The next meeting of the Clarksville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 in our new home at the Bone & Joint Center, 980 Professional Park Drive, right across the street from Gateway Hospital. This is just off Dunlop Lane and Holiday Drive and only a few minutes east of Governor’s Square mall. The meeting begins at 7:00 pm and is always open to the public.
OUR SPEAKER AND TOPIC:
“Ellet’s Rams”
The War Between the States started with neither side having a plan for conducting a war or any known strategy of winning. Many Americans throughout North and South believed there would not even be a war, and if war came, it would be short. In the shipyards at Norfolk and New York, the warring factions raced to modernize their navies, European-style, with the latest innovations in armored vessels. Meanwhile in the West, tension was mounting because the Mississippi River was closed off to the Northern states for both commerce and as a conduit for moving war materiel. The Father of Waters inevitably became the main object of the contest in the West.
While entire fleets of "modern" armored gunboats were being assembled, one man stood up to boldly assert that he knew a better way to win the struggle for control of the Mississippi and he proposed to do it himself. His was a style of naval warfare almost as old as naval warfare itself—the battering ram. The only thing modern would be steam power. He even distained guns and armor claiming they would only slow him down. That man was no crank. He was Charles R. Ellet, Jr., a prominent civil (civilian) engineer in his day. With keen insight and a quick mind, he knew that ram warfare, ancient and obsolete as it may sound, was the right kind of warfare for ship-to-ship fighting on the inland waters. The only question to him was who would back him, the Army or the Navy. Without political connections or "friends in high places" other than Edwin Stanton, to whom he reported, Ellet would instantly become a colonel in the United States Army in charge of one of the strangest fleets of all—a rapid strike force known simply as "Ellet's Rams". This force was prominent in the naval battle of Memphis, Tennessee in June 1862.
Our speaker, Kent Wright, has been with us before. He is a veteran of the nuclear navy and the civilian nuclear power industry before retiring to Huntsville, Alabama. Kent is a member of the Tennessee Valley CWRT in Huntsville and a prominent speaker on the Civil War Roundtable circuit on the much overlooked naval aspects of the war. He has over 25 years of research into naval affairs of the Civil War.