By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025-2026, All Rights Reserved
Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the September 2025 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.
For its 2025 field trip, the Roundtable traveled to Vicksburg to study General Ulysses Grant’s campaign that accomplished one of the major goals of Union General Winfield Scott’s vaunted Anaconda Plan. But before the land campaign could be won, there was a war on the waters to win on the Mississippi River. Civil War naval battles quickly conjure the ironclad duel between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, Admiral Farragut at New Orleans, and Confederate blockade runners. However, for a couple of months in 1862, an improbable form of ancient naval battle reemerged on the Mississippi River, harkening back to the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Romans: that ancient form of naval battle being ram warfare.
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