First Battle of Memphis: A Naval Fight the City Watched

On the morning of June sixth, eighteen sixty-two, the citizens of Memphis lined the bluffs above the Mississippi River to watch their city's fate decided on the water below. What they witnessed was one of the most one-sided naval battles of the American Civil War.

The Confederate River Defense Fleet had eight vessels: converted wooden paddlewheel steamboats, armed with eighteen cannon and protected by cotton bales and oak planking. They were crewed not by naval officers but by river men, commercial steamboat captains given military commissions. Facing them was a Union fleet under Commodore Charles Henry Davis, five ironclad gunboats with iron plating and seventy-nine cannon, supported by two ram vessels commanded by the Ellet brothers.

The battle opened with artillery fire, then turned into a melee of ramming. Charles Ellet drove the Queen of the West directly through a gap in the Union line and into the Confederate fleet, ramming and crippling one vessel. His brother Alfred followed with the Monarch. The Confederates tried to fight back but their cotton-bale armor was no match for iron plating. Within ninety minutes, seven of the eight Confederate vessels had been sunk or captured. One escaped south. The Union fleet lost no ships and suffered minimal casualties.

Memphis surrendered within hours. The city that had expected to be a fortified stronghold became a Union port almost overnight, and would remain one for the rest of the war. The crowds on the bluffs watched the whole thing in silence. The First Battle of Memphis mattered beyond its outcome: it opened the Mississippi River to Union control as far south as Vicksburg. The river men who had built their lives on the Mississippi lost it on the same water.