By Gary D. Joiner
Illustrated, maps, notes, bibliography, index, softcover, 199 pp., 2007. Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group Inc., 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, MD 20706, $24.95 plus shipping.
Reviewer: Joseph Derie
Joseph Derie is a VMI graduate and a long time Civil War buff and military book reviewer. A retired Coast Guard officer and licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, he is a Certified Marine Investigator and marine surveyor.
Review:
Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron tells of the Civil War as fought by the U.S. Navy and various waterborne U.S. Army elements on the Western island waters from the early days of the war to the surrender of the last Confederate Naval forces at Shreveport on the Red River in June 1865.
Along the way the Navy battled high water, low water, heat, mosquitoes, the newly invented torpedo (we would call them mines today), guerillas, the Confederate Navy and Army, and the U.S .Army, which at first thought any vessels on the inland waters should be Army manned and commanded.
Historian and author Gary D. Joiner is an expert on the Red River steamboats and the Red River Campaign, in which the U..S Navy played a significant part (and almost lost a fleet), and has used that expertise to describe the Navy’s contributions to the Western campaigns.
After a slow start the Navy’s strategy and tactics were such that the Confederates would find that no body of water that could float a vessel would be safe from a visit by a Navy ironclad or its more lightly armored, and therefore more shallow draft sister, the tinclad.
The U.S. Army did have vessels on the water in those days (as a matter of fact, it still does), in this case army transports and hospital ships.
It also had Ellet’s Marine Brigade, the brainchild of a noted civil engineer. This was a specially built collection of rams, gunboats and transports with embarked “horse marines” (U.S. Army troops, not U.S. Marines) who would be let ashore to raise havoc behind the lines on unsuspecting Confederate forces.
This unit sometimes cooperated with the Navy, and sometimes cooperated with the Army, deeming itself a special circumstance, and was generally difficult to control.
The problem initially was that the U.S. Navy had traditionally been a blue water Navy. Its leadership thought of the high seas and coastal waters, where it had been successful in all its undertakings. A blockade of Southern ports and chasing blockade-runners was well understood. Going inland to tideless brown water with land on both beams and muddy shallows abounding was something else.
With the same spirit that later generations of Navy men would take with them to the Mekong Delta and their riverine patrol boats (PBRs), the Civil War sailors learned to adapt and improvise and work closely with the Army. The Army learned how a gunboat could provide an escort to vulnerable transports in contested territory or flank a Confederate force and provide support as a floating battery.
The vessels were either modified from existing steamboats or special designed for the unique requirements of river service. Technologically wide, they were mostly a naval architecture dead end, with no lessons learned and improved hull classes following the Civil War.
The book’s pictures of vessels like the USS Idianola, the USS Tyler and the Ellet ram fleet make a person wonder what would drive a man to go to war in a vessel like that, and what it was like to be afloat in one on a July day on the lower Mississippi, especially during battle.
Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron is a well-written, well-researched account of a little described story. It will be of interest to Civil War Navy aficionados and those whose particular interest is the Western campaigns of the Civil War. It is highly recommended.