Battle
As a result of the Federal victory at Corinth, the railroads that linked Memphis with the eastern part of the Confederacy had been cut, severely reducing the strategic importance of the city. Therefore, in early June Memphis and its nearby forts were abandoned by the Rebel army. Most of the garrison were sent to join units elsewhere, including Vicksburg, and only a small rear guard was left to make a token resistance. The River Defense Fleet would also have retreated to Vicksburg, but it could not get enough coal in Memphis. Unable to flee when the Federal fleet appeared on June 6, Montgomery and his captains had to decide whether to fight or scuttle their boats. They chose to fight, steaming out in the early morning to meet the advancing flotilla and the rams trailing behind it.
The battle started with an exchange of gunfire at long range, the Federal gunboats setting up a line of battle across the river and firing their stern guns at the cottonclads coming up to meet them. Two of the four rams advanced beyond the line of the gunboats and rammed or otherwise disrupted the movements of their opponents; the other rams misinterpreted their orders and did not enter the battle at all. With the Federal rams and gunboats not coordinating their movements and the Confederate vessels operating independently, the battle soon was reduced to a melee. It is agreed by all that the ram flagship, Queen of the West, drew first blood by ramming CSS Colonel Lovell. She was then rammed in turn by one or more of the remaining cottonclads. Col. Ellet was at this time wounded by a pistol shot in his knee, thereby becoming the only casualty on the Union side. (In the hospital, he contracted measles, the childhood disease that killed some 5,000 soldiers during the war. The combination of the disease and the debilitation caused by his wound was too great, and he died on June 21.) The remainder of the battle is obscured by more than the fog of war. Several eyewitness accounts are available; unfortunately, they are mutually contradictory to a greater degree than usual. All that is certain is that at the end of the battle, all but one of the cottonclads were either destroyed or captured, and one Yankee boat, Queen of the West, was disabled. The sole boat to escape, CSS General Earl Van Dorn, fled to the protection of the Yazoo River, just north of Vicksburg. Personnel losses among the Confederates cannot be estimated reliably.
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