Union Navy Wins: Mississippi River Secured

Thousands of Memphis residents climbed the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River on the morning of June 6, 1862, and watched their city’s defenses destroyed in ninety minutes. Union ironclads and ram boats engaged the Confederate River Defense Fleet in a battle so lopsided that only one Confederate vessel escaped. Seven ships were sunk, burned, or captured. The Union lost no ships and suffered fewer than ten casualties. Memphis surrendered before noon. The engagement was the culmination of a Union campaign to seize control of the Mississippi River, a strategic objective that Abraham Lincoln called the "backbone of the rebellion." Federal forces had already captured New Orleans from the south in April and had been fighting their way downriver from Cairo, Illinois, since February. Memphis was the last significant Confederate stronghold between those two points. Controlling the river would split the Confederacy in two, separating the resource-rich states of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana from the eastern theater. The Confederate River Defense Fleet was a collection of converted steamboats, inadequately armored and poorly coordinated. The fleet’s commanders were civilian riverboat captains with no naval training and no unified command structure. They faced a Union flotilla that included purpose-built ironclad gunboats and Colonel Charles Ellet’s ram boats, vessels designed to use speed and armored prows to sink enemy ships by collision. Ellet’s flagship, the Queen of the West, charged directly into the Confederate line, and the battle devolved into a close-quarters melee that the outgunned defenders could not survive. Colonel Ellet was the only Union fatality in the engagement, dying two weeks later from a pistol wound sustained during the battle. Memphis’s fall opened the river to Union traffic as far south as Vicksburg, Mississippi, which held out for another year before surrendering on July 4, 1863. With Vicksburg’s fall, the Confederacy was severed, and the Mississippi flowed, as Lincoln said, "unvexed to the sea."