num_pages: 428
description: For the second volume of his epochal history of THE CIVIL WAR AT SEA, V. C. Jones focuses on the great river battles—intense, close-fought campaigns that were to have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war. His absorbing narrative begins in March, 1862, just before the Monitor-Merrimack engagement, and ends in July 1863, when the capture of Vicksburg closed off the Mississippi and split the Confederacy in two.The colorful names that fill these pages—Yazoo Pass and Bayou Teche, Pumpkin Hill Channel and Fort Pillow—all represent fiery skirmishes of strategic importance. For at this stage of the war, with Southern ports bottled up and the remaining railroads threatened, the inland waterways of the Confederacy had become the life lines of a beleaguered nation.As in The Blockaders (Volume I of this projected trilogy), Mr. Jones presents the history of the river battles in terms of he men who made it. There is John Newland Maffitt, renowned for his blockade-running; David Farragut, the doughty old officer who came out of virtual retirement to capture "invincible" New Orleans; David Dixon Porter, whose dummy ironclad caused the Southerners to destroy a ship they had just captured; Isaac Newton Brown, who commanded the amazing Arkansas for the Confederate Navy.The chronicle of The River War takes us from the high councils of the Navy Department to the frail decks of the Cayuga and the Maria J. Carlton; from the shining city of New Orleans to remote outposts on the Red River. In recalling a hazardous and unique style of warfare, duplicated at no other time, Mr. Jones adds a stirring and significant chapter to the history of United States naval operations.
title: The Civil War at Sea, Volume Two:  The River War
publisher: Broadfoot Publishing Company