Looking Beyond the Letters

A Blog Exploring the Backstories of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project

Tag: Mississippi River

Civil War Ciphering: Confederate Coding in the Vicksburg Campaign, 1863

October 3, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By A. J. Blaylock

In the Spring of 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant began his campaign to capture the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. As Grant pursued his indirect course to the city and eventually laid siege to it, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, Governor of Mississippi John J. Pettus, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis frantically telegrammed each other about how to proceed.  Their messages underscore the Confederate high command’s waning confidence in each other and their ability to protect the Gibraltar of the Confederacy.

Pemberton, in a telegram to Pettus on May 1, 1863, indicated that despite Confederate resistance, “there will be ten thousand troops at Jackson in a few days.”[1] A month later, with the city of Vicksburg well under siege, President Davis reminded Governor Pettus of the lengths to which the Confederacy had already gone to reinforce the Vicksburg and declined interest in doing any more. On June 5, Davis informed the governor that he “had not the power to comply with the request” Pettus had made for more troops. He then called into question whether Mississippi was adequately using the forces it already possessed. Davis pointed to the fact that there had been no efforts to draw from “the militia or exempts of the state” and concluded that “to furnish the reinforcements sent to Mississippi” already, the Confederacy had “drawn from other points more heavily than was considered altogether safe.”[2]

This correspondence between Davis and Pettus only soured. As Vicksburg languished under siege, Davis again telegrammed Pettus that the “withdrawal of thirty thousand troops as suggested” by Pettus, from another part of the Confederacy to reinforce Vicksburg, would ultimately have to come from Middle Tennessee where they could not be spared. Davis acknowledged the importance of the situation at Vicksburg but nonetheless expressed discouragement that the governor’s recent communications indicated “no reliance on efforts to be made with the forces on the spot.”[3] Davis thereby indicated a declining faith that either Pemberton or Pettus could sustain Vicksburg with any number of troops.

By July 8, four days after the city belonged once more to the United States, a despondent Davis could only ask Pettus “what is the state of affairs at Vicksburg?”[4] The next day, Pettus informed the Confederate president of Vicksburg’s surrender but remained hopeful. He wrote Davis that Vicksburg had indeed fallen on their former nation’s anniversary “for want of provisions,” rather than unwillingness to fight. However, he maintained that “twenty-two thousand officers retain side arms and private property…and remain prisoners of war until exchanged. If arms are promptly sent them and the exchange pressed to a speedy completion Miss. may yet be saved.” Less optimistically, Pettus noted that the Federals were then within seven miles of Jackson and “battle expected.”[5]

These communications between Davis, Pemberton, and Pettus underscore growing divisiveness within the Confederate high command. Such telegrams threatened to boost Union morale and, in Pettus’ case, foil their military strategy, if leaked to the national public. To stave off such an eventuality, each of the above communications was written in code.

Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; June 5, 1863. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

Davis, Pemberton, and Pettus all adopted a substitution cipher known as a Vigenere cipher to encrypt their messages. It’s popularity among the Confederacy’s leaders, particularly at Vicksburg, produced its contemporary nickname, the “Vicksburg cipher.” As a substitution cipher, each letter in the original document is “substituted” for a coded letter based on a specific encryption pattern. The root of that pattern is a word or phrase that serves as the key to writing and then deciphering the code. The Confederacy used multiple keys including the most popular “Manchester Bluff.” If one has the key and the encoded letters, then deciphering the message is relatively straightforward. Vigenere ciphers work off an alphabetical grid like the one below. 

Square grid of letters that decipher Vicksburg codes.

This grid is a copy of one presented to the Union Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1865. Reproduced in “Overview of Civil War Codes and Ciphers” courtesy of Cryptiana.

The keyword indicates the correct horizontal row. So, if the first letter of the key phrase is “m” as in “Manchester Bluff,” one should start on the horizontal row that begins with “m.” If the first letter in the coded message was then “I” as it is in the June 21 telegram from Jefferson Davis, the decoder would move horizontally along the row beginning with “m” until reaching the letter “I.” The letter at the top of that column indicates the author’s meaning, here the letter “w.” Locating each letter, then, becomes a matter of navigating the grid in a backwards “L” shape.

Square grid of letters that decipher Vicksburg codes.

Writing the code would require working backwards, locating the true letter at the top of the grid and going downward along that column until reaching the horizontal row indicated by the keyword. The axis of the two would produce the coded letter one would write down. CWRGM’s documents only contain coded letters, but fortunately other historians have located the common keyword “Manchester Bluff,” which I adopted as a starting point when working on the documents as a graduate research assistant.[6] I wrote each letter out longhand to make it easier to see how the letters lined up, placing the keyword at the top, the code underneath, and the prospective meaning at the bottom. For example, to get the meaning of Davis’s June 21 telegram, I wrote:

KeyMANCHESTER
CodeILGJKVSPEC
MeaningWITHDRAWAL

Fortunately, Davis, Pettus, and Pemberton were kind enough to universally use “Manchester Bluff” as their key, saving Union Army codebreakers and impatient graduate researchers much trouble. Perhaps due to the haste required by their circumstances, Pemberton and Pettus even preserved the correct spacing between each word, whereas in the rest of the documents I had to parse out the words for myself from a lengthy, unbroken chain of letters.

            Aside from offering an interesting puzzle to sort out, these codes underscore the CWRGM database’s usefulness to researchers. The documents mentioned above embody the urgency and anxiety felt in a Confederacy faced with the loss of one of its most important cities, and their staunch hope of preserving the Confederate war effort despite it. They also provide a window into the decision-making and internal bickering of an army on its heels. Not only did Davis, Pettus, and Pemberton sharply disagree over how to proceed, and make subtle jabs at each other’s efforts, they took infinite pains to keep those disagreements secret from Union interceptors and, if unintentionally, historians. While the decoding of ciphers from Vicksburg is not new, CWRGM’s effort to provide deciphered transcriptions of these documents is ensuring that even documents designed specifically for secrecy are available and accessible to wide audience. CWRGM’s database thereby highlights the digital humanities’ role in pushing historical inquiry further by exploring not only the content of historical documents but the often more insightful forms of that content.

Image of telegram from President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; July 8, 1863 featuring a Vigenere Cypher.

In this July 8, 1863 telegram, Confederate President Jefferson Davis writes in a Vigenere Cypher and requests that the governor respond likewise. Telegram from President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; July 8, 1863. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

A. J. Blaylock is a Ph. D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi and an M.A. in History from the University of Alabama. He has worked on three different Civil War Governors projects in Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky and is currently an Assistant Editor for the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Digital Project. His current research focuses on the intersections of race, military service, and historical memory in the nineteenth-century U. S. South.

[1] “Telegram from General John C. Pemberton to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus,” May 9, 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-08-37.

[2] “Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus,” June 5, 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-09-06.

[3] “Copies of Telegram from President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, June 1863. Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-09-24.

[4] “Telegram from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, July 8, 1863.Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_762-948-10-09.

[5] “Letter from Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus to President Jefferson Davis; July 9, 1863,” Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_757-945-04-25.

[6] “Overview of Civil War Codes and Ciphers.” Cryptiana. http://cryptiana.web.fc2.com/code/civilwar0.htm.; Jones, Terry L. “The Codes of War,” New York Times, March 13, 2014. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/the-codes-of-war/.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part III

September 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            In the last two posts, we examined some of the more exceptional documents in the CWRGM collection that featured civilian suggestions to Governor John J. Pettus about defending Mississippi’s waterways, namely the Mississippi River. These proposals ranged from more conventional plans for fixed fortifications to—as we looked at last time—a unique plan for an ironclad warship with a rapid-fire battering ram. Today’s post continues the theme from that second article as it details perhaps the most unconventional of all the proposals: a plan for a manned, steam-powered submarine designed to attack Federal ships on the state’s rivers and in the ocean.

The advent of submarine warfare is near the top of the list of important technological innovations brought about by the American Civil War. The successful (albeit suicidal) attack by the submarine CSS Hunley on a Federal warship in Charleston Harbor in February 1864 heralded a new age of naval warfare that forced commanders to consider threats from below the waves, not just on the surface. When Thomas P. Hall of De Soto Parish, Louisiana, forwarded Governor Pettus a plan for a submarine in December 1862, however, that revolutionary change was by no means certain.[1] Hall’s letter contained a design by a local acquaintance, Charles J. Provost, that Hall felt deserved the Governor’s attention because of its potential to “prove a most efficient weapon for driving the enemy out of all our rivers and away from our harbors & seacoast.” According to Hall, Provost’s plan had been examined and approved by “some of our ablest engineers” in Louisiana and recommended that the Governor seek further confirmation of its potential from other experts.

Figure 1. Charles Post’s schematic drawing of his submarine design. Note the conning tower, rotating mechanism, and “arm holes.” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Provost’s plan was complex. It called for a vessel built around a boiler taken from a steamboat with a screw attached to a propeller as the primary means of propulsion. A “driving wheel” with “long hands extending forward having knobs to them” would allow the crew to crank the wheel and move the boat forward and backward. Ropes extending from the rudder would allow a crewmember in the bow to steer the vessel as necessary. Ballast meant to keep the submarine horizontal and aid in depth changes would be “distributed uniformly” along its length. Air for the crew would be pumped in by a tube extending to the boiler from a buoy on the water’s surface. If needed, he proposed that the crew condense “a sufficient quantity of air and take it aboard to last the men several hours.”  Provost did not elaborate on the submarine’s total size, but it can be inferred that by necessity, it would have been large to accommodate room for a steam boiler, crew, and machinery. Likewise, he did not specify the total number of crew the vessel required. Still, at least three men would likely have been needed to, at a minimum, man the “driving wheel,” service the boiler, and control navigation and the vessel’s weaponry.

The design also featured a few curious characteristics of note. Provost planned that a crew member of the crew would navigate the vessel from a revolving, conning tower-like feature extending from the top of the submarine. Made out of “india rubber or water proof leather,” this two-and-a-half-foot extension would contain “a glass in front to look through and two arm holes for the man to run his arms and hands into.” This navigator would also be the individual that manipulated the harpoon and explosive torpedo that extended from the bottom of the boat. This spar would be eight or nine feet long and be capable of swiveling to the left or right as necessary to deliver the torpedo against a Federal ship. According to Provost’s plan, to activate the torpedo, “the force of the boat in motion in the right direction will drive the harpoon in [to the enemy ship], and drive the collar back on the rod so as to disengage the harpoon instantly.” Once attached, the navigator would detach the torpedo manually via a chain and have the submarine back out from the area. In the event of a misfire, Provost detailed a procedure in which the navigator would use his arm-holes to manually mount the torpedo to the side of the enemy ship.

Figure 2. Diagram of the H. L. Hunley. Note the eight crew members driving the propeller shaft, the pilot’s position, and the forward torpedo spar. Image by Matthew Twombly (Smithsonian Magazine).

Despite the apparent thought put into his design, Charles Provost’s plan went unsatisfied—and probably for good reason. Provost’s design was mechanically complicated and would have required a large, and likely unwieldy vessel, considering its use of an adapted steam boiler. Likewise, the navigator’s role in the conning tower with its curious “arm holes” appears out of proportion to the size of the rest of the submarine and likely not functionally possible. The manipulation and activation of the spar torpedo also were overly intricate and not likely to be successful given its location on the boat’s underside. Finally, little thought seems to have been given about how the boiler smoke would be expended during operation.

By contrast, the designers of the H. L. Hunley employed a more straightforward design that favored manpower over complex engines. In their experiments at Mobile, Alabama, in 1862 and 1863, the Hunley’s inventors tested electric motors and a steam engine but found them both unworkable as a means of propulsion. They instead determined to use a screw cranked by eight crew members to turn the propeller and push the boat. Like Provost’s plan, the Hunley featured a two-foot-tall conning tower, but it did not rotate nor have “arm holes.” Instead, the pilot steered the boat with a forward wheel and manipulated the spar torpedo with wires (mounted to the submarine’s bow rather than the underside). No mechanism was used to supply air as the crew breathed what was contained in the ship after its twin hatches were closed.[2] This simpler design—while undoubtedly taxing for its crew—allowed it to function in a realistic manner not likely possible with Provost’s plan.

All told, Charles Provost’s submarine plan can be added to the list of the other plans that, while sincerely submitted, were disregarded by Pettus and other Confederate authorities. Nevertheless, together they build a picture of several industrious Southern civilians who sought to employ tactical and technical ingenuity to aid the Confederate war effort. Like the higher-level discussions of strategy and military operations contained in the documents of the CWRGM collection, theirs is also a part of the larger story of the American Civil War that deserves to be told. I hope you have enjoyed learning about them as much as I have and would encourage you to dig further into the collection to find other unique stores and voices from the past. Enjoy! 

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History Intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate Teaching Assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active-duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020. 

[1] By December 1862, experiments with submarine prototypes were ongoing within the Confederacy but still not yet completed. The first tests occurred in New Orleans, LA, in the spring of 1862 when a group of inventors built the Pioneer, a 30 ft. long, cigar shaped, submarine. It suffered from navigational and steering issues, but demonstrated the feasibility of underwater movement. It was scuttled when Federal forces seized New Orleans that April. Trials resumed in Mobile, AL, some months later when the same inventors built a second prototype, The American Diver. This boat was 36 ft. long and used a propeller shaft cranked by its four-man crew.  The Diver sank during sea trials in Mobile Bay in January 1863. The lessons learned from these two ventures would serve as the basis for their third (and ultimately successful) attempt, the H. L. Hunley in 1863 and 1864. See, Mark K. Ragan, Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015) 10-11, 25-27.

[2] Ragan, Confederate Saboteurs, 29-30.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part II

August 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, Former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            In the last post, I relayed several of the unique documents from the CWRGM collection that featured proposals sent by civilians to Mississippi Governor John Pettus on how best to fortify and defend the Mississippi River. While notable for their detail and designs, those propositions primarily focused on conventional techniques like land-based fortifications and a network of river obstructions. Today’s post highlights a series of letters from 1862 that offered a plan for an unconventional naval weapon that the author believed would neutralize the power of the United States Navy. Like the previous documents, these proposals contain a fascinating drawing accompanying the written proposal. Similarly, it also appears to have gone unimplemented at the state and national levels for untold reasons. Regardless, these documents contain a range of innovative, technical, and scientific thinking that—even if disregarded by government authorities— further demonstrate the extent to which some enterprising civilians sought to support and influence the Confederate war effort with their own advice and insight.

                On July 29, 1862, William R. Scott of Wilmington, North Carolina, sent a letter to Governor Pettus detailing his plans for a “Steam Battering Ram” that he felt would allow the Confederate Navy to “Destroy the Federal Navy that is in the Miss River” and thus “win and Rule their own rights.” Scott’s proposal envisioned an ironclad ship adapted from the hull and boilers of an existing steamboat. The crux of his design was a steam-powered, multi-use battering ram that he asserted could deliver repeated blows below the waterline on an enemy ship. Scott suggested that the state of Mississippi complete the construction at the shipyard on the Yazoo River and likened its armored design to that of the famed CSS Arkansas that had only weeks before been completed.[1] In total, Scott’s first letter was long on rhetoric and short on technical details. He provided no specifics on how the ram would operate, nor details on its prospective dimensions, crew, armament, or necessary construction material. In this initial proposition, all Scott provided was his brief proposal, a rough sketch (that is missing), and an assessment conducted by officials from the Confederate Navy Department that endorsed his design. 

Figure 1. The CSS Arkansas under construction on the Yazoo River, 1862. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.

           It is clear that Pettus did not answer Scott’s initial letter because, in December 1862, he again petitioned the Governor and stated that “not having heard from you concerning it” he would “take the liberty to send you another sketch.” Scott’s second letter is of greater significance as he included a detailed sketch of the boat and an eight-page copy of the meeting minutes from a sub-commission of the South Carolina government that inspected and approved the plans. Scott’s design (Fig. 2) shows a double-acting steam engine mounted towards the boat’s bow that would operate a “battering ram” protruding below the waterline. He asserted that this weapon could be “driven with a force of from one hundred to six hundred tons depending on the size of the engine” and could do so against an enemy ship at a rapid pace of up to twenty blows per minute.

Figure 2. William Scott’s design for his ironclad with its steam-powered battering ram. At top is a endview of the ship while the middle and bottom views are a top and side view respectively. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

In essence, Scott envisioned a vessel that would, like a boxer, close with a Federal ship and deliver repeated body blows until its hull was breached or the craft fled. Such a design differed widely from the operation of conventional naval rams like the CSS Virginia and the CSS Tennessee, which both depended on the force of the ship’s momentum to deliver a blow and relied on mounted artillery for defense and offensive capabilities.[2] Contrarily, Scott’s ship would be purely offensive in nature as it evidently (according to the basic design) featured no other form of armament beyond the steam ram. This decision would mean that the ship would have relied solely on the reliability of its steam engines to generate sufficient speed and its ability to get close to enemy ships to be effective. The design further meant that the ship would have no other defensive capabilities than its ability to close with and batter enemy vessels. 

Nevertheless, more than any other innovative proposal in the CWRGM collection, Scott’s design appears to have come the closest to fulfillment. This fact is evident from the South Carolina commission report, which included copies of correspondence between Scott and numerous high-level Confederate officials who each expressed support for his design. For example, Confederate Lieutenant General P. G. T. Beauregard endorsed the plan in October 1862 by stating that he thought “favorably of the proposed battering Ram of Mr. W. R. Scott” because it could “continue the battering process without having to back for a new momentum.” Moreover, the South Carolina commission unanimously approved the plan and recommended its immediate implementation, while some Confederate Naval Department officials like its Chief Engineer William P. Williamson likewise endorsed the proposal and recommended it for action. Finally, Scott’s plan even reached the desk of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in September 1862, whose secretary (and son of Robert E. Lee) Colonel George Washington Custis Lee promised to refer the plan to the Secretary of the Navy, Stephen F. Mallory.

Figure 3. The CSS Manassas, the only Confederate ironclad to operate as a singular ram. It served briefly as it suffered damage and was abandoned in an engagement near New Orleans, LA, in September 1861. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.

Likely, Scott’s plan went no further than Mallory’s (or Pettus’) desk, for no such ironclad was ever constructed in total in Mississippi or elsewhere. This is possibly because of the failure of the singular ram CSS Manassas in combat in 1861 or that it violated Mallory’s policy to both offensive and defensively capable ironclads.[3]  However, it is possible that Scott’s plan did influence the construction of the CSS Charleston, which was constructed by the state of South Carolina in the fall of 1862 and that interestingly featured a unique iron ram protruding at length from its bow.[4] This is a feature not seen any other Confederate ironclads and, given the South Carolina commission’s enthusiasm and recommendation for his proposal, could mean that they incorporated the spirit of Scott’s design rather than it completely. In any event, despite his evident passion and persistence, William Scott’s idea went unfulfilled as it applied to the state of Mississippi as Pettus, and local Confederates forged ahead with more conventional plans on the Mississippi River. In a third and final post, we will move below the waves to detail another unconventional proposal broached to Governor Pettus about thwarting the Federal Navy along the Mississippi River. Stay tuned!

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate teaching assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020.

[1] The CSS Arkansas was a large ironclad completed at a shipyard located on the Yazoo River in Mississippi in the mid-summer of 1862. It featured railroad iron for armor and two large (but unreliable) steam engines for propulsion. It left the shipyard on July 14, 1862 to engage Federal ships on the Mississippi River. In a series of engagements, it ran the Federal fleet above Vicksburg and remained near that city until it travelled south to participate in a Confederate offensive to retake Baton Rouge, LA. In that action, it suffered debilitating engine trouble and was abandoned and scuttled under fire by its crew. See, Saxon Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018), 68-81.

[2] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 7, 230.

[3] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 8, 33, 37, 84.

[4] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 132-133.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part I

July 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            As should be clear to anyone who has explored the documents in the CWRGM collection, nineteenth-century individuals wrote to their governors about virtually everything. Whether they were requests for criminal pardons, exemptions from military service, applications for employment, or appeals for mediation, white Mississippians had few qualms about penning a letter to their state executives. It shouldn’t be surprising then that this trend also carried over to the military sphere. Throughout the Civil War, a handful of Mississippi civilians took it on themselves to submit proposals to their Governors on how best to fight the Federal army and navy. In many of these cases, recommendations revolved around defending Mississippi’s many waterways, especially the Mississippi River. While small in number, these letters comprise some of the collection’s most interesting and visually entertaining documents because they often include detailed drawings and descriptions of the author’s plans. Military history buffs will especially enjoy the documents that relay designs for new military equipment meant to revolutionize the Confederate war effort.

             A series of letters from an Edward Rew in Sageville, Mississippi, are perhaps the two best examples of this phenomenon. Before the war, Rew was a moderately successful carpenter turned planter in Lauderdale County with no evident engineering or military experience.[1] Nevertheless, in August 1861, he wrote Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus a lengthy plan to “aid in the defences of the Mississippi River,” which he felt, if implemented, would make “an effectual barrier to the enemy should they attempt to send a fleet down said river at this or any future time during the present war.” Accompanying Rew’s letter is a detailed drawing depicting the various elements of his defensive plan.

Figure1. Edward Rew’s diagram depicts his plan to obstruct the Mississippi River. Note the chain, network of boats, and the artillery batteries flanking the obstacle on both riverbanks. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Rew proposed that the state build a large iron chain to stretch across the Mississippi River. This obstacle would be secured at both ends by timer pilings driven into the riverbank, while a series of wooden boats with anchors would be scattered along the chain to hold it in place. He also proposed that Confederates place other obstructions upstream of the chain “so as to deaden the headway” of boat traffic and allow fortified artillery batteries on both riverbanks to bombard and sink any Federal ships. At his own admission, Rew submitted a similar—albeit less-detailed—plan to then Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Walker to possibly attract his attention.

It is unclear how (or even if) Governor Pettus responded to Rew’s first suggestion, but it is fair to think that the governor likely shelved the idea and moved on to more practical concerns. Nevertheless, six months later, in February 1862, Rew resubmitted his plan to Pettus—this time apparently at the governor’s request. In this letter, Rew referenced the need to save the Confederacy from “any more Ft. Henrys and Donnalsons,” so it is possible that those twin defeats only weeks before sparked a renewed desire to improve Confederate defenses along the Mississippi. Rew’s second proposal differed little from his first, though he did add the possibility of employing “submarine batteries” to supplement the chain obstacle. Although Rew admitted that such devices “would hardly be necessary,” his reference to underwater mines alluded to the tactics Confederates would employ in great numbers later in the war. His dismissal of these mines—while later proven to be misguided—nonetheless demonstrated a striking familiarity with up-and-coming military technology for an untrained civilian.

Figure2. Edward Rew’s second diagram from February 26, 1862 depicts his plan to save the Confederacy from “any more Ft. Henrys and Donnalsons.” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

In July 1862, just six months after Rew’s letters, R. P. Guyard of Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, wrote Governor Pettus to provide “some suggestions that can permanently secure for all time…as much of the Mississippi River as is indispensable to have crossings for travellers, and railroads wherever possible.” Much like Rew, Guyard proposed that state or Confederate authorities obstruct the river by placing obstacles directly in its flow, though he differed on how it should be done. “Chains or cables across the river as a barrier is worse than useless,” he claimed.

Figure 3. R. P. Guyard’s drawing depicting his plan to drive piles into the riverbed. The dash-marks indicate the sharpened piles, while the triangular symbols are the secondary field of wooden piers meant to further obstruct traffic. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Instead, Guyard recommended that teams of workers (likely enslaved people) use a specially-fitted steam engine to drive sharpened poles into the river bottom to create a dense field of obstacles. A secondary group of triangular wooden piers would follow the main obstacle to further slow movement. Like Rew, Guyard envisioned that fortified artillery batteries with sharpshooters would overwatch the obstructions from the riverbank and attack Federal ships as they approached. This construction would occur in multiple locations on the river, with at least one obstacle belt placed north of Memphis, TN. At the same time, another would face southward “below the mouth of Red River” to prevent movement up from newly-occupied New Orleans, LA. No doubt reflecting the acknowledgment that war with the United States could drag on for some time, Guyard proposed that his proposed obstacles would “endure for ages” and permanently block traffic on the Mississippi.

In subsequent months, other civilian writers made similar pitches to Pettus about obstructing the river (such as one anonymous proposal from South Carolina or another from Hazlehurst, Mississippi). In any event, though, no such elaborate obstacles were ever constructed across the waterway in Mississippi. This choice was undoubtedly the result of the sheer impracticality of such an elaborate and challenging venture and because of the significant resources and labor it would have required.[2] Rather, Confederate defenses along the river relied on a combination of massed artillery at fortified points like Port Hudson, Louisiana, or Vicksburg, Mississippi, some minor obstructions, and a small force of naval vessels—including some ironclads. To the extent that Confederates employed techniques like those suggested above, they came at more remote locations along the smaller inland waterways like the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers. There, Confederate troops sunk wooden obstructions and used artillery to overwatch for approaching Federal ships much like in Rew or Guyard’s proposals. They also employed “submarine batteries” or “torpedoes” to great effect—most notably in the sinking of the U.S.S. Cairo in December 1862.[3]

The efficacy of employing more unconventional devices like “torpedoes” was a point made to Governor Pettus in a December 1862 letter by one J. B. Poindexter, an officer in the Third Mississippi Infantry. Poindexter’s forward-looking vision would be matched by other proposals from citizens for more innovative solutions to the threat posed by the United States Navy.

The next blog post in this three-part series will detail these sometimes-radical suggestions. Stay tuned!     

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate teaching assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020.

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, 1860 United States Federal Census, “Census Place: Beat 4, Lauderdale, Mississippi, Page: 371,” NARA, Publication M653, Ancestry.com. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/38747111:7667.

[2] It should be noted, however, that Rew and Guyard’s plans had some basis of precedent. When Confederate forces occupied Columbus, Kentucky, in September 1861 they strung a large iron chain across the Mississippi River one mile above town. This chain was suspended below the waterline by a series of boats posted along its length. Numerous artillery batteries overlooked the obstacle from the high bluffs along the river. Reportedly, numerous “torpedoes” were also deployed along the chain and around the area. In almost every sense, this network of obstacles matched Edward Rew’s proposal to Governor Pettus in August 1861. See O.R. ser. I, vol. 7, pp. 436, 534; “Columbus-Belmont State Park—Historic Pocket Brochure Text,” Kentucky Department of Parks, https://parks.ky.gov/sites/default/files/listing_documents/bd5d0c09888351da895977a12981568a_Col-Belmontpcktbrochure.pdf.

[3] Neil Chatelain, Defending the Arteries of Rebellion: Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865 (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2020) 205-208, 246-250.

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