U.S.S. Cairo: The Story of a Civil War Gunboat / Comprising a Narrative of Her Wartime Adventures by Virgil Carrington Jones, and an Account of Her Raising in 1964 by Harold L. Peterson

Still they were unsatisfied. The port covers made them want more. Visions of raising the whole boat danced enticingly before them. It could be done. It was worth a try. First they needed public support, then money. A spectacular find, the resurrection of a significant fragment, might do it. Local people succumbed to their persuasion. They gave or lent equipment. A lumber company donated the services of a tug and a derrick. The skilled divers spent 10 days sluicing the silt out of the pilothouse with jets from a firehose. Then, working in total blackness, they passed 1-inch cables through four of the ports. The tug pulled the derrick into position, workmen attached the cables, and in a few moments the pilothouse broke water. A significant portion of the historic vessel felt the free air for the first time in almost a century. Buffs and workmen cheered in excited delight. But there was more. After dark, an 8-inch naval gun on its wooden carriage joined the pilothouse on the bank. Both were in excellent condition, almost perfectly preserved. They caught the popular imagination just as the planners hoped. Interest in the project spread far and wide. But the hoped-for money failed to appear.

A year passed. Public interest waned without the stimuli of exciting new discoveries. Then Gov. Ross Barnett of Mississippi came to the project’s aid. Long interested in history, the Governor persuaded several State agencies to provide funds. Historian Bearss appeared on a nationwide television quiz program and won the $10,000 jackpot for his knowledge of the Civil War. This money, too, went into the project. In the autumn of 1962, Bearss, Jacks, Vicksburg National Military Park historian Albert Banton, and scuba divers Parks and Hart began a 30-day survey to determine the condition of the Cairo’s structural timbers. The New England Naval and Maritime Museum joined them in the effort. Firehoses cleared the silt from the spardeck, and the divers forced their way inside the casemate to get at the beams. Every one they tested was sound.

Encouraged by this survey, the Mississippi Agricultural and Industrial Board superintended a drive in the autumn of 1963 to raise the ship intact. A mighty gravel dredge sucked the mud and debris away from the hull. Divers, both U.S. and professional, cleared the silt from the gundeck, and workmen pulled all the remaining cannon and carriages to the surface, along with hundreds of other historical objects of all kinds. The treasure hoard of Civil War artifacts began to accumulate.

Impressed by the importance of the recoveries and by the favorable publicity attached to them, the Mississippi Legislature in the spring of 1964 appropriated $50,000 to continue the operations. A group of interested Vicksburgers contacted a New Orleans construction firm which agreed to raise the Cairo on a “no raise, no pay” contract. An experienced diver undertook the diving on the same basis. And the Warren County (Miss.) Board of Supervisors agreed to underwrite the salvage. At long last everything had meshed.

The great adventure began on August 3, 1964. A dredge cleared away the silt that had accumulated since March, and a dragline dug a hole in the river bottom just ahead of the Cairo’s bow. Logs, some as much as 5 feet in diameter, had to be removed. Then the divers slowly see-sawed huge cables (2½ and 3 inches in diameter) under the hull. By October 17 seven of these cables were in position, and the next day the raising operation commenced. Four derricks with a total lifting capacity of 1,000 tons pitted their strength against the dead weight of the big ironclad. They hauled her out of the hole into which she had settled, but even their combined power could not lift her out of the water. The thick iron armor, the waterlogged timbers, and the mud-filled holds were too much for them. They moved the vessel, still submerged, 70 feet upstream and set her down on a shoal.

New strategy was needed. A giant barge (235 × 40 feet) was towed to the scene and sunk in the hole the Cairo had formerly occupied. On October 29 the derricks tugged on the old vessel once more. If they could get her on top of the sunken barge, the engineers felt they could raise both together without difficulty. But Nature refused to cooperate. Water in the Yazoo dropped to a low level, much lower than optimum for the effort. There was no time to wait for rains and a rise in the water level. They had to work now or abandon the project. Cables strained and the casemate broke water. Just 6 inches more and the Cairo would slip easily onto the barge. Again the cables strained, and the hulk moved, but, without the buoyancy of the water to help support most of the vessel, the weight on the cables increased drastically. With a sickening noise, two of them cut deeply into the wooden hull. All hope of raising the ship intact was gone.

Now it was a question of saving as much of the historic vessel as possible—in any way possible. The professionals decided to cut the Cairo into three sections: bow, midship, and stern. Finally, on December 12, 1964, the derrick raised the last section and lowered it gently to the deck of the barge. It was 102 years to the day since the gunboat had sunk.

Reminders of the Past

Even in fragments, the Cairo proved a treasure. Experts from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service found it a gold mine of information. It was, in fact, a century-old time capsule loaded with the everyday objects of naval life, some of them previously completely unknown. Studied in situ, they told of practices and customs no one had even dreamed about before. Even the vessel itself offered new information, for students quickly discovered that it had not been built according to the original specifications in some instances and that assumptions based on incomplete data were totally wrong. Museum models and drawings across the country had to be reworked, old concepts changed, new features added.

Many phases of life and organization on board a naval vessel developed according to tradition. No one ever wrote them down, and knowledge of them died with the veterans. In this field, the Cairo helped bring the period back to life in a truly vivid manner.

Take the matter of food and drink, for instance. Evidence from the Cairo shows that the sailors ate in messes of about 15 men, and each mess had a special chest to hold its gear: tin plates, cups, spoons, glass condiment bottles, scrub brushes, a washtub, and an earthenware jug of molasses. Every man took care of his own utensils, and he scratched his name or initials on each piece. Those who could not write at least could make an identifying mark. The glass condiment bottles bore embossed labels, “U S NAVY” on one side and “PEPPER” or “MUSTARD” on the other. No one had ever seen such bottles before, but there were more than 300 on board, some still holding their original contents.

The officers dined in a separate mess, and they had finer fare. The dishes were ironstone: the knives, forks, and spoons were made by Rogers and Brothers and the Hartford Manufacturing Company. Much of the ironstone had been broken, either in the mine explosion or in salvage, but a representative collection survived intact. These show that much of it had been made in England by J. Wedgwood and sold to the Government by J. J. Brown, Importer, New Albany, Ind. Cooks prepared the food for officers and men in big copper and iron pots on an iron cooking range ironically named “Southern Belle” but manufactured by S. A. Burton and Company of Cincinnati, Ohio; and the discovery of a rolling pin suggests that the fare sometimes included biscuits and pastry. The commissary storeroom yielded hundreds of barrels with bones inside—all that remained of the salt beef and pork that formed a major part of all naval diets during that period. Nearby stood the remnants of a butcher block, a two-handed meat cleaver, and several scales. Here, presumably, the boat’s butcher stood as he cut and issued the meat for the messes.

Officers overcame the monotony of their diet with the help of spirits as well as condiments. From their section came bottles for whiskey, rum, still wines, and champagne, some of them unopened.

Other bottles offered evidence on medical care, for many contained the remains of their original contents. These included potassium chlorate (a drug prescribed for many complaints of the period), blue mass for syphilis, quinine, rhubarb, ammonia, sulphur, zinc chloride (used as an antiseptic and astringent), and ferric chloride, often prescribed as an iron tonic. Most of these bottles required professional analysis for identification, but others are so familiar that a smell was enough to know that they held iodine, castor oil, camphor, turpentine, or linseed oil.

Only a few surgical items remained. Some may have been carried off the sinking vessel and others may have been lost in salvage. Among those that remained were silver ear syringes, buckles for tourniquets, a metal bedpan, and rubberbands for suturing arteries. These bands still retained their elasticity after 100 years of submersion!

Students of ordnance and weapons had a field day with the Cairo’s contents. Apparently the vessel carried no cutlasses, for none was found. Instead there were Army foot artillery swords of the “Roman” model of 1832 with their handsome cast-brass hilts reflecting the cultural interest in classical objects that had been so popular when they were adopted. Perhaps the use of Army swords instead of Navy patterns reflected the conflict over control of the river gunboats, or perhaps it meant that weapons were scarce just then and any usable type was welcome. The latter is the more probable explanation, for the muskets found on board were smoothbore model 1842’s instead of the rifled models of 1855 and 1861.

But the discoveries related to the cannon told much, much more. All the guns had been ready for action when the ironclad went down. They came up the same way—fully loaded, sights in place, and percussion locks mounted for firing. Here military historians noted the first significant new information. Each cannon had a white sighting line painted down the top of its barrel. No surviving ordnance manual or document mentions this practice. Yet it was an obviously sensible thing to do. It gave the gunner a quick visual line that he could pick up easily in the dark casemate. It would have been just as helpful in the enclosed gundecks of traditional warships, so now scholars wonder how long it had been done. All guns boasted two sets of sights: the new adjustable and precise brass patterns and the older strap-on tubes for quick point-blank firing. Further discoveries showed that the Civil War ordnance men had anticipated at least one modern efficiency technique. They had color-coded the wooden boxes that held the artillery projectiles—red for explosive shells, white for solid shot—so that the proper round could be identified quickly and easily.

For the non-specialist, however, the most fascinating items were those that told about the sailors’ everyday lives. Such things as the packets called “housewives” that held their needles, thread, and scissors; hard-rubber combs marked “U.S. NAVY” on one side and “IR GOODYEAR 1851” on the other; toothbrushes very much like modern types; and straight razors made by the same firm of Wade & Butcher who still produces them for barbers today. And there were yet other personal items—Captain Selfridge’s saddle that he used whenever he could get ashore and indulge his fondness for riding, officers’ buttons of gilt brass, enlisted men’s peajacket buttons of hard rubber decorated with an anchor and “U.S.N.” made by the Novelty Rubber Company, both Army and Navy regulation uniform brass buttons, and even bone buttons for shirts and underwear. Insignia from such varied branches of service as artillery, cavalry, and infantry showed that some of the Cairo’s complement had worn their old uniforms on board as they mixed with the Navy personnel. Government-issue pocketknives with square-ended blades proved that these had come into use well before scholars thought. There was a profusion of leather objects (boots, shoes, belts, cartridge-boxes, cap-pouches, book covers, and powder buckets), many still in excellent condition. The list of such valuable discoveries is almost endless, but perhaps the most poignant are the photographs of loved ones that survived their watery burial—and the pencils the men had used to write home to them. Some of the pencils were marked “A. W. FABER NO. 2,” just like those that modern sailors and soldiers sometimes still use for the same purpose.

Almost anyone who looks at these historic objects can find something that makes this ancient ship and its long-dead crew alive and meaningful to him. Even if he is not a student or specialist of the Civil War, the familiar forms and objects, even the common brand names, bring the period vividly to life. They form a national treasure of the greatest importance. The National Park Service, recognizing this, has entered into an agreement with Warren County and the State of Mississippi to care for and preserve them until the Cairo can be restored and exhibited. A selection of the specimens is now on display at Vicksburg National Military Park for all who want to see and experience this significant link with a historic era.

H. L. P.

As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has basic responsibilities for water, fish, wildlife, mineral, land, park, and recreational resources. Indian and Territorial affairs are other major concerns of America’s “Department of Natural Resources.” The Department works to assure the wisest choice in managing all our resources so each will make its full contribution to a better United States—now and in the future.

U.S. Department of the Interior
National Park Service

★ U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1974 O - 552-532

Transcriber’s Notes

• Silently corrected a few typos.
• Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
• In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.