Columbus,
Hickman County
Columbus, Kentucky, located near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the terminus of Mobile and Ohio Railroad, was an important trading center and a strategic location for control of the Mississippi River. The Confederate seizure of Columbus on the east bank of the Mississippi and the occupation of Hickman by Confederate Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow on September 3, 1861, was interpreted by the Union as an invasion of neutral Kentucky, one of the Border States. After the seizure, however, Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk moved his forces from Tennessee to occupy the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi at Columbus and established a camp at Belmont on the Missouri side of the river. Thus, Columbus became the western anchor of Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston's defense of the upper Mississippi River Valley.
Throughout the autumn and winter, as many as 19,000 Confederate troops labored to turn the Confederate bastion at Columbus into an impregnable fortress which would become known as the "Gibraltar of the West." A floating battery was positioned on the Mississippi, including river steamers that were converted to gunboats; more than 140 heavy guns were positioned on the bluffs; and a huge chain of 20 pound links and supported by anchored barges - said to have been more than a mile in length - was stretched across the river. The chain was firmly anchored on the Columbus shore by a buried six-ton sea anchor and attached to a capstan on the Belmont shore. River mines, then called torpedoes, were placed infront of the chain. In addition, a large earthwork named Fort DeRussy (named for Polk's chief engineer Col. Lewis G. DeRussy, the oldest West Point graduate to serve in the Confederate army) and two smaller detached forts on the bluff were surrounded by miles of infantry trenches and protected by abatis. Two additional small forts on the plain south of Columbus and more infantry trenches guarded the town of 1,000 residents. Electrically fired land mines were placed along the roads to Columbus.
Control of Columbus was critically important to both sides during the Civil War because of its strategic position overlooking the Mississippi River. On November 7, 1861, Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses Grant attacked the Belmont camp. After a sharp battle, the Confederates were forced to retreat, and Grant turned his guns on the main stronghold at Columbus. However, he was overpowered, and, after burning the Belmont camp, he withdrew upriver to Cairo, Illinois, and prepared for an offensive against Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.
During the Battle of Belmont, the guns of Fort DeRussy, situated high on the Columbus bluffs, raked the Union lines under Grant with merciless fire. Among the known large rifled cannon mounted on land at Columbus were two 6.4-inch rifled columbiads (the "Lady Polk" and the "Belmont"), three smaller 5.82-inch rifled columbiads, and 13 rifled 32-pounders (converted smoothbores). The "Lady Polk," named in honor of the wife of the Confederate commander, was the largest breechloading cannon in use at the time. It was an 8-ton, rifled Dahlgren gun, capable of firing 128-pound, cone-shaped projectiles. The heat from firing the gun expanded the barrel, and after the battle it was left loaded with unfired projectiles. Four days later when the Lady Polk was test fired, it exploded into three pieces, killing 11 men and wounding dozens more, and shook up and deafened Polk so badly that he had to give up his command for a month.
The Battle of Belmont ended all Union ideas of taking Columbus by direct assault. On March 1-2, 1862, Union troops arrived outside Confederate positions in and around Columbus after having taken weaker positions at Forts Heiman, Henry, and Donelson and thus outflanking Columbus. Although Polk favored standing a siege in the elaborate earthworks so laboriously constructed at Fort DeRussy, he was overruled and Columbus was evacuated on March 2 as a detachment of the U.S. Navy converged on Columbus from Cairo. Supplies, ammunition, heavy cannon, and gun crews were sent down the river to the Confederate enclave on Island No. 10 just below the Kentucky border, and Polk marched his infantry and field cannon southward to join Johnston in the preparations for the Battle of Shiloh. Thus, Grant's forces occupied the Columbus area on March 3 and eventually reopened the Mississippi River to Union shipping from Cairo to Island No. 10.
Columbus became an important Union railroad and river fleet supply depot, a refuge for former slaves, and a recruiting center for African-American soldiers. Fort DeRussy was renamed Fort Halleck in honor of Grant's commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck. At the end of the war most of its garrison were members of the 4th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment which had been raised at Columbus in 1863. By the summer of 1864 three out of four of the Union soldiers in western Kentucky were African-American.
Remnant earthwork fortifications associated with Fort DeRussy and two smaller forts, the largest Civil War cannon in Kentucky (a 7,545-pound, 32-pounder mounted on a barbette carriage), and the six-ton sea anchor (with several feet of chain still attached) that held the great chain across the river are preserved and interpreted at Columbus-Belmont State Park. The park commands a magnificent view of the Mississippi River from the top of the Iron Banks Bluff.
Columbus has regional/state significance, because Grant's occupation of that strategically located Confederate bastion at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in March 1862 contributed to Union efforts to hold western Kentucky and enabled the Union to open that part of the Mississippi River to Federal shipping.
