Confederate Floating Battery Revival - July ‘96 America’s Civil War Feature

The subsequent fall of New Orleans doomed the Confederate forward positions. The crew scuttled Louisiana to keep her from falling into Union hands.

The Confederates employed another floating battery, New Orleans, on the upper Mississippi. Originally designed as a dry dock rather than a ship at Algiers (across the river from New Orleans), the floating battery had a unique defensive system. A pumping engine in the hold allowed the crew to lower it until the deck was flush with the water. (While this protected New Orleans from the relatively flat trajectories of naval guns, it was unprotected from the plunging shots of mortars.)

Late in 1861, the Confederates towed New Orleans upriver. Near Columbia, Ark., the steamer Red Rover, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. John J. Guthrie, took it in tow, hauling it as far north as Columbus, Ky., where it arrived on December 11. On January 7, 1862, it had its first encounter with the enemy as Union Navy ships approached. Guthrie lowered the deck to the river’s edge and cleared for action. Neither side fired, and at 1 p.m. the Union ships withdrew.

With the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson to the east, the Confederate position at Columbus became untenable. Guthrie towed New Orleans downriver to Island No. 10, where it was anchored near the western end of the island. On board New Orleans were the Pelican Guards, one company from the 1st Alabama and one company from the 46th Tennessee. When Brig. Gen. John McCown ordered away this last unit, Guthrie had to stop using two guns.

On January 18, Beauregard ordered Guthrie to Memphis to supervise the ongoing construction of ironclads there. Lieutenant Samuel W. Averett took command of New Orleans. While the Union Navy bombarded the Confederate defenses around Island No. 10, New Orleans lay moored in the river, essentially a spectator to the conflict, since its guns lacked the range to reach the Union boats. New Orleans did fire a shot at a transport to test the range of its guns; the shot missed, but the boat withdrew upriver.

By the time the Union Navy arrived at Island No. 10 in mid-March, Confederate defenses were already crumbling. Major General John Pope marched his Federal Army of the Mississippi through a flooded swamp to capture New Madrid, Mo. With its fall, he effectively controlled the western bank of the Mississippi. Batteries placed at strategic points along the river hampered Confederate movements. Pope now controlled the Confederate left flank, and threatened the remainder of their defenses. Only the fact that the two armies were on opposite sides of the river delayed the collapse of the Southern defenses.To cross the river, Pope’s engineers laboriously cut a canal through a swamp that allowed shallow-draught transports to pass, but ironclad gunboats drew too much water to get through. With Confederate batteries mounted at landing sites on the other side of the river, the transports were useless to Pope unless he found a way to silence the Confederate guns.

No doubt inspired by the presence of New Orleans, Pope later began work on his own floating battery. “There seemed little hope of any assistance from the gunboats,” he wrote. “I therefore had several heavy coal-barges brought into the upper end of the canal, which during the progress of the work were made into floating batteries. Each battery consisted of three heavy barges, lashed together and bolted with iron. The middle barge was bulkheaded all around, so as to give 4 feet of thickness of solid timber both at the sides and on the ends. The heavy guns, three in number, were mounted on it, and protected by traverses of sand bags. It also carried 80 sharpshooters. The barges outside of it had a first layer in the bottom of empty water-tight barrels, securely lashed, then layers of dry cottonwood rails and cotton bales packed close. They were floored over at top to keep everything in its place, so that a shot penetrating the outer barges must pass through 20 feet of rails and cotton before reaching the middle one, which carried the men and guns.”