Battle of Corpus Christi, 1862
Near Corpus Christi, Texas
In the summer of eighteen sixty-two, Corpus Christi was a Confederate town with a problem: Union gunboats. The federal blockade of Texas's Gulf Coast had tightened through the first year of the war, and Acting Lieutenant John W. Kittredge of the United States Navy was proving to be exactly the kind of aggressive commander the Confederacy did not want patrolling the shallows of Corpus Christi Bay.
Kittredge commanded a small Union flotilla that included the converted steamer USS Sachem, the sloop USS Belle Italia, the bark USS Arthur, the schooner USS Reindeer, and an armed yacht called the USS Corypheus. Together they constituted more naval force than the Texas coast could easily answer. The engagement that followed, fought between August twelfth and August eighteenth of eighteen sixty-two, was modest in scale but revealing about the nature of Confederate coastal defense.
The Union ships bombarded the town and defeated the Confederate vessels operating in the bay: a modest collection of sloops and schooners flying Confederate colors. But when Union landing parties attempted to come ashore, they met something the gunboats could not suppress. Major Alfred Hobby commanded roughly seven hundred defenders, including four companies of the Eighth Texas Infantry Battalion, and the ground defense held. Federal sailors were driven back to their ships.
The outcome was a tactical split: Confederate naval forces were effectively cleared from the bay, while Union forces could not hold any ground they touched. For Corpus Christi, it meant continued Confederate occupation of the town itself, though the bay remained contested territory.
Kittredge's raid was part of a broader Union campaign to squeeze Texas ports, sever Confederate cotton exports, and deny the Confederacy the supplies it needed to sustain the war in the west. The town was not occupied after this fight and stayed in Confederate hands. But these August days in eighteen sixty-two were the first time the war arrived here in person, close enough to hear the guns from the waterfront.
