Guns on the Western Waters, H. Allen Gosnell

Posted: April 6, 2024 | Author: helytimes | Filed under: War of the Rebellion |1 Comment

Can you imagine seeing this in color? Fire in the darkness reflecting on the flowing water? The sounds?

Ulysses Grant, who heard the screams of the wounded at Shiloh, Cold Harbor, the Wilderness, a hundred other battlefields, uses the word “sickening” only twice in his Personal Memoirs: once to describe a bullfight he saw in Mexico, and once to describe “the sight of the mangled and dying men which met my eye as I boarded” the USS Benton, a steamship, after a battle on the Mississippi River off Grand Gulf, Louisiana.

It’s incredible.  The amazing things about naval engagements are the accounts of men firing eight-inch guns at each other from a range of eight-feet.  I’m afraid that is beyond my understanding.  But they did it all the time in naval battles.  It was a very strange business.

So said Shelby Foote in a Naval Institute Proceedings interview. In that same interview:

Naval History: Many regimental histories were written for Army units in the Civil War.  Why was that apparently not the case for the Navy?

Foote: I really don’t know.  No big Navy man even wrote his memoirs, did he?  Guns on the Western Waters was one of my main sources.  And I use the naval Official Records.  But I have found a shortage of naval material.

I got so much value out of this book, which I bought used via Amazon. Gosnell was a Lt. Commander in the Navy Reserve. I can find little else about him except possibly this letter?:

Anyway his book is terrific. Here’s how it begins:

The book is indeed mostly firsthand accounts of the river battles along the Mississippi during the War of the Rebellion (fka Civil War).

It’s arguable that all the drama with Lee in Virginia was just a sideshow/violent pageant, that the real war was won and the rebellion ended when the Union seized the Mississippi from New Orleans to Illinois, slicing the Confederacy in half. This was finished by July 4, 1863. When it was done the guy who did it, Grant, was brought east to mop up the operations there.

The best section of Guns On the Western Waters is David Dixon Porter’s story of an expedition along the Yazoo River backwaters, and what he encountered there. Next best is Junius Henri Browne’s tale of a night in a boat passing under the guns of Vicksburg, from his Four Years in Secessia. Gosnell says he’s sometimes edited accounts to make them less graphic, but guys are still trampling around in their shipmate’s brains. These battles were infernal, boilers would explode scalding people, if they didn’t write their memoirs maybe it’s because it was too intense to think about, plus half of them were dead.

When Grant heard that Junius Henri Browne and his fellow “Bohemians” (a gang of war correspondents who don’t seem super likable) were lost this is what he said:

An unsung hero of this era is James Buchanan Eads

who was contracted to construct the City Class ironclads for the war on the Mississippi, and built seven in five months.

The Union was just superior to the Confederacy in building, technology, mechanizing. Arguably Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory did the best he could with a challenging situation, and for that he has a nice square named after himself at Key West. But throughout the war we just find a more effective machine destroying a feebler competitor.

Eads has a bridge named after him near St. Louis. I said unsung earlier but I guess he’s reasonably sung. And how about his wife, Martha Dillon Eads?:

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