December 12, 1862. The ironclad USS Cairo was working up the Yazoo River north of Vicksburg when it hit a Confederate torpedo — what we'd call a mine today — and sank in twelve minutes. Nobody died. The Cairo was the first warship in history ever sunk by a remotely detonated mine, and that fact alone changed everything that came after in naval warfare. Then the river swallowed her.
She sat under the Yazoo silt for ninety-four years. In 1956 the historian Edwin Bearss found her with a hand compass and a canoe. Salvage crews raised her in three sections between 1964 and 1965 — the cables cut through the rotted timbers as they lifted, so she came up destroyed rather than intact. She's been on display at Vicksburg National Military Park since 1980, partially reconstructed, the missing cypress replaced with fiberglass. It's the shape of the thing, not the thing. A ghost in the most literal sense: held together by what it has become.
What stood here
3 surviving images.
Photograph of an ironclad gunboat with sailors onboard. Two smaller rowboats are in the foreground with more sailors in them. In the background are ot, 1863
USS Cairo was sunk up the Yazoo River during the approach to Vicksburg, 1999
Commodore Foote’s Gunboat Flotilla on the Mississippi.—Sketched by Mr. Alexander Simplot. Illustration published in Harper’s Weekly, Volume VI, No. 26, 1862