18621776 Club
Her engines dead, the crew burns the Arkansas rather than let the Union take her
The Confederacy's lone ram on the lower Mississippi goes up in flames within sight of Baton Rouge.
By the summer of 1862, the Confederacy had almost nothing left to contest the Mississippi River. The ironclad CSS Arkansas was one of its few answers, a makeshift ram that had already fought through the Union fleet above Vicksburg. Near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Her engines failed catastrophically as Union warships closed in. She was dead in the water. Rather than surrender the ship, her crew set her ablaze and let her burn to the waterline…
