Battle of Milliken's Bend
Ordered down the Mississippi on 2 June to support final operations against Vicksburg, Lexington joined Choctaw in defending Union troops at Milliken's Bend, Mississippi, from the assault of numerically superior Confederate soldiers on the 7th. For the next month she continued to operate against the mighty Confederate fortress until it fell on 4 July.
After reconnaissance work and patrol duty in the Mississippi during the summer Lexington was ordered back to the Tennessee River on 29 October to assist General Sherman at the beginning of his drive through the Confederate heartland. However, at the end of February 1864, she returned to the Mississippi for operations in support of the Red River Campaign. With paddle wheel monitor Osage and four other gunboats she moved up the Black River to gather information about Confederate sharpshooters as they entered the Ouachita River and proceeded up the Bayou Louis where shallowing water compelled them to return, capturing Confederate artillery and large quantities of cotton before reaching the mouth of the Red River on 5 March. A week later the Mississippi Squadron moved up the Red River in force.
Read more about this topic: USS Lexington (1861)
Famous quotes containing the words battle of, battle and/or bend:
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plough and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook.”
—Kate Richards O’Hare (1877–1948)