In late April 1861, Abraham Lincoln approved the construction of seven ironclad gunboats. Built of wood and covered by iron plating, they were named for cities and towns along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers where they would navigate, and upon them rested the Union’s hope to regain control of the Mississippi River and prevent the Confederacy from making use of the river systems of the West. After her sister vessels participated in the battles of Forts Henry and Donelson, the Cairo was sunk in 1862 by “infernal machines”—floating mines then called torpedoes—on a bend in the Yazoo River near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Union plans to recover the gunboat stalled, and the Cairo remained undisturbed for more than 90 years, buried—and preserved—by the river’s silt and mud. In the mid-1950s, National Park Service employee Edwin Bearss, stationed in Mississippi, along with two companions, studied the paper trail of the Cairo and using rudimentary equipment discovered her, unmoved from the position where she sank. The recovery of the vessel took nearly ten years, but produced a treasure trove of artifacts—a time capsule from the Civil War. Today, the Cairo and her treasures are on view at the Vicksburg National Military Park.
THE HISTORY
The ironclad gunboats Cairo and her sisters were designed by Samuel M. Pook and built by James Buchanan Eads, a St. Louis millionaire and riverman. When Eads learned of the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter and Abraham Lincoln’s call for 75,000 militia to serve in the Union Army for 90 days to quell the rebellion, he wrote a letter to the President describing how to win the war quickly by building a fleet of gunboats to patrol the Mississippi and her tributaries, effectively splitting the Confederacy. It was a good idea. Eads is familiar with the Mississippi River system and he also has personal relations with two of the seven members of Lincoln’s Cabinet: Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and Attorney General Edward Bates. They write letters of endorsement, and Eads comes to Washington in the last week of April 1861 to meet with the President and his senior advisors. Eads urges the government to let him convert his huge salvage vessel Submarine No. 7 into a gunboat as the core of a fleet to operate on western waters downstream from a base to be established at Cairo, Illinois. The President likes what he hears. But Secretary of War Simon Cameron, a machine politician from Pennsylvania, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, a Connecticut newspaperman who had been a Navy Department clerk in the Polk Administration (1845–49), raise jurisdictional issues. Cameron, alert to “pork barrel” issues, argues that since the vessels will operate in inland waterways they should both be built and be under operational control of the Army. Welles disagrees, but Mr. Lincoln sides with Cameron. The Army has won this turf battle.
As soon as Congress convenes on July 4, 1861, and the necessary appropriation is secured, Army Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs calls for sealed bids for constructing seven ironclad gunboats. Eads, who is a salvager, brilliant engineer, and idea man, but not a boat-builder, gets the contract. He will be the Civil War’s Henry J. Kaiser. He proposes to build and deliver the desired number of gunboats in 64 days at a price of $89,600 a vessel. If he fails to accomplish this, he will be subject to a penalty of $250 per day on each vessel. The contract is awarded on August 7; therefore Eads’s drop-dead date is October 10.
Eads leases two boatyards, one at Mound City, Illinois, and the other at Carondelet, Missouri, then a St. Louis suburb. He encounters major problems: The government fails to pay for work done on dates due, there are more than 120 change orders, et cetera, and Eads doesn’t meet the completion date. It is January 15, 1862, before the last of the seven “City Series” ironclads is accepted, 97 days after the date specified in the contract. The United States argues that Eads owes a penalty figure of $250 a day for 97 days times seven.
Cairo and her six sisters are the first ironclad vessels built from the keel up in the Western Hemisphere. They are 175 feet long and 51 feet 2 inches wide at the knuckle—a point just above the waterline. Forty feet wide on the keel. Forty feet wide on the spar deck. From the keel up to the hurricane deck, it is 16 feet. Chimneys add another 28 feet to the height. The average crew is 158 enlisted men and 17 officers. Each boat is armed with three guns firing forward, four starboard, an equal number to port, and two aft.
Federal gunboats—including three of Cairo’s sisters—enter into combat against Confederate Fort Henry on February 6, 1862. The government hasn’t paid for them yet, so Eads owns or has a claim on the vessels. Under operational control of the United States Army, they are officered by United States Navy personnel, and the crews are a mixture of Army and Navy. Fortunately for the Federals and Eads, the gunboats prove themselves at Fort Henry and the fort is blasted into surrender while Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s columns are still approaching the scene. This is important for Eads. After the victory, U.S. Treasury auditors, on evaluating the claims of Eads and the government, rule in favor of Eads, and he is paid the more than $148,000 due on his contract. It is also fortunate for Eads that Fort Henry occurred before Fort Donelson or he might not have not gotten paid. The gunboats, including four of Cairo’s sisters, suffer a severe repulse at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River on February 14.
Unlike her sisters, Cairo doesn’t see serious action as part of the Brown Water Navy on the Mississippi River until the Battle of Plum Point Bend, near Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on May 10, and at Memphis on June 6. In mid-September she visited the Vicksburg area as an escort to steamboats loaded with thousands of Confederate prisoners being transported down the Mississippi to be exchanged in accordance with the Dix-Hill Cartel.
On December 12, 1862, the first armored warship to be sunk by an electronically detonated mine, the ironclad gunboat Cairo, sank on the Yazoo River and quickly filled with mud and silt.
As the river war continues in the West on the Mississippi and her tributaries, Cairo’s date with destiny comes on December 12, 1862. In late November General Grant’s army, in northern Mississippi, crosses the Tallahatchie River and compels the Confederates to retreat south of the Yalobusha River and take position at Grenada. To pressure the Rebels, Grant sends a request to Rear Adm. David D. Porter—the Navy had in mid-October 1862 secured operational control of the Brown Water Navy—that he send gunboats down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo. The gunboats would, Grant hoped, ascend the Yazoo as far as Greenwood and then go up the Yalobusha and threaten the Rebels’ hold on Grenada.
The Yazoo is as muddy a river as you have in America. When the gunboats arrive, there is only five feet of water over the bar of the Yazoo, but to cross it the City Series ironclads need a six foot depth. The advance squadron is commanded by Cmdr. Henry Walke, a well-known senior officer, who has seen much combat afloat. His squadron includes three of Eads’ ironclads—Carondelet (Walke’s flagship), Cairo, and Pittsburg—several less heavily armored “tinclads,” and a ram.
On December 11 two light-draft tinclads—Marmora and Signal—enter the Yazoo. Soundings taken as they cross the bar show that the Yazoo is rising and there is now six and a half feet of water. About 12 miles upstream, as the mariners continue to make soundings, a sailor sees a block of wood floating in the water. He takes his rifled musket, aims at it, and “Boom!” A geyser of water leaps up and douses the deck. He has fired into and detonated what is known as an “infernal machine.” As Marmora’s captain, Lt. Robert Getty seeks to turn his tinclad about, there’s another explosion, followed by a geyser of water, but again no damage. Whereupon Marmora and Signal return to the fleet anchorage at the mouth of the Yazoo. Getty goes aboard Carondelet and informs Commander Walke that the Confederates have infernal machines up the Yazoo and he knows how to safely remove them. But to do so he must be supported by ironclads. Walke is down with malaria, but he decides to follow up on Getty’s recommendation and entrusts the next day’s mission to Lt. Cmdr. Thomas O. Selfridge, an 1854 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. Walke’s instructions to Selfridge, who has captained Cairo since September 12, are to take his vessel, the Pittsburg, the tinclads Marmora and Signal, and the ram Queen of the West up the Yazoo. When they go upriver Selfridge is to cover the light drafts as they remove the torpedoes. However, under no circumstances is he to take the ironclads into unreconnoitered waters.
It is a mizzly day on December 12 as the squadron enters the Yazoo. Marmora, followed by Signal and then Queen of the West, takes the lead. As ordered, the ironclads Cairo, trailed by Pittsburg, follow. About 11 a.m., well above the mouth of Thompson Lake and abreast of Benson Blake’s levee, Marmora stops, and the crew lowers and mans her cutter. Hearing firing ahead where Marmora has stopped, Selfridge takes his vessel forward. At the same time the gunners manning the big ironclad’s starboard battery open fire into the woods on the south bank. Passing Queen of the West and Signal, Cairo draws abreast of Marmora. As Cairo closes on the tinclad, Selfridge puts a bullhorn to his mouth and calls out, “Getty, what is your problem?” Getty answers, “This is where the torpedoes are.” Getty does not run a tight ship. His men have difficulty getting the cutter away. Their inaction angers Selfridge. The Marmora’s bluejackets finally get the cutter underway, and they pull toward the south bank. They locate and recover a glass demijohn, which proves to be an infernal machine. Returning to the tinclad, they disarm and disassemble the demijohn. Meanwhile Cairo’s stern begins to drift toward shore. Once again Selfridge calls to Getty to take the Marmora ahead. Getty doesn’t react fast enough to satisfy Selfridge, so he orders Chief Pilot Charles Young to go ahead, and the Cairo shoots out into unreconnoitered waters.
There’s a Boom, followed by a second Boom! Geysers of water leap up, and a report comes up from the fo’c’sle, “that the water is rushing in like the roar of Niagara.” Selfridge issues orders for the Cairo to back up and be driven aground bow-on. Sailors leap ashore with lines and secure them to cottonwood trees, but within 12 minutes the hawsers have tautened, parted, and the Cairo slips off into 36 feet of water. Only the tops of her chimneys and jackstaffs extend above the foaming waters. Fortunately no one is killed and only half a dozen people are injured. The other vessels take the survivors aboard; the Queen of the West comes alongside and pulls down the Cairo’s jackstaffs and chimneys to prevent the Rebels from locating the boat. Within an hour nothing else protrudes above the waters of the Yazoo. Selfridge returns to the mouth of the Yazoo and goes aboard the Carondelet to report to Commander Walke the loss of the Cairo. She has earned a place in history, for on this day has occurred a “first:” Electrically activated torpedoes (mines) sink an armored warship, inaugurating a new era in naval warfare. One of Selfridge’s critics in the Western Squadron, Master George Brown, dryly reports that on December 12 “Commander Selfridge of the Cairo found two torpedoes and removed them by placing his vessel over them.”
A word about what the Yankees called “infernal machines,” what the Confederates called torpedoes, and what we today identify as mines would be appropriate at this point. The Confederates seek to nullify Union superiority afloat by ways small naval powers always try. “Unsinkable warships,” such as the Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee, are employed, but they are nullified by Union numbers. Like the Germans in World War II with their V1s and V2s, the Confederates give priority to the development and deployment of explosive devices and enjoy considerable success with these weapons, sinking or damaging more than 25 Union warships.
THE RECOVERY
The Cairo is at the bottom of the Yazoo River. Union plans to salvage her in the summer of 1863, following the fall of Vicksburg, are scrapped because Confederate guerrillas are too active. The Yazoo carries as much silt as any river in the world, and within a year the Cairo is buried in the bed of the Yazoo. This is good. If she’s buried in the bed of the Yazoo, she’s not a hazard to navigation and is soon forgotten. As first the years and then the decades pass, the Cairo will remain in her resting place, her location obscured in mystery and speculation. This changed forever on Veteran’s Day 1956, which at that time was officially marked on the closest Monday, November 12. Two friends and I had the day off. My companions for the day’s adventure were Warren Grabau, a geologist with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, and M. Don Jacks, a man of the river and a fellow National Park Service employee in Vicksburg. We had long researched and studied the paper trail of the Cairo to establish likely sites for the sinking. To conduct the physical search, we had hoped to secure a dip-needle, an extremely sensitive magnetic device that would react to the Cairo’s hidden metal cladding, but we were compelled to use instead a World War II military compass.
We boarded Jacks’ runabout at the Vicksburg Landing and headed up the Yazoo. We began our search near the south bank of the river adjacent to the site of Benson Blake’s 1860s lower plantation. Jacks conned a course some 15 yards offshore. After one earlier wiggle, the compass needle went wild at a point seven-eighths of a mile downstream from Blake’s plantation. We probed the mud with a metal rod and struck the sloping sides of a large object sheeted with iron.
In 1960, reinforced by James “Skeeter” Hart, a Jackson, Mississippi, fireman, and S. Ken Parks, a local TV personality, we returned to the site. Beside being qualified scuba divers, the two were interested in further documenting the site, and if it was truly the Cairo, to see if she could be raised. We borrowed a World War II pumping unit from the Jackson Fire Department and a work barge from someone else, and proceeded up the river to the Cairo site. It took a lot longer to relocate the Cairo than it did to find it the first time. When we found it originally we had secured metal targets to trees that when sighted in on from shore zeroed in on the pilothouse. This was the only part of the vessel that extended above the mud cocoon. But the Yazoo’s banks are unstable, and all a tree has to do is tilt a few degrees to throw your markings off target. The Yazoo here is controlled by the water level in the Mississippi. The level can be 5 feet above the Cairo or it can be 50 feet—depending on the stage of the Mississippi at Vicksburg. We had to spend much time reestablishing contact with the pilothouse. Then we had to remove the mud from outside and inside the pilothouse. Mud had impacted around the sloping sides of the pilothouse, so Parks and Hart had to jump up the engine to put a lot of power on the hose to jet the mud loose from the pilothouse. After two weeks they had exposed the four upper feet of the pilothouse above the mud cocoon. They also jetted mud loose from inside, and we were finally ready to try to raise the pilothouse.
I’m not going to tell you how to lift a pilothouse, or an ironclad gunboat. I’m going to review the problems of raising one and you’ll agree why I titled my book Hardluck Ironclad: The Sinking and Salvage of the Cairo. We are now ready to challenge the river. We were fortunate that my neighbor knew Mr. Bart Tully of Anderson Tully Lumber Co., who agreed to lend “Operation Cairo, Inc.,” as we designated the project, the tug Porterfield.
On September 14 we were ready, and up the Yazoo came the tug Porterfield. Naive as we were, we thought that a line from the crane would separate the pilothouse from the sunken hulk. But such was not to be. Fortunately, the floating crane had an A-frame on its bow with a 50-ton lift capacity. Parks and Hart, working in black water, threaded two 1.5-inch wires through opposite ports in the octagonal pilothouse, and we began the lift. We wanted to bring the pilothouse to the surface in the presence of Johnny Holland, the personable mayor of Vicksburg, who happened to be chairman of the Mississippi War Between the States Centennial and wanted publicity for that effort. It was getting dark.
As we began to lift, the bow of the barge sank lower and lower. Instead of six foot of free board it now had about a foot and a half. We worried that the barge might sink when a line of bubbles shot to the surface and an object that no living human had seen surfaced—the eight-sided pilothouse of Cairo. By the next morning we had lifted an eight-inch naval gun. This was the Cairo’s number two starboard gun. We knew from the paper trail that the gun carriages were made of green white oak. The cannon was loaded with canister, and the cap on the nipple ready to be fired.
We cleared away the mound of mud that remained on the pilothouse site. The removal of the impacted mud disclosed a McClellan saddle that probably belonged to Commander Selfridge, as he wrote of going on horseback rides with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman. We also found a Colt .44 caliber pistol, artillery short swords, and a folding chair, among other items.
In 1962 the Mississippi Agricultural & Industrial Board contracted to have a survey made of the vessel by the New England Naval and Maritime Museum. The investigation revealed that the Cairo was positioned at nearly a right angle to the Yazoo’s south bank and her stern was well beyond mid-channel. Her back was not broken and the situation was favorable for raising her. On the dark side, the cost of such an undertaking was placed at $300,000, and while Operation Cairo, Inc. had lots of enthusiasm, money was a problem. Money can be hard to come by and would always plague us.
After more than 100 years submerged beneath the Yazoo, Cairo’s casemate shield emerges from its muddy resting place as her namesake barge struggles to raise the rest of the boat.
More than half the money to fund a volunteer effort to raise Cairo in 1963 came from two sources: J. W. Williams, of Corr-Williams Tobacco Co., contributed $20,000, and I won $10,000 on the $64,000 Challenge. The game show gave an amateur the opportunity to win $100,000. A professional could win a $1,000 bond, and $10,000 for a project of his interest. The Civil War, as we know, is always popular with the American people. It was also one of the subjects that doomed the $64,000 Question in the late 1950s, because that’s when the sponsors fed answers to a very popular young man. The $64,000 Challenge was designed to guard against a repeat of this embarrassment. The Vicksburg Chamber of Commerce put me up for the show and the sponsors asked me to come to New York. I flew to New York, and on Saturday morning a private “dick” showed up. He informed me he would be with me until the program was over, because this show has to be purer than Caesar’s wife. He stayed with me till I entered the “bubble.” The format was: You formulated your questions for the other contestant. The first question was one-part, the second two-part, and the third three-part. The rules were that the questions had to appear in two of four standard references. I can remember two of the references: Ralph Newman’s and Otto Eisenschiml’s The American Iliad and the American Heritage book on the Civil War published in 1959. To ensure that the questions weren’t too vague or had more than one answer, each contestant, with the private eye in attendance, had his questions reviewed and certified by a two-person panel, one a Civil War historian and the other a generalist. I then entered on a stage with the master of ceremonies in the middle, and they dropped a glass bubble over me. Since I was the challenger I had to answer first. Got through the first question, as did the amateur, then I got through the second question. On the first part of the second question I put him down. The question he went down on was this: Who was in charge of the pontoons that were drifted down the Tennessee River to open the Cracker Line into Chattanooga? My opponent answered “John Geary,” but the answer was “William Hazen.” Operation Cairo was $10,000 richer.
So that gave us $30,000 to begin the raising of the Cairo. Inexperienced as we were, we priced out what a cutter-head dredge would cost. It was $100 an hour, and even with $30,000 that was too much money. So we decided to go with a gravel dredge, the Mary Ann. We also built a sluiceway to screen out artifacts that came up in the mud.
Cairo-watching soon became popular as hundreds of people assembled on the banks of the Yazoo daily, with particularly large crowds on Sundays. In the autumn of 1963 there were still 12 cannon aboard. So whenever possible we planned a good show for the Lord’s day. Unfortunately we didn’t take advantage of the popularity of Cairo-watching until too late. No fees for this activity were charged until late fall 1964.
The summer and autumn of 1963 were months that saw the civil rights spotlight shine on Mississippi with the assassination of Medgar Evers and the murder of the Philadelphia Three. Standing by waiting for something to break were CBS’s Nelson Benton and NBC’s Jay Barbree. And they were frequently there for cannon raisings.
Because of the huge number of explosive shells in one of the boat’s magazines, the U.S. Coast Guard requested that personnel of the U.S. Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit 2, based in Charleston, South Carolina, be sent to the site. On October 19, Nelson Benton with his CBS team was present as well as Chief Wesley Collins and other members of the EOD team. A 30-pounder rifled Parrott gun was raised from the stern. When examined by Chief Collins it was found to be loaded and fused. While the camera crew filmed and Benton described what was happening, the men of Unit 2 removed and disarmed the projectile, which could have been a hazardous undertaking. The next night Walter Cronkite featured the recovery and disarming of the Parrott gun and shell on his prime-time evening news program.
Through the assistance of U.S. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, we secured the lease of two large fuel barges, 235 feet long, 40 feet wide, and divided into nine compartments. Mud and silt that had entombed Cairo were removed to a considerable distance both up- and downstream from the hulk by mid-February 1965, and the weather had turned cold.
If we were to use buoyancy to raise the Civil War ironclad, divers would have to go down and, by feel, position three-quarter-inch wires under the stern. One barge was anchored parallel to and upstream from the Cairo and the other downstream. A dragline positioned on the upstream barge was fastened to one end of the wire and the other end secured to a bollard on the downstream barge. First one wire and then six more were sawed into position under the Cairo; seven evenly spaced lifting points were established. The barges were then flooded so that less than 18 inches thrust above the river surface. The ends of the wires that provided the give for the sawing were secured to the upstream barge’s bollards. We were now ready to pump out the barges. When this was done, strain would be placed on the lifting points and the Cairo hopefully would be raised from the grave in which she had rested for more than a century.
Unfortunately, heavy rains had fallen. Upstream someone was clearing an area of timber for construction of a pulpwood plant, so against the upper barge there were soon wedged seven acres of debris. This put more stress on the lines securing the barges to anchors ashore than they could resist: The anchors were uprooted; the barges were swept downstream, and the Cairo sank back into her grave. Daybreak on March 6 found the barges on the Vicksburg waterfront. All our work since September 6 had come unraveled. Worse, on January 12, Dr. Walter Johnston, one of Operation Cairo, Inc.’s hardest and most dedicated workers, fell overboard from a workboat and drowned.
All, however, had not been lost; we had recovered and curated a collection of artifacts documenting life aboard a Civil War ironclad. The largest of these were her 13 big guns, 12 of these had been entombed in the Cairo for 101 years, and the one salvaged earlier for 98 years. When the mud and crud were removed, marks left by machine tools used in their manufacture were clearly visible.
Officers always have it a little better. In the officers’ quarters there was water for a shower and the head’s commode. How did they get the water? As the paddle-wheel turns, runoff from the bucket drains into a storage tank. Thus the officers had water for their “head.” The enlisted men made use of heads that extended over the fantail. We found castor oil and all sorts of bottled medicines in the sick bay. I played with an iodine bottle too much, let the vapors out, and the iodine soon crystallized. It turns out that the treatment for syphilis and gonorrhea was the same as they used in the 1930s: Blue Mass. One rather interesting artifact was an ice chest. No beer in it. We found a barrel that had contained beer; we could still smell a musty odor of beer in it. The ship’s brass bell came up and shone as brightly as it had more than a century earlier. When it was exposed to oxygen in the air, it tarnished before our eyes. Among the most numerous objects recovered were wrist and ankle shackles, like those used during the Revolutionary War. You had to go to the blacksmith to have them removed. The large number of pistols recovered consisted mostly of personal weapons.
We salvaged thousands of artifacts but the vessel still sat on the bottom. Soundings showed the Cairo had silted in again, and was once more entombed. Perhaps not as tightly packed as heretofore, but it was back to square one. The Vicksburg Chamber of Commerce and the Mississippi A & I Board took the lead in putting together a financial package, including $40,000 made available by the Warren County Board of Supervisors and $50,000 by the state. With more money available, hopes high, and a realization that this was a major undertaking, a contract was signed with Capt. William “Billy” Bisso, the most experienced salvage man on the lower Mississippi. His company would raise the Cairo and place her on a barge for $40,000, and better yet, the contract included a “no cure no pay” provision.
Bisso, his crew, and his equipment—the tug Rip Tide and the powerful floating steam derrick cranes Boaz, Atlas, and Ajax—reached the Cairo site on July 25.
A take-charge guy, Captain Billy began work on August 3, a Monday. A dragline excavated a trench where the riverbank had sloughed and covered the forward part of the ironclad’s bow. This was necessary because Bisso needed to seesaw 2.5- and 3-inch wires under the hulk from fore to aft to establish six lifting points. The gravel dredge Mary Ann returned and, assisted by cutter-head dredge Benalo, removed thousands of cubic yards of buckshot mud and silt that enclosed the Cairo’s grave. Several lifting wires were positioned under the ironclad’s bow with mighty Boaz and Rip Tide acting as seesaws. Heavy rains associated with Hurricane Hilda struck the Louisiana coast, enabling Bisso to call up from New Orleans his giant floating steam dredge Cairo, the largest on the Gulf Coast, with a lifting capacity of 320 tons. She arrived on site October 4.
Much cleanup and tidying kept Bisso’s people busy during the next two weeks. On Sunday morning, the 18th, everyone was at his station. Upstream of the ironclad were moored the mighty floating derrick Cairo, nearest the bank, and the Boaz. The Atlas and the Ajax were on the downriver side, the latter opposite the Cairo. Wires were attached and the lift began at 11 a.m. It was interrupted at noon. Soon one of the engineers shouted that the strain on his derrick had lessened. Back to their stations Bisso and his hands raced, and within minutes the water boiled and churned. Moments later the tip of the ironclad’s starboard casemate shield poked above the brown water. Employing winches and spring lines, the four floating derricks eased the submerged Cairo, cradled in her nest of six lifting wires, upstream more than a hundred feet and gently lowered her. This had been a banner day, but what the future held we fortunately did not know.
A hectic ten days followed. A gasoline barge similar to those used in the ill-fated 1963–64 raising was readied and sunk in Cairo’s late grave downstream and parallel to where she now rested. We knew that the barge and the Cairo’s bottom had identical widths, which in zero visibility water could be a problem. Also the river was low, which meant that several feet of the casemate must be above water in positioning her on the submerged barge.
The lift began on a warm October 29 afternoon. A huge crowd gathered; both CBS and NBC television crews are there. Bisso deployed his floating derricks as they were on October 18. Initially all seemingly was on schedule. The Cairo’s casemate shield was in view; we saw the three gunports; the iron, shut off from oxygen for more than a century, was blue-gray; out near mid-channel we saw the paddle-wheel spiders. Soundings showed that about two more feet of the casemate needed to be exposed before the keel could clear the barge. The ironclad’s namesake increases the strain on her end of the lifting wires. There was a crack. A surge of water swept across the Cairo’s deck forward of the casemate, the paddle-wheel spiders disappeared, and the casemate shield slanted at a rakish angle.
Bisso shut down operations while he assessed what had gone wrong. It was determined that two of the six lifting wires cut deeply into the vessel’s bowels below the knuckle like a hot knife through butter. We had a disaster. To cut losses we determined to use these two wires to cut the ironclad into three parts: the bow aft of No. 1 gunports, the amidships containing the five boilers, and the stern aft of No. 3 gunports and forward of the paddle-wheel raceway.
This was done and the bow was positioned with little difficulty on the barge. We saw that, as with the cannon, the iron on exposure to air rusted before our eyes. When Bisso sought to position the heavy amidships section aboard the barge, it turned 90 degrees in its wire slings. The amidships was then “walked” ashore and dismantled. The stern was placed successfully on the barge, but the rains had come and the Yazoo was rising rapidly, some six feet in 30 hours, and the current accelerated. On Thanksgiving Day the pumps were started to expel more than 750,000 gallons of water from the barge and bring her to the surface. But before our dreams were realized, a powerful eddy caught the lifting barge, causing it to list and tilt at a rakish angle. The Cairo’s stern slid off the barge. Fortunately it was still nestled in its lift wires and, although the raceway was crushed, two of the floating derricks beached the two sponsons, each containing an engine and a treasure trove of artifacts. On December 22 Captain Bisso complied with the “no cure no pay” condition in his contract. Taking in tow two barges on which rested the battered remains of the Cairo, the tug Rip Tide chugged down the Yazoo.
In late winter of 1965, still on the barges that took her to Vicksburg, the battered Cairo was towed to Pascagoula on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The parts were off-loaded at the yard of Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp. There she was entrusted to the care of the firm’s chief naval architect Clyde Leavitt. Under his careful supervision the vessel was laid out, the armor removed, the engines disassembled, and measures taken to preserve the historic fabric.
With the end of the Vietnam conflict, responsibility for restoration, preservation, and interpretation of the Cairo was turned over to the National Park Service. In 1977 the vessel was returned to Vicksburg. At the national military park, the ironclad has been restored. In exhibiting, the surviving historic fabric has been used where possible. To give size and support to the Cairo, a skeleton of laminated wood of a distinctive color is used. This replicates in shape and form a framework to support the historic fabric, the cannon and carriages, boilers, engines, et cetera.
Adjacent to the vessel is the Cairo museum and interpretation center. On display are thousands of representative objects that interpret the material culture illustrative of a moment in time in the lives of the officers and men of Cairo. You can see one of Commander Selfridge’s gold oak leaves and a watch. Sailors have always like to whittle, and one of the Cairo’s bluejackets has carved a naval eagle and shield. Another, perhaps homesick for the open sea, has carved a ship. The large number of civilian shoes of various sizes and looks underscore what the paper trail told of the ironclad’s interception of a boat smuggling shoes across the Mississippi from Memphis into Arkansas. We also found many different kinds and shapes of pipes. Archaeologists find pipes like these of value because they’re datable. Coins were drilled for wear in the ears as good luck pieces. Artillery shells were stored in color-coded boxes—red fused to explode in 15 seconds, white 10 seconds, blue 5 seconds. We found toothbrushes. We tried the tobacco. It wasn’t too bad except its muddy taste. The Navy until World War II wore flat hats, and one flat hat we found still has its blue silk ribbon embossed in gold with the name of the vessel, Cairo. Silk fabric held up very well in the Yazoo mud, and we found lots of it. Wool pea jackets were not as durable. We found a bluish coloration in the mud sporting four Goodyear-patented buttons.
I had a close association with Cairo from 1956 until the late 1970s, when the National Park Service assumed responsibility for her restoration and interpretation. Beginning in September 1960 with recovery of the pilothouse, Cairo became a part of the Bearss family, particularly because of my wife’s interest in material cultures of the past. Thousands of artifacts were recovered from Cairo. My wife headed the volunteers who, like herself, spent hours washing mud from artifacts, inventorying them, and taking measures to preserve them. She then researched and cataloged these “bits and pieces from the past.”
Since the mid-1980s the Cairo has been a feature at the Vicksburg National Military Park, which displays the restored Cairo and her artifacts. Today when I tour the Vicksburg park and the Cairo museum I hark back a half a century to that day when Grabau, Jacks, and I set out to see if we could find the all but forgotten ironclad. In the years since, much has happened, and as time marches on most of those who were associated with raising the Cairo have answered the last roll call and have joined Lt. Cmdr. Thomas O. Selfridge and his crew.