The Confederates created mobile ambush squads that were conglomerations of artillery and cavalry and sent them to the shores of the Mississippi River and its tributaries to attack Union supply boats and the ironclad gunboats that protected them. As northern armies began to march overland toward Vicksburg and elsewhere, they depended on steamboats for supplies. By that point, Union ironclads and speedy rams had squashed the measly Confederate River Defense Fleet at Memphis. This irregular guerrilla war was an improvisation that began in earnest in the summer of 1862. My research also reframes our understanding of the Civil War away from well-known battles to a constant, grinding war that sucked in thousands of civilians. I then worked with my university’s mapping experts to analyze the data using computers.Īs the resulting map makes clear, combat between Union gunboats and southerners occurred across the Civil War’s western theater but was also clustered in a few important areas. Piecing together this fragmentary material, I created a database of 559 separate episodes where gunboats attacked a target, southerners shot at a federal boat, or there was a mutual fight. Bits and pieces of information are littered throughout the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, materials in the National Archives, collections of sailors’ letters and diaries, and post-war accounts.
The evidence for this unconventional war is hidden in the shadows of the archives. In the process, the Union navy waged a nasty war against southerners who supported the insurgents.
It protected Union transports and supply boats from Confederate ambushes. As a Civil War historian who has been researching the Union’s river navy for seven years, I have learned that the fleet was important in ways beyond its attacks on southern forts.
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