A River Unvexed , livre ebook

Titles in the Civil War Campaigns Series
Fields of Glory Paths to Victory Piercing the Heartland A River Unvexed To the Sea

To the memory of the Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in the Western Theater of the Civil War . Their valor has been too long neglected.
Copyright © 1994 by Jim Miles
 
All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
 
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Rutledge Hill Press, Inc., 211 Seventh Avenue North, Nashville, Tennessee 37219
 
Typography by D&T/Bailey, Inc. Drawings by Tonya Pitkin Presley, Studio III Productions Unless noted differently, photographs are by the author.
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 
Miles, Jim.

A river unvexed : a history and tour guide to the campaign for the Mississippi River / Jim Miles.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9781620452035

1. Mississippi River Valley—History—Civil War, 1861-1865 —Campaigns. 2. United States- History- Civil War, 1861-1865 —Campaigns. 3. Historic sites- Mississippi River Valley—Guide—books. 4. Mississippi River Valley—Guidebooks. I. Title.
E470.8.M63 1994
973.7’3’0977—dcZO
93-35025 CIP
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8—99 98 97 96 95 94
Introduction
The Mississippi River drains an area of 1.25 million square miles, or 41 percent of the continental United States, from Montana in the West to New York in the East. From its headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles south of New Orleans, the river is 2, 546 miles long and has 250 tributaries. Including the Missouri and Ohio rivers, the Mississippi is the longest river system in the world, surpassing even the Nile and Amazon.
Before the Civil War, the Mississippi was the glue that held together the enormous region it drained, unifying such diverse cities as New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh with strong economic and political ties. The people of the region—north and south—were alarmed by the secessionist fever that swept the area and by the creation of the Confederacy. Trade between Union and Confederate states continued through the winter of 1861, until the attack on Fort Sumter. After the first shots were fired and moderate southern states such as Tennessee joined the Confederacy, tentative moves were made to protect navigation of the Mississippi by the North and to prevent the Union from using it as a route of invasion by the South.
The region featured long distances and poor roads. Until the recent advent of the railroad, rivers had been the primary arteries of transportation for this area. Agricultural goods and the increasing industrial production of the Midwest depended on cheap bulk shipping via water. Fleets of flatboats, barges, and steamers descended the river to New Orleans and from there the vast amounts of cargo they carried were transported to every port in the world. When the Mississippi was blocked to trade, the Midwest soon suffered economically and in morale, which was of serious concern to a president who was a native of the region.
The Mississippi was the key to Union success in the West, which during the Civil War extended from the Appalachian Mountains west to Arkansas and south from the Ohio River through the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. Control of the Mississippi would not only relieve the Midwest, it would cost the Confederacy two vital cities, New Orleans and Memphis, and open large portions of Mississippi and Louisiana to invasion. Western Louisiana and the vast, fertile area of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, which constituted one-half of the land mass of the Confederacy, would be split from the rest of the new nation. That western region was expected to provide the South with large quantities of military goods, agricultural produce, mounts, and recruits. Seizure of the Ohio River would establish a defensive perimeter that would shield Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh from attack and Indiana and Ohio from invasion. Loss of the Tennessee River would cost the Confederates western Kentucky and Tennessee and allow penetration of northern Mississippi and Alabama. Capture of the Cumberland River would yield Nashville, one of the South’s most important industrial centers.
For more than two years after Fort Sumter was fired upon, this region was a primary target of the war. Once the Mississippi was captured, Union armies had no more fear of their flank being attacked as they drove to Chattanooga, Atlanta, Savannah, and into the Carolinas. The Union’s western armies began training for the war in St. Louis, and ended it near Virginia in April 1865, 3,000 miles from where they started. They had decimated Confederate armies and razed its territories.
The Civil War’s opening battle, First Manassas, and its conclusion at Appomattox are separated by about 115 miles. For four years massive armies fought great battles between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia. That was the focus of Federal and Confederate forces, and it has remained the focus of history since. The vast West was often ignored by leaders of both nations and received less attention and fewer men and supplies. Despite this oversight, great consequences hung in the balance of the western campaigns. The fate of entire states turned on the result of a single battle. Eastern combat was fought for the destruction of armies; in the West there were battles of maneuver. It should be no wonder that the best Union generals in the West were ultimately required to win the war in the East.
In the East, many rivers flow east to west and are shallow and navigable for only short distances from the Atlantic Ocean, both characteristics rendering them unsuitable for military use. In the West they flowed north to south and could be navigated for great distances. Here they were the primary avenues of invasion.
Possession of the Mississippi River was the most important asset the Confederacy had at the start of the Civil War. From the moment hostilities commenced, a 1, 000-mile stretch of the mighty waterway became the longest battlefield in American history. The two-year struggle to control it involved 200,000 soldiers, touched seven states, and was determined by 20 major battles, both on land and water, and by sieges.
The history begins on the upper river, where innovative Union gunboats were built and fought past Confederate positions at Columbus, Island Number 10, and Fort Pillow to occupy Memphis and approach Vicksburg from the north. At the same time, David Farragut assembled in the Gulf of Mexico the largest armada the United States had yet seen to conquer a Southern fleet and forts at the mouth of the Mississippi, capture New Orleans, and threaten Vicksburg from the south. The final chapter in this vast campaign occurred when U. S. Grant seized Vicksburg, which Jefferson Davis called “the Gibraltar of America, “ and “the nailhead that held the Confederacy together,” after a year of intense effort and fabled battles at Chickasaw Bayou, Arkansas Post, Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion’s Hill, the Big Black, and two attacks against Vicksburg. Other great western battles were fought to influence affairs on the Mississippi. The capture of Forts Henry and Donelson flanked Columbus; Shiloh made Memphis untenable; and Iuka and Corinth gave Grant an opportunity to turn against Vicksburg.
When the Civil War began, the Union navy counted 7,600 officers and men; when it was over there were 51,000 web-footed warriors. During the war, the navy built 200 vessels and purchased another 418. Entire fleets of warships, many of them revolutionary in naval design, were built or converted for use on the Mississippi. Steamers were made into gunboats and rams, and the strangest looking ironclad vessels were developed, some successfully, others not. Their mission was to reopen transportation routes from the Midwest to the gulf and to establish invasion routes into the Deep South.
There was no Confederate navy when the war erupted. Existing steamers were refitted into rams and cottonclad gunboats, and formidable ironclads were started across the nation: in the Mississippi Valley at New Orleans, Memphis, and Yazoo City. Delayed by lack of material and skilled workers, only one ironclad, the Arkansas , went into action. The remainder were destroyed unfinished when Union forces hove into sight. Faced with threats from upriver and downstream, the naval force the South managed to cobble together was never able to fight in a coordinated fashion with any strength.
Little-known fleet actions were fought on the Mississippi at the forts below New Orleans, Plum Run, and Memphis. The Arkansas gained international naval fame for singlehandedly fighting through a concentration of 30 Union ships, and the heroic deeds of the Hartford, Manassas, Brooklyn, Carondelet, Indianola, McRae, Queen of the West, Lexington, Governor Moore, and many others were writ large in military annals. Amphibious operations were the rule in the West at Island Number 10, Chickasaw Bayou, Arkansas Post, the bayou and canal experiments, the crossings of the Mississippi, and the sieges of Vicksburg and Port Hudson.
The campaign for the Mississippi River was distinguished by brilliant and daring maneuvers executed by some of the Civil War’s most noted leaders: U. S. Grant, David Farragut, Earl Van Dorn, Andrew Foote, Joseph Johnston, William T Sherman, Isaac Brown, David Dixon Porter, John Pope, and the much maligned John Pemberton.
In traveling across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the fall of 1861, Sherman studied the people’s morale and readiness for war. He was shocked to find the region completely unprepared and officials in Washington, D.C., apparently indifferent. He wrote his brother, Ohio Sen. John Sherman: “Whatever nation get