Civil War With Steamboats
The US Civil War spilled over to the Mississippi with naval sieges and naval war using paddlewheelers. The Battle of Vicksburg involved monitors and ironclad riverboats. The USS Cairo is a wrecked survivor of the Vicksburg battle. Trade on the river was suspended for two years because of a Confederate blockade. The triumph of Eads ironclads, and Farragut's seizure of New Orleans, secured the river for the Union North.
The worst of all steamboat accidents occurred at the end of the Civil War in April 1865, when the steamboat Sultana, carrying an over-capacity load of returning Union soldiers recently freed from Confederate prison camp, blew up, causing more than 1,700 deaths.
Read more about this topic: Steamboats Of The Mississippi
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war and/or steamboats:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water,—so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This war no longer bears the characteristics of former inter-European conflicts. It is one of those elemental conflicts which usher in a new millennium and which shake the world once in a thousand years.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“Hast ever ben in Omaha
Where rolls the dark Missouri down,
Where four strong horses scarce can draw
An empty wagon through the town?
Where sand is blown from every mound
To fill your eyes and ears and throat;
Where all the steamboats are aground,
And all the houses are afloat?...
If not, take heed to what I say,
You’ll find it just as I have found it;
And if it lies upon your way
For God’s sake, reader, go around it!”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)