The CSS Jackson: A Ship That Never Reached Water

By eighteen sixty-two, the Confederate Navy Department had decided that Columbus was the place to build an ironclad. The logic was sound: the city sat on a navigable river connected to the Gulf of Mexico, its inland position protected it from Union naval raids, and it already had an ironworks operating on the riverfront. If the Confederacy could get a heavily armored gunboat into the lower Chattahoochee, it might hold the river against the Union indefinitely.

The ship they began building was named the CSS Muscogee. She was designed as a casemate ironclad, a wide, flat-bottomed wooden hull covered in thick iron plating repurposed from railroad rails. Her engines came from the adjacent Columbus Naval Iron Works. Her guns, when fully mounted, would make her one of the more formidable vessels in Confederate service.

Construction moved slowly. The South's industrial capacity was always the limiting factor, iron was scarce, skilled labor was scarcer, and the rolling mills and foundries of Columbus were already working at maximum capacity for the war effort. A failed launch attempt in eighteen sixty-four led to a redesign. By the time the ship was relaunched and renamed the CSS Jackson, the war was nearly over.

On April sixteenth, eighteen sixty-five, Union cavalry rode into Columbus. The Jackson was still at her moorings, still fitting out. The following morning, Wilson's troops set her on fire and cut her loose. She drifted downriver approximately thirty miles and grounded on a sandbar.

She sat there in the mud for nearly a century. In nineteen sixty-two, salvagers raised the stern section, one hundred and six feet of it. The bow followed the next year. Both pieces are now on display at the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, a major collection of Confederate naval artifacts. The Jackson is still one of the most complete Confederate ironclad remains in existence.