Combat· American Civil War
Pascagoula Expedition
A small Gulf-coast raid of the kind that filled the summer of 1862.
In July a party of about twenty-eight Marines was embarked on the steamer USS Grey Cloud to join the gunboat USS New London in an expedition against the Confederate forces at Pascagoula, Mississippi. The operation was carried out successfully, the landing party doing its work and re-embarking. It was one of the many minor actions by which the Union squadron harassed the Confederate coast along the Mississippi Sound, putting Marine and sailor parties ashore to strike at the enemy's positions and supplies wherever a gunboat could reach. The affair met no serious resistance and cost no casualties. Such raids were the routine business of the Gulf blockade, individually small but cumulatively effective in keeping the Confederate coastal forces off balance and asserting Union control of the sound in the wake of the New Orleans campaign.
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Record no. 437