Time Period: Civil War through Reconstruction (1861 - 1874) - Starting with U

USS Rattler

The USS Rattler was a Union side-wheel tinclad steamer that served along the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Ouachita rivers, among others. The ship is best known in Arkansas for its role in the battle to capture Fort Hindman. The Rattler was constructed in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1862. Originally named the Florence Miller, the ship was purchased by the Federal government on November 11, 1862, and was renamed and commissioned in December. Acting Master Amos Longthorne served as the first commander of the ship. The ship was armed with two thirty-pound Parrott rifles and four twenty-four-pound guns. Joining the Mississippi River Squadron, the Rattler participated in the action against Fort Hindman in January 1863. A Union army under the command of Major …

USS Tensas

aka: Tom Sugg [Steamboat]
The USS Tensas was originally the steamboat Tom Sugg, which was captured by Federal troops during the Little Rock Campaign of 1863 and refitted as a tinclad gunboat before again returning to private service in 1865. The Tom Sugg was a sixty-two-ton sidewheel paddleboat built at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1860. The vessel was ninety-one feet and eight inches long and twenty-two feet and five inches wide. By 1862, the steamboat was being used by Confederate forces in Arkansas, and in the spring of 1862, Captain John W. Dunnington “armored” it with cotton bales and mounted an 8-inch cannon on its bow so that it could be used against Major General Samuel R. Curtis’s Army of the Southwest. While there are …

USS Tyler

The 180-foot-long A. O. Tyler, a Mississippi and Ohio river packet named for its original owner, was the largest of three side-wheeled steamboats purchased by the United States War Department for conversion into river gunboats at the beginning of the Civil War. Navy commander John Rodgers, the purchaser of the craft, felt it inappropriate to call the boat Tyler since former President James Tyler was a leading secessionist, preferring instead to refer to the boat as Taylor for unionist Zachary Taylor. However, the name Tyler remained official. During the first year and a half of the war, the gunboat was under U.S. Army control as part of the Western Gunboat Flotilla—yet was staffed by naval officers—to provide artillery support for General …