The Yazoo City Shipyard
18-20 MAY 1863
THE YAZOO CITY SHIPYARD
After the failure of the Yazoo Pass expedition before Confederate Fort Pemberton in March 1863, MGEN Ulysses Grant adopted a new strategy against Vicksburg, the last and most menacing Rebel city preventing Union control of the Mississippi River. Grant would move his 30,000 troops south on the Louisiana shore, cross the river to the south at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, and move toward Jackson, cutting Vicksburg’s supply line via the Yazoo River. Union gunboats, necessary to cover Grant’s river crossing, made a daring run past Vicksburg on the dark night of 16-17 April. Doing so gave them access to the Yazoo, which reaches the Mississippi just south of Vicksburg. By noon on 18 May 1863 RADM David Dixon Porter found himself on the Yazoo River with the ironclad USS BARON DE KALB and the tinclads CHOCTAW, LINDEN, PETREL, ROMEO, and FOREST ROSE. Porter was supporting MGEN William T. Sherman’s move up the Yazoo.
At Snyder’s Mill the Rebels had constructed extensive earthworks that would have been a formidable obstruction to Sherman’s and Porter’s advance had not the Confederates abandoned it the day before. Here Porter’s men found tents, field equipment, supplies, and 14 gun emplacements replete with artillery and ammunition. A band of Confederates left to recover this material skidaddled at the sight of Porter’s boats. Porter then sent LCDR John G. Walker ahead in BARON DE KALB to investigate rumors of a Confederate shipyard further upriver in Yazoo City.
DE KALB arrived this day in Yazoo City to find a column of smoke marking the Confederate shipyard. Three warships lay on the ways nearly completed: CSS MOBILE awaited only her iron plating; CSS REPUBLIC was being fitted with an iron ram at her bows; and a third 310-foot steamer Walker described as, “a monster,” was about to receive her 4.5″ iron plating. Her 70-foot beam enclosed six steam engines, powering four paddlewheels and two screw propellers. She would have given the Union a boatload of trouble indeed! The steamers were seaworthy enough for Walker to have commandeered them for the Union, but for the lack of pilots to guide them downriver they were burned. The shipyard was found to have five lumber and planing mills, blacksmith, machine, and carpentry shops, and all manner of equipment necessary to build or repair vessels of any size. A hospital ashore nursed 150 wounded Confederates, who were paroled, never to fight again. Walker destroyed the works, conservatively estimated to be worth $2 million in 1863 dollars.
Walker’s return was plagued on the 22nd by three field pieces and 200 infantry from the shore near Liverpool Landing. But as quickly as Union guns trained shoreward, the Rebels fled.
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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
“Additional Report of Acting Rear-Admiral Porter, U.S. Navy, transmitting report of Lieutenant-Commander Walker, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Baron de Kalb, regarding operations at Yazoo City.” IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 25, Naval Forces on Western Waters from May 18, 1863, to February 29, 1864. Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 7-9.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865. Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, pp. III-82-83.
Jones, Virgil Carrington. The Civil War at Sea: Vol 2 The River War. New York, NY: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1961, pp. 421-22.
“Report of Acting Rear-Admiral Porter, U.S. Navy.” IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 25, Naval Forces on Western Waters from May 18, 1863, to February 29, 1864. Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 5-7.
Sweetman, Jack. American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3rd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, pp. 71-72.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: The Yazoo Pass expedition was an attempt to reach the Yazoo River from the north by breaching the Mississippi River levee opposite Helena, Arkansas. Doing so flooded a former river channel that connected with Moon Lake, and the Coldwater and Tallahatchie Rivers to reach the Yazoo. The expedition was halted by the impassable Confederate Fort Pemberton on the Tallahatchie just three miles from the Yazoo.
Tinclads were the most prolific class of gunboat in the Mississippi Squadron of our Civil War. Each was a former civilian riverboat, purchased by our Navy and reinforced with heavy timber bulwarks overlain with sheet metal.
Most naval squadrons of these days had limited capacity for housing POWs. Captured soldiers and sailors were therefore paroled. They signed documents swearing never again to take up arms against the Union and were released in return. Paroles had mixed effectiveness, especially since soldiers thereby returning to their homes did not wish to be perceived as deserters.
