Memphis

On June 6, 1862, warships clashed on the Mississippi River just north of Memphis, Tennessee, in an encounter that would become known as the First Battle of Memphis. Numerous residents of the city looked on as the fight unfolded, watching Confederate naval power suffer a devastating blow that all but wiped it from the river entirely. Yet even with such a one-sided result, the Union Army did not recognize what the victory truly meant in strategic terms. What makes this clash stand out most in history is that it marked the final occasion on which men lacking any military background were allowed to lead ships into combat. In that sense, the engagement stands as a turning point in the growth of professional standards within the United States Navy.

Background

In terms of sheer vessel count, the Confederate defenders came close to equaling the Union force bearing down on them, fielding eight ships against nine federal gunboats and rams, though the quality of Confederate fighting craft fell well short. Armament on each Confederate vessel amounted to no more than one or two guns of light caliber, weapons too weak to penetrate the armored gunboats. Instead, these ships relied chiefly on a strengthened bow designed for ramming enemy vessels.

A distinctive protective scheme set the Confederate rams apart. Heavy timbers formed a double bulkhead shielding the engines and other interior areas, with railroad iron layered over the outer surface for additional defense. Between the two timber walls lay a 22 inch (56 cm) gap stuffed with cotton. Though this cotton contributed least to the actual armor, it captured public imagination and gave rise to the nickname "cottonclads" for these ships. Crews aboard later wartime vessels sometimes shielded themselves from small-arms fire using cotton bales stacked in vulnerable spots, and such ships also picked up the cottonclad label, despite being quite different from the original vessels bearing that name.

On the Union side, the fleet numbered five gunboats. Four of these were sometimes called "Eads gunboats" in semi-official usage, a nod to builder James Buchanan Eads, though sailors more commonly knew them as "Pook turtles," referencing designer Samuel M. Pook and their unusual silhouette. Rounding out the gunboats was the flagship Benton, another vessel from the Eads shipyards, though this one began as a civilian craft before its conversion. Guns aboard these five ships ranged between 13 and 16 per vessel. Beyond the gunboats, four additional ships came from the United States Ram Fleet. These carried no weaponry at all beyond whatever small arms their officers happened to have. Like their Confederate counterparts, all four had started out as civilian riverboats, and no two shared a common design.

Organization

Neither army entered this fight with a clean chain of command, and the flaws on both sides would prove costly. On the federal side, the gunboats belonged to the Mississippi River Squadron, answering to Flag Officer Charles H. Davis, who in turn took his orders from Major General Henry W. Halleck. Despite naval officers running these vessels, they technically fell under Army jurisdiction. Separately, Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr. commanded the ram fleet, taking his instructions straight from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. This split meant Union naval power on the river amounted to two distinct forces that shared no leadership except at the highest levels in Washington.

Confusion reigned even more thoroughly among Confederate forces. Roughly half of fourteen river steamers seized at New Orleans and refitted as rams made up the cottonclad contingent, all part of what became known as the River Defense Fleet. Pressure from Union forces approaching from both the Gulf and the north forced a split in this fleet. Six vessels stayed near New Orleans to counter David G. Farragut's approaching ships, and the remaining eight traveled upriver to Memphis, tasked with stopping the Union advance downstream. Since Memphis was considered essential to New Orleans's defense, this deployment fit within the fleet's original mission. James E. Montgomery, a civilian riverboat captain by trade, held overall command of the Memphis contingent. He also picked the other boat commanders, all former civilian rivermen lacking any formal military background. Once the vessels got moving, however, Montgomery's authority effectively evaporated, leaving each ram to fight on its own. Experienced military officers spotted the danger in this setup right away, though their warnings went nowhere. Adding to the trouble, none of the civilian captains bothered to learn gunnery themselves or delegate it to their own men, forcing the Confederate Army to supply gun crews instead. These soldiers never truly joined the ships' crews, continuing instead to answer only to their own army superiors.

Battle

The federal triumph at Corinth had already severed the rail lines connecting Memphis to the eastern Confederacy, leaving the city with little remaining military value. Because of this, Confederate forces pulled out of Memphis and its surrounding forts in early June 1862. The bulk of the garrison marched off to reinforce other positions, Vicksburg among them, leaving behind only a token rear guard meant to offer symbolic resistance. Plans called for the River Defense Fleet to withdraw toward Vicksburg as well, but a shortage of coal in Memphis made that impossible. When the Union fleet came into view on June 6, Montgomery and his officers found themselves trapped with no route for retreat, forced instead to choose between sinking their own vessels or engaging the enemy. They opted for battle, pushing out into the river at dawn to confront the approaching Union warships and the rams following behind, while onlookers from Memphis shouted encouragement from the banks.

Fighting opened at a distance, with the Union gunboats forming a defensive line across the water and firing their aft guns at the cottonclads, which entered the fray stern first. Of the four Union rams present, only two pushed past the gunboat line to strike or otherwise interfere with enemy vessels; the remaining pair misread their instructions and stayed out of the fight entirely. Because the Union ships failed to move in concert and the Confederate boats acted on their own, the engagement quickly dissolved into chaotic close-quarters combat. Most accounts agree that the flagship ram Queen of the West opened the violence by crashing into the Colonel Lovell, and was subsequently struck in return by at least one of the surviving cottonclads. During this exchange Ellet took a pistol shot to the knee, making him the only man wounded on the Union side that day. He later developed measles while recovering in the hospital, a childhood illness that claimed roughly five thousand soldiers over the course of the war, and the strain of both the wound and the sickness proved fatal; he died on June 21.

What happened afterward remains murky beyond the ordinary confusion of combat. Numerous witnesses left their own versions of events, yet these accounts clash with one another far more than is typical. The only certainty is the outcome: every cottonclad but one was sunk or seized by the war's end that day, while the Queen of the West was left crippled

Results

Fighting lasted under two hours on the morning of June 6, and by noon the city itself had capitulated to Union authority. Confederate losses came to roughly 100 dead or wounded, with 150 more taken as prisoners. Federal forces seized four Confederate vessels, the General Price, General Bragg, Sumter, and Little Rebel, restored them to working order, and folded them into the Mississippi River Squadron.

Apart from the ironclad Arkansas, which would appear later, this engagement marked the last serious obstacle facing the Union push down the Mississippi toward Vicksburg. From this point the river lay open all the way to that city, already under naval blockade by Farragut's fleet, yet federal commanders failed to recognize what this meant strategically for roughly six more months. Grant's army would not move to finish opening the river until November of that year.

Both here and earlier at New Orleans, the River Defense Fleet performed badly enough to prove conclusively that naval forces required leadership from trained officers operating under proper military discipline. The Ellet Rams stayed on in federal service afterward, though they never again saw the kind of combat they had been built for. Instead they evolved into the Mississippi Marine Brigade, an amphibious raiding unit under Lieutenant Colonel, later Brigadier General, Alfred W. Ellet, brother of the rams' commander, and unrelated to the Marine Corps. This same push toward professionalism brought an end to privateering as well, even though the River Defense Fleet did not technically consist of privateers in the strict sense.

As a cautionary example, the battle illustrates what can go wrong under a flawed chain of command. Setting aside isolated single-ship duels, it stands as one of just two entirely naval clashes of the entire war, remarkable given that it unfolded some 500 miles, or about 800 kilometers, from any open sea. The sole other such engagement was fought at Plum Point Bend, likewise on the Mississippi.

Memphis saw further conflict in April 1864, when Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest launched a nighttime cavalry strike against the city known as the Second Battle of Memphis. His aims were to free Confederate captives held there and seize Union officers stationed in the area. Though the raid achieved neither objective, it nonetheless pushed the Union Army toward tighter vigilance over the region afterward.