During the Civil War, Cairo, Illinois, because of its position at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, was deemed by some to be second in strategic importance only to the District of Columbia. Located on the fertile plain known as “Little Egypt,” Cairo was the northernmost point to which the Mississippi was navigable all year around.
General-in-Chief Winfield Scott’s strategy for winning the war was based on a plan for strangling the Confederacy, principally by blockade, and Cairo was the logical place at which to close off the waterway to the South. In May 1861, General George B. McClellan and General Scott were agreed that military forces operating in the Mississippi valley would require naval support from the river and, specifically, that Federal troops occupying Cairo should be supported by three gunboats.
Commander John Rodgers, U. S. Navy, was directed by General McClellan to develop a naval force on the Mississippi. Accordingly, Rodgers ordered armament and supplies to be sent to Cairo to await the arrival of the first three vessels purchased for conversion to gunboats—the Lexington, the Tyler, and the Conestoga.
The Cairo base became the fifth largest naval base in the country while still remaining a “temporary” establishment on the Navy Register. It grew from a hodgepodge of high-rent shacks; later, an annex was built four miles upriver at Mound City, but eventually both segments slid into the muddy waters of the Ohio River and oblivion.
In August 1861, the city swelled as General Grant moved in to use Cairo as his advanced headquarters for western operations, and the Navy built ironclads at St. Louis and Mound City up the Mississippi and Ohio, respectively. Supplies for the men and boats were forwarded to centrally located Cairo, as space was eagerly taken over by both the Army and Navy until even an outhouse could be worth a few hundred dollars a year. Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote, who relieved Rodgers in September, found it necessary to locate floating storage facilities for the fleet and the results were two giant, rented, wharfboats and a gaggle of barges which were moored along the levee with several large naval receiving vessels used in processing recruits. The expanded wharfboats became navy yards in miniature as Foote set up his offices in a storefront near the Ohio levee, delegating the administration of the Cairo and Mound City bases to Fleet Captain Alexander Pennock. Floating facilities included tools for moderate repairs on wood, ironwork, and machinery; heavy ordnance storage, clothing, and small arms storage, barracks; even paint shops, offices, blacksmiths’ shops, officers’ quarters, a mess hall, and large post office. Besides this, barges of coal, lumber, and gunpowder in bulk form were tied up beside the wharfboats.
The huge, temporary base became an integral part of the city of Cairo. Bolstered by high, fortress-like levees on all three sides, the muddy oasis which was Cairo existed in a hole and often found itself well below the level of the lapping river waters outside its walls. Beyond the marshes, over which the Illinois Central Railroad ran 365 miles from Chicago to this isolated rail and river terminal, wolves howled at night. Officers’ families moved into town or stayed in the world-famous St. Charles Hotel which Charles Dickens described in his novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. In fact, Dickens thought Cairo was “. . . a breeding place of fever, ague, and death . . . a dismal swamp . . . a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.”* Trains brought recruits in cigar smoke-filled coaches from naval rendezvous in Chicago and St. Louis and deposited them on the Ohio levee during the early hours of the morning. The knee-deep mud in the streets caused frequent drownings of children and drunks, and the high levees prevented anyone from seeing out of the city except from the rooftops. During the great flood of 1862, when the Mississippi crested at 52 feet, Cairo looked like a bowl set in a vast pond. The water level of the River was more than 50 feet above street level and wells had to be capped for fear a “gusher” would occur and fill the city. Beyond the levees, water surrounded the city as far as the eye could see and the crewmen on the flotilla boats moored along the levee could look down upon the rooftops of Cairo. The Provost Marshal ordered passing steamboats to reduce their speed for fear their wakes would topple the levee. To the present day, the Cairo levee has never broken—a claim unique among river towns.
For heavy repairs and hull damage, the Squadron vessels were sent four miles north to Mound City, on the Ohio, for drydocking. In April 1862, the ironclad gunboat Carondelet, Henry Walke commanding, had returned from the battle of Island No. 10 with extensive damages. After spending nine hours in drydock at Mound City, she returned to Cairo for repairs on her woodwork. As carpenters continued working, her engines were tested in the standard, pragmatic, manner: backing against the current up to Mound City. Any vessel able to perform the task was certified in combat condition. Soon after leaving Cairo, the Carondelet’s engines began to fail and one bow anchor was cast. She continued to drift south past Cairo and the other bow anchor was cast. Nevertheless, she continued to yaw downstream. As she drifted helplessly into the deep confluence, suddenly she held fast. Not wasting time to see why she had chosen that place to stop, repairs were rushed to completion. That evening, when her anchors were weighed, they brought with them a considerable portion of the local submarine telegraph line.
Besides offering repair facilities, the complex at Cairo and Mound City provided vast supplies for the units of the Mississippi Squadron; cattle from central Illinois arrived to feed the Navy and coal arrived to feed the gunboats. The common ironclad could swallow a ton of coal an hour and the Squadron alone gobbled one-third of the naval appropriations for fuel. Coal and powder were usually stored in tarpaulin-covered, open barges, but fears of snipers, arson, or accidental fire prompted an order to keep two tugs under steam at all times to be ready to push any burning vessels away from the floating base. Nevertheless, in 1863, all powder was moved up to Mound City where the Navy was purchasing property contiguous to the shoreline.
By May 1864, with the rivers under relatively tight control and Cairo rents soaring sky-high, the entire base was moved or floated up to Mound City to join the heavy repair shops already rented or under contract there. In addition to the wharfboats, extensive shore facilities included a blacksmith’s shop, paint shop, drydock, ordnance warehouses, recruiting office, post office, hospital, and numerous storage and office structures. In 1865, however, one wharfboat and Admiral D. D Porter’s flagship Black Hawk burned and sank. With the sunken wharfboat went most of the Squadron’s pay records and other valuable items, prompting a Congressional investigation. Following the two disasters, all facilities were rapidly relocated within the station’s compound.
By the War’s end, over 5,000 steamboats had put in to Cairo’s levee and over one million Servicemen had passed through its friendly confines. Drinking, brawling, and brutal crimes were common in its muddy streets, and Chicago papers claimed that over 2,000 “lewd women” gathered on the street corners—apparently leaving about 188 “honest” citizens, if the 1860 census is to be believed. Glutted with Army and Navy inflated rent-money, Cairo cast its lot with the postwar Southern economy and depended on the River to make it the winner in its contest with Chicago as the major city of Illinois.
Within several months after the end of the War, the entire Mississippi squadron was auctioned off. The Mound City Station was stripped of all nonessentials and the command passed through a series of well-meaning, but ill-suited, former Squadron commanders entrusted with the job maintaining a pair of virgin monitors laid up in the river. By 1869, the Commandant was forced to apologize to the Secretary of the Navy for not saluting the death of former President, Franklin Pierce. He explained, “Not having a battery mounted, saluting is impossible. . . .” Records after 1870 are rather sketchy, but it appears that the Commandant was the only regular Navy member assigned to the station, and that a large fire broke out in the compound during Christmas of 1872. The Navy failed to appropriate funds for repairs and subsequently the lands were sold. One of the nation’s largest naval bases had been created, had prospered, and died within ten years.