Blue hurricane [antikvár]

FOREWORD lor a long time it has seemed odd to this writer that the great "River War," as it was fought along the Tennessee, Cumberland and Mississippi in 1862, should have been so shamefully neglected not only by historical novelists but by formal historians as well. One has but to recall that the only land victories of real importance won by the Union during the first year and a half of our Civil War were rendered possible largely through the tactical and strategic assistance afforded to the Northern Armies by the Western Flotilla of the Mississippi Squadron. Just as a majority of the Corps of OfEcers in the old United States Army resigned in order to fight for the South so it became the North's good fortune to find that most officers of the Regular Naval Establishment were determined to cast their lot with the Union. Therefore the Union Navy, from the outset, was better led, served and officered than that of its antagonist. It was the hard fighting of Flag Officer Foote's gunboats at Forts Henry and Donelson and at Memphis which decided the fate of Kentucky and western Tennessee. This little flotilla of hastily built ironclads formed the upper claw of a great strategic pincers which eventually met the lower claw of U.S. naval forces fighting northwards from the Gulf of Mexico under Rear-Admiral David G. Farragut. At Vicksburg this pincers eventually split the Confederacy vertically in half and made possible a further breaking up of the South into militarily ineffectual segments by Lieutenant-General William T. Sherman. No part of the year-long research done for this book proved to be more fascinating than a study of the political and social conditions obtaining in St. Louis at the start of this war. Here partisanship became so violent that martial law soon had to be imposed, for to this thriving metropolis swarmed hordes of embittered and generally penniless refugees from southern and western Missouri as well as from Kansas. It was in St. Louis that were constructed four of those famous Eads ironclads with the service of which this book deals in so large a part. Yankee ingenuity, energy and a burning patriotism produced the armored hulls of these clumsy yet effective ironclads in a matter of forty-five days—a production miracle only to be equalled generations later, during World Wars I and II.