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Island No. 10 is a campaign you’ll occasionally hear about in the ACW, but not one that ever really gets to be the focus of the action. There’s a few reasons for this, I imagine. It’s in the West. The most prominent name involved is Pope. And the final act happened the same time as Shiloh. Also, it was a siege, without a lot of action, but it was well known at the time, as it attracted a large number of newspaper correspondents.

Bock and Daniel’s book is short (150 pages, discounting end-matter), but very informative.

The situation is certainly interesting enough, with the Confederates looking for ways to hold the Mississippi Valley, and the S-bend at New Madrid on the Missouri-Tennessee seems a good spot. At the apex of the first bend is the tenth island in the Mississippi past where it joins the Ohio River. A fortified battery of guns on the island will close it to (unfriendly) navigation.

Of course this means protecting said battery from being cut off, and that proves more troublesome. The Confederacy is not exactly well supplied with men or equipment. In fact, the units that are shipped for the garrison are in horrible shape, some not having nearly enough weapons, and many of the ones they do have are prone to breaking.

Outside of small arms, things are a bit better, and number of batteries are established. There’s a “floating battery”, a converted floating drydock mounted with nine fairly powerful cannon (with Wikipedia sourcing another book with a figure of 20), and with no motive power, anchored in the lee of Island 10, as well as a small squadron of gunboats. One battery is sited to fire up the length of the Mississippi as it enters the S-bend. The main positional problem is the opposite shore, where someone could potentially come up on the Missouri side, and cross below the protected point and cut off the position. So, a garrison is installed in New Madrid, to protect the apex of the second bend.

This is all a bit much to protect for an army that’s having problems putting together a decent field force. There’s a fair amount of indecision to go around, including how extensive any outer “shell” of defenses should be. Beauregard makes contradictory statements on the entire matter, saying Island No 10 must be protected, and implying that it’s just a delaying position to cover Fort Pillow (some 50 miles further downstream). He also mentions the idea of keeping these posts relatively small, with the field army being available to relieve them when threatened.

This is a good idea, but there’s a couple of problems. First, when the Union does approach, the main army is busy elsewhere dealing with Grant. Second, and something that the authors never mention, is if an army is to march to the relief of Island No. 10, how is it going to get there?

The entire siege of these defenses is something of a slow motion disaster for the Confederates. With a fair amount of trouble, and after repairing a railroad from Bird’s Point, Pope approaches New Madrid, and despite effort and time, the defenses aren’t ready to match his force, and the town is abandoned. There follows a period of ‘sitzkrieg’, largely because the naval commanders of both sides consider their commands to valuable to risk to enemy guns. Nonetheless, a steady bombardment of the defenses is kept up, largely by number of mortar boats.

Flanking the position could have used some discussion in the book, but the reality is that the New Madrid earthquakes (a series of seven quakes ranging from about 6.0 to 7.5 magnitude over the course of two months) five decades earlier had formed Reelfoot Lake, and drowned large areas into timber covered bayous. The entire area is drowned and marshy, and hard to move about in. The Confederate garrison was installed by moving up the river. When Union forces do eventually cross below the area, there’s no good way out, with troops having to swim or float through bayous behind the position.

Which shows how hard it would be to march a large army into the area, and presumably crossing the Mississippi above Island No 10, and marching down to the battery at the initial bend would be similarly impracticable. The Union success eventually rested on creating a canal of sorts between the Mississippi and Wilson’s Bayou, which lets out next to New Madrid, and lets them get a number of transports past the island

I could use a better look at some of the area around Madrid Bend, and discussions of what approaches to the area were available. But, short of that, this is a good account of a too-little studied part of the ACW.