Tusculum College Library Director Myron “Jack” Smith, Jr. has published the cover article in the March 2012 issue of “North & South,” the magazine of the Civil War Society.
The article, “Running the Gauntlet: CSS Arkansas vs. the Federal Combined Fleets, July 15, 1862” sheds new and detailed light on the saga of the makeshift Confederate ironclad and is based on his recently-published book “CSS Arkansas: A Confederate Ironclad on the Western Waters.”
According to accounts in the article, the CSS Arkansas was interrupted by events that culminated in the Battle of Memphis. The Arkansas was towed up the Yazoo River, north of Vicksburg, Miss., in May 1862 where she was finished under the direction of Lt. Isaac Newton Brown.
With a crew mostly made up of dedicated, if untrained, Southern army soldiers and river men, the craft defeated three enemy patrol boats before breaking out on the Mississippi. There the boat faced a double column of Yankee warships and dozens of heavy cannons and ran past them all in a fiery battle to reach the safety of the Confederacy’s most powerful Western fortress.
Her entire career after this eventful combat went on for only 27 additional days. During that time, the Arkansas fought three more times before the failure of her primitive engines forced the crew to scuttle and abandon a suddenly-motionless river queen.
Among the vessel’s other Confederate Navy officers with a Tennessee connection were Ensign Dabney Scales of Memphis and Lt. A. D. Wharton, of Alabama, who in January 1865, led an unsuccessful small boat raid down the Holston River towards Knoxville.
Copies of the magazine are available in supermarkets and newsstands nationwide. As part of the library’s outreach programming. Smith will speak on “USS Carondelet and the Civil War on Western Waters in Early 1862” at the March 12 meeting of the Tri-Cities Civil War Roundtable.
The meeting will start at 7 p.m. in the Eastman Employee Center/Room 219 on Wilcox Dr., Kingsport, and the Tusculum community is invited.