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.
After the Battle of Shiloh, the Union outflanked the powerful Confederate Mississippi River fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky, which were then abandoned. Following this, the North was victorious over the Confederate forts at Island No. 10. The next Confederate stronghold that was targeted by the North (and where our focus begins) was 50 miles further south at Fort Pillow, deemed to be weaker than the previous two. But unknown or underappreciated by the Union, the South now supplemented Fort Pillow with its River Defense Fleet, which had cruised north to Memphis from New Orleans in March of 1862. The fleet consisted of eight fast rams, which were converted from steamboats.
These rams were the brainchild of James Edward Montgomery, who was not a navy man but rather a steamboat captain. Montgomery tried to convince the Confederate Congress to convert riverboats into lightly armed but speedy rams crewed by river men familiar with the Mississippi and other major rivers. The navy turned him down, so Montgomery appealed to the War Department, which ultimately backed the project. Jack D. Coombe in his book Thunder Along the Mississippi noted that the rams were no match for the Union’s heavily gunned river ironclads also known as Pook’s Turtles, but that, “the Confederate vessels…had speeds of from eight to ten knots with remarkable maneuverability.” James M. McPherson in his book War on the Waters states, “(their) reinforced bows were solid twelve-inch timber sheathed with four-inch oak planks and iron bands bent around the bow to create a powerful ram.” Speedwise, Pook’s Turtles were no match for the rams.
The Union plan to defeat Fort Pillow envisioned the North’s river ironclads accompanying mortar boats to the fort, but beyond the range of Confederate guns. From there, the mortars would inflict devasting heavy and high-trajectory 44-pound rounds, which over time would weaken the fort into near submission. Fort Pillow would then be easy prey for Union troops, which would be landed nearby. The Union began its naval siege in mid-April of 1862. On May 10, the Union mortar boats were accompanied into static position by the ironclad USS Cincinnati and began lobbing their 44-pound rounds at the fort. However, Coombs states in his book, “The element of surprise and speed worked to the benefit of the southern flotilla, and their captains were determined to take full advantage.”
Accordingly, that morning, the eight Confederate rams cruising at top speed came around a bend in the river. The now alerted Cincinnati fired a salvo from her bow guns and began to get up speed when the twenty-foot-high, smoke-belching ram CSS General Bragg rammed her starboard just off her iron belt, creating a huge hole. In close succession the CSS General Price and the CSS General Sumter rammed Cincinnati’s stern at full speed, whereupon she limped haplessly to the river bank and sank in a dozen feet of water. Further upstream, the rest of Pook’s Turtles made steam toward the audacious rams, at which point the CSS General Van Dorn with superior speed headed for the USS Mound City and rammed her starboard, turning her around, tearing away her forecastle, and creating a gaping hole in her bow. The Mound City ran herself aground on a sandbar. As the rest of Pook’s Turtles neared, Montgomery called it a day and using superior speed cruised downriver, which brought an end to what became known as the Battle of Plum Point Bend.
Montgomery could claim a victory, having sunk two of the Pook’s Turtles. Shelby Foote in The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I records it this way: “Montgomery was satisfied…an ironclad could be sent to the bottom. He had done it twice in a single morning. Returning to a cheering reception at Memphis he triumphantly…(stated to the crowd) ‘they will never penetrate farther down the Mississippi.'” Meanwhile, unfortunately for the South, General Beauregard vacated Corinth to overwhelming Union forces on May 30. Consequently, Fort Pillow was now also outflanked, rendered indefensible, and evacuated.
In an incredibly unique coincidence, around this time the Union was also preparing a ram fleet of its own. The North’s proponent was Charles Ellet, whom McPherson describes as “one of those eccentric geniuses that wars often thrust forth…small and frail in build…Ellet was a giant in energy and ambition…A civil engineer by profession…his hobby was the study of the tactics of ramming in naval history.” Like his Confederate counterpart, Ellet also was unsuccessful in convincing the Union’s navy. However, when the USS Cumberland was sunk by the ram-tipped ironclad CSS Virginia, none other than Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took note and authorized Ellet to purchase seven strong riverboats and convert them into rams. In March of 1862 Ellet acquired them in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and New Albany, Indiana and had them swiftly converted and crewed within weeks. McPherson states, “Ellet had carpenters bolt three oak beams twelve to sixteen inches thick from stem to stern, the middle one directly on the keel. They bound the beams together crosswise with iron rods and screw bolts fastened to the hull, so that the whole weight of the boat would add its momentum to that of the central bulkhead at the moment of impact.” With 15-knot speed downstream, Ellet stated that, in accordance with the formula well-known to physicists and engineers, force equals mass times acceleration, the rams “will assuredly make their way through the hull of any transport or gunboat they may chance to hit fairly.” Ellet would soon prove it on June 6, 1862.
Aware of the upcoming battle and confident of victory, the South’s ram commander Montgomery invited the residents of Memphis to view the battle from the city’s bluffs. Thousands of them did. The Union ironclads came toward Memphis five abreast with Ellet’s rams behind and commenced long-range firing with their forward guns. Ellet in his ram Queen of the West along with the ram Monarch, which was commanded by Ellet’s brother, emerged between the ironclads at top speed toward the surprised Confederate rams. The Queen of the West quickly struck the Confederate ram Colonel Lovell and nearly broke her in half. Then two Confederate rams converged on the Monarch from opposite sides. The Monarch speedily slipped through them, whereupon the Confederate rams collided with one another, the first running aground and the other soon hit by devastating fire from the ironclads, which caused her boilers to explode.
The five other Confederate rams tried to escape downstream and in a running ten-mile fight all but one were sunk or captured. The South’s River Defense Fleet was virtually destroyed. Conversely, the only Union casualty was Charles Ellet himself, who was struck by a pistol shot while leading from above deck. His son, Charles Rivers Ellet, only 19 years old, soon debarked with three other crewmen at Memphis, which was remarkably undefended. They were howled at by the cursing crowd, but they promptly and courageously fixed a U.S. flag above the Memphis post office, declaring this important southern city reunited with the North.
The next destination for the Union’s boats was downstream, and this city was also the destination of the Roundtable’s 2025 field trip: Vicksburg, where the field trip’s participants learned and saw firsthand that that city’s defenses required exceedingly more than Ellet’s rams, Pook’s Turtles, and a nineteen-year-old with a flag to subdue!
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