Combat· American Civil War
Gulf Coast Operations
A grouping of the Marine actions along the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas.
The category opens with the early sparring around Pensacola, the burning of the privateer Judah and the first exchanges in which the Confederate Marines came under fire, and runs through the war's great Gulf events. Chief among them was the running of Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans, which opened the lower Mississippi to Farragut and led to the capture and occupation of the Confederacy's largest city, and the Battle of Mobile Bay, where Captain Charles Heywood, a future Commandant, commanded the after guns of the flagship Hartford as the fleet fought past the forts and the ram Tennessee. Marines served as the guards and gun crews of the Gulf squadron throughout, and the theater saw some of the heaviest naval fighting of the war.
Engagements in this conflict (10) Podcast episodes on American Civil War
Record no. 394