Yazoo City and the Confederate Ironclad That Never Was

The Yazoo River above Vicksburg was Confederate territory for most of the Civil War, and the Confederate Navy used the waterway to build warships beyond Union reach. At Yazoo City, an improvised shipyard produced several gunboats, and the Confederates had completed the ironclad CSS Arkansas there in the summer of eighteen sixty-two. She fought her way through the Union fleet at the mouth of the Yazoo in July of that year, and weeks later, after engine failure at Baton Rouge, her own crew destroyed her to prevent capture.

In May of eighteen sixty-three, as a Union fleet moved up the Yazoo River, the Confederates themselves burned the Yazoo City shipyard to keep the vessels under construction there from being captured. Union forces then burned the sawmill and lumberyard before withdrawing.

In March of eighteen sixty-four, a Union force under Colonel James Coates, backed by gunboats, occupied Yazoo City. Confederate cavalry under Generals Lawrence Ross and Robert Richardson attacked on March fifth. The Union troops held their ground and withdrew downriver the next day.

The larger story of Yazoo City during the war is one of the river as a strategic corridor. The Yazoo feeds into the Mississippi north of Vicksburg, and controlling it meant controlling the approach to that fortress city from the north and east. Union gunboats spent two years trying to find a way through the Yazoo Delta to strike Vicksburg from an unexpected direction. The Delta's bayous and swamps defeated them repeatedly. When Vicksburg finally fell, it fell from siege from the south, not from the tangled waterways to the north.