Eads' Ironclads

James Buchanan Eads of St. Louis helped transform the Union war effort on the Mississippi during the Civil War by building innovative ironclad warships at his Union Iron Works in Carondelet. After President Abraham Lincoln identified reopening the Mississippi as crucial to defeating the Confederacy, Eads urged close-range attacks on Confederate forts, and government engineer Samuel Pook developed the design for a new class of river ironclad. In August 1861 Eads won the contract to build seven gunboats under intense financial and logistical pressure, reopening supply networks across the region and employing hundreds of men while coping with material shortages, sabotage fears, labor unrest, design changes, and delayed government payment. Despite those setbacks, USS Carondelet was launched on October 12, 1861, the first ironclad warship built by the United States and more than three months before USS Monitor, and the other six Pook-designed gunboats soon followed. These vessels, nicknamed Pook's Turtles, played an important part in the Union capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, New Madrid, Island No. 10, Fort Pillow, Memphis, and ultimately Vicksburg, helping open the Mississippi to its mouth. Eads continued producing ironclads at Carondelet, where his yards became the most complete facility of their kind in the country, turning out ten ironclads during the war, along with thirty-eight mortar boats and numerous tinclads, while more than half of the Union's twenty-two Western ironclad warships were built at Carondelet or St. Louis. He also worked to improve naval technology, designing a steam-powered turret that proved superior in action at Mobile Bay in 1864 and drew Admiral David Farragut's praise. Eads later gained international recognition for his engineering work, and his major postwar achievements included the completion of the Eads Bridge in 1874 and a jetty system that kept the mouth of the Mississippi from silting over.

St. Louis, Missouri · United States