Heroic Deeds of Heroic Men: Charles Ellet, Jr., Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1866)

   I made a new acquisition last week--the first since this blog has been in existence!  Last week I found an interesting article on eBay called "Heroic Deeds of Heroic Men: Charles Ellet and His Naval Steam Rams."  It was published in 1866 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Volume XXXII).  This acquisition is very exciting for me.  I've always wanted a piece from Harper's.  More importantly, it is about a civil engineer and badass who gained national fame in the 1850s and 60s, Charles Ellet, Jr.  Ellet was a pioneering civil engineer of the 1840s and 50s, designing early suspension bridges and other works of public importance.  As an example of his work, in 1849 he designed and built the longest spanning bridge in the world at the time, the Wheeling Suspension Bridge at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia).

Note that all pictures in this post are taken from the article.

Charles Ellet, Jr. (1810-1862)

   Ellet is better known by military historians for his feats commanding a Steam Ram Boat squadron on the Mississippi River in the American Civil War.  Early in the war he proposed to the War Department that the Navy should allow him to construct and captain a small fleet of steam ram boat ships.  The War Department was resistant to the idea at first, but eventually allowed him to build.  The steam ram boat idea was an untested theory (not used since the Greeks in antiquity)--to take an already-existing vessel, reinforce it, and ram it into other ships, sinking them.  It was a very risky maneuver, dangerous for both vessels.

USS Switzerland. Example of ram boat
under Ellet's command.

   Ellet bought up steam river boats in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, nine total, and recruited men in those respective cities for service on board.  After fitting them with reinforced hulls and added protection for the engines, boilers and wheels, he floated his small fleet down the Ohio River into the Mississippi and engaged confederate vessels at the Battle of Memphis in June, 1862.  After separating his fleet, he commanded two ram boats in the battle.  He was supported by five iron-clad gunboats under Flag Officer Charles Henry Davis (the rank of "Flag Officer" denotes that an officer is entitled to fly their own flag, usually meaning they have direct command over their own ship/unit and command over other ships/units).  The Union ram boats destroyed or captured seven of the Confederate boats, allowing only one to flee south to the Yazoo River, near Vicksburg.  It was an astounding victory for the Union, in only twenty minutes.  They lost only one man in the battle.  Unfortunately, the only casualty was Charles Ellet, Jr.  Ellet would receive a musket ball in his knee while standing on the deck of his flagship boat USS Queen of the West.  Refusing amputation, the wound got infected and he died fifteen days later.

 The Queen of the West was Ellet's flagship and would

be captured by the Confederates later in the war.

The Vicksburg Area.  Note the sharp bend in the Mississippi River

at Vicksburg which made passing the Confederate batteries very
treacherous (also illustrated in the lithograph below). Note the Yazoo River 
branching off to the northeast.

   After Ellet died, the ram boat fleet would fall under the command of his brother, Alfred Ellet.  The ram boat fleet concentrated its efforts at destroying Confederate supplies, fortifications and vessels in the Vicksburg area.  This area of operations extended south of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and up into the Yazoo River.  The fleet would go on to destroy many more Confederate vessels, and sustain losses of its own.

 

On several occasions Union boats would try to make the "run"

past the batteries at Vicksburg in order to exchange information with

Union forces or make attacks south of the city.

   Ellet's family was ravaged by the Civil War.  Ellet himself was killed, with his wife dying the next day from grief and exhaustion.  She had been suffering from anxiety and probably depression for much of her life.  Ellet's son, Charles Rivers Ellet, also served with the ram fleet and performed many feats of skill and daring, passing behind enemy lines to deliver information to Union fleets south of Vicksburg.  Rivers commanded the Queen of the West after his father's death and lost the ship after being ordered to attack Confederate boats beneath the bluffs of Vicksburg, a difficult task.  He survived that battle, but in the heat of the summer had to take sick leave.  He went to his uncle's home in Illinois to recover.  From the article: "A severe facial neuralgia had long troubled him, for which he was in the habit of taking some opiate... Whether from an over-dose, or from some weakness of the system, morning found him cold, and the soul gone from its earthly casket.  He was but twenty years and five months old..."

   The article is very interesting, detailing the accounts which I've only briefly described above.  It is an example of the writing and a then-recent recounting of history.  It was published only 3-4 years after most of the events described occurred.  The biases of the writers were present and the memories of those people who contributed to the history was fresh.  What they wrote about was personal, not a distant history, like how we read about most wars in our nation's history.  You can click HERE to read the full article, and get a sense of what I'm talking about.  In closing, here is an interesting excerpt from the battle where the Union lost the Queen of the West.  It captures the period in many ways:

Click on the image to enlarge: