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At 19 years old, Charles Rivers Ellet was one of the Union Army's youngest colonels. In a Feb. 2, 1863 report, Rear Adm. David Porter characterized him as " the kind of man I like to command," a "gallant and daring officer" who "will undertake anything I wish him to without asking questions." But, Porter added, "The only trouble I have is to hold him in and keep him out of danger." That same day, Porter had ordered the Queen of the West, a steam-powered wooden ram under Ellet's command, south past the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg to reconnoiter the lower Red River and destroy any Confederate ships he encountered.
The young colonel, who had been a medical student when the war broke out, could be said to have inherited the family business. The fleet of Union rams that included the Queen of the West was the brainchild of his father, Charles Ellet Jr., a Paris-trained civil engineer who had spent the antebellum years designing some of the nation's earliest wire-cable suspension bridges, including spans over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, the Ohio River in Wheeling, W.V., and a 770-foot suspension footbridge at Niagara Falls. He also oversaw the construction of canals and railroads and surveyed both the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in anticipation of improvements to navigation and flood control.
Ellet also had an abiding interest in the history of the naval ram as a weapon, and the advent of steam-powered vessels convinced him that this ancient tactic might once more prove effective. His attempts to interest official Washington in his theories proved futile until early 1862. On March 8, the Confederate ironclad Virginia, in a prelude to her encounter with Monitor the next day, rammed and sank the 50-gun frigate Cumberland off Newport News, Va. Despite the success of the Monitor in stopping the Virginia, some members of the Lincoln administration quickly conjured up frightening scenes of Confederate warships shelling the nation's capital city from the Potomac.
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, one of the panic stricken, quickly engineered a meeting with Ellet and within days appointed him a colonel in the Union Army and authorized him to purchase and outfit steam vessels for use as military rams. He "has more ingenuity, more personal courage, and more enterprise than anybody else I have met," wrote the usually skeptical Stanton. The cabinet officer's action trumped any interest the Navy might reluctantly have displayed in Ellet's ideas, and set up an inter-service rivalry that produced considerable confusion over the coming months.
Ellet went to work immediately, purchasing seven of the fastest vessels he could find on the Ohio River and setting about converting them for military use. He also enlisted 12 members of his family, including a brother Alfred and his son Charles, to serve aboard the newborn fleet.
The Queen of the West, built in Cincinnati in 1854 and retrofitted there under Ellet's direction, was one of the larger rams: the side-wheeler measured 181 feet in length and displaced 406 tons. Shipwrights used iron rods to attach three solid oak bulkheads, each 12 to 16 inches thick and up to seven feet high, to the keel, the hull and the decks. A central oak beam stretched from the bow to the stern; iron stays held the boilers and engines in place, and two-foot-thick oak timbers surrounded them. The ship carried four guns, but its greatest offensive threat was as a ram: the structural changes concentrated the entire vessel's weight behind the iron-reinforced bow of the boat. Ellet's decision to paint the ship black gave it a sinister quality.
By June 1862, Ellet's squadron was ready to join a fleet of Union gunboats intent on capturing Memphis. Bridling at the caution displayed by the commanding flag officer, Charles H. Davis, Charles Ellet and his brother Alfred took matters into their own hands, steaming through the line of gunboats to attack the Confederate flotilla. The Queen of the West and the Monarch together destroyed all but one of eight enemy ships, a fact later acknowledged by a surprisingly gracious Charles Davis. The capture of Memphis gave the Union control of the Mississippi as far south as Vicksburg, but the victory proved costly. Two weeks later Charles Ellet succumbed to wounds received during the engagement.
In the ensuing months the Queen of the West participated in the Union campaign against Vicksburg, joining an attack on the Confederate ironclad Arkansas in July and at year's end working to clear Confederate torpedoes from the Yazoo River. In October Gideon Welles reorganized what had been known as the Western Flotilla, rechristening it the Mississippi Squadron and naming Commander David D. Porter to lead the Union fleet. Porter was, in Welles's opinion, "impressed with and boastful of his own powers," and "given to exaggeration in everything related to himself." But, Welles continued, he also "has stirring and positive qualities, is fertile in resources, has great energy" and "is brave and daring like all of his family" (his adoptive brother was Admiral David G. Farragut).
A month later Welles won his administrative tug-of-war with Secretary of War Stanton when the president transferred jurisdiction over the ram fleet from the Army to the Navy. The fleet continued to act largely independent of naval control, however, and early in 1863 Admiral Porter added to the confusion when he formed the Mississippi Marine Brigade. Intended to combat Confederate guerillas, this 350-man unit was an Army command consisting of artillery, cavalry and infantry that were to be ferried about by the rams and operate under the direction of the Union Navy. Its officers nonetheless remained army officers: Alfred Ellet was appointed brigadier general and commander of the brigade. His nephew Charles Rivers Ellet received command of the Queen of the West.
A Feb. 28, 1863, report in Harper's Weekly vividly describes the Union ram's brazen passage that month under the Confederate guns at Vicksburg:
Rear-Admiral Porter had given orders that she should proceed down to Vicksburg, destroy the rebel steamboat City of Vicksburg . . . and then run past the lower rebel batteries. . . . When the ram had reached the proper position the Colonel turned her partly around, so as to face the city, and then made across the river straight for the fated steamboat. . . . She struck the rebel steamboat forward of the wheel-house. . . .Both steam-boats were thus ablaze at the same time [and] the flames spread rapidly. . . . Colonel Ellet had intended to strike the rebel steamboat in the stern [to] . . . finish the work of demolition; but the spreading flames on the Queen of the West made it necessary for him to . . .run down stream, and set all hands on board at work extinguishing the flames.
Ellet's successful foray past the Confederate guns at Vicksburg positioned the Union ram to wreak considerable havoc on Southern attempts to sustain the Port Hudson garrison, the southern anchor of the Confederacy's increasingly tenuous hold on the Mississippi. After putting out the fires caused by his successful assault on the City of Vicksburg, Ellet destroyed three steamers carrying $200,000 worth of provisions to Port Hudson. Confederate vessels tied up at Natchez fled up the Red River, and after refueling from coal barges that Porter had floated down the river, the Queen of the West followed.
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On Feb. 12, Ellet steamed six miles up and back on the Atchafalaya River, a tributary of the Red River, destroying Confederate wagons and supplies as he went and burning houses at the mouth of the Red River as retaliation for the wounding of one of his officers. The following night, the Union ironclad Indianola also passed Vicksburg, with orders to protect the Queen of the West.
At this juncture, Ellet displayed the youthful impetuosity that concerned Porter. On Feb. 13, he steamed 15 miles upriver to the mouth of the Black River (another tributary of the Red River) and the next morning captured the steamer Era No. 5 and its cargo of 4,500 bushels of corn. Upon learning that other Confederate ships were even further upriver, Ellet, whose pilot had fallen ill, took on board a new pilot and moved ahead. Almost certainly a Southern sympathizer, the new pilot ran the Queen of the West aground within sight of a powerful battery at Fort DeRussy. Confederate gunners forced Ellet and his crew to abandon ship and float down river on the cotton bales that had served as armor for the ram.
This ignominious end to Ellet's captaincy of the Queen of the West did not spell an immediate end to his or the ship's wartime service. Confederate forces quickly repaired the ram and 10 days later the C.S.S. Queen of the West assisted in the capture of the Union ship Indianola below Vicksburg. On April 11, 1863, it engaged with Union gunboats on the Atchafalaya River, where a shell from the Union's Calhoun set the ram's cotton on fire. She drifted down the river for several hours before running aground and exploding.
Charles Rivers Ellet went on to command the ram Switzerland, and then infantry from the Mississippi Marine Brigade. He died of disease on Oct. 29, 1863.
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Sources: Harper's Weekly, Feb. 28, 1863; Gary D. Joiner, "Mr. Lincoln's Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron"; Angus Konstam, "Mississippi River Gunboats of the American Civil War, 1861-65"; James M. McPherson, "War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1861"; William l. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, "Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River."
Rick Beard, an independent historian, is senior adviser for the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 and volunteer coordinator of the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.
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