page_title: Missouri in the American Civil War
section_title: Ironclad Navy and Riverine Campaigns
hierarchical_section_title: Missouri in the American Civil War / Early military actions, 1861–1862 / Ironclad Navy and Riverine Campaigns
caption_attribution_description: English: USS Cairo 1862Photographed in the Mississippi River area during 1862, with a boat alongside her port bow, crewmen on deck and other river steamers in the background.
context_page_description: During the American Civil War, Missouri was a hotly contested border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, was represented with a star on both flags, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war.
  A slave state since statehood in 1821, Missouri's geographic position in the center of the country and at the rural edge of the American frontier ensured that it remained a divisive battleground for competing Northern and Southern ideologies in the years preceding the war. When the war began in 1861, it became clear that control of the Mississippi River and the burgeoning economic hub of St. Louis would make Missouri a strategic territory in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.
  By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and at least 30,000 in the Confederate Army; many had also fought with bands of pro–Confederate partisans known as "bushwhackers".
context_section_description: While various forces battled inconclusively for southwest Missouri, a unique cooperative effort between the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and civilian resources built a war-winning brown-water navy. St. Louis river salvage expert and engineering genius James Buchanan Eads won a contract to build a fleet of shallow-draft ironclads for use on the western rivers. An unusually cooperative relationship between Army officials, who would own the vessels, and Navy officers, who would command them, helped speed the work. Drawing on his reputation and personal credit as well as that of St. Louis Unionists, Eads used subcontractors throughout the Midwest (and as far east as Pittsburgh) to produce nine ironclads in just over three months. Built at Eads' own Union Marine Works in the St. Louis suburb of Carondelet and at a satellite yard in Cairo, Illinois, the seven City-class ironclads,  Essex, and the heavy ironclad Benton were the first U.S. ironclads and the first to see combat.
  St. Louis' Benton Barracks became the mustering depot for western troops, and in February 1862, Department of Missouri commander Henry Halleck approved a joint invasion of west Tennessee along the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Army troops under Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, alongside the newly built Western Gunboat Flotilla commanded by Navy Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote, captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, unhinging the Confederate defensive perimeter in the west. After the subsequent Battle of Shiloh, the Federal Army pushed into northern Mississippi, while the Gunboat fleet moved down the Mississippi with cooperating Federal troops, systematically capturing every Confederate position north of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
  The riverine strategy put the Confederacy on the defensive in the west for the rest of the war, and effectively ended meaningful Confederate efforts to recapture Missouri. The defeat of the Confederate army under Earl Van Dorn, Benjamin McCulloch, and Price in northwestern Arkansas at the Battle of Pea Ridge further discouraged the Confederate leadership as to the wisdom, or possibility, of occupying Missouri. Subsequent Confederate military action in the state would be limited to a few large raids (notably Shelby's Raid of 1863 and Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864), and partial endorsement of the activities of Missouri guerrillas.
caption: City-class gunboat USS Cairo
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