War on the Waters: The Civil War Navy

With James M. McPherson, Craig L. Symonds, Harold Holzer (moderator).

The naval side of the Civil War was far more than a picturesque battle over vast oceans. Rather, it was a gritty fight involving deadly new technologies, focused primarily on the nation’s rivers — particularly the “Father of Waters,” as Lincoln called the crucial Mississippi. Now two of the nation’s leading military historians — each with a new book on the Civil War navies — re-examine the “inland” war for the divided nation’s waters.