherman; the general, learning on October 19 that the water level was finally rising, in turn, ordered his Memphis quartermaster to send down a ferryboat.
Grant reached Chattanooga on October 23. The next day, Porter promised Sherman to line the Tennessee “with gunboats” and keep his communications from being interrupted “if there is water in the river.” Phelps simultaneously arrived at Eastport, Mississippi, with the Hastings and Key West and was greeted by officers from a Federal cavalry regiment stationed near the wharf awaiting their arrival. Riders hastened the news over the eight miles to Sherman’s headquarters at Iuka. The XV Corps commanding general, sick on his cot, was roused by the arrival of the horsemen, waving their hats and yelling that the gunboats had arrived. He immediately dispatched an officer with an extra horse, an escort, and an invitation for Phelps to come to camp.
Lt. Cmdr. Seth Ledyard Phelps, USN. To assist in the military relief of Chattanooga, RAdm. Porter ordered as many gunboats as possible into the Tennessee River, detailing Lt. Cmdr. Phelps, then in command off White River, to reach Maj. Gen. Sherman as soon as possible. Arriving at Eastport, Mississippi, with two gunboats in late October 1863, the naval officer met with the general, making arrangements for his craft to immediately begin crossing soldiers. After a month, Phelps would continue his White River duties and, during the 1864 Red River campaign, serve as captain of the ill-fated ironclad Eastport. Dissatisfaction led to his resignation that fall (Naval History and Heritage Command).
Sherman was so pleased to receive the Hastings’ commander that he “almost shook his arm off.” The sailor was invited to spend the night and the two men spoke of many issues, most importantly the matter of getting the thousands of bluecoats across the Tennessee. Both understood that the two gunboats could easily transport the soldiers, but getting the horses, guns, and wagons over was another matter.
Phelps suggested that his nearly empty coal barge be planked over and that it could serve to take the “grub and mules.” Seizing upon the idea, Sherman immediately dispatched carpenters with tools to Eastport to do the job. The modifications were made within hours and the trans-river lift, beginning with the Fourth Division, was started late on October 26. Although two small steamers from Eastport were also chartered into service, the process was slow and it was the night of October 28 before the lead units were over.8
Over the next few days, a sizable naval force, assisted by a “fortunate rise of water,” arrived in the Eastport vicinity to support army operations along the Tennessee River. RAdm. Porter on October 29 encouraged the officers of his Mississippi Squadron “to give all the aid and assistance in their power” to the Chattanooga relief force. The same day, Sherman was appointed commander of the Federal Department of the Tennessee as Grant, elevated to Lt. Gen., was transferred to the East. Porter advised Welles on October 30: “The Lexington, Hastings, Key West, Cricket, Robb, Romeo, and Peosta are detached for duty in the Tennessee River; and the Paw Paw, Tawah, Tyler, and one or two others will soon join them, which will give a good force for that river.”
The effort to support the army was not always easy. Sandbars and other navigation challenges continued to cause crossing problems while the growing number of troop steamers were often harassed by Confederate riflemen. Still, Sherman was able to cheerfully observe to Porter on Halloween, “I think our movement up the Tennessee has taken them by surprise and their cavalry is very much scattered.” The military ashore at Eastport put on a full-scale review on the morning of November 23. It looked “nice from the boats,” remembered Seaman James Dickinson aboard the Tawah. All during the night, however, Confederate forces fired on the landing. Three times the tinclads were called to quarters. The Tawah “threw 20 shell back over the hills.”
On the morning of November 25, a long line of wagons and 9,000 Eastport-based soldiers departed for the war zone. They were accompanied by four artillery batteries. More Federal troops departed the next day and the remainder on November 27, “all for Chattanooga.” Sherman’s corps was across the Tennessee in time to make a difference in the final outcome of the campaign. The naval ferry and associated convoy work, though not strictly a combat operation, was a vital element in that success.
Meanwhile, the USN support effort was shifted over on the gradually rising Cumberland River as a growing number of unprotected transports were paddling to Nashville from Louisville in a logistical effort ratcheted up in response to the army’s increased need of supplies. Confederate riflemen, waiting along the banks, made the steamboatmen pay. Of the eight steamers that reached the landings of the Tennessee capital on November 1–2, three had been badly shot up while passing the village of Davis’ Ripple. Although bullet holes on the boats were everywhere, none of the crews were wounded. Even after convoys were introduced on November 7, some transport captains preferred to travel alone, presuming that their speed would offer protection.
In reviewing the contribution of the Mississippi Squadron during the Chattanooga crisis, RAdm. Porter informed Secretary Welles on December 2, “In the operations lately carried on up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, the gunboats have been extremely active and have achieved with perfect success all that was desired or required of them.”9
Lookout Mountain from the Tennessee River. Fought on November 24, the fog-shrouded Battle of Lookout Mountain helped assure Union control of the Tennessee River and the railroad into Chattanooga. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, watching it from Orchard Knob, labeled it the “Battle Above the Clouds.” (Library of Congress)
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. 25, 264–271 (cited hereafter as ORN, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]); Chicago Daily Tribune, November 22, 1863; Thomas O. Selfridge, Memoirs of Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr., Rear Admiral, U.S.N. (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1924; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 84–86; David Dixon Porter, Naval History of the Civil War (New York: Sherman Publishing Company, 1886; reprint, Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1984), 332–333; Alfred T. Mahan, The Gulf and Inland Waters, Vol. 3 of The Navy in the Civil War (New York: Scribner's, 1883), 177–178.
2. Philip Leich, Trading with the Enemy: The Covert Economy during the American Civil War (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2014), 58, 60–67; Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 115–128; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: A Modern Abridgment (New York: Premier Books, 1962), 207–208; David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p., 184; Merton E. Coulter, “Commercial Intercourse with the Confederacy in the Mississippi Valley, 1861–1865,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, V (March 1919), 392 (whole 377–395); Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton, 2013), 18; David Cohn, The Life and Times of King Cotton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 129; Grant to Porter, July 19, 1863, David Dixon Porter Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.
3. 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. 22, Pt. 1, 472–476, 511 (cited hereafter as OR, followed by the series number, volume number, part number, if any, and page[s]); OR, I, 24:3: 497–499, 513; The New York Times, August 12, 1863; St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1863; Thomas A. DeBlack, With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874 (Histories of Arkansas; Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 93; Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 308; Albert G. Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 152–155. The entire Little Rock campaign, including USN participation is nicely covered in Mark K. Christ, “‘As Much as Humanity Can Stand’: The Little Rock Campaign of 1863,” in Mark K. Christ, ed., “The Earth Reeled and Trees Trembled”: Civil War Arkansas, 1863–1864 (Little Rock, AR: Old State House Museum, 2007), 22–47 and Leo E. Huff, “The Union Expedition Against Little Rock, August–September 1863,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, XXII (Fall 1963), 224–227.
4. OR, I, 22, 1: 511–512;OR, I, 23, 1: 472; ORN, I, 25: 352–363, 367; St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, quoted in the Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1863; New York Daily Tribune, August 29, 1863; Hartford Daily Courant, August 29, 1863; Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1863; Chicago Daily Tribune, quoted in the National Intelligencer, October 6, 1863; Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West, 154, 158; DeBlack, With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874, 92–98; Bobby Roberts, “ Rivers of No Return,” in Mark K. Christ, ed., “The Earth Reeled and Trees Trembled”: Civil War Arkansas, 1863–1864 (Little Rock: Old State House Museum, 2007), 83–84.
5. Memphis Daily Bulletin, September 22, 1863. As Federal forces moved further up the White and Arkansas, attacks on steamers from shore intensified, though brazen attempts to storm boats were actually less frequent here than in other locations such as near Memphis.
6. Mark M. Boatner, III, The Civil War Dictionary (New York: David McKay Company, 1959), 149–150; Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy: War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 292–293; 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), 369–371; William Glenn Robertson et al., Staff Ride Handbook for the Battle of Chickamauga, 18–20 September 1863 (Fort Leavenworth, KA: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Combat Studies Institute, 1992), 27–28. Studies of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns are plentiful. For details, we have chosen to rely upon the work of fellow Tennessean John Bowers, Chickamauga and Chattanooga: The Battles That Doomed the Confederacy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995) and the volume by Steven E. Woodward, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Great Campaigns of the Civil War Series; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); the 15-page pamphlet by Harold S. Fink, The Battle of Knoxville (1863), published by The Knoxville–Knox County Civil War Centennial Committee in 1965, was a helpful introduction as was the 37-page document The Civil War in the Upper Cumberland Plateau and its Effects on the Local Population: A Guide of the Major Events and Themes, for Teachers and Interested Citizens of the Upper Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee and Kentucky, by W. Stephen McBride (Kentucky Archaeological Survey Report 236, University of Kentucky, 2012). It should be noted that construction now finally began on a prewar plan to build the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad from Kingston Springs, west of Nashville, to the Tennessee River. Upon its completion in 1864, under the direction since October 22, 1863 of Gov. Andrew Johnson, it would link the capital with a huge military supply depot on the Tennessee River named for the Greeneville politician, thereby significantly increasing the Union Army's western logistical apparatus. Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy, 295; Richard P. Gildrie, "Guerrilla Warfare in the Lower Cumberland River Valley, 1862–1865," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, XLIX (Fall 1990), 169; Clifton R. Hall, Andrew Johnson: Military Governor of Tennessee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1916), 196–199.
7. ORN, I, 25: 438; 464–465; Lenette S. Taylor, “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins, Jr., a Union Quartermaster (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 150–151, 256–260. Perkins was the army's head quartermaster in Nashville at this time. It was he who now took charge of the army's three makeshift Cumberland River gunboats, the Hagan, Newsboy, and Silver Lake No. 2. OR, I, 31, 3: 93.
8. ORN, I, 25: 466–475; OR, I, 23:2: 592–594, 598, 600; Jay Slagle, Ironclad Captain: Seth Ledyard Phelps and the U.S. Navy (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 338–341; Stoker, The Grand Design, 309–328; David Dixon Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1885; reprint, Harrisburg PA: The Archive Society, 1997), 210–211; 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), 380–381; Grant, Personal Memoirs, pp.n403–462; James Lee McDonough, Chattanooga: A Death Grip on the Confederacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 45–49, 54–58, 76–85; Peter Cozzens, The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 48–65; Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy, 324.
9. ORN, I, 25: 469–498, 614–615; Nashville Daily Press, November 3, 7, 1863; Slagle, Ironclad Captain, 338–341; Walter T. Durham, Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union—July 1, 1863, to June 30, 1865 (Nashville: The Tennessee Historical Society, 1987), 16; Cooling, Fort Donelson’s Legacy, 324–325.