This thorough account of the South’s efforts to hold the Mississippi River is “fast-paced, easy to read, and well supported by archival research”(The Civil War Monitor). Most studies of the Mississippi River focus on Union campaigns to open and control it, while overlooking Southern attempts to stop them. This book tells the other side of the story—the first modern full-length treatment of inland naval operations from the Confederate perspective. Jefferson Davis realized the value of the Mississippi River and its entire valley, which he described as the “great artery of the Confederacy.” This was the key internal highway that controlled the fledgling nation’s transportation network. Davis and his secretary of the navy knew these vital logistical paths offered potential highways of invasion for Union warships and armies to stab their way deep into the heart of the Confederacy, and had to be held. They planned to protect these arteries of rebellion by crafting a ring of powerful fortifications supported by naval forces. Different military branches, however, including the navy, marine corps, army, and revenue service, as well as civilian privateers and even state naval forces, competed for scarce resources to operate their own vessels. A lack of industrial capacity further complicated Confederate efforts and guaranteed the South’s grand vision of deploying dozens of river gunboats and powerful ironclads would never be fully realized. Despite these limitations, the Southern war machine introduced many innovations and alternate defenses including the Confederacy’s first operational ironclad, the first successful use of underwater torpedoes, widespread use of army-navy joint operations, and the employment of extensive river obstructions. When the river came under complete Union control in 1863, Confederate efforts shifted to its many tributaries, and a bitter, deadly struggle to control these internal lifelines. Despite a lack of ships, material, personnel, funding, and unified organization, the Confederacy fought desperately and scored many localized tactical victories—often at great cost—but failed at the strategic level. Written by a former Navy Surface Warfare Officer, this study, grounded in extensive archival and firsthand accounts, official records, and a keen understanding of terrain and geography, “very astutely gets to the heart of the main internal factors that lay behind the CSN's catastrophic failure to defend the strategic waterways of the Mississippi River Valley” (Civil War Books and Authors).

Most studies of the Mississippi River focus on Union campaigns to open and control it, while overlooking Southern attempts to stop them. Neil Chatelain's Defending the Arteries of Rebellion: Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865 is the other side of the story--the first modern full-length treatment of inland naval operations from the Confederate perspective.Confederate President Jefferson Davis realized the value of the Mississippi River and its entire valley, which he described as the "great artery of the Confederacy." This was the key internal highway that controlled the fledgling nation's transportation network. Davis and Stephen Mallory, his secretary of the navy, knew these vital logistical paths had to be held, and offered potential highways of invasion for Union warships and armies to stab their way deep into the heart of the Confederacy.They planned to protect these arteries of rebellion by crafting a ring of powerful fortifications supported by naval forces. Different military branches, however, including the navy, marine corps, army, and revenue service, as well as civilian privateers and even state naval forces, competed for scarce resources to operate their own vessels. A lack of industrial capacity further complicated Confederate efforts and guaranteed the South's grand vision of deploying dozens of river gunboats and powerful ironclads would never be fully realized.Despite these limitations, the Southern war machine introduced numerous innovations and alternate defenses including the Confederacy's first operational ironclad, the first successful use of underwater torpedoes, widespread use of army-navy joint operations, and the employment of extensive river obstructions. When the Mississippi River came under complete Union control in 1863, Confederate efforts shifted to the river's many tributaries, where a bitter and deadly struggle ensued to control these internal lifelines. Despite a lack of ships, material, personnel, funding, and unified organization, the Confederacy fought desperately and scored many localized tactical victories--often won at great cost--but failed at the strategic level.Chatelain, a former Navy Surface Warfare Officer, grounds his study in extensive archival and firsthand accounts, official records, and a keen understanding of terrain and geography. The result is a fast-paced, well-crafted, and endlessly fascinating account that is sure to please the most discriminating student of the Civil War.

With a unique prewar history as a snagboat and James B. Eads' noted catamaran salvage vessel, the Benton survived a tumultuous government acquisition process and conversion to become flagship of the Union's Civil War Western river navy. From Island No. 10 through the Vicksburg and Red River campaigns, the revolutionary ironclad participated in both combat and administrative activities, earning a prominent place in nautical legend and literature. This first book-length profile of the warship reveals little known details of both her prewar and wartime career and reviews her final disposal.

William Royston Geise was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1970s when he researched and wrote The Confederate Military Forces in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1861- 1865: A Study in Command in 1974. Although it remained unpublished, it was not wholly unknown. Deep-diving researchers were aware of Dr. Geise’s work and lamented the fact that it was not widely available to the general public. In many respects, studies of the Trans-Mississippi Theater are only now catching up with Geise. This intriguing book traces the evolution of Confederate command and how it affected the shifting strategic situation and general course of the war. Dr. Geise accomplishes his task by coming at the question in a unique fashion. Military field operations are discussed as needed, but his emphasis is on the functioning of headquarters and staff—the central nervous system of any military command. This was especially so for the Trans-Mississippi. After July 1863, the only viable Confederate agency west of the great river was the headquarters at Shreveport. That hub of activity became the sole location to which all isolated players, civilians and military alike, could look for immediate overall leadership and a sense of Confederate solidarity. By filling these needs, the Trans-Mississippi Department assumed a unique and vital role among Confederate military departments and provided a focus for continued Confederate resistance west of the Mississippi River. The author’s work mining primary archival sources and published firsthand accounts, coupled with a smooth and clear writing style, helps explain why this remote department (referred to as “Kirby Smithdom” after Gen. Kirby Smith) failed to function efficiently, and how and why the war unfolded there as it did. Trans-Mississippi Theater historian and Ph.D. candidate Michael J. Forsyth (Col., U.S. Army, Ret.) has resurrected Dr. Geise’s smoothly written and deeply researched manuscript from its undeserved obscurity. This edition, with its original annotations and Forsyth’s updated citations and observations, is bolstered with original maps, photographs, and images. Students of the war in general, and the Trans-Mississippi Theater in particular, will delight in its long overdue publication.

Across North America's periphery, unknown and overlooked Civil War campaigns were waged over whether the United States or Confederacy would dominate lands, mines, and seaborne transportation networks of North America's mineral wealth. The U.S. needed this wealth to stabilize their wartime economy while the Confederacy sought to expand their own treasury. Confederate armies advanced to seize the West and its gold and silver reserves, while warships steamed to intercept Panama route ships transporting bullion from California to Panama to New York. United States forces responded by expelling Confederate incursions and solidified territorial control by combating Indigenous populations and enacting laws encouraging frontier settlement. The U.S. Navy patrolled key ports, convoyed treasure ships, and integrated continent-wide intelligence networks in the ultimate game of cat and mouse. This book examines the campaigns to control North America's mineral wealth, linking the Civil War's military, naval, political, diplomatic and economic elements. Included are the hemispheric land and sea adventures involving tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, admiral and explorer Charles Wilkes, renowned sea captain Raphael Semmes, General Henry Sibley, cowboy and mountain man Kit Carson, Indigenous leaders Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo, writer and miner Mark Twain, and Mormon leader Brigham Young.

The dawn of 1863 brought a new phase of the Union’s Mississippi Valley operations against Vicksburg. For the first four months, Union attempts to reach high and dry ground east of the Mississippi River would be plagued by high water everywhere, and the resulting bayou and river expeditions would test everyone involved, including the defending Confederates. In Bayou Battles for Vicksburg, the latest volume in his five-volume history of the Vicksburg Campaign of the US Civil War, Timothy B. Smith offers the first book-length examination of Ulysses S. Grant’s winter waterborne attempts to capture the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The accepted strategy up to this point in the war was aligned with the principles of the Swiss theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini, whose work was taught at West Point, where commanders on both sides of the conflict had been educated. But Jomini emphasized secure supply lines and a slow, steady, unified approach to a target such as Vicksburg, and never had much to say about creeks, rivers, and bayous in a subtropical swamp environment. Grant threw out conventional wisdom with a bold, and ultimately successful, plan to avoid a direct approach and rather divide his forces to accomplish multiple goals and to confuse the enemy by cutting levies, flooding whole sections of watersheds, and bypassing strongholds by digging canals far around them. Bayou Battles for Vicksburg details each of the Union attempts to reach high ground east of the Mississippi River and includes fresh research on the Yazoo Pass and Steele’s Bayou expeditions, Grant’s canal, and the Lake Providence effort. Smith weaves several simultaneous Union initiatives together into a chronological narrative that provides great detail on the Union’s successful final attempt to get to good ground east of the Mississippi.

War in the Western Theater offers fresh perspectives on pivotal Civil War events, shedding light on overlooked battles and figures, revealing untold stories that reshape our understanding of this crucial region. The Western Theater has long been pushed to the side by events in the Eastern Theater, but it was in the West where the Federal armies won the Civil War. Interest in this complex region is finally increasing, and the authors at Emerging Civil War add substantially to that growing body of literature with War in the Western Theater: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War. Dozens of entries offer fresh and insightful aspects and angles to key events that unfolded between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. Revisit an important Confederate charge at Shiloh, discover how key decisions won (and lost) the bloody fighting at Chickamauga, and ponder how whiskey may have impacted the fighting at Corinth. Readers will walk the battlefield at Fort Blakeley outside Mobile, fight in the hellish cedars at Stones River, and mourn with a Mississippi family. Insights abound. How many students of the war knew a Confederate major, watching the riverine bombardment of Fort Donelson up close and personal, rushed to send detailed sketches of the ironclads to Gen. Robert E. Lee to warn him of this new way of fighting—and the lethal dangers it portended? And these are just a taste of what’s waiting inside. The selections herein bring together the best scholarship from Emerging Civil War’s blog, symposia, and podcast, revised and updated, together with original pieces designed to shed new light and insight on some of the most important and fascinating events that have for too long flown under the radar of history’s pens.