Map of operations at Bermuda Hundred and Drewry's Bluff, Virginia, 10th May 1864.
Summary
In this map Sneden attempts to show several engagements that took place between Butler's Army of the James and Beauregard's Confederates, May 6th through May 13th, 1864. He includes Port Walthall Junction, where Union forces first engaged Beauregard's Confederates; the Confederate defense of Fort Darling at Drewry's Bluff; and the Union entrenchments astride the Appomattox River at Bermuda Hundred and City Point, where they were blocked by Confederate forces spanning the peninsula formed by the Appomattox and James rivers.
In the early years of the war many civilian ships were confiscated for military use, while both sides built new ships. The most popular ships were tinclads—mobile, small ships that actually contained no tin. These ships were former merchant ships, generally about 150 feet in length, with about two to six feet of draft, and about 200 tons. Shipbuilders would remove the deck and add an armored pilothouse as well as sheets of iron around the forward part of the casemate and the engines. Most of the tinclads had six guns: two or three twelve-pounder or twenty-four-pounder howitzers on each broadside, with two heavier guns, often thirty-two-pounder smoothbores or thirty-pounder rifles, in the bow. These ships proved faster than ironclads and, with such a shallow draft, worked well on the tributaries of the Mississippi.
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